Journal

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Basic building layers: data, identity, aggregation, search.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

We interviewed the Mozart of Gen Z - Colin and Samir

[Your heroes make things possible.]

[Finding your voice involves trying stuff; not possible to ‘contribute’ by waiting to find your voice first.]

[Try making the worst song ever.]

[A question culture versus answee culture.]

[Questions last longer than answers.]

[My room is my spaceship and I can command it to go wherever I want. My job is to tune in to the internal weather: what’s turning me on today?]


Jacob Collier edits his own videos?

Whisper or ‘Whisper-Faster’ can run as a standalone terminal program on macOS 10.14 with whisper-standalone-win by simply downloading the binary from ‘releases’ and running a single command from the resulting folder:

./whisper-faster "~/alfa/bravo.mp3" --pp --model base.en --language=en --output_format all --output_dir .

This will fetch the model if there isn’t a local copy, and transcribe into about half a dozen formats, including plaintext, JSON, and subtitle files.

The openai/whisper documentation says:

The .en models for English-only applications tend to perform better, especially for the tiny.en and base.en models. We observed that the difference becomes less significant for the small.en and medium.en models.

To run it without printing text into the console, use -pp or send to NUL

Monday, March 4, 2024

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.]

Sunday, March 3, 2024

Instead of unsustainable ‘sprints’, take each day as an opportunity to integrate your values holistically.

Nas feat. A Boogie Wit da Hoodie & YG: YKTV

Triplet tension in chorus; lyric flows while never mechanically aligning with the beat’s grid; bass triplets that happen a few times create a feeling of suspension; contrast between silence and full beat avoids monotony,

Bobby McFerrin: Circlesongs - Live in Budapest (2018)

Been appreciating lately how hard it is to sing in tune and so I enjoyed this on a higher level than normal.

27:17: wildly precise abstract tuning, singing, and gibberish without turning into a mess.

31:31: groovy bass-y beatboxing to support instrument-like vocal solos.

43:31: improvised speaking through music and singing, realistic voice-only drum groove; polyrhythmic breaking of Bobby’s voice to create effects.

STAR Voting

[Instead of voting yes or no, rate all options on a scale of 0 through 5 and calculate multiple rounds in one session.]

It’s useful to journal or take notes even if they aren’t synthesized, just as it is to take photos even if they aren’t synthesized.

Other people could be more inclined to get involved when it’s aligned with their current goals, when it feels like riding the same bus together.

I wish for you everything you wish for those people over there.

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Twilight

[Desire always implies you don’t have it.]

[Trills are like musical edging.]

[Disavowal let’s someone get what they are afraid to want and without risk of exposure that comes from asking.]

macOS Time Machine exclusions can be managed via the terminal, as documented in Exclude folders by regex (?) from time machine backup, Control Time Machine from the command line, and Scripting Timemachine exclusion lists:

find `pwd` -maxdepth 3 -type d -name 'node_modules' | xargs -n 1 tmutil addexclusion

But this doesn’t make it show up in the System Preferences GUI. Writing to defaults seems to do that:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist SkipPaths -array-add "~/.cache"

but I’m too paranoid about doing it wrong to see what happens.

Asimov is another option (installed via homebrew) to “Automatically exclude development dependencies from Apple Time Machine backups”.

Friday, March 1, 2024

Instead of ‘proving someone wrong’, why not help improve their capacities?

Web Skills

A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer.

Reminds me of the trees from DuoLingo.

About Feeds

[Getting started guide to RSS.]

About Ideas Now

Find people to talk to or collaborate with by searching across the /about, /ideas and /now pages of 6692 personal websites.

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.

32-Bit Cafe

You’ve just made a website, but now you’re unsure where to go from here. Here are some ideas for things to add and techniques to learn.

How Bear does analytics with CSS

when a person hovers their cursor over the page (or scrolls on mobile) it triggers body:hover which calls the URL for the post hit. I don’t think any bots hover and instead just use JS to interact with the page, so I can, with reasonable certainty, assume that this is a human reader.