Jake Russo

I didn’t read as much this week: I do most of my article reading during school via print-outs¹ I bring from home². It works out because it’s nowhere near as obvious as a book but still gives me back some of the time that’s being absolutely destroyed by whichever class I’m required to attend. Also, we had Monday off for Labor Day, and I have been super tired.

• Instacart is the Best and Worst Grocery Business Imaginable (thediff.co)
  • I’ve been passively curious about Instacart and was excited when I saw the email from TheDiff.
    • I’ve never used it, but I think it’s cool to understand a little more about the business.
  • Byrne’s writing — at least for me — is tough to read the first time you pick it up. I’ve been reading him since early this year, though, and I’m finally able to be confident in my ability to follow his thoughts. He posts consistently, and those posts are consistently super interesting.
    • Sidenote to the sidenote — I once pasted an article of his into a writing help tool, and it said the sentences were likely too complex for a general audience.
      • This helped my ego. 😉
• Hey tech folks: Vivek Ramaswamy is not the one (noahpinion.blog)
  • I already was not a fan of Ramaswamey because most of what I’ve heard him say is a little crazy, and I’m not a fan of right-wing ideas generally, but this was a good takedown of just a few of his incoherent ideas.
  • His speech is also annoying; Chris Christie was right.
    • Also, it looks like YouTube is now tracking individual shares with a new “si” parameter. This must be pretty new because I’ve never seen it before, and I didn’t see much mention of it after some quick (admittedly imprecise) googling.
• The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • I’ve never watched sports, and have only tuned into ESPN a handful of times — most of which were five–seven years ago when I was testing connecting my TV directly to the coax outlet in the wall because my cable provider at the time didn’t encrypt the channels or require a set-top box — but I enjoyed this article and have found Ben’s continuing coverage of the collapse of ESPN on Sharp Tech and in his updates quite interesting.
  • The quotes from Those Guys Have All the Fun worked well.
    • According to Ben on a recent Sharp Tech podcast, he’s been wanting to quote this book in an article for a while.
• The prologue to Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller
  • I finish very few of the books I start, which is something I’m working on. That said, I don’t know if I’ll finish this book — one difficulty is that I have too many books, both printed and digital, and I subscribe to Kindle Unlimited — but I enjoyed the discussion of life as being a fight against entropy, disorder.
  • The opening lines were captivating: > “Picture the person you love most […] eating cereal. […] Entropy will get them.”
• Our climate change debates are out of date – by Noah Smith (noahpinion.blog)
  • My current biology teacher is more hopeless about climate change than I’d like, and this was a nice, interesting update to my (limited!) knowledge on climate change.
  • I didn’t know how cheap solar and wind were getting!
• Amazon and Shopify, Shopify and Its Merchants, The Payments Question – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • The AWS model for Amazon distribution!
    • Ben has covered this on Sharp Tech.
    • One of the many differences between the two, though, is that AWS is not branded; Buy with Prime is.
  • This was a good update, but it left me curious about how exactly Amazon Pay is integrated with Shopify Checkout such that Shopify processes the payments.
    • Maybe this was a bit of a miscommunication because the press release seems to imply that Amazon Pay is/will be a payment option but not a required one for Buy with Prime.
  • I enjoyed the nuances about e.g., how Amazon might have wanted the deal with Shopify more than Shopify did.
• Credit card debt collection (bitsaboutmoney.com)
  • I read this about a month ago when it came out, but it was featured in The Browser today, which, to me, was a validation both of the article — reading this very blog a few years ago sparked my (casual) interest in finance and economics! — and of The Browser, the editors of which consistently find excellent reads.

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¹four pages per sheet, double sided, flipped on the long edge!

²or, sometimes, when I’m desperate, print in the school library for $0.10/page

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I wrote many of the entries in this post at once, but the goal is to write my reactions soon after I read an article — which is something I often do anyway, just on the paper on which I’ve printed the piece.

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Week numbers! What’s the Current Week Number? (epochconverter.com)

I’ve fallen victim to a corollary of Parkinson’s Law. Indeed, as work expands to fill the time it’s been allotted, use of that time becomes less efficient. This has described much of my summer: I have accomplished very few of the things I set aside for “when I have more time”. I, embarrassingly, feel as though I haven’t done much at all. While some of that might be due to quirks in memory, I certainly haven’t been terribly productive. In some sense, that’s okay. There’s a value in having almost more time than you know what to do with — and that’s not a luxury I’ll have for much longer.

