341 entries under "article"

How Caetano Veloso Revolutionized Brazil’s Sound and Spirit

He is soft-spoken, even shy. As a boy, he once wrote, “I was timid and extravagant.” He can seem suspiciously modest for a world-famous musician. Many of his contemporaries are technically superior, he’ll say. “But there is this more mysterious aspect” to his talent, he told me: “The atmosphere that comes with my voice.” He described it as “my presence, my personality,” which echoed an old song of his, called “Minha Voz, Minha Vida,” or “My Voice, My Life.” His liquid tenor, melodic and trance-like, is one of the most distinctive voices in music. Away from the microphone, he listens intently, and goes into languorous digressions full of references to books and films.

“Michelin Guide” Marketing

[When Michelin started, the car market was small, so they published guides as a way to encourage more driving. Ogilvy had under twenty clients before writing Confessions of an Advertising Man. Content is king.]

Money - Simple English Wikipedia

[Through bartering, more value accrued to objects that were easier to carry around.]

[The first country to create a coin was Lydia, spreading to Greece and the Mediterranean, and eventually the rest of the world.]

[Money was favourable because it was interchangeable (fungible), could be easily divided or carried around, and lasted longer.]

Whitepaper | Circles UBI | Handbook:

[Everyone has their own currency operating by a shared set of rules, culminating to form a kind of monetary fabric.]

[Each personal currency mints new coins for the associated person every minute, and the quantity inflates each year.]

[To mitigate the risk of any account turning into a sybil, trust can be revoked, which allows the revoker to continue spending the revokee's coins but not receive new coins from them.]

[If Carol and Bob are strangers (not yet established mutual trust) but both extend trust to Alice, they can send each other money by transacting in AliceCoin; through transitive chains of trust Carol and Bob receive BobCoin and CarolCoin, respectively.]

[If a trusted person creates a Fake account, other people cannot receive FakeCoin until they trust it, and that person can only spend it if other people trust it.]

faq – Circles UBI:

[People receive CRC unconditionally and the supply is constantly increasing, which incentivizes spending (flowing) over hoarding.]

[The current dominant monetary system is like agricultural monoculture, which devitalizes the soil and requires pesticides to protect. Circles is more diverse:] if you lose your strawberry fields, you will still have your roses and potatoes and cannabis.

[Being careless with trust in Circles mostly hurts you personally and not the whole system.]

[Trust limits are the percentage of your Circles that you are willing to hold in a given person's coin (50% by default, but may be lowered or cancelled eventually); they prevent you from losing all your tokens through transitive transactions.]

[You can start your own local Circles community without three trust connections by sending 0.1–0.2 xDAI to your account, but this will only be useful if you invite your network to exchange products and services with you.]

["Shared wallets" do not issue UBI or receive trust, but they can be opened and shared by anyone in a group or organization. Businesses should not use personal wallets because taxes are complicated.]

[UBI stops if you don't log into your wallet for 90 days, thus incentivizes meaningful usage. To receive UBI after that you need to create a new wallet and transfer over your old CRC.]

[Circles is not on any crypto exchange as it is meant for spending, not for getting rich. You might convince someone to give you other currencies for your tokens, but the peer-to-peer nature of Circles makes it hard to give liquidity to the whole network.]

[The co-op covers transaction costs on the xDAI chain so that buyers and sellers can use the marketplace for free.]

Rahul Vohra's 7 principles of game design

[The conditions for flow include: 1) knowing what to do next; 2) knowing how to do it; 3) being distraction-free; 4) receiving clear and immediate feedback; 5) feeling a balance between challenge and skill.]

Punctuation in novels

Visualizing texts by frequency of their punctuation marks. I’ve always been a fan of data visualization, especially condensing an entire work into a single graphic to facilitate comparisons. I did this once when studying Hindustani music by transcribing an improvisation and mapping out which notes of the raga were used and how they were approached (laborious but interesting to look at). Curious to try this on my own writing some day to know what it ‘looks’ like.

Notes app musings: proposals for resonate community to consider from a label perspective

[Show something that's unavailable and provide a means to signal intent with which to inform future decisions.]

How I got wealthy without working too hard

[Making money is a form of procrastination (option to decide later) and the cost of that option is inflation.]

[Big cities are a geographical rat-race: don't compete.]

Miraculous cake

You certainly can’t make a cake by collecting a few eggs in Asia and walking across an entire continent to where the wheat is, all while picking up milk and sugar somewhere along the way.

The Phrase "No Evidence" Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication

[No evidence can indicate that 1) there were no studies; 2) there were studies proving the claim is false; 3) we assume it foolish to test.]

