I see you, with errors in your ways, and I choose compassion.

[It's a strange time to do 'living' things.]

@danielbmate x @thedandelionking

[What's the difference between destroying in the name of your country versus your god?]

Twitter’s game mechanics select for a low-effort posting strategy, the dunking game. The rules are: find a way to misunderstand the tweet so that it is wrong. If you can’t, quote it out of context so that it is wrong. Tired.

Lines — Scenes from Egypt

If you are loud & obnoxious, you'll most likely get your paperwork done first, because the agent can't focus with all your noise and just wants to finish your stuff quickly & get it over with. Unless it backfires and the agent decides to turn around for a few minutes and sip his coffee while everyone calms down.

The Tyranny of the Marginal User

a company with a billion-user product doesn't actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user - the billion-plus-first user - and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn't stop using the app. Yes, if you neglect the existing users' experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted.

The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headline, otherwise he'll swipe back to TikTok and never open your app again.

Marl's tolerance for user interface complexity is zero.
As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion.

You might think Marl just doesn't know about the settings. You might think to make things more convenient for Marl, perhaps add a little "see less like this" button below a piece of content. Oh boy, are you ever wrong This absolutely infuriates Marl. On the margin, the handful of pixels occupied by your well-intentioned little button replaced pixels that contained a triggering headline or a cute image of a puppy. Insufficiently stimulated, Marl throws a fit and swipes over to TikTok, never to return to your app.
Your feature decreases DAUs in the A/B test. In the launch committee meeting, you mumble something about "user agency as your VP looks at you with pity and scorn. Your button doesn't get deployed. You don't get your promotion. Your wife leaves you. Probably for Marl.

A substantial fraction of the world's most brilliant, competent, and empathetic people, armed with near-unlimited capital and increasingly god-like computers, spend their lives serving Marl.

The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy

Love isn't more 'real' when acting out of compromise.

Tiktok’s enshittification

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

[The word 'monetize' implies there is no 'attention economy' in the pure sense: users need to pay fiat at some point.]

Gut-Friendly Fruit Sodas

[Add some ginger bug starter to pressed juice; anything with natural sugars will do, and you can add maple syrup if none. close, and let sit for 3 days or until bubbles form. Burp them daily to avoid that they explode.]

Fermented Ginger Bug!

[Combine 6tsp chopped ginger, 4 tsp unrefined sugar, and 2 cups filtered room temperature water. Close well, shake, and let sit for a 24 hours. Feed daily with 2 tsp ginger and sugar for 3–5 days until bubbles form.]

when should one pay attention to critics? or the choir? or both equally?

Think outside the project.

Exalting data, missing meaning

[Data-centric approaches might better fit fields like manufacturing, transport, and aviation, perhaps less so education, consumer products, and other domains involving messy humans; we risk depriving ourselves of insights from philosophy, intuition, and stories, as they may still be inaccessible through quantitative approaches.]

[Specific initiatives might appear to have no effect on engagement, but might unexpectedly and invisibly affect the actor's social or political over the long-term.]

Let’s talk about pods

[Choosing where and how to store data is less about how to make it work for one app work and more about all other apps.]

How does the way we write data impact others’ ability to reuse that data?

[The document box approach creates conflicts between 1) how data was obtained (provenance); 2) what it will be used for (trust); 3) logical groupings of items (context); 4) who has access (permission). For example, an address book app that dealing with all contact data versus a birthday app dealing only with one detail of many contacts.]

On a whim, but a deeply felt one, I went live to share some impromptu thoughts on Israel, Palestine, condemnation, and context. Thanks for tuning in and considering.

[Might seem futile to add one's voice to the cacophony of others on social media, especially as it makes little difference to people suffering over there, but my voice is all I have.]

Digital Strategy Consulting from Tom Critchlow

I think of clients like partners and typically don’t get hired to make spreadsheets. I’ll make the spreadsheets anyway, but you hire me to care about your business.

Embedded leadership is useful because I’m often available to lead projects on short notice and can shape the strategy, work rapidly to define the roadmap and then over time work to build a robust sustainable team within the organization to own the work.

Engagements often start with a short, small group workshop where we can create clarity around both the problem and solution in a short space of time. These workshops often springboard into larger ongoing retainers and embedded leadership engagements.

