This blog

Hi everyone! As you may have noticed, I changed the url for this blog. I spent the weekend cleaning up my personal web infrastructure, and decided to consolidate my projects under the cahillanelabs.com domain. Every domain you own costs an annual fee, so I’m going to let most of mine expire without paying to renew them to save some money.

I’m going to host my side projects in subdomains like mrbooks.cahillanelabs.com and blog.cahillanelabs.com. To ease the transition I set up 301 redirects that respect the slug of the old url. So if you have a link to a post on this blog, it will still work.

I also changed the blog layout, so visitors can read posts without clicking into the post page. Let me know what you think!

Buildspace

I just went through buildspace Nights and Weekends and it was pretty intense. I didn’t graduate because I didn’t complete all of the activities. I did get a lot out of it, learned a lot of simple lessons that will pay off big time. In the end, the program demands about 10-20 hours a week minimum, and the best projects spend more time than that. I simply didn’t have time to work on my project (my youtube channel TechEeq) enough. Not enough to post an update every week, since I only uploaded two real videos during the six-week program.

Buildspace is a wonderful program I recommend to anyone thinking about it. The more time you put in, the more you’ll get out of it. I would love to do a future season. (I have done season one, when I did graduate but my product was hopeless, and season three, where I didn’t graduate and my product is awful, but getting better!)

Zettelkasten

I’ve had a Zettelkasten for a few years, and have gradually been getting used to using it properly. This weekend I brought together scattered notes, bookmarks and saved essays and put everything worth saving into the Zettelkasten.

I even posted on Hacker News about archiving webpages, because I found that some of them have been lost since I started my Zettelkasten in 2019. For now I am archiving valuable text by hand, by cutting, pasting and formatting it myself in a notecard file.

Tthe value of a Zettelkasten comes when an idea or some analysis you’ve currated yourself, that to you personally is valuable, is stored in your “second brain” (another name for Zettelkasten.) A few months or years later, when you’re interested in that topic again, you’ll find that a past version of yourself already researched it.

Building a second brain, to me, has been a project that takes a lot of effort up front, that seemed confusing, and initially of little value. I remembered everything that I stored, and I wasn’t sure what to put in there. Now that I’ve been doing it for four years, I’m starting to find stuff that I had only vaguely remembered, forgotten, or see in a new light now. I hope the payoffs continue!

The biggest benefit is not wondering where to save something, I know I can put it in the Zettelkasten, and I’ll look there later. Centralized notes!

My Youtube channel

I haven’t posted a new video lately, but I’ve been researching two ideas that I think people would like. I’m not sure how to title and thumbnail them, and searching youtube for similar ideas yields videos with very low view counts.

The first idea is how short sellers can be right about a company that goes bankrupt, but in between when they take a short position, and when their prediction comes true, the company stock increases so much that the investors get margin called. They are dead right!

The second idea is the story of a polymarket prediction market about the Elon and DeSantis Twitter Spaces event. The question was, will they mention Trump? During the event, one of them said the word “trump”, the verb, meaning to win! The market resolved to “yes” for a while, then switched to “no”. This raises the question of who resolves markets, which is a fundamental question for prediction markets, especially those that aspire to decentalization.