With just over a week to go before my break is over, I’m experiencing the inevitably familiar emotions of school: frustration, boredom, a shortness of time. It’s difficult for me to say outright that I dislike school, and it’s hardly a brave or original thing to say. There are definitely things I like and things I don’t — it’s mostly a waste of time, but that’s the price to pay for the benefits, which, in my judgement, are the handful of life-changing teachers and the opportunity to socialize. I’m planning a “Retrospective on High School” post¹ at the end of the year, so I’ll keep it brief here.

I’d say I have a couple goals for this school year: one being to finish diploma requirements (e.g., essay, CAS, other busywork), and another being to socialize more with friends new and old. People say to “take risks”, whatever that means. I guess it’s because general advice is so difficult to give that we end up with lines — ambiguities — like these. I think, though, it’d be fair to say I haven’t taken many.

This summer, I

• made friends and spent more time with those I already had.
  • Introvert vs extrovert sometimes seems like a false binary. But I suppose I’m clearly an introvert.
• managed to get fired from a second job after two days of work.
  • It was, ostensibly, without cause, and the restaurant is exceptionally poorly managed, (e.g., they were well acquainted with the health department as well as the federal government, among others) so maybe it’s for the best.
• pulled money out of thin air by cancelling a bunch of subscriptions I wasn’t using nearly enough, one of those being GeForce Now (which I’ve mentioned before).
  • Interestingly, my least used subscriptions were the most expensive — I cancelled multiple for $20/month each.
  • I downgraded my plan on the subscription service that hosts this site because I wasn’t using a single one of the features of the Premium plan.
• recycled my Halo products. (This one is clearly out of place, but the products were the subject of my most recent post here.)
• didn’t accomplish much of anything I set out to at the beginning.

I often cite to myself summer breaks in between years of school as some of the more transformative times. It seems these breaks — at least for me — force a sort of introspection and living with oneself. It’s something that sometimes threatens to drive me crazy.

Maybe, though, I’m misattributing changes that happen during the rest of the year, while school is in session, to the almost artificial breaks between them: if some internal change happened at at some point during the year, I might cite the break separating that year from the previous, rather than the year itself.

Anyway, maybe I’ll finally attend a sportsball² game this year.

I find this might actually be useful because I find that I blank completely when people ask me what I did over the summer. Maybe I could pull out this webpage. 😉

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¹We’ll see whether or not that actually happens.

²I’m not sure how widespread this term is, so here’s the dictionary.

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This is quite incomplete, but it represents what I could remember when I wrote it.

I’ve backdated this post by about a month and a half because that’s when I wrote most of it, and it’ll be more accurate as of then.

In January, I felt the sudden urge to buy a fingerprint sensor. I have a habit of locking my desktop each time I get up, and retyping my password ten times daily was getting annoying. More than that, though, leaving the computer unattended for more than ten minutes locks the password manager. That’s probably drop-down menu away from being fixed, but a fingerprint sensor seemed cool.

Naturally, my purchase research began with an Amazon search for “fingerprint reader”. Among the seemingly random off-brands was one I recognized: Kensington. They make the Kensington lock (which I’ve found intriguing for years since I started noticing it and its logo on things)! In addition to reading fingerprints, it’s also a FIDO key, which is nice (more on that later).

Reviews on Amazon were fine, but they were hard to find on YouTube, Reddit, or separate sites. Lazy Tech TV’s video overview was helpful, though, and we have the same microphone (including the finish)!

The setup was plug-and-play on Windows 11. You, of course, have to navigate to Windows Hello in settings, and setup your fingerprint.

I don’t need it — I could take the extra few seconds to type in my password (or PIN?) each time. But between not having to do that, and using Hello to bypass my password manager’s re-authentication, it makes using the computer significantly more enjoyable. The logo glows white when the computer prompts for a scan, and quickly flashes red for misreads or unmatched prints. Also, my desktop is set to sleep the display pretty rapidly when it’s locked, and just tapping on the fingerprint sensor to wake it up, bypassing the login screen, is satisfying.

The sensor almost always works, and quickly — in contrast to my laptop, whose sensor is quite finicky. The only real problem I’ve experienced is having to un- and re-plug the sensor, but very rarely; this could be a machine- or configuration-specific problem.