Image - Sublime

FROM "Pressure to perform" TO "Freedom to express"

FROM "Low-level anxiety" TO "Aliveness and possibility"

FROM "Immediacy and impermanence" TO "Slowness and contemplation"

FROM "Mindless consumption" TO "Mindful curation"

FROM "Loneliness and disconnection" TO "Connection to ideas and people"

FROM "Perpetual information overload" TO "Joy of discovery and insight"

FROM "Bogged down in irrelevant stuff" TO "The right information when you need it"

FROM "Exploiting our attention" TO "Living in healthy ways with abundance"

FROM "Linear and hierarchical interfaces" TO "Associative, context-rich digital gardens"

open-funding

This document aims to be an open guide to funding of open source projects.

[Grants, Notable Projects, Other Organisations, Crowdfunding]

Awesome OSS Funding

A curated list of awesome resources for funding open source projects and authors.

[Products, Donations, Bounties, Licensing, Articles, Organizations]

A handy guide to financial support for open source

This document aims to provide an exhaustive list of all the ways that people get paid for open source work.

[Donation button; Bounties; Sponsorware; Crowdfunding (one-time); Crowdfunding (recurring); Books and merchandise; Advertising & sponsorships; Get hired by a company to work on project; Start a project while currently employed; Grants; Consulting; Paid support; SaaS; Copyleft + paid license; Open core; Foundations & consortiums; Venture capital; Restricted license]

The War on Informality

People cram off the Tube to cram into Pret for coffee to cram into work, before cramming into the self-service checkouts at Tesco for lunch. You'll never see the bosses or shareholders of the production lines, but you will see a series of CCTV cameras, touch-screens, QR codes and employees, with the latter increasingly subordinated to the technology.

As people cram into the bars in the evening, they’ll leave their Pret cups and Sainsbury’s sushi containers crammed into bins. Those will be emptied before dawn by an army of unseen cleaners, many of them immigrants, who will un-cram the city so the process can continue when everyone drains from the catchment area of the suburbs into the trains again. Once on the platform, our minds can get crammed afresh with the cutting edge of automation ideology, which in London means pervasive fintech ads, like this one from the automated investment manager Nutmeg.

The fintech scene primarily exists for one thing: to help bridge the gap between Big Finance and Big Tech.

London is a city of endless helpful requests coldly delivered to sound like orders, alongside matey propaganda designed by M&C Saatchi to make corporate platforms look warm and cuddly. When I lived here, this mix of dripping corporate inauthenticity and stultifying paternalism was there like a suffocating blanket, but the city had a strong counterculture to balance it out.

Isn’t it strange that a bunch of financial elites were invited to sit on the board. Someone should report that to the See It, Say It, Sorted help-line as suspicious behaviour. I fantasize about calling the operator and saying:

‘I’ve noticed London has been taken over by two colossal American payments firms working in conjunction with Big Finance and Tech, and people don’t seem to notice. Suspicious?’

I can imagine the operator looking for ‘corporate takeover’ and ‘apathy towards ruling class hegemony’ in the list of threats to UK democracy. ‘No, sorry, we only act upon terrorist threats, homeless people, brown people, and people who take photos of our CCTV cameras’.

One of the classic symptoms of deep urban commodification is that the identity of a place gets ripped away from those who live there and displayed back to them from the outside. You don’t host the spirit of Soho. You consume it. You live inside a product, and the local authorities begin to view themselves as product managers.

People ask me why I focus so much on cash. It’s because the arrival of so-called cashlessness is an eviction notice served to non-commercial spirits. The formal sector is slowly assassinating the informal economy, like an imperial death squad hunting down rebels. The creep is like a virus, and old Brixton punks must watch as it spreads into the body of the neighbourhood that hosts their identity. It appears to them as a sedation of the spirit, and a great forgetting of a world where solidarity, disdain for authority, and acceptance of imperfection were standard.

Their – perhaps reactionary – fear, of course, is that young Londoners will be born into this situation of capture, with their brain patterns calibrated within the formal system, such that they can’t recognise an outside. For example, many young people no longer have a concept of ‘money outside the bank’. Money is ApplePay. What is friendship without WhatsApp? What is directions without Google? There is no world that precedes the digital corporate overlay, with its filtering, auto-correcting and curating. The very concept of un-intermediated life is an endangered species.

feedbox is an embed for previewing RSS feeds. Here's what it looks like:

Here it's configured to fetch the one from this blog, but you can use any RSS feed and drop in on your website with a few lines of code. I've added it to all my project home pages, including Zero Data App and my homepage.

