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. 👍🏽
Talking files, protocols, and data ownership in TfTs
[It’s a useful contribution to try what we’ve made and complaining about the ways it doesn’t work for you.]
I offer this work on a sliding scale based on income; I ask 1/1,000th of your annual income per hour. So if you make $45,000 per year, I ask for $45/hr. If you make $150,000/yr, I ask for $150/hr.
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.]
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.
A hyperlink is a triple where the subject is the page, the predicate is the link text, and the object is the thing being linked to.
Using the object name as link text could be wasteful.
Subtext explorations on Hashtags
Collecting into tagged buckets is not sense-making, only a coarse-grained first approximation. Sense-making should fold into Orientation, and make it possible to expand your repertoire of Actions. That means synthesizing collected information into new knowledge. This is something linking supports, and tags do not.
[Start using an approach with obvious shortcomings and use the flywheel of growth to improve.]
[Starting simple creates low-hanging fruit for newcomers to get involved, which helps increase traction.]
what was it, aaron?
which atrocity drove your desperation to set your body on fire to match your burning spirit?
was it the baby starving to death on camera?
was it the children eating food for livestock?
was it the artillery shot towards children celebrating at the border?
was it the millionth mother grieving her dead baby?
or was it the silence?
“I will pelt you to death with marshmallows” is not very credible, though it might conceivably be done if one had a great many marshmallows.
My Secret Teaching Framework (Revealed)
[Organize your message by: 1) starting with the point up-front; 2) tell a story to demonstrate; 3) make it more relatable with a metaphor; and 4) re-state the point.]
Unlike “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them” this focuses on starting with useful information. I’ve been organizing myself lately to share ’nuggets’, which gives you something without having to read further, and like the idea of progressively adding layers or enriching what was previously stated.
[Find more contributors by: 1) always recruiting; 2) caring about people first, contributions second; 3) documenting your processes.]
[Sunlight helps your skin produce melanin, which keeps hair black, skin tanned, and influences the amount of hair. Eyes also have some.]
[Lack of vitamin B1 (thiamin) can cause white hairs to appear.]
[Copper is essential for producing melanin and can be found in seafood (oysters, mussels, crustaceans), liver, nuts (cashews, Brazil nuts), legumes (lentils, beans) and dark chocolate.]
[Yanking out hairs can destroy their roots and over the long-term create gaps in your beard. Doing it gently can help keep the root alive. It might produce the same white hair again if melanin production in this particular root stopped for some reason.]
Paying people to work on open source is good actually
Every time a maintainer finds a way to get paid, it’s a win.
Until we have fully automated luxury gay space communism every. single. person. who figures out a mechanism to write free software and still pay rent represents a win and we should celebrate accordingly.