mocking your opposition without reducing their power is not a flex.
mocking your opposition without reducing their power is not a flex.
[Bring some cookies to your neighbour for no reason other than they might need to smile today.]
[I didn’t give her a tip or make her famous, just told her I loved her voice.]
[The point of leaving the flock to go after the lost sheep isn’t to bring them back, but to let them know they’re loved.]
Erin Kissane leaving the internet
[Pretender technologies may only appear to be the next thing, without eventually changing anything, but they can function as a playspace to try possible futures.]
[If we want better networks, we must concretely understand what happened to us, and then use that knowledge to try new things deliberately, with painstaking attention to the human cost.]
I was told a long time ago that ‘modeling your classical music performance on recordings can ruin your artistic integrity because it distracts you from finding your own interpretation’. Only now have I considered how this can parallel in improvised music, where playing ’like the recording’ leads me to be detached from my current needs and capacity. It’s more honest to understand a song from the recording, but without using it as an excuse to skip over dealing with current challenges, which might mean performing it in a way that bears little resemblance to the original, and this can be constructive.
[When someone asks ‘why’ after you respond to their request with ’no, you can say “it’s not what’s best for me right now”, “it’s outside my focus right now”, “I need to make another choice”.]
How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
[When you feel the tightening up and defensiveness that comes with someone trying to ‘prove’ or ‘persuade’ their perspective, consider focusing on what question to ask so that you can learn something.]
[Feeling triggered is a prompt to understand what provoked it.]
[We did this three-session activity three times during the year: first for cars, then the internet, then generative AI.]
[Global impact doesn’t lend itself to simple numerical representations, as what the numbers represent may not be evenly distributed.]
[Generative models are often discussed in terms of potential impact decades from now, so to start by measuring something that has already existed for decades helps ground discussion in less theoretical terms.]
[If we network homogeneously, our surrounding opinions will tend to conform similarly.]
Peanut butter soya cucumber salad
I was taught something, so now i know it, right?
[Nothing can be taught, there is only learning.]
[Having read about a topic or participated in a workshop does not mean knowing it, which is painfully obvious in the trades.]
Let’s talk about keeping your community network going….
[Cross train your community network on manuals by letting each person pick a specific part to master and then teaching it to the group.]
[Keep things interesting by meeting up without a specific plan, deciding something fun together, and getting to it right away from there.]
[Build a network resource together through labour or by chipping in funds.]
[Most people who use Facebook or Twitter don’t know what protocol they’re using.]
Visual design rules you can safely follow every time
[Differentiate hues in a palette with unique brightness values.]
[Saturate your neutrals with warm or cool colours, but not both.]
[Spacing better separates contrasting elements than similar ones.]
The YouTube you see has the same colours and layout as the one I see, and yet we’re not present in each other’s space like two customers browsing through the same record collection at a music store. The Internet is seldom used to ‘connect us together’ any more. No, we’re each in a private bubble.
In a sense, the new digital interfaces are like a reflective store-front made of one-way glass. Whoever approaches will see an image of themselves, reflected in what products turn up, and what messages they receive. The corporate can see them, but the person is encouraged to imagine themselves as walking through an uninhabited room with shelves that belong to them: my shelf, my basket, my account, my list, my favourites, my Amazon, my Google etc. In the 1980s there was no ‘my Walmart’, but now your data is reflected back to you as your own store with that possessive pronoun. In doing that, they get to present themselves as you.
‘Erica’ is legally in the same category as the bank’s supply of staples or fleet of vehicles, but they don’t give human names to their water coolers or keyboards. They only grant that to assets that form part of the new outward-facing interface. They encourage us to get on first-name terms with this combination of code and hardware, and by now all of us have experienced the proliferation of these named interfaces like Alexa, Bard, Claude, or Jasper.
AI chatbots give the one-way mirror a human name that’s different to your own. “I’m having a conversation with Erica”, you think to yourself as you transmit information to the (largely male) engineers of Bank of America. “She knows me so well”.
Stop travelling when you feel good somewhere.
[LLM chatbot that runs offline entirely inside a browser with open models like Mistral and LLama 3. Needs WebGPU so you need to use Chrome or Edge.]
[Perhaps obsession with individualism shames us if we are ’less disciplined’ when ‘alone’, while blinding us to how functional it is to live your best through other people.]
Write when hungry. Read when fed.
Programming require you to reify anything in order to act on it, whereas in the physical world you can directly engage with your environment.
It may be easier to change analog than digital.
I was wondering if it’s possible to load a local JavaScript file via bookmarklet (to get around Firefox’s character limit) but it seems file:// URLs will return an error. I can either load an https:// URL or embed my file inside an extension.
Social media keeps the locus of attention on small formats, which makes it easy to weaponize for misinformation.