It uses an instance of cors-anywhere to get around CORS complaints; I hope someday it will be simpler to just fetch the raw contents of a page.

Unlike most of my programming projects, I tried to write code that feels more 'messy' to me (simple human names instead of XYZVerboseNames, which is generally hell for other people). I also actually wrote a README (uncommon for most of the over 100 OldSkool modules) to describe the setup and possible options; hope to maintain this as a baseline for future modules.

Was kind of fun to let go, and not test everything, although I still wrote some tests…

As a more general complement, I automatically added link[rel="alternate] to sites that don't have one by setting an environment variable.

The sensation of stuff updating everywhere, even on static pages, without anybody doing anything, is kind of electric to me: isn't that what computers are for? bleep bloop!

on journaling

[Prompt ideas: 1) what's happening? 2) gratitude journaling. 3) talk with my older self.]

Journaling

[Prompts levels: 1) what happened? 2) how am I feeling? 3) follow the rabbit hole.]

Digital Tools I Wish Existed

Let me compare my reading list with another to see overlap. I find this a wonderful way to spark conversation and find common interests.

The Future of Search Is Boutique

[Makes little sense to search for recipes and freelancers with the same interface: better to create diverse experiences with specific affordances for each niche.]

Re-Decentralizing the Web, For Good This Time

[Centralized systems addict us by combining what decentralization cannot: speed without cost.]

[Slower results might even be healthy if it gives us space to process the information more deeply and carefully.]

No more raw data

[Sometimes it's better not to decide what data you share, and defer the choice to someone with more expertise, such as medical data being provisioned by your doctor (who likely knows better how to respond to the request).]

Not only can my pod automatically fill out such forms; the forms don’t need to be there in the first place, because my pod can just share the needed data, machine to machine.

[Recipients will want to keep the trust envelope because it's their proof to an auditor that they comply with its policy.]

Musician’s own website as definitive source of all info

I think the musician’s own “.com” homepage website should be the one-and-only place the musician ever has to enter their info. It should be the sole definitive source for their music, photos, bio, lyrics, calendar, blog, and especially their fan/friend/email list.

How to organise yourself - the dangerous path to Explorer, Villager and Town Planners

Be prepared to be shocked, that's the horror of looking.

This is like a guide on how to run a company or organization.

Deprecating Content

[Include enough context (such as what, when, why, and the plan) so that the reader can make more informed prioritization of how to handle it.]

Foam: Software as Curation

[With a modular enough system, people can simply curate components or plugins into a kind of software experience, requiring less effort or technical skill than programming.]

Why don’t the Democrats adopt the obvious winning strategies?

[Since the Clinton era, US Democrats want to lose because it enables them to continue campaign funding as a lucrative income, as the Republicans started to do decades earlier.]

Jess Martin on devtools.fm

Do you have ten years of experience? or ten of the same year?

Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster

[Instead of saving an hour from not having to walk an hour to work, speed and distance increases so that we spend a comparable amount of time occupied with new trajectories.]

The Linking of Opposites

[It's fine to stop a video to talk about one frame, but we cannot separate it from the moving picture of life: we're always in motion.]

How Close Is That Photo to the Truth? What to Know in the Age of AI

[The camera's photon sensor converts light into pixel data and makes guesses about how much red, green, and blue to represent in each one.]

[Breaking up the image into multiple frames helps better represent shadows and skies while reducing noise.]

[Cameras make choices about how to make photos more vivid or different skin colors better represented, and decide how to store them for maximum compression.]

More Money For Better Open-Source Software

I am going to emphasize, in the docs, the license file, and the communication surrounding the project, that free-loading is not socially acceptable. Along with this, I will provide convenient mechanisms to donate. The code of financial conduct would be something like this:

• If you are a non-commercial user, don't worry about it.
• If I fix a bug you reported or add a feature you wanted and you have the financial means, a one-time tip is much appreciated. Even if this is unlikely to add up to serious money, it takes the one-sidedness out of the process of responding to user requests.
• If you are extracting value from your use of my software, set up a proportional monthly donation.

The monthly part is the important thing here. Having to periodically beg a user base to please contribute to a donation drive again is a drag, and not very effective. Convincing users to donate as long as they get value from the software gives a maintainer a more or less predictable, low-maintenance source of compensations for their work.

