December 2022 - Fin 📆

Introduction

Welcome to my email capping off the last year.

If the format of this one looks a little different to you, it’s because I’m using Substack now as my newsletter platform. I made a prediction about a month ago that Revue (a Twitter-owned platform I was using) would be shut down post-acquisition by Elon. It looks like I was right.

I’m writing you this as I’m sitting in a terminal at the SFO airport. I’m about to fly to New York City on a red eye. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

This new year should be about action. It should be about trying new things to see what makes us happy while also actively removing what doesn’t.

Real, lasting change doesn’t come from grandiose resolutions; if you want to change your life, start now and start small. It’s okay if it’s not perfect. All you need to do is get started. You can refine along the way as you go through life’s journey.

Take the leap.

I also hope you have a great first month of 2023.

—

Nathan ☕️

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Books

“Hell Yeah or No” by Derek Sivers

This book was a gift from my friend Alex King, and it has changed my perspective on how important it is to turn down lots of options in life so that we can fully focus on (and pursue) what is really important to us. I’d highly recommend it.

Derek Sivers founded the famous CD Baby website which distributed independent music in the CD era at a time when indie artists had trouble getting their music out into the world.

“Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur” by Derek Sivers

By the same author, this book walks through Derek’s opinions on entrepreneurship. They largely parallel the ones in the first book I shared above, but do so with a business-oriented slant. It’s also highly inspiring and put a lot of seeds in my mind for this new year.

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Code

tRPC

According to the documentation, “tRPC allows you to easily build & consume fully typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation.” This is a full replacement for GraphQL and RESTful APIs, and you can find the documentation for it here.

FastAI “From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion” Course

Some of you might recognize the name “FastAI” from the other newsletter links I’ve shared before. They teach a lot of cool stuff surrounding machine learning. This course (or at least the 2 classes of it that they’re sharing for free) is awesome because Stable Diffusion is one of the machine learning models that’s generating the images you’re seeing all over social media. Here’s the tweet from FastAI’s founder Jeremy Howard about this course:

Jeremy Howard @jeremyphoward

I got a special surprise for you all... We just released the first 5.5 hours of our new course "From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion", for free!

fast.aifast.ai - 1st Two Lessons of From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion4 videos from Practical Deep Learning for Coders Part 2, 2022 have been released as a special early preview of the new course.

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Games

Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra (board game)

One of my favorite board games of the last 12 months has been Azul. It’s beautifully-designed game that’s pretty easy to pick up but also has enough strategy to keep experienced board game fans busy.

Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra is the sequel, and it evolves the design quite a bit shifting the style of the board along (the theme is hanging stained glass rather than laying down tiling like in the first game). I’d highly recommend it.

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Music

King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard

One part psychedelic rock, one part jam band, and one part second coming of The Grateful Dead (according to their fans), King Gizzard has quickly become one of my favorite bands to listen to this month. They are incredibly prolific and their live jam sessions which you can find on YouTube are epic (Apple Music and Spotify).

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Videos

Using LEAPS for Stock Investing

While I know the whole stock market is down right now, I wanted to share this YouTube video I dug up recently to give to a friend; it breaks down how to use LEAPS (Long-Term Equity Anticipation Securities) instead of owning individual stocks.

This exchanges some risk in order to use a smaller amount of capital to purchase the underlying asset (the stock) compared with just outright buying 100 shares of the it.

It’s worth adding here that this is not financial advice. I just think they’re cool.

“How Startup Fundraising Works” by Brad Flora at Y Combinator

I always love to watch Y Combinator materials, and this one is no different. If you’ve ever even been so much as slightly curious about how fundraising for tech startups works, this video is for you!