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.]
[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.]
[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.]
[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.]
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.]
[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.]
[Shows that are understandable on mute have a strong visual context.]
[Comic books have visual cues that support the text.]
[Some stories have narratives that use predictable tropes, which are easier to grasp than improvised situations.]
[Certain shows are focused on a single domain whereas news can move freely between multiple.]
[Political dramas or technical lectures requires specific domain knowledge.]
[Overdubbed content can be simplified because things don't always translate.]
[Listening to a news broadcast has some shared language with conversation, but they require different skills and different vocabularies. Better to narrowly focus on one and move on after you master it.]
[There is a disputed theory that mistakes in geometric repetitions were intentionally made to show humility and how only God can produce perfection.]
[The binary form of AABB provides enough variation to allow a dance to be extended indefinitely.]
The Dangers of Intellectualized Emotions
[Avoid using umbrella terms (like upset, overwhelmed, stressed, weird, okay) or metaphors (like soread too thin) and try to use plain language (sad, angry, frustrated, confused, scared, disappointed) to communicate emotions directly.]
[To eat healthy, it isn't enough to avoid unhealthy food, it is necessary to keep your home stocked with healthy alternatives. Make the right thing easy.]
