346 entries under "article"

The Open-Source Software bubble that is and the blogging bubble that was

[Google Reader and Feedburner were not victims but weapons used to ensure that only Google was extracting value from the industry.]

[Blogspot was an attempt to populate the search indexes because there was not much content. As advertisers started to push back, it became less worthwhile of an investment.]

[Open-source projects without revenue are either burnout waiting to happen, or a formerly well-paid developer coasting on savings, or a group that took venture capital.]

[Microsoft invests in VSCode, TypeScript, GitHub and npm to create business for Azure and other offerings.]

[The 'money hose' is a mechanism to ensure that big tech can control the ecosystem.]

[Capitalism will always find a way to exploit common resources. It's just a matter of time.]

Declarative programming

[Declarative programming expresses logic without control flow—describe what should happen without saying how to accomplish it.]

Creativity in the Digital Age

[Analytics shows me that 'How I do …' performs better than 'How to do …']

[Negative feedback or people correcting you can help you learn cool stuff. Publishing a book is a free life-long education.]

How Writing Online Changed My Life

[There is a paradox of beginners simultaneously wanting and being afraid of the masses seeing their stuff. You wouldn't want your first post to go to a million people: smaller audiences are a safe place to experiment and refine.]

[Smaller audiences make it easier to find friends.]

If You Can Be Bad, You Can Also Be Good

[If a conspiracy theorist is no different from a scientist because 'everything is political', then words have no meaning. What isn't rational then?]

What's Behind the Shopify Effect

[Opt-in commerce is challenge-oriented whereas opt-out commerce is convenience-oriented.]

[If people identify with the challenge you've set for them, the transaction becomes a moment worth sharing.]

[People want meaning, to become something, to express themselves. How does what you sell help them succeed?]

How to Practice Mindfulness Meditation

[Mindfulness meditation is an opportunity to observe yourself as you are.]

[Suffering comes from escaping the experience of being alive.]

[Let your gaze rest, without staring or focusing. Whatever's in front is in front.]

Content strategy for creators: How to grow an audience

[Publish bite-sized shareable content on existing networks to help with discovery.]

[Create longer content to build trust.]

[Offer exclusive content in exchange for an email.]

[Give benefits to your most dedicated supporters who purchase.]

Signaling as a Service

[Software doesn't lend itself to signal messaging, so it's more lucrative to monetize signal distribution or amplification. Make it free and charge to stand out.]

“Free Software”: An idea whose time has passed

[The GPL only fails bad actors if hobbyists are responsible for regulating cyberspace and preventing cybercrime.]

Friendcatchers

[Learn to cook so that you will have an excuse to invite friends over for he rest of your life.]

Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality

[Van de Bergh et al suggest that the brain reduces bandwidth in 'raw experience' when it is intolerable, which is why trauma victims describe their traumas as short, undetailed, and to-the-point.]

Whenever the party you don't like says something seemingly reasonable, you can interpret in context as them wanting something horrible. Whenever they want a seemingly desirable thing, you secretly know it means they want a horrible moral atrocity. If a Republican talks about "law and order", it doesn't mean they're concerned about the victims of violent crime, it means they want to lock up as many black people as possible to strike a blow for white supremacy. When a Democrat talks about "gay rights", it doesn't mean letting people marry the people they love, it means destroying the family so they can replace it with state control over your children.

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.]

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.]

The Crypto-Chernobyl

[Bitcoin is an investment bubble built around the narrative of people's rage at economic inequality and a broken economy.]

Bitcoin = Death Processors

[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'.]

Songs vs Grooves

[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.]

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…]

A System for Interleaving Discussion and Summarization in Online Collaboration

[Give everyone the tools to summarize, without needing to rely on a single person to 'take notes']

[Contract threads into summaries.]

[Summaries can include other summaries and can have their own threads.]

[Discussion grows with comments and shrink with summaries.]

Comprehensibility Index

[TV shows with subtitles and comic books use multiple channels which can maximize comprehension whereas 'pure' forms like radio, text, talk shows demand more comprehension to start.]