31 entries for April 2024

[When people try to console your loss but make you cringe, there might be an unspoken (and perhaps unintended) “so please stop feeling bad”]

[Life is more about integrating than improvement.]

most things offered as “support” in our culture are really designed to solve problems or to get you out of pain. If it feels wrong to you, it is.

[The doctor who came up with the popular ‘five stages of grief’ regrets writing them in that way because it’s not linear and universal: there is no standard process.]

[The griever and those who care about them may want a road map to guarantee success, but grief isn’t predictable or structured.]

[Culture emphasizing happy endings, solutioneering, recovery, overcoming, redemption confuses us into seeing bad things as happening ‘for growth’]

Disadvantaged people who suffer so that the more privileged can live easier are labelled ‘heroes’ to keep them working.

More useful than agreeing is to hear why we come to our conclusions.

Reducing psychological burden via ‘“they shouldn’t need to consider that” versus ‘bringing them along your process’.

Changing state policy is like repurposing parts of a warship to build a sewing machine.

Cheap non-ugly ULID combining time and a random number using radix 36.

Date.now().toString(36) + Math.random().toString(36).replace('0.', '') // something like lulgjvgkc5mk5sbmfaf

masterWiki

Classes stolen from MasterClass, republished as wikiHow articles.

Controlled Vocabulary

Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designers of the schemes, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, which have no such restriction.

Choices of authorized terms are based on the principles of user warrant (what terms users are likely to use), literary warrant (what terms are generally used in the literature and documents), and structural warrant (terms chosen by considering the structure, scope of the controlled vocabulary).

The terms are chosen and organized by trained professionals (including librarians and information scientists) who possess expertise in the subject area. Controlled vocabulary terms can accurately describe what a given document is actually about, even if the terms themselves do not occur within the document’s text.

Let’s talk about books to read….

[Types of books you might want to read: 1. a religious text (other than your own if you have one); 2. the perspective of any subculture; 3. making the monster human; 4. a political ideology; 5. your childhood hero or strongest memory memory; 6. the hero of your enemy; 7. favourable about someone you don’t like; 8. critical of war; 9. critical of your heroes; 10. about ancient or indigenous peoples (if they were oral, imagine what might have gotten lost by writing); 11. a distopia; 12. about a character you can’t relate to at all.]

Literature exposes you to things you wouldn’t experience in real life.

[Grief is to be carried, not fixed.]

Inflation means: after working to earn money, you need to work again so that “your money works for you”.

SCAMPER is a procedural idea generator

S: Can I substitute a material? A key ingredient? A process? What happens if I substitute an emotion? Can I substitute the packaging for something else?

C: Can I combine different components to create something new? Can I bundle things in a new way? Can I combine different use-cases, such as author and reader, or seller and buyer?

A: Can I adapt a process from somewhere else? A component from something else? Can I adapt it to existing infrastructure? Can I adjust something just 3% to create something new?

M: Can I modify the form factor? Shape? Color? Can I magnify the key idea? What happens if I magnify an attribute beyond all reason? Or minify it?

P: Can I put a component to other uses? A mechanism? A process? An idea? A set of rules? Can I transform a waste product into an input? Can I put it to use in another context? Can I translate it into another medium? Create spinoffs?

E: Can I eliminate a rule? Can I simplify it? Make it compact? Eliminate a feature? Remove a complication?

R: Can I reverse a relationship? An assumption? What happens if I reverse my point of view? Can I rearrange the sequence? The layout? The structure? Can I rearrange the components to create something new?