346 entries under "article"

SCAMPER is a procedural idea generator

S: Can I substitute a material? A key ingredient? A process? What happens if I substitute an emotion? Can I substitute the packaging for something else?

C: Can I combine different components to create something new? Can I bundle things in a new way? Can I combine different use-cases, such as author and reader, or seller and buyer?

A: Can I adapt a process from somewhere else? A component from something else? Can I adapt it to existing infrastructure? Can I adjust something just 3% to create something new?

M: Can I modify the form factor? Shape? Color? Can I magnify the key idea? What happens if I magnify an attribute beyond all reason? Or minify it?

P: Can I put a component to other uses? A mechanism? A process? An idea? A set of rules? Can I transform a waste product into an input? Can I put it to use in another context? Can I translate it into another medium? Create spinoffs?

E: Can I eliminate a rule? Can I simplify it? Make it compact? Eliminate a feature? Remove a complication?

R: Can I reverse a relationship? An assumption? What happens if I reverse my point of view? Can I rearrange the sequence? The layout? The structure? Can I rearrange the components to create something new?

A Fediverse, if you can keep it

Companies might serve as on-ramps, but at the end of the day this is a network of people sharing things with other people. You’re not blocking Meta; you’re blocking countless people who would otherwise stand to benefit from the open nature of the network. And the cruel irony here is that preemptive blocking is what will ultimately destroy the Fediverse as we know it. People want to connect with one another, and they’re going to do it one way or another. (And we’re right back to WhatsApp again.)

How do we evaluate people for their technical leadership?

Programmers’ chief value does not come from producing code. It comes from knowing enough about the situation to solve automation and scaling problems. Code that doesn’t solve those problems is worthless to the organization. If code that doesn’t solve those problems gets deployed somewhere, it’s worse than worthless because it incurs maintenance costs in addition to being worthless.

Perhaps even more importantly, though, they ensure that the wrong thing does not get done. And that is what makes them look worthless: their chief outcome is the absence of something. […] It’s the breaches that didn’t happen because someone double-checked what this SQL did. It’s the multi-server failure that did not occur because two separate engineers saw the warning signs and one responded to the other in a messaging channel. It’s the disaster feature that got killed because someone who understands inclusion demonstrated how it might be used to attack a marginalized constituency.

Money as Addiction

[As addiction to cigarettes changes your body and turns your into a different person, material progress changes our baseline expectations for what is necessary to live. Solutionism wants to measure progress cumulatively, but this ignores how each stage of development rebases our 'zero point'.]

I've been trying to articulate the false sense of pioneering characterized in the fintech reference at the end: the story that businesses tell themselves and the world about 'heading towards the future' while essentially anchoring us deeper into this monetary system; today's version in my head is "There are no leftist startups." Yes to acknowledging where we are. 👍🏽

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.]

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.

How to Use C.R.A.P. Design Principles For Better UX?

[Use contrast of shape and colour to draw the eye's attention to important parts of the layout.]

Support Kottke.org With a Membership

About 45% of those who have been a member of kottke.org are currently not active paying members. That's a lot of churn! If even half of those folks would re-up, I could do some additional cool shit around here, I think. That said, the number of active members has remained relatively steady over time, which I'm thankful for.

All you need is links

A hyperlink is a triple where the subject is the page, the predicate is the link text, and the object is the thing being linked to.

Using the object name as link text could be wasteful.

Subtext explorations on Hashtags

Collecting into tagged buckets is not sense-making, only a coarse-grained first approximation. Sense-making should fold into Orientation, and make it possible to expand your repertoire of Actions. That means synthesizing collected information into new knowledge. This is something linking supports, and tags do not.

Create good problems to have

[Start using an approach with obvious shortcomings and use the flywheel of growth to improve.]

[Starting simple creates low-hanging fruit for newcomers to get involved, which helps increase traction.]

all of it.

what was it, aaron?

which atrocity drove your desperation to
set your body on fire to match your burning spirit?

was it the baby starving to death on camera?

was it the children eating food for livestock?

was it the artillery shot towards children
celebrating at the border?

was it the millionth mother
grieving her dead baby?

or was it
the silence?

Substack's Dilemma

“I will pelt you to death with marshmallows” is not very credible, though it might conceivably be done if one had a great many marshmallows.

My Secret Teaching Framework (Revealed)

[Organize your message by: 1) starting with the point up-front; 2) tell a story to demonstrate; 3) make it more relatable with a metaphor; and 4) re-state the point.]

Unlike "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them" this focuses on starting with useful information. I've been organizing myself lately to share 'nuggets', which gives you something without having to read further, and like the idea of progressively adding layers or enriching what was previously stated.

Sustainable Open Source

[Find more contributors by: 1) always recruiting; 2) caring about people first, contributions second; 3) documenting your processes.]

[Sunlight helps your skin produce melanin, which keeps hair black, skin tanned, and influences the amount of hair. Eyes also have some.]

[Lack of vitamin B1 (thiamin) can cause white hairs to appear.]

[Copper is essential for producing melanin and can be found in seafood (oysters, mussels, crustaceans), liver, nuts (cashews, Brazil nuts), legumes (lentils, beans) and dark chocolate.]

[Yanking out hairs can destroy their roots and over the long-term create gaps in your beard. Doing it gently can help keep the root alive. It might produce the same white hair again if melanin production in this particular root stopped for some reason.]

Paying people to work on open source is good actually

Every time a maintainer finds a way to get paid, it's a win.

Until we have fully automated luxury gay space communism every. single. person. who figures out a mechanism to write free software and still pay rent represents a win and we should celebrate accordingly.

What is the Difference Between a Radler and a Shandy? | Druthers Brewing Company

Shandy originated in the 1850s in England where it was earlier known as Shandygaff. The Shandygaff was a mixture of beer and ginger ale or ginger beer. By the late 19th-century, the ginger ale in the Shandygaff was replaced by lemonade or lemon soda, and the “gaff” was dropped to shorten the word to just Shandy.

A Failure Resume

This document has served as a powerful reminder to myself of how much I’ve struggled to get to where I am and why I deserve to be here. And more importantly, it serves as a place to reflect and learn from the past and be less scared of failure in the future.

Keeping a failure resume has let me be so much more ambitious in trying new things and applying for things I would otherwise think I’m unqualified to apply for.

solve for distribution

[Better distribution matters more than better product because most people are satisfied beyond a certain 'decent' threshold. If you deliver a decent product to many customers, you can make enough to improve your product.]

“But the superior product must win!” Why? “Because it’s the superior product!” To who? “To me! And the 10 people I’ve talked to!” Ok but your competitor has talked to 10,000 people and they like his product well enough. And he’s hiring your product guy, oops, better luck next time.

I am sympathetic to the idea that great products, great artists, creators, etc should be appreciated. but also, “the audience” or “the market” is not actually some perfect, platonic ether. It’s people. And people are busy and tired and generally prefer to be met where they are.

If you don’t go out and do the work of teaching people how to appreciate you, your odds of being appreciated are very, very slim. you’re basically depending on chance, on the whim that Serious Appreciators will notice you. It’s very risky to leave this up to chance.

[Talk to a thousand people about it and you will notice patterns. When something resonates with a few dozen people, there are probably thousands of people that feel the same. Addressing what they mention means you connect with their specific experiences as opposed to what you think might be interesting.]