Filhos de Bimba. Demonstration

Seamless flow, nothing stops, question and answer are one.

Handstand progression with a wall

[First stage; keep your knees bent and touch your toes. Second stage: stretch one leg up straight. Third stage: loosen your toe touching the wall a bit. Fourth stage: loosen it even more until you almost don't need to depend on it. Fifth stage: lift your toe away from the wall. Sixth stage: stretch the other leg. Give some weeks per stage and get comfortable holding for twenty seconds before advancing to the next.]

flip the power dynamic with the high ground.

[When someone talks down to you, 1) flip it around with 'this way of speaking is beneath me'; 2) assert authority by 'allowing' or 'giving them another chance' to try that again'; and 3) express that you are 'willing to continue the conversation if they speak respectfully'.]

Interoperability is people connecting, communicating, collaborating.

'Capoeira should be fun' can extend to the game itself; the movement you admire is never in frenzy; always calma, giving time and space, not allowing someone else to make you hyperventilate; how can it feel more like effortless language exchange?

We can even extend this farther: how can everything be fun? more like that? fluid conversation with yourself and the stars.

The German prefix "zer-" is a tiny Terminator.

legen: to lay
zerlegen: to destroy

teilen: to share, to split
zerteilen: to destoy

siedeln: to settle
zersiedeln: to destroy (by settling)

setzen: to set
zersetzen: to destroy (by corrosion)

drücken: to press, to squeeze
zerdrücken: to destroy (by squeezing)

Zerjoy our language!

venting has a purpose.

[Let hotheads vent without interruption to 'deflate the balloon'. Ask them to repeat with 'can you please tell me that again?' so that they can speak more calmly (they've already vented). Ask questions of fact like who, what, where, when to engage with their analytical side.]

Using all flavours of Solid

Whereas classically we think of the situation where a user interacts with one identity provider, one storage provider, and multiple applications, recent experiments in practice have moved more towards also using multiple storage providers linked to a single identity.

There is an example app called Projectron which is mentioned throughout the Solid Application Interoperability spec and which can be used to track projects and issues; a first step would be to make this app compatible with the SolidOS Issue tracker, so that issues created through Solid OS will "magically" show up when you open Projectron.

Problems and Goals for Interoperability, Collaboration, and Security in a Solid Pod

Applications must have a shared understanding of data

Data must be discoverable.

Data must be durable.

Data must be portable.

Problem #3 - Disparate entities using different applications must be able to safely and effectively interoperate within their scope of authorization

Problem #4 - People shouldn’t need to think about how to physically organize their data to use Solid.

moleza

After eating a rich and filling tapioca, I sat satisfied, staring into space. The woman who cooked it saw me and asked if it 'deu uma moleza?'.

Let's talk about changing times and minds....

[If you believe in changing the world for the better, you also believe that individuals can change; there's no other way.]

[When sharing the 'same bus' with people who think differently, some might be on for a few kilometers, some for a few thousand.]

Spreadable Garlic Confit

[Cover unpeeled cloves of garlic in a bowl with boiling water for five minutes; then peel the skins easily. Place in a pan and submerge in oil, add aromatics (like thyme, basil) if desired, and slow roast at 120°C for two hours. Store in a jar with the oil and use three times the batch in any recipe calling for oil or garlic.]

How to upcycle turkey bones!

[Boil thanksgiving turkey remains for fifteen minutes to remove all the meat more easily; save the broth for soup. Bake the bones for fifteen minutes at 400°F to soften them, then grind into a powder. Mix a teaspoon of the powder with water to fertilize your plants.]

My name changed from Yasin to Jack. A/B test it.

[I got 0 interviews with my real name Yasin, but by using the name Jack, 40% gave me interviews and over 70% gave me offers. I took one of those offers and was Jack for over a year!]

