337 entries for 2024

Hank Green Unpacks YouTube’s Biggest Problems

[There was a period when books were considered dangerous because we didn’t have the social structures to deal with everyone having access. We’re currently in the messy equivalent with video.]

Indigenous people don’t destroy land. People who love land don’t destroy it.

Chronically making excuses is a missed opportunity to develop resilience through adapting to diverse circumstances.

Let’s expand the discourse about Empire

[America is a business.]

Genius way to clean carpets / couches!

[Make a natural carpet cleaner with baking soda, dish soap, 2 cups of vinegar, 1 teaspoon of salt, and some fresh lemon juice; mix until foamy. Dip in and squeeze a towel, then wrap a saucepan lid to use as leverage before scrubbing.]

Brad Mehldau: The Greatest Jazz Pianist of Our Generation

[Written chord changes are an expedient way to quickly coordinate playing together, but they lack precision to specify things like voice-leading even from more popular songs like Blackbird.]

[I like to add a note to so-called ‘stock voicings’ for crunch.]

[The intellectual aspect of improvising happens as you make sense of music. WhT happens in real-time while playing is an natural reflexive response based on everything you’ve learned.]

[Can you tell the same story with just two notes?]

fluid switches between discussion and piano playing

Talking files, protocols, and data ownership in TfTs

[It’s a useful contribution to try what we’ve made and complaining about the ways it doesn’t work for you.]

Is it just my ignorance or is most ‘representative democracy’ actually not so?

Why Can’t We Make Simple Software?

[Complexity is an inevitable result of internals interacting with themselves, and can’t be solved by tools.]

[Starting over will not avoid complexity, but can reset the clock to give you some breathing room.]

Coaching - heal the cycle

I offer this work on a sliding scale based on income; I ask 1/1,000th of your annual income per hour. So if you make $45,000 per year, I ask for $45/hr. If you make $150,000/yr, I ask for $150/hr.

One of the coolest things I’ve been told about jazz is that the better you are as a player, the better experts sound. I’ve been called a talented musician but I am absolutely, unabashedly ecstatic to hear music that I can barely understand what’s happening. The piano and that sax solo mostly sound like random chaos and it excites me to know there’s structure and intent and beauty in there, waiting to be understood by the skill I have yet to achieve.

Kenny Garrett and Sounds From The Ancestors: Tiny Desk Concert

simple gospel influenced groove turns into a party; got me out of my seat pretty quick, couldn’t sit still; lots of subtle polyrhythmic goodness in the background.

DOMi & JD BECK: SMiLE

catchy tune without words; complex drumming and rhythms but flows easy; video and imagery kind of absurd and hilarious with some famous figures doing a cameo.

HuggingChat

ChatGPT interface without signup.

[Skip the self-signup and require participation when releasing a new product. Feedback cycles are more important that ‘how many free users left today?’. Building automation is hard anyway and steals resources from what people actually want.]

Is it funny, or is it hurtful and ppl are laughing to defuse the tension?

[Just like tickling, pseudo-comedy evokes laughter as listeners relieve discomfort and misinterprets their response as enjoyment.]

What’s your role in creating true systemic change?

[If you call yourself an ally to certain people and aren’t getting hit by the stones thrown at them, you’re not standing close enough.]

[Healing without allyship is spiritual bypassing and privilege. Protesting and organizing without healing will undermine the efforts you support. Protest without litigation becomes self-serving, and litigation without protest lacks teeth. Critique without counter-growth creates burnout. Building systems without addressing the ugliness of the current one is detached.

3.5% of the population can shift the entire political reality of a nation.

[Protests spark a sense of possibility and can easily bring newcomers to want more.]

The mind separates, the body integrates.

Imprisoned in every UI is a concatenative REPL operating on a stack. Buttons do “type function + Enter,” GUI renders return stack.

Are there examples of the opposite of this where “imprisoned in every command-line program is a GUI that lets you discover its features” or “type command with arguments becomes a button”?

When capitalism responds, it acknowledges how large a demographic is.