We saw The Wild Robot tonight at Edina 4. It was a new story to most of us however Mazie had read the book. I thought the animation style was very unique and fit the story well. Fabulous family movie outing!

Ready for the Twin Cities Marathon 5k!

Ordered these awesome new MNUFC license plates for my car! Go Loons! ⚽️

Transferring to the new iPhone 16 Pro!

Tammy and I went to see the Cowboy Junkies at The Dakota tonight. Both of us have enjoyed the Cowboy Junkies but hadn’t seem them live. The show was good and featured a bunch of new music, but got a little long for us with two different sets.

Tammy and I went to a very cool small performance by Gary Louris of The Jayhawks and Golden Smog at O’Shaughnessy Distilling. Just him and his guitar for 90 minutes.

Our Favorite Cheeseburgers

Since we just tried a new burger place I thought it would be fun to capture our favorite places that the Thingelstad family goes to for cheeseburgers.

  • Lion’s Tap: this is not a smash burger but it is a delicious classic cheeseburger. The standard bearer.

  • Tap Society: this is closest to our house and the burger here has evolved over the years. It is always good and a bonus that their fries and shakes are top notch too.

  • Lake & Irving: the cheeseburger here is heavenly.

  • The Dakota: there are much fancier items on the menu, but the double cheeseburger at the Dakota is great and one of the cheaper items on the menu.

  • Flat Top: Honestly the best, and only true smash burger we get is the one I make on the flat top at the cabin. I haven’t found many (any?) restaurants that truly let the patty adhere to the grill surface to be scraped off. It adds a lot of time and effort.

We made our way to Wells Roadside tonight to try the newest smash burger place. This place has a cool location with a very classic drive-in feel. They specialize in wagyu smash burgers and are intentionally very affordable. You can get a double cheeseburger and fries for a very reasonable price.

Judged two novice rounds at the Minnesota Debate Teachers Association (MDTA) Jamboree today at Wayzata High School. Was fun to remember how to flow a round and the debaters in general did a great job for their very first rounds in a tournament!

Two AI Bots Discussing the Weekly Thing

My friend Garrick recently shared about Two AI Bots Discussing His Work — a test he did using Google’s Notebook LM. I listened to the three recordings that he shared and it was incredible.

I had to try this myself so I fired up Notebook LM and decided to throw some issues of the Weekly Thing at it. The results were interesting to say the least!

292 / Signal, Checkboxes, Hope

Notes:

  • I found the beginning of this super interesting. It just jumps right into the privacy topic and for some reason even pulls in bee keeping which seems strangely connected to other things.
  • The AI really got focused on the featured article about Section 230 and ignores everything else in this issue. There is a good chunk of writing in here about GTD that is entirely ignored.
  • The bots totally understand what Section 230 is.
  • It cracked me up when the AI’s highlight quotes.
  • I found it odd that it mostly pronounces my last name right, but gets it wrong one time.

287 / Plinky, Piccolo, Privacy

Notes:

  • This one starts out with a much more traditional podcast introduction, even using a title “The Deep Dive”. Very different from what it did on the other ones.
  • The bots talking about stackless interpreters is pretty funny.
  • This one works hard to cover all the various things in the newsletter and kind of rambles on.

276 / Contextual, Copilot, Collections

Notes:

  • This issue includes the dates that it covers in the header, and the AI clearly sees that and makes an intentional reference to this being somewhat old. “Back in February 2024…”
  • The Apple Vision Pro “Ahh, yes. It was all the rage back then.”
  • “This guy is writing the user manual for the future.” Okay!
  • Even the bots poke fun at blockchain. “Obsessed with the idea of decentralization.” 😂
  • It is curious to me that in this one there are more references to “this guy” and “the author”. It doesn’t seem to know who I am like it does in the others.
  • I love the “totally random” reference to the blog post about the Minneapolis Downtown Council. The bots can’t help but try to connect it to the rest of the content, which it isn’t at all. But it does make one up! Apparently I’m connecting urban planning to digital spaces.

