Learning Archives - Michael Bianco

European Experiment: Cholesterol & HA1C After Two Months of Living In Italy

I’ve been fighting my cholesterol for a couple of years at this point. This past summer, I lived in Italy for two months, ate whatever I wanted, and my cholesterol dropped by nearly 50% and my HA1C didn’t change. Below is the full story! Background Why even track your cholesterol and HA1C levels? After I was diagnosed with methane-dominant SIBO (confirmed by FoodMarble) in my early 30s, I was motivated to find the root cause. I started paying attention to my bloodwork and discovered I had high cholesterol. Not only was it possible that these were tied to SIBO, but I learned that these elevated levels, if not reduced, could cause many more health issues down the line. That was just enough incentive for me to start owning my health data…

The Future and AI, Part 1

Introduction I’m in the midst of hunting for the next startup idea, and I’ve been thinking about and playing around with AI nearly every day over the last year. I’ve had a lot of conversations with fellow technologists about how the advances in AI are going to change our world, and I wanted to get some of them down on paper. I’d love to hear critiques and comments on any of these thoughts! I’m still revising my thinking here and would love to hear different points of view. How Will AI Improve? It’s impossible to predict exactly how things will play out, but it’s important to at least define a point of view and think about the categories where AI may or may not improve: Cost. Undoubtedly, inference costs will drop…

Building a High-Performance Local Server

It’s been a really long time since I built a custom PC. At least 15 years, maybe closer to 20. Inspired by DDH, the crazy high cost of renting high-performance compute in the cloud1 , and my success with running both an Orange Pi and Raspberry Pi I decided to go ahead and do a custom build to create a high-powered home server box that I could use to play with some higher-compute workloads and get to play with desktop ubuntu at the same time (I’ve only ever interacted with linux via the CLI). Additionally, I wanted to play with self-hosting a wider array of production-related supporting applications: Sentry Windmill Prometheus and other observability tools As a bonus, I’m hoping this will heat my tiny house/office structure in the winter…

My Ergonomic Desk Setup

Years ago, I had wrist issues. After a certain point, they would just constantly hurt. Since then I’ve always tried to iterate on my desk setup each year. I sit at my computer typing a lot; investing in the tools I use every day always made a bunch of sense. I’ve spent time & money researching, purchasing, testing, etc various tools to improve my desk setup to eliminate pain. Notes from an Ergonomic Consultation One of the neat things my BigTech job provided was a session with an ergonomic consultant. Here are some notes: The screen should be at arm’s length from your body. Most likely, you should pull your screen closer to your face. The knees should be at or below the hip level. This means your desk and chair should sit lower…

Automatically Download and Rename Your LabCorp PDFs

Over the last couple of years, I’ve incrementally tried to improve my understanding of my health. Part of this is understanding my lab work and collecting the data in a way that I can personally understand and analyze it. In order to do this, I needed to download all of my past LabCorp PDFs. My goal in downloading these PDFs is to funnel them into my custom GPT, which will extract the results into a nicely formatted CSV that I can then copy and paste into Google Sheets. This enables me to easily graph, chart, and otherwise analyze my blood work results. Given the lack of a straightforward way to download all PDFs from the LabCorp website, I created scripts to automate the downloading and renaming of the PDFs for easier analysis and storage…

What I’ve Learned Searching for a New Startup Idea, Part 3

This is part 3 of a series of blog posts (here’s part 1 & part 2) about what I’m learning as I hunt for a new startup idea to work on). PE Rollups Create Opportunity Private equity is rolling up every industry you can imagine 1 . Plumbers, electricians, dental offices, primary care offices, machine shops, lawn businesses, RV parks, and software. PE is brilliant at extracting returns from an unoptimized business. It’s bad at focusing on the customer and building a great product. As industries roll up, prices increase, the quality of service decreases, and opportunities for a new disruptor at the bottom of the market emerge. Why does this happen? When PE acquires a business, the original founders lose motivation…

How I Think About Insurance Products

Following up on my financial directives post, here are some of my thoughts about insurance. Nearly everyone has to purchase multiple insurance policies. It’s a constant cost you’ll have your entire financial life. It’s worth spending some time optimizing. Friends and family have asked me about this multiple times, so I’ve slowly compiled my notes for them. Here they are! Don’t Prepay, Self-Insure Instead I like to think of insurance as something you most likely never have to use. If you expect to use insurance, you’ll pay for it in increased premiums and the insurance companies will come out ahead. Then, it’s not really insurance, it’s prepayment for services you are going to use…

Vertical SaaS is Dead

Ok, not completely, but it’s a catchy headline, huh? Last year, I set out to find a new startup idea with a straightforward thesis: There’s important B2B SaaS software to build. It’s easy to feel like so much software has been built, but if you look under the surface, there’s so much that’s broken. There’s much opportunity to build B2B SaaS—especially for underserved markets. Specific markets are grossly underserved by technology. For instance, founders and engineers don’t generally build for civil engineers or landscape architects, but developers love building devtools and infrastructure. If we build modern software for these underserved markets, they’ll eagerly adopt it…

Learning Docker Compose by Self-hosting Monica

I ran into Monica a while back, which bills itself as an "open source CRM"—an advanced address book. I’ve made it a hobby to meet random people I run into online. I really enjoy meeting new & interesting people, and I thought it would be nice to note down who I’ve met. This post is a compilation of notes from 1-2 years ago, and at the time, I did not have much experience with Docker (I really just used Heroku for all hosting and deployment before then). Self-hosting Monica on my raspberry pi was a great excuse to go deep and learn a lot about docker compose. Here’s some of what I learned getting Monica to run self-hosted on my raspberry pi…

Pi Hole, TailScale, and Docker on an Orange Pi

I’ve always been fascinated by this super cheap and relatively fast hardware you can buy now. A while back I bought a Raspberry Pi and a friend recently told me about the Orange Pi. I decided to give it a shot primarily because it supports an eMMC chip which allows super fast ssd IO (170mb+ writes in my case). I was nervous about compatibility issues, but I was pleasantly surprised that it worked out of the box without any real issues. The hardest part was actually getting the eMMC working (which I’ll detail in another post). Here’s a walkthrough of what I did to get the orange pi up and running…

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