Nono.MA

MARCH 19, 2024

Every Monday

I check whether my Tuesday post is ready.

As of lately, the answer is usually, No, the post is not ready. I then browse my archives or write something completely from scratch.

Why? I decided to do so, and I've experienced how it pays off in the long run.

It's craft, not art.

"A pro views her work as craft, not art." Says Steven Pressfield in The War of Art.

It's professional, not amateur.

"Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way." Says James Clear in Atomic Habits.

Good Mondays, I enjoy the freedom of having completed my "homework" in advance.

MARCH 14, 2024


In Live 115, we played with tldraw's 'Draw Fast' experiment, which turns freehand scribbles and shapes into realistic images using the Optimized Latent Consistency (Stable Diffusion v1.5) machine learning model through fal.ai's API.

Thanks to the tldraw team for open-sourcing this experiment. ❤️


If this interests you, please let me know on Twitter or, even better, on the Discord community.

Thanks for watching.

See you next time!

Chapters

00:17 · Introduction
02:30 · Today
04:17 · Draw Fast by tldraw
06:15 · Fal AI
07:20 · Hands-On Draw Fast
08:03 · What is Draw Fast?
10:09 · Clone Draw Fast
14:16 · Fal AI
15:04 · Sign Up
16:41 · API Key
20:17 · Pricing
21:55 · DEMO
25:55 · Credits
28:03 · Models
30:57 · DEMO
37:59 · Challenge
41:27 · Break
44:42 · Tldraw React component
49:23 · Draw Fast Code
01:05:50 · Outro

MARCH 13, 2024

I was sad to see a redirect from Lobe.ai to Lobe's GitHub repository.

Thank you for the support of Lobe! The team has loved seeing what the community built with our application and appreciated your interest and feedback. We wanted to share with you that the Lobe desktop application is no longer under development.

The Lobe team open-sourced a lot of their tooling to use Lobe-trained models on the web, or with Python, .NET, and other platforms. Yet the Lobe app and website were never open-sourced, which means they will no longer be usable when they cease to work.

Before it's gone, you can access Lobe's site and download the latest app at aka.ms/DownloadLobe.

Lobe takes a new humane approach to machine learning by putting your images in the foreground and receding to the background, serving as the main bridge between your ideas and your machine learning model.

Lobe also simplifies the process of machine learning into three easy steps. Collect and label your images. Train and understand your results. Then play with your model and improve it.

I'd invite you to listen to my conversation with Adam Menges on the origins of Lobe.

MARCH 12, 2024

Time or priority

We often say, "I have no time," instead of "It's not a priority."

In 168 Hours, Laura Vanderkam states that, in our society, "there is plenty of time for raising kids while running a business, for working, teaching, and training for a triathlon, or whatever brings joy and meaning to your life."

Vanderkam says that recognizing this requires changing the narrative: instead of saying we don't have time to do X, Y, or Z we should say we won't do X, Y, or Z because "it's not a priority."

MARCH 11, 2024

In its policy update of February 21, 2024, PayPal announced that it will exclude NFTs from eligibility for the buyer protection program and limit the protection of sold NFTs to ten thousand dollars at the moment of the transaction.

We are revising PayPal’s Buyer Protection Program to exclude Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) from eligibility [and the] Seller Protection Program to exclude from eligibility Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) with a transaction amount of $10,000.01 USD or above (or equivalent value in local currency as calculated at the time of the transaction); $10,000.00 USD or below (or equivalent value in local currency as calculated at the time of the transaction), unless the buyer claims it was an Unauthorised Transaction and the transaction meets all other eligibility requirements.

The crypto world seems to be the perfect place for fraudulent and counterfeit transactions, as scammers request money through digital wallets, which are often hard to trace and have no protection, instead of using traditional banks.

This policy update comes right after Cent NFT blocked NFT sales and the UK authorities seized, for the first time, three NFTs.

MARCH 5, 2024

Before and after

Every endeavor has a before and an after.

Before and after it's done; before and after you give up; before and after you have energy for it; before and after you have time for it.

I try to do whatever I must get done in the day before I run out of time and energy.

Not everything can be done in one go, even if you set yourself to it, and it's easy to fall into the trap of postponing for later.

Doing things you know you'll end up doing today as early as possible always works best.

In the morning, your mind is sharp, and you're energized.