Multiple Issues

At this point I was pretty impressed and intrigued by what this was doing. I wanted to try something with more content so this time I uploaded 14 recent issues of the Weekly Thing into the notebook and told it to generate. I was curious what it would do with this much material! This one has an entirely different structure.

Notes:

  • The bots cover a lot of ground but focus a lot on the variety of topics.
  • It is goofy to me when the AI says to the other one “I think I remember that one…” Huh?
  • It thinks I switched my whole blog to a web3 platform, which I didn’t. Not sure how it got that.
  • “He’s grounded.” If I want some compliments I’ll just listen to this. 😊
  • “Jamie doesn’t shy away from any topic. He even went deep on cryptocurrency.”

Debate Season Begins

Tyler is heading to the Minnesota Debate Teachers Association (MDTA) Jamboree today for his very first debate tournament and the official start of the debate season. I’m also going to be there judging rounds. It has been 35 years since I flowed a debate round!

The policy resolution selected for this season is:

Resolved: The United States federal government should significantly strengthen its protection of domestic intellectual property rights in copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks.

Listening to the arguments around this topic had me remembering the resolutions I debated in high school. I couldn’t remember them exactly but did remember the themes well. I found this comprehensive list of High School Policy Debate Resolutions on a blog with a wonderful debate-inspired name “The 3NR”. Love that.

1987/1988
Resolved: That the United States government should adopt a policy to increase political stability in Latin America.

1988/1989
Resolved: That the federal government should implement a comprehensive program to guarantee retirement security for United States citizens over age 65.

1989/1990
Resolved: That the federal government should adopt a nationwide policy to decrease overcrowding in prisons and jails in the United States.

I remember the prison overcrowding one the best for sure. My partner Jeff and I were varsity debaters that year and took that resolution and stretched it very far in various arguments. I’m looking forward to seeing all of these debaters today making their cases around intellectual property.

Fall CIO Wine Tasting Evening

Another incredible evening for the CIO Wine Tasting event hosted by Dee Thibodeau of Charter Solutions and Terri Naughtin of Naughtin Group. Tony Peleska of Kraus Anderson provides a stunning venue on their balcony in downtown Minneapolis. What a wonderful group of technology leaders to connect with. And the highlight of the evening is Chuck Kanski of Solo Vino providing an incredible array of unique wines with the background on each of the grapes. 🍷

ENS Continued Progress

I continue to believe that despite the volume of scammers in crypto there is real value and important capability in this technology. Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a key component of that and these three highlights stood out to me in ENS DAO Newsletter #70, Sept 24 2024

ENS Domains Now Supported on PayPal and Venmo…

ENS is now integrated with PayPal and Venmo, allowing users to simplify crypto transfers by entering their ENS name. This feature eliminates the need for copying long wallet addresses and enables secure, user-friendly transactions. An Address Book feature also allows users to save and recall frequently used ENS names and wallet addresses for faster transfers. This service is currently available in the U.S.

Eth.Link Operating Again…

The eth.link gateway is now officially powered by eth.limo, reviving its role as a key ENS gateway for decentralized websites.

POAP Providing Free ENS…

The latest release of the POAP Home app includes a feature allowing collectors to claim a free ENS subname.

And how about these incredible August 2024 DAO financials:

  • Revenue > Cash Burn, Runway: 140 months
  • Revenue: $1.9M (vs. $2.4M last month)
  • Cash Inflow: $1M (vs. $1M last month)
  • Normalized Cash Burn: $0.8M
  • Reserves: $113M (ETH: 101M, USDC: 12M)
  • Total Endowment: $79.7M
  • P&L: -$15.7M (ETH mark-to-market)

All powered as an operating DAO.

Ordered an iPhone 16 Pro today. I currently have an iPhone 14 Pro. I typically wait three years between upgrades. The camera improvements and ability to use Apple Intelligence pushed me to upgrade earlier.

