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”.
[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.]
With more politically homogenous audiences, the market demand for truth goes down a little bit in favor of an increased demand for viewpoint confirmation
[Narrowcast media turns boring political reality into a sensational reality show to entertain everyone who finds politics boring.]
A scam is like a virus that converts trust into cynicism, but it’s the news, in the name of keeping things entertaining and addictive, that distributes the virus across the whole country.
Geographic bubbles mean many people barely know anyone on the other political side personally, so the only information they have on what those people are like comes from information bubbles. And those bubbles have increasingly become hate-mongering machines.
An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.
He constrains himself only to the forgeable domains, often ones based on games of language, and so he is never put to the test. Since he can never definitively fail, he will never be cast out, but he will also never “pass” and become initiated. He remains anxiously in limbo, waiting in fear and hope for some immanent sense of identity to emerge from the undifferentiated mass, not realizing that he has already precluded the possibility of any critical event.
FAT32 doesn’t actually mark sectors as “deleted”. It marks the entire file as deleted, without permanently erasing any of its information until it’s needed. Testdisk knows this, and it makes recovery a breeze. The entire operation took 5 minutes.
[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.]
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.
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.
[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.]
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
[You can avoid keeping up with news directly by listening to podcasts that might give a sense of important issues indirectly.]
Open Source is a restaurant. At a restaurant, you eat your meal first, and then you are expected to pay for it. Yes, we could dine and dash. But we don’t. When presented with a tab for a meal we have just eaten, we pay the tab.
The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram
Actual power is controlling the means by which lesser power can be displayed—i.e., congrats on the 500K likes on your polling numbers, @jack still owns all your tweets. Actual power keeps a low profile; actual power doesn’t need a social media presence, it owns social media.
Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed
Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.
We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have, We buy so much because it always seems like something, is still missing,
For the economy to be “healthy”, America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials.
Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designers of the schemes, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, which have no such restriction.
Choices of authorized terms are based on the principles of user warrant (what terms users are likely to use), literary warrant (what terms are generally used in the literature and documents), and structural warrant (terms chosen by considering the structure, scope of the controlled vocabulary).
The terms are chosen and organized by trained professionals (including librarians and information scientists) who possess expertise in the subject area. Controlled vocabulary terms can accurately describe what a given document is actually about, even if the terms themselves do not occur within the document’s text.
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.
[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. 👍🏽