At night, as happens to me many days with writing, each word requires ten times more effort than when I woke up.

It's a matter of priorities and focus.

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

A daily word counter

One of the ideas I wanted to build in 2024 was a daily word counter to track whether I had written my two hundred words of the day.

I made a Mac menu bar app1 that displays the word count below the running date—say, 240227, for today—and shows the ✍🏻 emoji until I’ve passed the two-hundred-word mark.

As I mentioned last week, I write daily within a fuzzy timeframe. As the app doesn’t know when I wake up or go to bed, I programmed it for the day to start and end at 6 am.

If you’re curious about why I write daily and how I do it, you can learn more about my writing habits.


  1. I used a developer tool called Raycast to build what Raycast calls “menu bar commands.” You can find the documentation here. The menu bar app also tells me how many words the current daily file has, which I would archive to start a new one whenever I go beyond 7,000 words. 

FEBRUARY 26, 2024


How to run Google Gemma 2B- and 7B-parameter instruct models locally on the CPU and the GPU on Apple Silicon Macs.


See transcript ›

FEBRUARY 23, 2024


In Live 113, we ran Google's Gemma LLM 2B- and 7B-parameter open models on an Apple Silicon Mac, both on the CPU and the GPU.

We downloaded the Instruct models with the Hugging Face CLI and used PyTorch with Hugging Face's Transformers and Accelerate Python packages to run Gemma locally.


If this is something that interests you, please let me know on Twitter or, even better, on the Discord community.

Thanks for watching.

See you next time!

Chapters

01:23 · Introduction
02:46 · Previously
03:11 · Today
03:45 · Elgato Prompter
06:19 · Interlude
06:43 · Google Gemma 2B & 7B
08:45 · Overview
11:59 · Hugging Face CLI
14:01 · CLI Install
14:54 · CLI Login
15:33 · Download Gemma
22:19 · Run Gemma Locally
24:49 · Anaconda Environment
29:00 · Gemma on the CPU
52:56 · Apple Silicon GPUs
55:32 · List Torch Silicon MPS Device
56:50 · Gemma on Apple Silicon GPUs
01:08:16 · Sync Samples to Git
01:17:22 · Thumbnail
01:28:42 · Links
01:31:12 · Chapters
01:36:28 · Outro

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Performance Max campaigns serve across all of Google’s ad inventory, unlocking more opportunities for you to connect with customers.

[…]

[Google announced] several new features to help you scale and build high-quality assets — including bringing Gemini models into Performance Max.

[…]

Better Ad Strength and more ways to help you create engaging assets.

[A]dvertisers that use asset generation when creating a Performance Max campaign are 63% more likely to publish a campaign with Good or Excellent Ad Strength.

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

A fuzzy timeframe

For digital systems, the day starts and ends at twelve o'clock at night—every day is twenty-four hours (00:00–24:00).

For humans, the day begins when you wake up and lasts til you go back to sleep.

Days at home are commonly sixteen hours—from eight in the morning til midnight.

Traveling days are shortened or extended depending on whether you travel east or west, lasting up to thirty hours when you fly from Europe to California.

It is within this fuzzy timeframe that I write and sketch daily.

FEBRUARY 16, 2024


In Live 112, we did a hands-on example of how to deploy a web app with Vercel.

We used Yarn Modern (4.1.0) to create, develop, and build a Vite app that uses React, SWC & TypeScript, pushed the app to GitHub, and import the Git repository into a Vercel deployment, which then re-builds and deploys on every code change.


If this is something that interests you, please let me know on Twitter or, even better, on the Discord community.

Thanks for watching.

See you next time!

Chapters

00:16 · Introduction
01:58 · Previously
02:26 · Today
05:21 · Diffusion Models for Visual Computing
10:07 · LGM
11:21 · Interlude
12:53 · Vite, React & TypeScript Apps with Yarn Modern
17:20 · Create the App
24:29 · Push to Git
29:07 · Deploy to Vercel
33:40 · Edit the App
42:53 · YouTube Channel
45:23 · Draw Fast
46:25 · Markers
47:51 · Elgato Prompter
48:27 · Markers
51:45 · Outro

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

I kept seeing this error when creating a new Yarn Modern project—setting Yarn to the latest version with yarn set version stable—and using the yarn init command.