A Verdadeira Seqüência Mestre Bimba

1. meia lua, guarda-baixa, meia lua:, guarda baixa, :armada, negativa, awo
2. queixada, guarda-baixa, queixada, guarda-baixa; armada, guarda-baixa; benção, negativa, awo:, cabeçada, :rolê
3. martelo, palma, martelo, palma; armada, guarda-baixa; benção, negativa, awo:, cabeçada, :rolê
4. godeme, palma braço, godeme, palma braço; galopante, arrastão (sair awo?), negativa, awo:, cabeçada, :rolê
5. giro, guarda-média:; :cabeçada, joelhada (sair grab), negativa, awo:, cabeçada, :rolê
6. compasso, guarda-baixa; compasso, guarda-baixa; joelhada lateral, negativa, awo:, cabeçada, :rolê
7. armada, guarda-baixa; armada, guarda-baixa; benção, negativa, awo:, cabeçada, :rolê
8. benção, negativa, awo:, cabeçada, :rolê

The Roads to Ruining Thanksgiving....

[Eat an elephant one bite at a time, starting with the youngest.]

Plausible: GDPR, CCPA and cookie law compliant site analytics

Old salts are deleted every 24 hours to avoid the possibility of linking visitor information from one day to the next. Forgetting used salts also removes the possibility of the original IP addresses being revealed in a brute-force attack.

How to make banana water!

[Chop banana peels and let sit in water for an hour or longer, then strain into a bottle. Use as fertilizer for plants.]

Is this something we have to agree on?

[Avoid getting into a heated argument by 1) asking if this is something we need to agree on, as often it's not the case; 2) pulling the brake of "well, maybe so" to acknowledge it's possible they're right, sometimes all they wanted to hear; 3) lowering your voice and slowing down your words if they do the opposite.]

push the eject button

[Politely end a conversation by: 1) acknowledging you need to interrupt; 2) moving to another room (like the bathroom); and 3) cuing an end with "thanks for sharing".]

A lot of us eat oranges and throw out the peels..

[Pack a jar with orange peels, fill with vinegar, and let sit in a cool dark place. After two weeks, strain into a spray bottle. The D-limonene combined with vinegar is a naturally powerful household cleaner.]

How to start a movement | Derek Sivers

[The first follower transforms someone else from lone nut to leader, thereby giving legitimacy to the movement. Have courage to be that follower, as it isn't always easy, but it can help set the wheels of change in motion.]

[Treat the first followers as equals so that the movement takes precedence over the leader.]

The more my practice is an own connection with body, the less I need to take classes or achieve a standard. In this sense I may never need to take another movement class. My progress can be personal and infinite, adapted to my context.

Embark - Dynamic documents for making plans

Travel-certified trip planning demo combining end-user programming and customization, spreadsheet-like formulas, text as super app.

ChatGPT as muse, not oracle

In rubber duck debugging, talking to a silent rubber duck helps a person figure out the problem by forcing them to put it into words. The Oblique Strategies card deck promotes creative ideas based on general loose strategies. ELIZA can ask super basic questions and cause people to feel a therapeutic relationship. In all these cases, a person gets a boost in the creative process from interacting with a tool that’s clearly far from intelligent. It seems like large language models could do at least as well as these tools, and have a much higher ceiling.

for the unwanted table talk

[Pass over unwanted conversation by saying 1) "that subject isn't for me", as with food you don't eat; 2) "good to know" and "that's interesting", to acknowledge without agreeing; and 3) "I typically avoid this discussion", to communicate it's not singling them out. Nobody can force you to talk about anything you don't want to talk about.]

So many of us throw these things out..

[Instead of wasting the ends of these veggies, grow something from them.]

[Lettuce and celery bottoms can be cut around two inches and half submerged with sticks in a cup of water (ideally filtered).]

[Take one stick of basil, remove the bottom leaves, cut the bottom of the stem at a forty-five degree angle, and place the top part in a shot glass for three days. When it grows roots, plant it in soil.]

[Green onions or scallions can be planted directly in soil to regrow in about six days.]

[Carrot tops can be cut to about an inch and planted directly in soil.]

don’t feed the complaint, funnel it out.

[Complaints generally mask a larger underlying issue. Help them to get it all out by saying 'tell me more' and repeating until they're empty. Then guide them towards a solution with phrases like "How do you resolve this?", "What's the answer?", "How do you usually handle this?", "How have you addressed this in the past?"]

Not sponsored

(Puts on infomercial hat bought explicitly for this post.)

Ever wanted to learn Spanish or French? Brush up on German? Understand Greek?

Are you tired of language learning apps leaving you with little feeling of progress?

Or did you try private or group classes without being able to say much after several lessons?

Well, you'll probably appreciate what I'm about to share with you!

(Removes hat, reacting with some aversion.)

