This document has served as a powerful reminder to myself of how much I’ve struggled to get to where I am and why I deserve to be here. And more importantly, it serves as a place to reflect and learn from the past and be less scared of failure in the future.
Keeping a failure resume has let me be so much more ambitious in trying new things and applying for things I would otherwise think I’m unqualified to apply for.
[Better distribution matters more than better product because most people are satisfied beyond a certain ‘decent’ threshold. If you deliver a decent product to many customers, you can make enough to improve your product.]
“But the superior product must win!” Why? “Because it’s the superior product!” To who? “To me! And the 10 people I’ve talked to!” Ok but your competitor has talked to 10,000 people and they like his product well enough. And he’s hiring your product guy, oops, better luck next time.
I am sympathetic to the idea that great products, great artists, creators, etc should be appreciated. but also, “the audience” or “the market” is not actually some perfect, platonic ether. It’s people. And people are busy and tired and generally prefer to be met where they are.
If you don’t go out and do the work of teaching people how to appreciate you, your odds of being appreciated are very, very slim. you’re basically depending on chance, on the whim that Serious Appreciators will notice you. It’s very risky to leave this up to chance.
[Talk to a thousand people about it and you will notice patterns. When something resonates with a few dozen people, there are probably thousands of people that feel the same. Addressing what they mention means you connect with their specific experiences as opposed to what you think might be interesting.]
[When someone’s lying to you: 1. tell them you need to come back to the conversation (and walk away); 2. say “something feels off”; 3. simply wait, as it makes dishonesty uncomfortable.]
Putting something on the internet is unfortunately default public (insecure / opt-out) unless you can personally verify that it’s not, which might be impossible.
Rate my theory: I’ve seen an uptick in ‘your year in review’ summaries from apps & even phone providers. By packaging their surveillance of us in the form of pie charts & wacky slogans these firms are trying to normalize data extraction as a form of fun self-exploration
If you want to study the economy, consider studying anthropology, sociology, geography, law, politics, psychology, and even biology and physics
If you want to study a very narrow method for analysing very narrow aspects of the economy, consider studying economics, maths & stats
The Poor Can’t Afford the Benefits of Monogamy, and the Rich Don’t Need Them
Non-monogamy is generally cringe not because multiple people are consensually involved, but rather because relatively privileged people have dumped their neuroses and misguided aspirations for a “free” or authentic life
The people documented in our study kept households together, raised each other’s children, stayed together for lifetimes, aided each other’s work and stayed by each other during war, illness, death and grief. Much of this is the sort of relationship style I get to experience daily, too, living with my partners and my cats and I am both grateful and hardly special for it. There are lots of people like me. We are, of course, also doing a social reproduction, making the world over and over again, just slightly differently. We are generally using different relationship style and thus socio-cultural technology in a way that is responsive to the precarity of neoliberalism—not liberated from it, because we have of course not escaped material and historical trends. But though we cannot escape these trends we can counter some of their isolating or libertarian effects, and so live in a less individualist, more communal and fairly committed way.
ask: if two parents good, perhaps three parents better? Perhaps motherhood communes better? Perhaps parenting with friends better?
[Add pauses around your verbs to appear more controlled in your speaking.]
[DRAFT] FAST Accessibility Checklist
[Look for these cues to ensure accessibility: visual content (like images, video); changeable color; input controls; interaction features; audio content; time limits; text-only input.]
[Look for these cues to handle underlying localization: natural language text for humans (in error messages, UI text, JSON strings, etc…); interactions with text through a keyboard or cursor; searching, matching, sorting text; capturing user input; represents time; deals with names, addresses, time formats, etc…; references any cultural norms.]
Mock function calls until no original code runs.
Wow, do I need to change my approach!
Our current dominant political system used to impress people like old infomercials, but is increasingly understood as the phony sales pitch it has long been.
People don’t like build systems but they love static-site generators.
If money is all the machine understands, we can only be heard by putting money where our mouth is.
[RSS turns the web into tapas.]
Each branch of Joe’s hugo-testing git repository is a scratchpad where he has over 750 attempted ‘solutions’ to help different people on the Hugo forum. Seems like discovery requires starting at a specific topic (as opposed to searching for the problem or solution), but it’s quite organized the way it is. How might being this prolific in helping others impact one’s own skills?
the following games profit solely from aesthetic upgrades: Rocket League, Fortnite, CS:GO, Path of Exile, League of Legends. In these games, players purchase outfits for in-game avatars that do not impact the competitive balance.
I plaster the word “free” everywhere until consumers pay for a license. I’m not the first to do this, and I certainly won’t be the last.
I’ve been to the Hackerspace Wiki before to find local places while travelling. I didn’t know they had hackerspace apps listing, software wishlists.
Their design patterns library includes The Community Pattern:
set up a mailing list, a wiki, and an IRC channel. You will need all three. Think about a platform for discussion, storage for documentation and real-time communication.
[You need at least two people to start an idea and two more to get work done. It’s easy to recruit once you have four people, and best to get started with ten.]
[Infrastructure first or projects first? By making everything infrastructure-driven, people will come up with contributions you would have never thought about.]
World map of 24x365 average temperature fingerprints
The temperature fingerprints cover every day of the year horizontally, and every hour of the day vertically
Every child on their own trampoline
Private affluence is individuals gaining things for themselves – possessions, nice homes and experiences, trampolines. Public affluence is money spent lavishly on things that are shared – libraries, parks, buses, playgrounds.