Journal

325 entries for 2024

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Marta Gómez: Canciones de sol (2016)

Sweet simple melodies with complex rhythms and accompaniment, punctuated with a children’s chorus.

The benefits of interop are greater than the convenience of not caring about standard formats.

Monday, February 19, 2024

What is the Difference Between a Radler and a Shandy? | Druthers Brewing Company

Shandy originated in the 1850s in England where it was earlier known as Shandygaff. The Shandygaff was a mixture of beer and ginger ale or ginger beer. By the late 19th-century, the ginger ale in the Shandygaff was replaced by lemonade or lemon soda, and the “gaff” was dropped to shorten the word to just Shandy.

Phenology, Time and Synchronization

[Befriending a bird, the news spreads to other animals.]

[We refer to plants in English as “whats” and “its”, implying an object, rather than “whos”, implying living beings.]

What would it mean to speak a language thousands of years older than English?

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Let’s talk about a gofundme for Trump….

[Someone working at $15 per hour wanting to raise 355 million dollars would have had to start in the year 678, BC, and that assumes a twenty-four hour workday with no weekends or holidays.]

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Forked cors-anywhere to replace cors-proxy.fringe.zone with cors.rosano.ca in Joybox, OSFeedbox, and home.

YunoHost has an ‘Edit’ button on their homepage which lets you directly modify the content and send them a ‘patch’.

I wasn’t able to submit my change because of a ‘File not found’ error, but still find it fascinating to not require people to use GitHub or Git in order to contribute.

The logic is in the seemingly random ‘gertrude’ repository (which has not much of a README or description for what it is, and it looks like the ‘patch’ is just the full HTML page content; perhaps someone can manually integrate it later. They claim to require email verification to catch spam before actually sending the change.

If it was possible to put a mailto on the internet without spam, it could remove friction from this kind of collaboration and create steps for people to do larger things.

Start where you are instead of implementing a concept, especially somebody else’s concept—an overarching strategy isn’t necessary.

Only on #Mastodon do I see people judging others being on #Substack and #X, seemingly implying that they are better humans for not being on it.

Purist reductions of any platform and the people there to it’s worst policy is lazy; it’s harder and more meaningful to actually help.

When confronted with a choice between more financial security (stability) or more meaning, what would persuade you to pursue the latter?

Friday, February 16, 2024

A Failure Resume

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.

solve for distribution

[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.]

Thursday, February 15, 2024

for when something feels off

[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.]

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

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?

Monday, February 12, 2024

your defense against yelling.

[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.]

Spec review i18n checklist

[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.]