Journal

337 entries for 2024

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Send your users this welcome email

[Ask: “What’s happening in your world that brought you to this project?”]

Saturday, February 3, 2024

[1. Distribute a self-hostable package; 2. Releases are free to distribute and use, source not available; 3. Offer free community support channels via a forum or chat; 4. Provide source and extended community access for a monthly fee; 5. Automatically make the source available on a rolling basis delayed by one year.]

The Cheap Web

The “cheap” web is a solarpunk philosophy of web design.

cheap ≠ free

cheap ≠ sleek

cheap ≠ creep

cheap ≠ deep

cheap ≠ dark

cheap = cheap

[cheap to maintain: should work indefinitely without falling over].

[cheap to access: should be compatible with screen readers and various devices.]

[cheap to explore: should be pleasant on low power devices.]

[cheap to contribute: creating and hosting websites should be easier than scrapbooking.]

Life in Weeks

Visualize a life compressed into blocks of one week and grouped be decade. The simple data file is written in YAML. This could be useful to help write one’s autobiography.

OLLOS

Most items appear in the timeline at the time they were created.

If an item attribute can be updated, such as by completing a to-do, a small update line appears at that time in the timeline.

If an item is scheduled for a future date or time, it appears there instead, and a simple update line appears at the time it was created and / or scheduled.

I see updates appear in my timeline when she schedules something. This is a very helpful transaction or record; I now know she set up an appointment for something I’m going to with her, or that she set up a meeting in the future, without any kind of extra “notification” feature, and without having to check future dates regularly for updates.

The more you hit “review later”, the longer it takes for the item to return, allowing items you’re less interested in to “float away” from you without requiring more destructive or detailed actions.


you can’t edit an existing note. Instead, you build on past notes using replies: you can reply to any past note with a new one that goes into your timeline now, forming a thread.

Much easier to compile buckets for ideas when you don’t need to label them—this is why people can write so much on micro-blogging platforms.

Beliefs

communication is a proxy for care. If the person doesn’t communicate, they don’t care.

Friday, February 2, 2024

Juke Lockstep | Guedra Guedra كدرة كدرة

Middle eastern oboe/reed/clarinet head banger with body shaking beat.

Tenets

Instead of striving to be the fastest or smallest or whateverest, we explicitly aim to be the framework with the best vibes.

HTML, The Mother Language

There’s a subtle line between something feeling magical, and something feeling like magic. We want Svelte to feel magical — we want you to feel like a wizard when you’re writing Svelte code. Historically I think Svelte went too far into magic territory, where it’s not 100% clear why things work a certain way, and that’s something that we’re rectifying with Svelte 5.

So when we design things we need to think about the people who haven’t read the docs in a while, if at all, and don’t care about things like fine-grained rendering or configuring their build tool. This means that things need to be intuitive, that we shouldn’t need to worry about manual optimisations like memoisation, that we should have as few APIs as possible, and that things need to be discoverable — for example you should be able to hover over a rune and get a link to comprehensive documentation.

Thursday, February 1, 2024

1.8 Million Subscribers (and no one cares)

[Musicians can play until they’re 98 years old and beyond, but nobody wants a YouTuber doing that.]

[Not making an industry money puts you in a somewhat adversarial relationship.]

[The YouTuber career inevitably ends in burnout.]

[YouTubers have no elders, only peers, and this is isolating. Musicians have those who have been doing it longer than them, and a community in the real world to engage with.]

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

[Make rice without an occasion, because you’ll eventually be hungry.]

Part of An Everlasting Meal.

how to respond to passive aggression

[Respond to passive aggressiveness by: 1. clarifying if that was ‘meant to be helpful or hurtful’?; 2. stating when you observe negative tone even when they claim to mean it positively; and 3. acknowledging that it’s okay to not be okay and communicate that it’s a safe space.]

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

NIOSH Sound Level Meter

Monitor for the room volume level made by the CDC.

I’m turning off my website analytics because I’m very brave and I promise I truly do not care about the numbers

Cosplaying internet detective doesn’t do much to sate my curiosity, it just lets me spin my wheels and trick me into thinking I’m being productive.

I turned off analytics

I don’t care about what gets ranked on Google, I’m not trying to optimise for the people who come from that channel.

People who arrive via search are just looking to get a question answered and move on. That’s great and I hope I can help them, but they are not the reason I’m here. This site is here for the people who stay a while, have a look around and then send me an email to start an interesting conversation.


I’ve been feeling similar lately, but erring on the side of continuing until there’s a specific reason to stop; there’s some underlying fear of losing something in the future that I can’t describe. The data is kind of boring—maybe the whole notion of this analytics exploits a ‘wanting to know where people come from’ and the deep-seated desire for connection. I’m curious in your case, why not ‘just’ make a filter to see the non-search data?

I definitely believe in meaningful connections as the fundamental focus for myself; measuring this might be valuable but not necessary for me, I’d prefer to hear people’s stories of change over seeing numbers. Wishing that your ‘search query’ returns results 🙏🏽☀️.

Sunday, January 28, 2024

[Confidence is like a shrug: “Okay, no problem.”]

Let’s talk about changing American foreign policy….

[Build power for yourself and your community instead of borrowing it from elected officials.]

[If you want to make a difference in areas where the USA invades, you’re better off buying solar panels or an electric car because it helps shift the dynamics to not require the resources for that intervention.]

Saturday, January 27, 2024

in search of a new tab

[Each new tab feels like a choice: how do I want to spend my time?]


What a ’new tab page’ this is! I prefer queries (via keystroke launchers like Quicksilver or ‘Command-K’) over big lists, but this is beautifully personal and makes me drool; stable options can leverage muscle memory and reduce distractions. 👍🏽

Provokes me to wonder about social patterns and ‘formats’ like /now or ‘daily note’, ways of organizing that many people can practice and share so that we can all learn from each other.

Growing your own food is the highest form of meditation.

[Soak cardboard in water for fifteen minutes, wrap around a glass jar, and remove just before dry. Use as a plant pot and place in soil to prevent root interference.]

Individual initiative, corporate inertia and good bad advice

Good luck finding books that somberly advise corporations on how to encourage a dangerous reliance on unsupervised individual inspiration.

A company needs to be able to treat its employees as interchangeable and expendable, both individually and collectively. It needs to be able to periodically layoff 17% of its workforce to cut its margin overhead by 1% and temporarily boost its stock price by 5%, without having to endure existential upheaval to its ongoing business processes. It needs to be able to double and redouble recklessly in size for the same dubious market reasons, without those people all piling up in the lobby where their chaos is visible from the street.

The key to these flexibilities, as we have understood at least since Henry Ford, is to formalize the operational roles so that their function in the overall system is symbolic and anonymous. As long as people are just units inserted into well-defined slots, the machinery doesn’t need to care who they are.

The secret truth of business advice is that it’s mostly about how to grimly extract residual value from the luck you already had, and the unearned love you were already unguardedly given, because there’s really no method for making more of it.

what happens in the conversations I have with the ppl I’m coaching

[I offer: space away from the rat-race to reflect, breathe more deeply, move deliberately; a good bullshit detector; place to practice, prepare, or role-play tough future conversations; help to find the right amount of stretch in your development goal without overdoing to short circuit progress; encouragement if you need someone telling you to quit your job.]

[Improve your interpersonal dynamics by seeing the relationship as something that can be co-designed in process rather than ‘agreed upon’.]

[My formal training is in engineering and agriculture. I coach because people ask me, not because I’m certified.]

[Smaller organizations might not be able to afford leadership coaching from professionals but can afford peer-to-pear from like-minded companions.]