Usage Error: The nearest package directory doesn't seem part of the project declared in […]

For instance, yarn add -D @types/node wouldn't work.

The fix

There was a package.json and a yarn.lock file in my home directory.

Removing the file fixed the issue.

rm ~/package.json ~/yarn.lock

Create a Yarn Modern project

Then, in any directory, even subfolders of your home directory (~) you can create new yarn projects.

mkdir app && cd app
yarn init -y
yarn add -D @types/node

Doing It Right

When you run yarn set version stable, Yarn Modern creates a package.json with the packageManager property set to the latest stable version of Yarn, such as 4.1.0.

To avoid the above issue, you should first create your project.

yarn create vite my-app --template react-swc-ts

Then, enter the app's directory and only then set the desired Yarn version.

cd my-app
yarn set version stable
yarn
# Yarn Modern will be used here.

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Writing in public

...is easier than it sounds.

But also harder to accomplish consistently if you overthink it.

I keep writing and journaling daily.

Yet I've experienced how stopping a habit for a few days can turn into stopping it for a very long time—weeks, months, years.

The gist is to put systems in place that make you do what you should do, to spend time doing impactful things.

FEBRUARY 12, 2024

After I put my M1 MacBook Pro to sleep for a couple of weeks, it woke up with the wrong date and time, set to around two years before the current date.

Here's what fixed it for me.

Open a Terminal window and run the following command.

sudo sntp -sS time.apple.com

This will trigger a time sync with the actual date and time from Apple's clock. But it won't completely fix the issue. If you close the lid and reopen your laptop, the time will return to the wrong time.

After you run the command above, you have to do the following.

  • Open System SettingsGeneralDate & Time
  • Disable Set time and date automatically
  • Enable Set time and delete automatically

That's it. This permanently fixed the issue for me.


If you found this useful, let me know!

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

You can directly assign new properties.

(window as any).talk = () => { console.log(`Hello!`) }

You can extend the Window interface with typings and then assign the property values.

declare global {
  interface Window {
    talk: () => void
    concat: (words: string[]) => string
  }
}

window.talk = () => { console.log(`Hello!`) }
window.concat = (words: string[]) => {
  return words.join(`, `)
}

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

The password-management promise

I don't buy the promise behind 1Password or LastPass.

You only need to remember one password.
The last password you'd need to remember.

They don't tell you that you're also building a one-stop shop for hackers to steal it all at once.

The solution?

Store hints, not passwords.

Don't reuse passwords. Use algorithmic passwords instead.

Use passkeys and security keys.

FEBRUARY 2, 2024


In Live 111, I showed a few tools I've recently discovered.


If this is something that interests you, please let me know on Twitter or, even better, on the Discord community.

Thanks for watching.

See you next time!

Chapters

00:11 · Introduction
02:34 · Previously
03:54 · Password Managers
06:45 · Notion
07:57 · Animations with Lottielab
13:33 · Animations with Linearity Move
17:31 · Visual Electric: Generative AI Images
21:32 · Break
23:25 · Visual Electric
26:27 · Future Topics
27:03 · Outro

JANUARY 30, 2024

Scatter-hoarders don't like risk

Squirrels scatter collected foods in numerous locations to minimize the risk of losing everything at once. Certain animals even collect and cache until food ripens and becomes edible.1

Everything under the same roof can be stolen with one key.

Centralization is convenient but unsafe.

Decentralization takes more work but is more secure.

It's all about minimizing risk.


  1. Hoarding (Animal Behavior). Wikipedia. Accessed Jan 27, 2024. 

JANUARY 26, 2024

In an email to Apple Podcasts Connect, Apple announced today they will be displaying transcripts of podcasts in Apple Podcasts, which will be generated by them.

To make podcasts accessible to more users, we’re adding transcripts to Apple Podcasts. Listeners will be able to read along while your podcast plays or access a transcript from your episode page.

Apple Podcasts will start to automatically create and display transcripts for your shows, or you can provide your own. Learn more about our newest feature.

This is a great feature which, if their transcripts are accurate enough, may render useless the countless hours of manual transcription or manual AI-transcript editing to make sure the produced transcripts are accurate.

I wondered whether Apple would allow podcast creator edits when AI gets parts of the transcripts wrong. The answer is yes; transcripts can be provided via podcasts' RSS feeds or uploaded to Apple Podcasts.