I stocked up on YubiKeys late last year (Cloudflare ran an excellent promotion), but a location-fixed one is nice to have. It works on most sites that accept FIDO keys (I had problems with sites that require a PIN when using the key), and requires — like all(?) FIDO2-compliant devices — you touch it when signing in (though it checks touch only, not fingerprint).

Small quality of life improvements in everyday tedium are nice, and this is an example of just such an improvement.

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I haven’t been writing lately. I would use exam season as an excuse, but that hasn’t had much of an impact on my free time. I have some ideas! More soon… maybe. 🙂

Even accounting for hindsight bias, I think Amazon’s nuking Halo might’ve been an easy call. I didn’t make it, and I didn’t think it’d come true so quickly — they just released a new device (Halo Rise) to the lineup earlier this year; this year isn’t half over!

The bands were constantly on sale, and it seemed like Amazon was trying to liquidate them. One of the few things I actually remember from congressional hearings is that Amazon, somewhat unsurprisingly, does lose money on its in-house products like Kindle and (especially) Echo¹, but only when they’re on sale (which is often).

The Halo View was listed for a similar price as a Fitbit but looked much worse. Also, Fitbit is still around, and their app will still work after August 1st! I never found the View compelling; it was a poor knock-off² of a Fitbit. The Band, however, was more interesting — it was different! I think it had a similar appeal as the Fitbit Flex, where there was no screen, no distraction, but the data was there when you wanted it. This has been my approach with sleep tracking — the Withings sleep tracker goes under the matress, silently and forgettably recording data. I can go weeks or months without looking at it; but when I’m curious, I can check on my sleep data. The Band had a gimmick — of course it did — it could analyze your conversations and record how you sounded. It was an entertaining gimmick! Its resolution was higher than I expected: “confrontational”, “reflective”, or “encouraging” instead of “sad” or “happy”. This wasn’t very insightful, though. I tend to have some idea what I sound like and of the emotions I’m conveying. The only value I found was in remembering moments throughout the day, based on the timestamped emotions.

Amazon was almost giving the Band away when I bought it — $24.99. I don’t wear a fitness tracker, and smart watches annoy me; heartrate data³, though, was kind of interesting.

I ended up with the Halo Rise a few months after its release after they discounted it like 30%. It’s surprisingly difficult to find internet-connected⁴ clocks that don’t look horrible — my other one is the Echo Show 5, configured⁵ only to show the current time — and this was one of those. The radar-based sleep tracking (similar to my now-broken-and-recycled Nest Hub gen 2) was interesting. It also seemed like it would make a good reading light. (It didn’t; the angle was weird.) The sunrise/smart alarm feature was cool and reminiscent of the Sleep Cycle app; it was useful for about a week.

Amazon discontinued the entire Halo line a couple weeks ago; coincidentaly, this was right after I read The Composting Theory of Continuous Growth, which references Amazon’s seemingly-failed projects like the Fire Phone and presents them as proofs of concept for AWS services. Applied to this scenario, the health data systems Amazon built might⁶ be for sale to AWS customers.

Conceivably, Amazon might not have turned all Halo devices to bricks as immediately as they have — app support ends in August, making the devices completely useless⁷. But supporting it was probably a complete waste of resources, and they’re refunding everyone! Yes, manufactured e-waste is bad; it’s annoying these products are disappearing. Companies like Amazon and Google, though, have the resources to make customers (almost) whole — Stadia refunded everything, so some customers got to use it for free. With Stadia, time and save data was lost; with Halo, health data is lost (it’s downloadable, but portability might be tough).

I woke up this morning to a notification from Amazon, saying they’d processed my refunds. I’m sure(?) there are Halo customers out there who are more upset than I, but, selfishly, this worked out well; Halo was okay but unneccesary, and it’s nice that it’s free.

Halo is off to compost.

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¹Selling the latest Echo for $49.99 with a free color Hue bulb is clearly not profitable.

²Amazfit, anyone?

³My phone tracks my steps, apparently.

⁴Because they keep time well and automatically adjust for daylight saving time (syncronization with time servers!)

⁵Which likes to turn on other homescreen features and ads, even after I turn them off

⁶Didn’t bother checking

⁷We’ll see if the Rise still works as a light or clock, but the Alexa control seems to go through Halo, so I’m not hopeful.

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As always, let me know if I’m wrong. My nonchalance on this might make for a boring, meandering read.