Ben Mann Monthly Nov 2023

Robots, running buddies, baby milestones, superheroes

Purpose

• An index for my memory

• A menu of topics for my next conversation with you

• A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it

• A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable

Photos

Experiments and experiences

• Euda's developmental milestones

  • Euda has all the components of walking figured out: standing up, sitting down, taking steps. She hasn't been able to put them together, however, and generally she's pretty lazy about practicing. When I try to get her to stand up, she usually sits herself back down. I'm not worried about her figuring it out eventually, but I think she'll enjoy it when she does. It'll unlock a whole new set of possibilities for her. That said, her vocabulary is increasing almost every day. She's getting better at repeating words when we say them, and she's able to use them herself more and more. Her most frequent words are "no", which is her default answer to all questions, and "apple" which does mean apple, but also maybe many other solid foods.

• Long distance exercise buddy

  • My brother lives in Helsinki, but that didn't stop us from hanging out! We put on our headphones and he did stairmaster while I ran outdoors in San Francisco. We usually sit around while chatting, but this format made downtime between conversation topics feel more natural. We've tried it three times so far and are refining our technique. Wind noise is the biggest problem, so maybe we'll stick to gym only in the future. Good accountability for both of us to sweat.

• New robot vacuum

  • We previously had the Roomba i3+ self emptying vacuum. It picked up all of Roong-ji's shedding and Euda's crumbs, but left smudges and scuffs everywhere, took a long time, was fairly loud, and in its old age (2 years), the charging contacts frequently failed to connect. For Black Friday we got the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra. It has lidar, AI obstacle detection, a self-cleaning and drying mop, and a couple other fancy features. We've only had it a few days, but it's far better than the Roomba! The mop is very water efficient so it dries quickly; the map is very accurate, so it doesn't get lost and stuck as much as the Roomba; the route planning is better, so it covers the space more efficiently; it's quieter; and maybe most importantly, the mop means the floor is noticeably cleaner. Let's see how it holds up.

Life updates

• 🚀 Launched Claude 2.1+200k context

• 🦷 Finished 4th hour of deep cleaning, now done for 2y

• 🍵 Diana's really into roasted barley tea

• 📘 Started reading The Idea Factory

Content

5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted

• Invincible S1 3/5

  • I liked the first few episodes. Felt fairly genre-aware and interesting. Reminded me a bit of Worm, both in its self-awareness but also in the way it kind of devolved into one big fight scene after another. I committed series suicide (aka reading the plot summaries in Wikipedia) and felt no regret.

• Loki S2 3/5

  • Continuing to try to escalate the ideas of the first season. Feels very middle-of-road Marvel formula at this point.

• The Little Mermaid 3/5

  • Pretty good remake, though the new songs were hit or miss. I loved Awkwafina's character Scuttle.

• Apocalypse Now 3/5

  • A bit more modern than I remembered from the last time I watched it maybe 10 years ago, just as haunting

  • Diana was NOT in the mood for it.

• M3gan 3/5

  • Surprisingly good horror comedy that's kind of about AI safety.

• For All Mankind S4E1 2/5

  • Only watched the first episode and churned. Felt like it's out of ideas.

• Family Switch 2/5

  • Meh comedy

• Shortcomings 2/5

  • Woof, I hated the main character. Even though I'm supposed to hate him, I hated him too much.