Hi everyone!
I've been using AI to help me code a lot. But I've always been very strict on reviewing every bit of code and cleaning up where necessary. Lately however, I've been leaning harder into vibe coding. I've created small scripts and apps that solve a specific annoyance in my life.
My favorite one so far is called MavNote, a tiny iOS application that lets me record voice notes by triple taping my phone. When I'm done recording, it sends the recording to my n8n instance, where an AI agent processes it while having access to my emails, todo app, the internet, and my Obsidian notes.
Voice notes never really clicked for me, until now. And I'm using it all the time. When I'm listening to a podcast in the car, I use it to "take notes". When I have a ton of unstructured ideas that I need to get out of my head, I record a voice note and let AI do a first pass. I sometimes even ask dumb questions like "does my electric car weigh more when it's charged" and let it research the answer and drop its findings in Obsidian for me later.
And sure, there are a ton of other applications like this already. But honestly? I had a hard time finding one that didn't wat to sell me yet another overpriced subscription. Why? This stuff isn't rocket science!
Anyway, being able to make "personal software" like this is super cool. What a time to be alive!
Enjoy this edition of the newsletter,
Xavier
🤓 Cool Stuff I Found on the Internet
Audiophiles can't hear if their music passed through mud
A moderator on the forum DIYAudio tested if audiophiles could hear the difference between an original file and versions of it passed through different conducting materials. That included professional audio cable (which is crazy expensive), a banana, and wet mud. The result? Most audiophiles were unable to tell the difference!
Deceptive babies
A study found that babies start practicing deception when only 10 months old. They pretend not to hear their parents or hide forbidden snacks. By age three, that behavior becomes increasingly complex. The conclusion? Parents can rest assured: deception is a normal part of cognitive development.
YouTube = Disney + NBC + Paramount + Warner
Last year, YouTube raked in $40 billion in ad revenue. That's a lot. But what surprised me most, is that it's more than the Disney, NBC, Paramount, and Warner Bros combined. Analysts expect YouTube to continue to grow.
Barf bag collection
Everyone needs a hobby. For Steven J. Silberberg that’s a collection of barf bags. He has been collecting bags since 1997, and his collection contains 3655 bags. The entire collection is viewable on his website, the Air Sickness Bag Museum.
Mosquitoes are the future of 3D printing
Want to 3D print something incredibly small? Like 20 micrometres small? Don’t bother developing an expensive nozzle. Researchers discovered that a severed mosquito proboscis does the job and is cheap at the same time. They call it “3D necroprinting” and could pave the way for 3D-printing human-like tissue and even replacement organs.
⏳ On this day...
1965 - NASA launches Ranger 9, a probe designed to capture high-resolution photos of the Moon's surface to prove the Moon was solid enough for humans to walk on.
1970 - The inaugural San Diego Comic-Con is held, marking the humble beginning of what would become the world's most influential pop culture conference.
2006 - The social media platform Twitter was founded. It introduced a “microblogging” format with messages of maximum 140 characters.
đź‘˝ Space
Artemis ll planned for April 1st
On April 1st we might finally send astronauts on their way around the moon and back. If all goes well, it’ll be the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. Let’s hope NASA isn’t pulling a prank on us...
Russia plans mission to Venus
The Russians are the only ones who have successfully landed spacecraft on Venus. They're now planning on reviving their Venus exploration program with the Venera-D mission, slated for 2036. A key goal is to investigate potential signs of microbial life in Venus's clouds.
Asteroid contains building blocks for life
Scientists analyzed samples from the asteroid Ryugu and found that it contains all five nucleobases that form DNA and RNA. These molecules are the fundamental building blocks of all known life. This finding bolsters the theory that asteroids could have delivered the essential ingredients for life to Earth. It also hints that these molecules could be widespread across the cosmos and not unique to our planet.
🏥 Health & Medicine
Lab-grown hair follicles
Japanese researchers have made a significant breakthrough in hair regeneration. The team successfully grew functional hair follicles in a lab. And when transplanted onto mice, these follicles integrated with the host’s body and followed natural growing cycles! This might pave the way for human hair restoration.
Carrots & World War ll propaganda
Eating carrots doesn’t improve your eyesight. That idea was cooked up by the British government during World War II. The Royal Air Force had developed secret radar technology that let its pilots shoot down German planes at night, but they didn’t want the enemy finding out. So instead, they told the press that their pilots were just really, really into carrots, which improved their vision at night.
🧠🤖 Artificial intelligence
Keeping sharp while using AI
This article is written for software engineers, but honestly, the advice applies to anyone using AI. As AI tools get better at doing the thinking for us, it's tempting to just take the output and run. The problem is that over time, that can erode the very skills that make you good at your job. The article makes a great point: instead of just using AI to get answers faster, use it to actually learn. Question its output, ask it to explain its reasoning, and make it work as a tutor rather than a shortcut.
Can you run AI locally?
Wondering if you can run an open source AI model on your own computer? This website allows you to see which models can run on your machine and estimates how fast they’ll be. I have a MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro and 16GB of memory. I should be able to run models like Llama 3.1, Qwen 3.5 9B, and GPT-OSS 20B.
AI increases workload
Silicon Valley sold a vision of AI-powered tools that would automate tasks, reduce workloads, and create a better work-life balance. However, the reality is proving to be quite different. Amazon employees, suggests that AI is actually increasing workloads. Employees find themselves correcting AI mistakes or using the time saved by AI to simply do more work.
Autoresearch
Andrej Karpathy, one of the most well known names in AI research, recently created a project called Autoresearch. The idea is simple: you let an AI agent run experiments on its own. The agent then writes some code, tests the result, keeps what works, and repeats. Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify has used this technique to improve the performance of the Liquid template language by 53%!