[Start out by not letting anyone touch it without being there to show how it works. First give a demo to let them see what they can do with the product, then guide them while they try it for themselves.]
[Help provide context and help them understand why they should care.]
10 Years of Open-Source Visualization
[Maximize your impact by making teaching central to your strategy, ideally material that can be consumed without you being present.]
[Have lots of examples.]
[Answering questions is more than altruism, it's a chance to learn.]
[If you're complaining on the Internet, think of the practical impact of your words.]
[Focus on laying a perfect brick everyday and eventually you'll look up and there will be a wall.]
[Conversational language is a poor medium of HCI because computers lack the context that we constantly refer to, as well as the ability to interpret context to derive meaning.]
[Deterministic outcomes from a computer and so prefer formal languages because conversation is naturally open-ended and not specific.]
Don't End The Week With Nothing
[If you are not allowed side projects or to make your work open source, ask for more money.]
[Bitcoin is an investment bubble built around the narrative of people's rage at economic inequality and a broken economy.]
[Cache and cash sound similar because our concept of storing value comes from nature, squirrels keeping a stock of acorns in such a way to avoid it being eaten by someone else.]
[People die because we give numbers in machines more resources, attention, and care than living beings.]
[The Kwakiutl call their money objects 'bad things', like dead bodies or intestines, and in potlatch money-destruction ceremonies they 'wipe the shame off their body'.]
[A groove is a cell that repeats. A song is a collection of cells that are organized linearly to have a beginning, middle, and end.]
[Making a groove longer is trivial, a song not so.]
[Songs lend themselves to be covered and arranged. Grooves lend themselves to be remixed and sampled.]
What can I say or offer as a pleasant surprise to the other person?
[End users are not 'casual' or 'naive', they are scientists, librarians, teachers, architects, people that want to make serious use of computers without becoming professional programmers.]
Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie on Getting Your First Consulting Client
[When starting out: instead of doing free work, offer a limited free or discounted sample and propose that if the results are excellent that we discuss paying the full rate.]
[Public/private distinctions are a natural fit for offering things for free.]
[Understand the words that people use to describe their problems, then repeat their words back to them.]
[If you can empathize with the client, you will be more likely to be chosen than someone who has more technical skill.]
[If his life's work is men's clothes, you can bet he likes to talk about men's clothes.]
[If your first question is how much does it cost…]
[When you enter an area with birds, insects korbanimals, they are listening to you completely as it may mean the difference between survival and death. You are received.]
[Context, like location and the people present, is what defines how a story is told: the same story can vary based on the audience. Social media like twitter collapses context to the point where the more successful actors are generic.]
[As opposed to friends and family that see a person growing and changing over time, the social media crowd sees a monolithic and timeless figure who is expected to never change their mind.]
[Contrast Mark Zuckerberg's 'two identities is a lack of integrity' with Audrey Lorde's 'multiple selves']
[Online censorship exists without governmental intervention through flooding the stream with banalities that distracts from serious issues.]
[Online discourse creates weak ties: physical dimensions of time and space enable stronger connections and dialogues.]
Anger will get you started but it won't keep you going.
[Various questions that you pose while knowing your environment are all trying to answer: where and when am I, and how do I know that?]
[Algorithms recommend friends based on instrumental qualities like shared interests, common purchases or friends. Geographic proximity places us near people we have no apparent instrumental reason for connecting with, and sometimes they are neither family, or friends, or potential friends.]
[Expansions of attention are hard to reverse: when something goes from idea to reality, perception cannot easily be forced back into a smaller container.]
['Be yourself' in language of advertising and marketing means 'be more of the consistent and recognizable habits and drives that are easy to target and appropriate']
[If you were reading a book where the pages progressively became more and more similar until you were reading the same page repeatedly, you would probably put the book down.]
['Alone in nature' is an oxymoron.]
[When thinking about where ideas come from, the constraints of English force the phrase "I" "produced" an "idea". But none of those entities are stable with clear boundaries and the grammatical relationship between them is misleading.]
[Cognition is not the functional output of an input world with an input mind, but rather the enactment of a world and mind.]
[Going through life not knowing the names of our surrounding plants and animals is like being lost in a foreign city where we can't read the street signs. We become isolated and lonely without being able to call out to our neighbors.]
Linnaeus lends Nanabozho his magnifying glass so he can see the tiny floral parts. Nanabozho gives Linnaeus a song so he can see their spirits. And neither of them are lonely.
[Referring to things as inanimate objects closes the door to the possibility of them interacting and engaging with us, teaching us.]
[She looked at what was left of Mount St. Helens and commented in English, "Poor thing", expressing sympathy and concern for the well-being of another person, which she didn't have to explain because of the particular way of perceiving the world embedded in her native language.]
[The species had co-evolved with indigenous harvesting practices, which itself evolved to increase the success of the plant.]
[Chris J. Cuomo critiques the animal rights based on sentience because it assumes that lifeforms are valuable insofar as they resemble humans.]
[Bioregional borders are permeable and impossible to define.]
Difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.
[Communities in the attention economy feel like industrial farms, where we are supposed to grow straight an tall, side by side, producing faithfully without touching. There is no time to reach out and form horizontally networks of attention and support.]
[Bioregionalism and acts of attention can help break the individualism that prevents seeing how we are integrated with the planet and other living beings without boundaries.]
Let's talk about how "canceling" isn't new....
[Conservative views getting squeezed out of social media is american capitalism: companies side with the larger market and the younger generation is more profitable than the older one.]
posted to Blog
If something is boring after two minutes, try if for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
[Attention is a state that assumes there is something new to be seen and that resists the tendency to declare observation finished.]
[What passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive attempts to bring attention back to the same thing.]
[Watching your assumptions like waiting with a net to catch a dragonfly.]
"Ethical persuasion" means persuading the user to do something that is good for them, using "harmonious designs that continuously empower us instead of distracting and frustrating us"
[Most persuasive design, whether nefarious or 'empowering', assumes a shallow form of attention.]
[Experience is what we agree to attend to. At first I chose certain things to look at, and over time more and more actors appeared in my reality: after birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them. I began to notice animal communities, plant communities, animal-plant communities. I began to build a map of my attention that included more-than-human communities, noticing things that I had walked by past most of my life. This is bioregionalism.]
Once, seeing a child drinking from his hands, Diogenes threw away his cup and said, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living." Another time, he loudly admired a mouse for its economy of living.
[Rather than fleeing to the mountains or killing himself, he lived in the midst of a hypocritic society as the embodiment of refusal.]
[When life both inside and outside of society doesn't make sense, create the 'third space' as an alternate frame of reference, a non-answer.]
[In Bartleby's repetitions of 'I would prefer not to', there is no reason given, no reason given for why there is not reason given, and so on.]
[As fewer people find themselves with the margin of privilege to switch off from the attention economy, attention itself might be the last resource we can control.]
[Hyper-accelerated expression on social media produces value for the platform and is a form of communication driven by fear and anger as opposed to reflection and reason. They become like firecrackers that trigger other firecrackers, soon filling the room with smoke. Outrage drives engagement while publishers promote articles that fan the flames.]
[Standing apart is to take the view of an outsider without leaving, to know your enemy, to allow belief in another world while continuing to live in this one.]