The project

It's amazing how much depth and potency one can chance upon inside what might be labelled "some random person's project on the Internet". I'm not sure who to credit for my discovery—perhaps a language-learning YouTube rabbit hole or Olly Richards' StoryLearning (which itself is a great alternative method for acquiring languages).

Mihalis Eleftheriou's Language Transfer / The Thinking Method claims that it's "only as hard as starting…" and promises:

an instant sense of progress, and an ensuing learning journey like none other!

I hadn't read those phrases before trying it myself, yet my conclusions are the same, and so I find myself completely fascinated with this method of speaking new languages mostly by listening and answering questions

My experience

My prior attempts at learning various languages include group classes, private lessons, flashcards, conversations, friends helping me and vice versa, reading books, watching television series' and movies, writing daily journals in the target language, developing my own app, making vocabulary tables, memory mnemonics, transcribing talk radio, learning song lyrics—I've tried many things… Yet, I've never encountered or experienced anything like this.

No writing? No memorizing? The teacher claims he can't really speak the language? How could this make sense?

The basic experience is: an instructor introduces certain concepts to their student as the conversation is recorded in audio; you simply listen back and when encountering a question: 1) hit pause, 2) take your time to respond with clarity in the target language, then 3) hear what their student said to compare with your response; it's important to engage in this more 'active' process of pausing and answering "so that you have your own learning experience, rather than just listening to someone else's". You do it on your own terms, at your own pace, and start speaking phrases from the very first lesson.

Of course, it's recommended to supplement your learning with independent immersion, but it's remarkable how much you can progress only by following the recordings. Trying this with languages where I already had some experience (Egyptian Arabic and German), it's not noticeable to me that he "doesn't really speak them" and feels like he actually knows quite a bit; perhaps a native speaker should evaluate instead.

My partner enjoyed the Spanish course without much experience learning other languages, which means for me that it's not necessary to be a linguistic nerd like myself to get something useful out of it.

I confess to having not tried this as a beginner, but, by comparing it to all the experiences where I was a beginner, it feels like it would have been a thousand times more helpful than whatever I was doing. With German and Arabic, it gave me the clarity to feel like I understand how the language works, that I can actually speak a bit, as opposed to considering it a giant incomprehensible cloud of confusion. Some of the framings, such as German "putting important information at the end to minimize interruptions", were enormously useful to constructing my own mental models, whether or not they're 'true' in terms of why the language is the way it is. I'm curious to continue with the languages I know, perhaps someday try Turkish or Swahili, and maybe even make my own course for Brazilian Portuguese.

Method

The process of 'invisibly leading the student by asking guiding questions', modeled after the Socratic method, supports the student by building and refining their understanding of how the language works, to eventually produce language by thinking for themselves: for this reason, it's also called 'the thinking method' or sometimes 'thinking slow'.

There's a lot of invisible work (described with detail in the book for teachers below) involved to streamline communication and the ordering of concepts, making the experience as simple and focused as possible for the student. Following this, an instructor can move from 'teaching information tables' (which can get dusty and dry real quick) to 'meeting the student where they are and helping them across the next step'. The conversation appears fluid and spontaneous but moves with awareness of a pre-written script (more like a route), which leaves room to handle interesting happenings: 'mistakes' for example, can become useful feedback to understand what's challenging so that instructors can find creative ways to anticipate and solve it in the future without the student even realizing.

Who's it for?

I now recommend this to everyone when they ask me about language tips, but it still might not actually be for everyone. With new languages, one might learn to read, write, listen, or speak: although it often seems 'nice' to do all of them, it's better to define your goals and focus on the specific skills that are relevant to your interests. Do you want to read stories or poetry? Get hired in a specific domain? Understand family members whose language you don't know? My objectives are casual conversation so that I can travel and make new friends, which means prioritizing listening and speaking, with a little reading thrown in; the Language Transfer method suits me because, while following the recordings, I am constantly 'producing' with my mouth, to the extent that the only sounds I make are in the target language; it's hard to overstate how rare that has been in most of my previous attempts at learning, even in schools that speak one hundred percent in the target language.