The Noguchi filing system

Paper filing system, where frequently used documents automatically end up together—one can safely archive what hasn’t come up after a long period. Similar to that ‘touching moves it to the top of the list’ paradigm common in messaging and note-taking apps. I love learning about simple systems that are built with the right incentives to encourage what’s natural, without impeding flow. Organization can bring peace of mind and increase cognitive bandwidth, so it’s powerful to achieve this automatically.

LN 005: Associated items

I often find myself glazing over conceptual interfaces for computing because I usually just want to use the thing to see how it feels, but the nice demos on this one stopped me.

The promise of digital systems for me has always had something to do with ‘surfacing the right amount of meaningful things at the right time’. I have approximated this in my apps by requiring explicit actions to surface things because it’s beyond my capacity to imagine how to do this more automatically, and also generally distrust machines to automate this well. So how nice it is to see a vision for creating structures and associations with little friction, more or less by directing your attention. Computers should be good at this while allowing us to tweak things, to avoid relying completely on a black box:

The system can handle most of the heavy lifting by simply paying attention to how we move through our items within different contexts, but we can further manage the associations manually as we like.

Bringing things to view in the way presented here is so much more compelling than clicking around through filesystems or apps. The closest that I’ve seen and used is Quicksilver’s way of 'knowing’ by key combinations and their frequency, but this requires explicit association. Successfully capturing intent passively instead of explicitly makes it so that being a programmer is not necessary.

It’s important to have higher-level primitives baked into lower levels, rather than reconstructing them in each app–this can mean schemas, file formats, or an operating system itself. Your trail or history is valuable and shouldn’t be siloed in or built bespoke for certain apps. How can this be constructed without a universal app for all the things? (or is that just another operating system?) How can this be done in a way where the data is not siloed within this system (even though it seems to afford great flexibility across app boundaries)?

How I made $210,822 selling a pdf and a video on the internet

[Find something you know super well and give away everything you know about it for free wherever people interested in that hang around. If you manage to get attention, you will start getting questions: whatever doesn't fit into a short response can be a prompt for your info product. If you do the product, you'll have the audience at the outset because they already asked for the info from you specifically.]

[A one-hour promotion making the product available at any price over one dollar.]

About | Derek Sivers

I’m very attached to my kid, but I don’t expect him to be attached to me. I don’t want him to feel more tied to some people than others. I hope he ventures out into the world, makes new bonds, and feels no obligation to me. He doesn’t owe me anything. His life is his own. He didn’t ask to be born, and has no debts.

Pay What You Want and the Four Currencies

[Optional contributions in software don't work because they're more of a pain in the ass than the free experience. If you forced a minimum price of even a cent, people would likely be more generous than the minimum because they're already in the payment process.]

Lessons from a Feline Gaze

My former professor started writing in public recently and managed to describe transcendence in what we, here on the Internet, refer to as a “cat picture”. I’m fond of lenses that help us see the sublime in ordinary experiences. There is so much we can learn from animals and nature, such as paying attention to our natural reactions and inhibitions. Feels also like a kind of oblique strategy.

Here is Stella, instructing us on how to look at something we’ve never seen before. As our resident cat-comedian with a gift for irony, she is wondering whether this item — a conductor’s baton — can be worked in as “A” material for her next vaudeville show. The baton is also about to become a tooth sharpener, but we’ll explore that in a moment. Here, Stella is elevating attention itself into an art form, and teaching us to do the same. If that idea doesn’t resonate with you, please find your inner still-point and a moment to drink in her lucent, emerald gaze.

How I Produce a Podcast

[The easier it is, the more likely people will do it: write the introduction email so that they don't have to.]

[If they're excited about something and remind you to bring it up later, ask them right away.]

[If they receive a second wave of ideas after the interview ends, ask permission to record again.]

A Pedagogy of Improvisation

My hope is just that reading these snippets may remind you of things you have forgotten, and that you can reconnect with thise oleasurable memories.

[He was there listening to his little kid play music. His enjoyment transfered to me and increased mine. His listening supported my listening. I was able to give something back to my dad.]

[Sound and silence are complementary. Take equal care when playing either.]

[Rests are less the absence of something and more the presence of nothing.]

[What people call random might simple be too complex to explain.]

[Instead of telling me what 'root' meant, he asked me what I know about roots. When I explained that plants have roots and hold up the rest, he made the connection with roots of a chord that 'supports' the other notes.]

[When I asked which G should I play, he suggested that I try all of them and see which one I was happy with.]

The Source of Sadness

[By tolerating discomfort we actually broaden our comfort zone.]

The global streaming boom is creating a severe translator shortage

[Netflix lost about half a million subscribers in the United States and Canada, but gained over a million in the Asia-Pacific region.]

[Translating Korean to French through English makes as much sense as translating English to French through Korean.]