569: Cabarete tips, dictator jokes, and GPT's actual Co2 footprint
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This is my last week in Cabarete, Dominican Republic, so time for tips!
Surfers, kitesurfers, and Canadian snowbirds make up the expats here.
I’d recommend staying in the Encuentro neighborhood, which is quiet, full of new build apartments, and next to the surfer beach. I stayed on Kite Beach, which was great for kitesurfing but very loud right next to the highway. Cabarete town has the same issue unless you’re right on the beach.
This document from @ariwindmermaid is a treasure trove of everything you want to know. Wilsons, La Chabola open mic, and Vagamundo were my faves.
Nearby Sosua has diving, prettier beaches, better supermarkets, and even more old gringos (along with sex tourists). Definitely worth a daytrip.
We drove 90 minutes to canyoneer the Damajagua waterfalls alongside the Puerto Plata cruise ship people and thought it was worth it - great slot canyon.
The Roam app lists all the local events and is a great way to sink in. I enjoyed offerings from @maddie.amor, @djneekola, @andrea_rabasa and @chilversart.
Kite House has a good guide on getting into town from abroad. I rented kites from Kite Point and can vouch for their shop.
Eat lots of mofongos and tostones. :) Komida app does cheap delivery.
Technology
This Final Round app secretly joins your job interview Zoom room and feeds you responses to say in real time in order to look good to the interviewer. Wow!
The Fractional Jobs job board is, well, clean, well populated, and well made.
Create will code mini apps for you off of GPT prompts. The cost of entry for an app decreases even further!
Ideologies
Why Dictators Don’t Like Jokes from one of the Serbian activists who brought down Milosevic is a good read from 2013 all the more timely now, with a book for more. ‘A punch is no match for a punch line’, indeed. (Don’t punch Nazis, ridicule them!)
Similarly, the OSS (CIA precursor)’s guide to subverting organizations with strategic incompetences reads like the todo list of your least favorite coworker.
Via Astral Codex Ten:
This guy ridicules the FIRE movement for thinking that a job can’t be fun. Reads a bit ‘you must work to validate your existence’ to me, but I agree the FIRE folks who retire early without another life direction are missing some essential part of life. I don’t dream of profitable labor, but I don’t dream of retirement either, and I want to use my life to give value to others. Whether thats through money is less relevant.
This research on how much water/electricity AI uses makes me feel a lot better about my prompts, especially after learning how much more a request uses than a Google search. Almost anything else you do online uses way more water, and if you really cared about CO2, there’s better lifestyle choices to make.
Memes
Watching these college boys fulfill every college boy fantasy (ex: sledding down a mountain in an inflatable kayak) brings a smile to my face, and a fearful ache to my thirtysomething year old bones.