Journal

Thursday, May 9, 2024

No need to own my data when it’s okay to lose things.

John Cleese vs Extremism

[Extremism lets you pretend that all badness is in your enemies while all goodness is in you.]

Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Political Disney World

[Progressivism creates and strengthen. Conservatism preserves and protects.]

[Between ‘what is’, ‘what should be’, and ‘how to get there’, people aligned or unaligned regardless of their viewpoint.]

[People are not ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’ either in opposition to the other by definition: they can think in certain ways.]

[Political Disney World is interpreting people as always bad or always good like characters in a fictional story rather than complex and inconsistent as messy humans can be.]

[The Trend-Anecdote Swapper is a fallacy that misrepresents reality by casting anecdotes as evidence of a larger trend and trends as anecdotal evidence.]

[The motte-and-bailey fallacy stitches a weak and questionable argument to an irrefutable one that gets substituted when the former is scrutinized, so that someone can easily switch between when convenient.]

Clew

[Search engine for independent creators that detects ads and page size.]

Monday, May 6, 2024

The Cost of Cash…lessness

At one point they’re a consumer in the goods market, the next an employee in the job market, and the next an investor in the financial market. In each of these spaces they’re but one tiny node, and rather than recognizing the interlocking nature of the markets they pass through, they experience themselves like a blindfolded person moving around an elephant, imagining each part they touch to be a unique object.

They’re trying to imply that the €10 billion is like a gas lost to space, but those monetary costs will appear on a bunch of income statements somewhere else as income earned from providing a service, and will turn up in GDP figures.

Of course there’s a real resource cost to producing jeans, and to maintaining the cash system, but there’s also a real resource cost to maintaining an army, a logistics system, or stairs in a skyscraper.

An overflowing of difference

Conviviality is an overflowing of difference in the environment. There is so much difference being communicated that the only device possible to transmit it is the world itself. The map expands to the size of the territory. When in the presence of so much information, we feel it is incommunicable. I can’t explain it… I don’t even know where to begin.

On Storytelling

[Find shared language by replacing ’true statements’ with words that convey the emotional experience around your solution.]

[Finding ways to solve multiple issues simultaneously helps tell a stronger story than a list of bug fixes or closed issues: try to holistically answer ‘what actually happened?’]

Sunday, May 5, 2024

What is Success?

[Community is about helping each other, rather than having similar interests or agreements or approaches.]

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Social media keeps the locus of attention on small formats, which makes it easy to weaponize for misinformation.

Monday, April 29, 2024

“don’t want to do tech but doing it anyway”

Sunday, April 28, 2024

Don’t Fuck It Up!

[Randomize your MAC address often.]

[Tor is for anonymity, not encryption: you need to configure it to avoid sending unencrypted data.]

Saturday, April 27, 2024

The Economics of Programming Languages

[People expect the same project execution from a single-person as with a company without the ’traffic and acquisition’ money that often finances such development.]

[Businesses who commercialize other open source projects save the cost of developing them, whereas authors who try to commercialize their own projects will be out competed by any entity with more resources.]

“The Open Source Way” is for businesses.

Saturday, April 20, 2024

following the signs toward an imminent hopeful cybernetic future.

Friday, April 19, 2024

agency over platform

Thursday, April 18, 2024

in it, but not of it

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Fishbowl

[An unconference gathering structure with chairs in the middle of the audience where anyone can sit to speak but it requires another person in the center to leave; one chair left empty invites new people to join anytime.]

Neologisms

Hospice Mode: The stage your when your phone / fitness tracker / laptop is in its final months and you’re just prolonging its death through a series of coping techniques. Carrying around extra battery packs. Patiently giving it 10 minutes to restart. Resetting the system at regular intervals.

Manel: Panel made up entirely of men. Usually honouring work done entirely by other men.

Pinkering: Named for Steven Pinker - a common phenomenon among do-gooder elites who cite the long arc of human history in order to downplay and minimise any immediate suffering.

Privacy Veganism: Unnecessarily shaming people who aren’t willing to delete their Facebook account when it’s a functional necessity in their social context

If it’s obvious to you, it’s for someone else.

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Mailbag #2

[You can avoid keeping up with news directly by listening to podcasts that might give a sense of important issues indirectly.]

One Pot Pony

A lazy person’s guide to delicious meal prep

This is the power of Combinatorial Cooking. From a seemingly limited set of base ingredients, there is a whole universe of food options you can prepare quickly and easily.

The wok lets you boil, saute, stir-fry, and simmer. The spaghetti spoon lets you stir, mix, scrape, and mash. They’re both incredibly versatile and easy to clean. It’s all you need to make any Combinatorial Cooking recipe. Plus, using a wok makes you look and feel like a real chef, that’s just science.