Listening to the recordings, one could criticize the approach as a form of control or manipulation, where the only expression from the student is in the form of answers to the teacher's questions—no questions of their own or other feedback; there's even a notion articulated somewhere of 'submitting' to the experience and perhaps 'trusting' the method. I can see how that might be scary for some, but personally enjoy the thoughtful simplification from removing superfluous details and distractions, as well as avoiding obsession with rules and formalities, and feel grateful that the more 'broadcast-y' lesson design guides efficiently and enables an audio version that I can follow from anywhere; perhaps in the live experience the students ask more questions that have been removed to shorten the recordings… Feels like the right amount of everything: repetition, correction, firmness, and flexibility.

Other noteworthy details

Experience the audio course as an app for Android or iPhone or a podcast, or find them on SoundCloud and YouTube.

The list of free courses includes English for Spanish speakers and even music theory.

The project is self-funded via Patreon, PayPal donations, or buying physical versions of free online material from the non-shop.

Wishing a bright, diverse, and dynamic future to this wonderful project 🙏🏽☀️.

---

Book for teachers

I was so struck by the experience that learning about the book got my inner pedagogue excited. There's documentation on techniques designed to mask repetition, inhabit the student's mental theatre, get around stubborn habits, and build their confidence: all of which seem like great techniques for any kind of teaching.

I found myself impatient with many devices to teach specific aspects of specific languages, preferring to trust my own intuition as an improviser to figure out interesting pathways to navigate someone else's learning; for that reason, I glazed through much after the first quarter, but the initial parts were super interesting, and part of what I read is in the notes below:

I have taken few steps to simplify [the book's] content, deeming any simplification a complication in waiting.

language

it is this thought that we must transcribe into our new language, rather than the base language itself.

[Languages don't exist: there are only dialects, and some of those get promoted as a vehicle for national purposes, which makes it a political event.]

learning and teaching

Writing words down creates an external loop that becomes part of your process and means you aren't building affordances to recall without it.

[Teaching a language vertically is quickly tedious. Nobody makes a sentence from only prepositions. Better to tie together various concepts to enable creating simple expressions.]

[Teach common words after the necessary knowledge to understand them, not at the beginning.]

[We often already know, without realizing that we know.]

pedagogy

[They only know what we tell them when we tell it to them.]

[Often what looks like one concept to someone with experience is really several concepts to a beginner. Make a list of all the elements involved and there will usually be one that can be learned in isolation.]

[The learner should rarely feel like something is missing. The teacher presents one idea at a time, and the learner tries to apply it feeling complete and resolved.]

[Maintain an optimum cognitive load normally and increase or decrease tension deliberately to create contours of peaks and valleys so that the experience feels dynamic and engaging.]

[Recaps can help ease tension contours after intense learning.]

status quo

As language methods often completely ignore the language of instruction, they tend to have an irritating habit of describing absolutely everything a language does. Learners are often forced to spend too much time trying to make heads or tails of grammatical descriptions provided to them for a new language, without ever realising that the target language functions in the same way as the base language, or indeed realising it when it's too late and the knowledge can do little to spare the learner any effort. What's worse, is that superfluous descriptions run the risk of becoming mental debris that the learner is unsure how to apply. They may lurk in the shadows and raise their ugly heads later on, interfering with other thought processes (often in fascinating ways, mind!).

In short, we don't need to describe everything the target language does, and what should remain unsaid will have much to do with the structure of the language of instruction. To describe certain things in the target language which are indeed the same in the base language (without a particular reason for doing so) would serve to make our learner feel less in control than they would have with less information. We will avoid burdening our learners with irrelevant observations they're not sure what to do with, and in this way we also cue that what we do tell our learners is important.

spanish

Está rojo is what we might say when referring to the state of a glowing hot piece of metal, while es rojo, as a characteristic, would be used to describe a painted piece of metal.

When it comes to importing vocabulary, we are almost always using the vocabulary for something other than learning a word. When Complete Spanish opens with -al words, it is not so we can learn legal, normal and metal, but so that we can begin dissecting what vowels sound and look like in Spanish, whilst raising the learner's consciousness of word stress, too. In the same course, when we access verbs through the pattern 'cancelation - cancelar, we do so to highlight the infinitive and its function, to then begin establishing the infinitive as a launchpad for building other tenses. The vocabulary conversion itself is secondary to these goals. Our learner will be taken aback by all the free words, of course, but our own focus as writers is elsewhere!

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More quotes in the log.

Garlic + Honey = Magic for your health!