Apple will automatically generate episode transcripts for your show. You can also provide your own transcripts through RSS or upload. Displaying transcripts will make your podcast more accessible.

Apple lists two options. "Only display auto-generated transcripts by Apple" and "Display transcripts I provide, or auto-generated transcripts by Apple if one isn't provided."

If you choose to provide your own transcripts, we will ingest them using the RSS transcript tag. […] All transcripts are subject to quality standards. Files that do not meet standards will not be displayed.

You can download and edit transcripts in Apple Podcasts Connect, make changes, and link the new file to your RSS feed. For this, Apple has added the new tag <podcast:transcript> to specify "a link to the episode transcript in the Closed Caption format. Apple Podcasts will prefer VTT format over SRT format if multiple instances are included."

You should use this tag when you have a valid transcript file available for users to read. Specify the link to your transcript in the url attribute of the tag. A valid type attribute is also requried. Learn more about namespace RSS tags on the Github repository.

Options for displaying transcripts are available in Apple Podcasts Connect for each show.

I'm looking forward to this amazing feature. It will make the vast catalog of existing podcasts more accessible.

JANUARY 24, 2024


In Live 110, I continued looking at Apple's MLX framework.

Watch this stream to learn how to run MLX code in Python and generate text with Mistral 7B on Apple silicon.


If this is something that interests you, please let me know on Twitter or, even better, on the Discord community.

Thanks for watching.

See you next week!

Chapters

00:17 · Introduction
02:35 · Today
04:35 · Apple MLX
06:40 · mlx
08:24 · mlx-data
09:55 · mlx-examples
10:43 · MLX Community in HuggingFace
13:40 · M1 Pro with MLX?
15:43 · mlx-lm Troubleshoot
26:19 · mlx-lm Solution
31:57 · Lazy Evaluation
34:09 · Indexing Arrays
39:48 · Generative Image Control
40:48 · Instruct Pix2Pix
45:21 · ControlNet Depth
52:47 · LLMs in MLX with Mistral 7B

JANUARY 23, 2024

Types of deadlines

A faraway deadline gives you time to think, work, and procrastinate.

No deadline makes you feel you have all the time in the world, which you don't.

A short deadline induces you to focus and makes you more efficient.

And a super-short deadline adds pressure and freezes you.

The sweet spot is to fake short deadlines to ship often.

That way, you can't hide, procrastinate, and won't freeze because you'll be ready when the time comes.

JANUARY 19, 2024

Yesterday, Cron announced this is "the final chapter of Cron Calendar and the beginning of Notion Calendar."

I've been a heavy Notion user for years to organize my projects. But I needed to find a good workflow to use Calendars. Notion Calendar to the rescue; this is a great step to surface tasks and pages from Notion databases in my desktop and mobile calendar. Everything would be complete if my main calendar tool were Google Calendar, but I use Apple Calendar.

The last piece missing for me is displaying Apple Calendars in Notion Calendar or the other way around—showing Notion Calendars in Apple Calendar.

JANUARY 18, 2024

First, you must install Rust in your machine, which comes with Cargo. (Installing Rust with rustc will also install Cargo.)

Create a new package

cargo new my_package

Build and run your package

cd my_package
cargo build
cargo run

Adding dependencies

Edit Cargo.toml and add your package dependencies.

// Cargo.toml
[dependencies]
base64 = "0.21.7"

You can browse Cargo packages at crates.io.

See how to compile and run Rust programs without Cargo.

JANUARY 17, 2024

Here are two simple Rust programs and how to compile and run them in macOS with rustc.

The simplest Rust program

// first.rs
fn main() {
    println!("Hello, World!");
}

You can compile this program with rustc.

rustc first.rs

Then run it.

./first
# Hello, World!

A program that counts words in files concurrently

I generated this program with ChatGPT and then modified it.

