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.
[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.]
[When someone’s lying to you: 1. tell them you need to come back to the conversation (and walk away); 2. say “something feels off”; 3. simply wait, as it makes dishonesty uncomfortable.]
Putting something on the internet is unfortunately default public (insecure / opt-out) unless you can personally verify that it’s not, which might be impossible.
Rate my theory: I’ve seen an uptick in ‘your year in review’ summaries from apps & even phone providers. By packaging their surveillance of us in the form of pie charts & wacky slogans these firms are trying to normalize data extraction as a form of fun self-exploration
Non-monogamy is generally cringe not because multiple people are consensually involved, but rather because relatively privileged people have dumped their neuroses and misguided aspirations for a “free” or authentic life
The people documented in our study kept households together, raised each other’s children, stayed together for lifetimes, aided each other’s work and stayed by each other during war, illness, death and grief. Much of this is the sort of relationship style I get to experience daily, too, living with my partners and my cats and I am both grateful and hardly special for it. There are lots of people like me. We are, of course, also doing a social reproduction, making the world over and over again, just slightly differently. We are generally using different relationship style and thus socio-cultural technology in a way that is responsive to the precarity of neoliberalism—not liberated from it, because we have of course not escaped material and historical trends. But though we cannot escape these trends we can counter some of their isolating or libertarian effects, and so live in a less individualist, more communal and fairly committed way.
ask: if two parents good, perhaps three parents better? Perhaps motherhood communes better? Perhaps parenting with friends better?
[Look for these cues to handle underlying localization: natural language text for humans (in error messages, UI text, JSON strings, etc…); interactions with text through a keyboard or cursor; searching, matching, sorting text; capturing user input; represents time; deals with names, addresses, time formats, etc…; references any cultural norms.]
Our current dominant political system used to impress people like old infomercials, but is increasingly understood as the phony sales pitch it has long been.
Each branch of Joe’s hugo-testing git repository is a scratchpad where he has over 750 attempted ‘solutions’ to help different people on the Hugo forum. Seems like discovery requires starting at a specific topic (as opposed to searching for the problem or solution), but it’s quite organized the way it is. How might being this prolific in helping others impact one’s own skills?
the following games profit solely from aesthetic upgrades: Rocket League, Fortnite, CS:GO, Path of Exile, League of Legends. In these games, players purchase outfits for in-game avatars that do not impact the competitive balance.
I plaster the word “free” everywhere until consumers pay for a license. I’m not the first to do this, and I certainly won’t be the last.