Buttondown Newsletters

I like that this exists, as someone who writes everything in Markdown.

(I should note that there is a platform that offers something similar to this already: https://buttondown.email/)

But while Markdown on its own is great to see more of in the email space, I think there's room to extend the idea. A few years ago, an employee of CakeMail created this great demo of a concept that mixed shortcodes and Markdown, but never followed through with the idea: http://cakedown.alexandredeschamps.ca/

Part of the problem with that design was that it was built around specific components in Foundation for Emails, which kinda backed that design in a corner, but there's room to allow end users to custom-build components for easy access, along the lines of what MJML can do. To me, I think that idea has a ton of blue water around it. Nobody is combining shortcodes and Markdown in this way for email clients, and it could potentially be very valuable as an alternative to the overly complex WYSIWYG editors the rest of the email market uses.

I run a newsletter with 10k+ subscribers (https://tedium.co/) and I run it on Craft CMS in a way that replicates the CakeMail approach to a degree, with my own flourishes (which was convenient as I already use shortcodes for my text). It allows me to throw in ads on the fly and simply add design features to content without a lot of extra work. I'd love to see the general idea get picked up by some new email provider.

I think we need more thinking in this…

Thanks for flagging. opsindev.news is hosted on GitLab Pages using Let's Encrypt. Maybe the TLS ciphers or versions do not match. Which error message do you see, browser/OS and location may help (if you want to share)

If the MkDocs website does not work, suggest the following workarounds: Newsletter issues in [0] as markdown files, example [1] or the newsletter archive on Buttondown [2].

I'm using Buttondown to send the newsletter, MkDocs serves as web-searchable archive. Kudos to Michael Hausenblas here for the idea, he publishes the o11y.news newsletter.

[0] https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/opsindev.news/-/tree/main/docs/archive

[1] https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/opsindev.news/-/blob/main/docs/archive/2022-07-12.md

[2] https://buttondown.email/opsindev.news/

indeed. I pointed out in https://buttondown.email/ainews/archive/ainews-llama-31-the-synthetic-data-model/ that the frontier model curve is currently going down 1 OoM every 4 months, meaning every model release has a very short half life[0]. however this progress is still worth it if we can deploy it to improve millions and eventually billions of people's lives. a commenter pointed out that the amoutn spent on Llama 3.1 was only like 60% of the cost of Ant Man and the Wasp Quantumania, in which case I'd advocate for killing all Marvel slop and dumping all that budget on LLM progress.

[0] not technically complete depreciation, since for example 4o mini is widely believed to be a distillation of 4o, so 4o's investment still carries over into 4o mini

Mine would be Cassidy William's newsletter: https://tinyletter.com/cassidoo. It's free, but there was a few newsletters where she linked her Venmo/Paypal in case people wanted to support, and I contributed during that time. She's since removed those from the letters for whatever reason. This newsletter is great on a Monday morning because it's light and has some interesting/cool links in it.

Another great one would be Kent C Dodds' newsletters: https://buttondown.email/kentcdodds. Kent is highly active in the React/JS/OS community and he's a super great guy. Same deal here, its free but you can choose to support, which I do from time to time. His newsletters are focused on JS/React and are a bit more dense, but they're interesting.

I'm actually currently writing a book with exactly this emphasis!

The working title is "Practical Math for Programmers," and the idea is to build a collection of 60-75, 3-page long, _compelling_ demonstrations of mathematics used in production settings, biased toward stuff a generalist programmer might find useful. Not going into proofs or foundations, but providing lots of references to further reading.

I'm aspiring for it to be like a Hacker's Delight, or Programming Gems, but just for math that is genuinely useful.

Read more here: https://buttondown.email/j2kun/archive/a-week-of-book-writing/

Sign up to hear when it's released here: https://jeremykun.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=99aa071e97df95d3a140b1a3f&id=fbe11f6b59

Hard to take this seriously, citing Durovs nonsense about best practices and backdoors and completely ignoring the fact that Telegram almost certainly shipped a backdoor! https://buttondown.email/cryptography-dispatches/archive/cryptography-dispatches-the-most-backdoor-looking/

You even discuss this issue in the "History of Telegram vulnerabilities", but don't bother to mention the fact that this was almost certainly a deliberate backdoor.

You also seem to suggest that DUAL_EC_DRBG was promoted as a best practice by the crypto-community, what an utterly bizarre claim.

Of course, the mental gymnastics in the "Defamation" section make it clear that this was never intended to be a honest analysis.