Travis Fantina

My wife and I have started painting our Christmas cards. I’m a big fan of Owen Pomery’s style, it kond of reminds me of Hergé. I copied this from Victory Point

I was telling my wife about the raccoon who broke into a liquor store, got drunk, then passed out in the bathroom. She said, “Sounds like an American racoon”, I guess he truly was living the American Dream.

If your worried, they sobered him up in the drunk tank and released him safely into the wild a few hours later.

Finished reading: No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris 📚

I love a good expose on unchecked corporate greed. I’d say I’m not surprised because there are no depths to which unchecked capitalism won’t sink to but there were a few takeaways in this book that shocked me:

1. J&J was conducting tests on black prisoners up to at least 1971, that’s nearly 30 years after the Nuremberg Trails!
2. I was breathing in asbestos anytime I used J&J baby powder. Years ago I heard that talc was not good for the lungs, but I didn’t realize that all talc has trace amounts of asbestos due to their similar chemical makeup and co-location.
3. J&J actively sold unapproved drugs in the optimistic hope that the FDA would approve them and thereby give a retroactive taciturn approval.
4. Although Purdue and the Sackler family are the public face of the opioid epidemic; J&J has, outsold Purdue with subsequent opioids running the same marketing playbook that “this time it’s not addictive!” Not only that, but all the opium Purdue used to manufacture their opioids was supplied by… J&J.

My daughter really wanted to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” for our November movie night, you can’t rent it you have to subscribe to Apple TV to get it. This gives me at least 1 month to binge all the Apple shows people talk about. We are working our way through Severance.

Wonderful to see this from James Cameron:

…you’ve got generative AI, where they can make up a character. They can make up an actor. They can make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. It’s like, no. That’s horrifying to me

He’s a futurist who has always embraced cutting edge technology in his films but only in service of the story, pushing the limits of his creativity and the creativity of those he works with. Generative AI will never do that; because it is not creative. Computers can not produce art.

I’m no lover of the Olympics but the branding behind them fascinates me (see 99pi Mexico 68). This morning I stumbled across some hate for Utah 2034 and all I could do is shake my head; to be an Olympic Logo designer, what a thankless job in it’s time. I think the general trajectory of an Olympic logo is this:

1. Unveiling: everyone hates it and loudly proclaims this
2. Lead up to the games: through repeated exposure the image is rehabilitated in people’s minds
3. Immediately following the games: people mostly have positive associations with it
4. Legacy: this is where the timeless/iconic nature of the logo is actually proved. Will people remember it in 30 years? 50 years?

In general people hate new logos, anytime a company changes their logo there is going to be backlash which is why, it’s best to just keep moving forward and ignore the chatter for a few months. The Olympics are unique because the logo (and associated iconography) for each games is both a “brand new” logo but it’s also an iteration or a “redesign” of all previous logos. Of course, Utah is not Vancouver, or Turin but when people see this logo their mind is going to think of those logos and do, likely, the same thing it would for a corporate rebrand.

Personally, I think Utah 2034 is dope. Although, I might have skewed something in the A or H to avoid the 4 leaf clover look they’ve got going on.

After about 7 months exclusively working on a product team I’ve started delving back into a bit of agency work with clients. It’s a stark difference moving from a code base with an up to date version of Rails, the latest TS/React best practices, etc. to just trying to get docker compose up to run on a Rails 5 project but it’s also a lot of fun.

As frustrating as working in ancient code bases can be, and I get why a lot of programmers hate it, solving these kinds of problems especially within the constraints of a tight budget can be a lot of fun. Greenfield projects are basically writing code, and writing a lot of it, legacy projects help you flex your Docker muscles, read release notes, and calculate end of life scenarios for Ubuntu versions!

I used to consciously unsubscribe from things but it’s just too much, now if I get something I didn’t sign up for it goes straight to spam. I’ll still try to unsubscribe from non-profits and stuff I care about; but a random Shopify store… straight to spam.

Whether or not they can ever make this thing safe for children… just don’t buy AI toys. Kids are happy to play with a cardboard box and some paints for hours and hours they don’t need AI.

I’m sure git worktrees have their place, perhaps in large compiled projects, but in Ruby and TS I find them to be more a foot gun than not. Not being able to run specs or the server always becomes a hindrance. I’m often tempted to git worktree add when reviewing a PR or doing a quick bugfix on one of my branches but inevitably I’ll get to a point where I want to make sure it works and more often or not at that point I’ll have forgotten I’m even on a worktree. Just last week I spent about 15 minutes trying to debug a TS error before realizing that I was on a worktree and, therefore, the paths were confusing the TS compiler.

I’d love to take full advantage of worktrees but based on the above experiences I can’t see the benefit over something like gwip && gs some_other_branch. Which is pretty snappy. (If your not familiar gwip and gs are just aliases for git add -A; git rm $(git ls-files --deleted) 2> /dev/null; git commit --no-verify --no-gpg-sign --message "--wip-- [skip ci]" and git switch from the OhMyZsh git plugin).