172. Cycling Qingshan Lake
The cover photo was taken while cycling during a camping trip at Qingshan Lake. I cycled for over a dozen kilometers—there’s a dedicated path around the lake that eventually extends into a beautiful riverside area. It was cool and breezy.
Record the down-to-earth trending technologies seen every week, and publish them here after screening. If you find it good, you can follow this weekly to get update notifications.
Technical Learning
Image magnification feature added to Trending Weekly
A smoother experience for those who like to see high-res images on desktop.
How to read a paper
https://dub.sh/paper-read
A concise 2-page guide from the University of Waterloo’s CS department. The English is straightforward and easy to read.
Use ChatGPT API to track and monitor personal expenses
https://joncallahan.com/blog/ai-txns/
An interesting tutorial on using the ChatGPT API to categorize and monitor expenses—covering automated notifications, email workflows, webhooks, and generating formatted JSON for storage. A very practical idea.
Software Technical Writing Guide (E-book)
https://jamesg.blog/book.pdf
A ~110 page guide on technical writing for documentation, blogs, and open-source projects. Very useful if you’re looking to improve your documentation skills.
Trending Tools
Dub.co: Open-source short link tool
https://dub.co/
I highly recommend this open-source short link tool. It allows custom strings, project management, has a generous free tier, and provides detailed click analytics. Everything a short link service should be.
Sequel Ace: Open-source Mac DB manager
https://dub.sh/sequel-ace
A fast, easy-to-use open-source Mac database manager for MySQL and MariaDB. You can even install it via the App Store.
Comflowy: Open-source AI image/video generation
https://comflowy.com/zh-CN/space
An out-of-the-box tool that makes WebUI and ComfyUI much more accessible with one-click installation and workflow management.
Just Looking Around
Pro-tip: try adding some osmanthus flowers when brewing coffee—the subtle floral scent is lovely!
2023 New Media Platform Strategy Report
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/8FiV1KYbUyTQ6yhfz9tBiw
Useful for engineers looking to understand domestic social media platforms like Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Video Accounts, covering operations and traffic tools.
Reading Notes on the Elon Musk Biography: The Five-Step Method
- Question every requirement. Every requirement should be attached to a person’s name. Never accept a requirement from “legal” or “safety”—you must know the individual responsible. Question it, no matter how smart they are. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous because they are less likely to be questioned. Even if it comes from Musk himself, question and improve it.
- Delete as much as you can. You can always add it back later. If you don’t end up adding back at least 10% of what you deleted, you haven’t deleted enough.
- Simplify and optimize. This MUST come after step 2. People often make the mistake of optimizing a process that shouldn’t even exist.
- Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be faster, but only after following the first three steps. At Tesla, I once spent too much energy speeding up a process that should have been removed entirely.
- Automate. A big mistake at the Nevada and Fremont factories was trying to automate every step from the start. We should have questioned requirements, deleted unnecessary parts, and fixed issues before automating.
The Method Sometimes Leads to a Few Corollaries
- All technical managers must have hands-on experience. Managers of software teams, for example, must spend at least 20% of their time coding, and managers of the solar roof business must spend time on roofs doing installations themselves. Otherwise they are all talk, like a cavalry captain who cannot ride or a general who cannot use a sword.
- “You’re fine, I’m fine, everyone’s fine” is dangerous, because it makes people stop questioning their colleagues’ work. People naturally do not want to throw a good colleague overboard, and that dangerous tendency must be avoided.
- Making mistakes is fine, but being wrong and refusing to admit it is not.
- Never ask your team to do something you are not willing to do yourself.
- Whenever there is a problem to solve, do not only talk to the managers who report to you. To dig in properly, communicate across levels and talk directly to the people who report to your reports.
- Hire people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught, but changing someone’s attitude to work is far too hard, it takes “a brain transplant”. A maniacal sense of urgency is the operating principle of our company.
- The only rules that must be followed are the ones that can be derived from the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.