Nice evening for a fire at Quarterdeck Resort.

The sauna at Quarterdeck Resort is incredible. Enjoyed a couple of cycles through here on our stay.

On the corner of Get Outside Trail and Smore Fun Way at Quarterdeck Resort.

Minnedemo 40

The 40th installment of Minnedemo had me wondering about the first one — I was there for Holiday Minnedemo in October of 2006! I have a lot of Minnedemo blog posts. 🤩

HabitAware

Aneela Idnani + Sameer Kumar

Auto-generated description: A smartphone screen displays an ad for HabitAware's Keen2, promoting help for hair pulling, skin picking, and nail biting habits.

App along with a bracelet that attempts to interrupt someone that is habitually picking on their skin, pulling their hair, or some other body-focused repetitive behavior (BFRB). One of the founders successfully used this to stop a hair pulling habit. They demoed their solution now working as an app on an Apple Watch. They also have a new version of the bracelet on the way.

OmegaVR

Dagmawe Mamo, Mahamud Hussien + Keleabe Mamo

Auto-generated description: A smartphone displays Omega VR's website, featuring controllerless VR experiences and a Join Beta Trial button, with a VR headset image in the center.

Focused on creating accessible technology specifically to allow VR usage for people that have mobility limitations. Allow user to move around VR space with eye tracking and other assistive methods. Uses EEG to monitor brain activity to allow navigation via thought.

tinkl: Pee in Peace

Essie Schlotterbeck

Not a launched app but will be soon. The app uses an established database with user generated content layered on to help locate gender neutral bathrooms. The app was originally built as part of Prime Academy program. Great name!

Attentio: Latent Signal Descent & Context Stacking

Lukas Valine

Auto-generated description: A smartphone displays the Attentio website on a vibrant, rainbow-colored background, featuring a message about simplifying AI model building and a Join Beta button.

Platform to allow training and custom weights of an LLM using plain text. You can simply describe facets and data and then tell the LLM to save that and it will respond with that from then on. It was a good demo. It wasn’t clear to me how different it is from a Custom GPT in ChatGPT. It does work on significantly smaller and cheaper models.

Auto-generated description: A person is standing on a stage next to a large screen displaying a presentation.

Abe

Isaac Kamsin

Auto-generated description: A smartphone displays a webpage for Abe, featuring a home service app advertisement encouraging video chats with professionals for DIY project assistance.

Platform that connects DIY home repair people to others to help them solve problems in the home via online video sharing. Buy on demand expertise that can help you navigate projects. Particularly good where YouTube videos just don’t address the specific questions you have. Much cheaper than a handyman or tradesperson visiting, and perhaps a way for a tradesperson to generate additional income? The demo was replacing a flapper in a toilet. 🚽

HLRBO

Heath Schubert + Cookie Lithyouvong

Interesting idea that has market traction and raised investment round. Like VRBO, but for Hunting Leases. Provides a market for landowners to put the hunting rights up for lease, and provides the legal lease documents as well as hosting assets to better explain the plot of land. Seems like a solid idea taking an existing proven model and applying to a different asset.

The Poopcopter

Caleb Olson

Olson presented a classic Minnedemo that will be remembered for years — a drone that flies around and finding and removing dog poop. He has an operational drone that uses computer vision to spot dog poop, then descends onto it and uses a twisting motion to close a custom designed “scoop” which then flies away to collect it. Practical? No. Fun? Absolutely! 💩

See also official Minnedemo 40 recap!

Was great to run into this amazing group of Minnestar superstars at Minnedemo 40: Adrienne Peirce, Lindsi Gish, Jenna Pederson, and Justin Porter!

Ran into Justin Porter as I arrived at Minnedemo 40! FORTY!

Two people are smiling for a photo outside a theater displaying the sign MINNEDEMO 40.

We got a similar photo at Minnedemo 39!