// count.rs
use std::fs::File;
use std::io::{self, BufRead};
use std::path::Path;
use std::thread;

fn count_words_in_file(file_path: &Path) -> io::Result<usize> {
    let file = File::open(file_path)?;
    let reader = io::BufReader::new(file);

    let mut count = 0;
    for line in reader.lines() {
        let line = line?;
        count += line.split_whitespace().count();
    }
    Ok(count)
}

fn main() {
    let file_paths = vec!["file1.txt", "file2.txt", "file3.txt"]; // Replace with actual file paths
    let mut handles = vec![];

    for path in file_paths {
        let path = Path::new(path);
        let handle = thread::spawn(move || {
            match count_words_in_file(path) {
                Ok(count) => println!("{} has {} words.", path.display(), count),
                Err(e) => eprintln!("Error processing file {}: {}", path.display(), e),
            }
        });
        handles.push(handle);
    }

    for handle in handles {
        handle.join().unwrap();
    }
}

We then build and run as before, assuming we have three text files (file1.txt, file2.txt, and file3.txt) in the same directory of our program.

rustc count.rs
./count
# file2.txt has 45 words.
# file3.txt has 1324 words.
# file1.txt has 93980 words.

JANUARY 16, 2024

No such thing as easy steps

It seems dumb to write down obvious things—easy processes that you can do without thinking much.

But give it enough time, and you'll likely forget even the simplest details.

That's why capturing the steps you take, one after the other, makes sense—no matter how easy they seem while you are taking them.

There's no such thing as easy steps when you can't remember them.

JANUARY 12, 2024

I got a Permission denied error when trying to cargo install.

› cargo install cargo-wasm
    Updating crates.io index
  Downloaded cargo-wasm v0.4.1
error: failed to download replaced source registry `crates-io`

Caused by:
  failed to create directory `/Users/nono/.cargo/registry/cache/index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f`

Caused by:
  Permission denied (os error 13)

This is how I fixed it.

sudo chown -R $(whoami) /Users/nono/.cargo

I then tried to cargo wasm setup and got this error.

› cargo wasm setup
info: syncing channel updates for 'nightly-aarch64-apple-darwin'
error: could not create temp file /Users/nono/.rustup/tmp/628escjb9fzjn4mu_file: Permission denied (os error 13)
Failed to run rustup. Exit code was: 1

Which, again, was solved by changing the owner of ~/.rustup to myself.

sudo chown -R $(whoami) /Users/nono/.rustup

JANUARY 9, 2024

Systems not goals

"Forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead." Says James Clear in Atomic Habits. "Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results."

Changing your mindset to think this way can be hard, but it ultimately pays off.

This is why I prioritize periodicity—showing up with a constant cadence—over achieving specific goals. A weekly stream, weekly mini-essay, daily sketch, and monthly podcast episode.

Let's use the beginning of 2024 to iterate over our systems.

DECEMBER 26, 2023

Goodbye, 2023

Hi, Friends.

Here is my last publication of the year.1

In 2023, I slowed down my projects—YouTube channel, podcast, and writing—amidst a job change, a wedding, and a house renovation.

I still managed to ship new content and recently started recovering my former pace, but it wasn’t easy to give up on well-established habits.

Here are some of the highlights.

  • I released 2 long-form video podcasts with Ian Keough & Alex O’Connor (and enjoyed working with Andrea Villalón, who edited these episodes)
  • I live-streamed 15 times, celebrated 100 streams with friends, and started season 4
  • I wrote and sketched daily (and published 52 mini-essays)
  • I published 101 posts (including the mini-essays above)
  • I started monetizing my YouTube channel after reaching 4,000 played hours in 365 days and 1,000 subscribers (we're nearing 3,000)2

The end of the year is a great temporal landmark to reflect on what we did over the past year and rethink our practice. Yet, it’s best to conduct similar reviews throughout the year instead of waiting for New Year’s resolutions.3


If you're thinking of starting a blog or a personal journal, I invite you to read One Word per Day. I agree with Seth Godin that "everyone should have a blog and write daily, in public." It's free and a great way to establish your tone before anyone cares about your writing.


If there’s anything you’ve learned or enjoyed from my content, I’d love for you to send me a note.

I look forward to sharing more with you in 2024.

Thanks so much for being there!

Goodbye, 2023.

Happy New Year!



  1. This is the third time I have written a year-goodbye post. You can read previous ones from 2020, 2021, and 2022

  2. I'm barely getting twenty bucks a month. But it's great to have reached this milestone and start generating some passive income with my content. 

  3. At the turn of 2019, I published Twelve Grapes—a short reflection on temporal landmarks and New Year's resolutions. 

Want to see older publications? Visit the archive.

Listen to Getting Simple .