[Peel the cloves in a head of garlic filling about a third of a jar. Fill about three quarters with honey and seal standing upside down at room temperature. After about five dais it will start to bubble. Open every three days to 'burp' or release gas. After thirty days it should darken and reduce into a remedy you can take (one spoon a day) to fight cold and flu.]

Super cool ways to use onion peels!

[Many uses for onion peels. Soak in boiling water for fifteen minutes for a sedative tea that can help you sleep. Let sit overnight until the water turns amber and conserve in a spray bottle for relieving itchy skin. Dry and grind to a powder to use in your cooking.]

Principles for sharing on the Internet

[Your opinion has more credibility the better you can argue against your own points.]

[Social media systematically pushes you to ideological extremes.]

The more I pay attention to observations or notice where my attention is, the less effort it takes to have something to say.

How to take a lime seed and turn it into a tree!

[Soak the seed in water for six hours. Cut off the tip, peel the outer layer, and plant in half inch deep of loosely covering soil. Mist and cover with a shot glass to increase humidity until sprouting. When six inches tall with some leaves, transplant to a bigger pot

How to Upcycle those fallen leaves!

[Instead of throwing out leaves from a garden, wash and dry them, then break them down, and finally grind into a powder. The micro-nutrients enrich and fluff the soil for grass and plants to grow better.]

I'm not in the habit of documenting trips, especially sharing travel photos; I even used to avoid using my phone camera for some time, with an idea of 'being present instead'. Happy to see things differently now, but I notice that I take photos—capture, capture, capture—never re-visiting them much, even though it's often valuable for me to do that. This trip was special to me, so I would like to revisit what happened and create a nicely encapsulated memory for myself. I would like to generally share more about how I travel, as it's different from the way I usually see it happen and might even be interesting to some people. Perhaps this blog medium can break the 'photo album or stream' concept to share different kinds of things in context.

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October 2023 was a busy month. I changed cities every couple days, knowing that I actually dislike travelling with that frequency, preferring instead to spend longer periods in places to go deeper. I explained my trip quite often as "I'm not here to see or do anything but rather to connect with my people", and it was a mindset that made bearable the hectic schedules and planning of bouncing around that much; 'attractions' visited can be counted on less than one hand, but there was an immeasurable quantity of diverse lenses into ordinary and everyday local life. With just my cabin-sized backpack weighing seven to nine kilograms, I was quite focused on going only where I felt called, connected, or welcome; this filled my experience with a sense of purpose, sometimes in completely unexpected ways.

2023.09.30 Winnipeg

My USA trip began in Canada with a visit to my cousin, who loves plants and lives in a small town near Winnipeg.

Then I headed south. I've had some anxiety about getting grilled at borders if I or my plans might seem strange, but I felt completely chill about showing up at pre-clearance without a return ticket. The agent actually seemed impressed with me 'not having a home address since 2019 as I often travel' and that I was 'planning to head to Brazil after maybe month in the United States'. "Let that guy in!" right?

2023.10.02 Minneapolis

Reef and I shared deep thoughts, Hamburger Helper, and lots of music.

2023.10.07 Chicago

I was hosted by a friendly stranger and made my signature oatmeal dish, called "Poor man's risotto".

2023.10.09 Ithaca

Not sure how else I would have ended up visiting a place like this without knowing Omar, one of several friends I've made from Interintellect. Also not sure how to describe the range of our many, many conversations; he's what I call a 'generator', with much to say about many things.

2023.10.12 NYC

I met Nathan again, and we talked about platforms, travel, and friendships. His room's walls are filled with cool posters.

I met briefly with Kaixi and Sruti, both of whom shared my residency experience at Moos, as well as Cristóbal, with whom I shared sentiments about Brazil, creativity, and computing.

For some reason, I met all of these people for the first time in Berlin last year.

2023.10.15 Fuquay-Varina

A small town where homes have front yards larger than public parks from most cities. I got to stand inside Jess' legendary office.

2023.10.17 Burlington

Life in April's co-op housing network, with many friends, groups, and projects passing through.

2023.10.20 Denver

I reconnected with Ted after many years, and stayed at Hearthstone Cohousing, where I had a fun jam with Danilo and Charlie.

2023.10.23 Oakland

What a dreamy place! I've never seen so many beautiful plants and home gardens in one neighborhood. Benji's father in Sausalito showed me the amazing "It's-It" ice cream sandwich. Zach, who I met at Proyecto Lingüístico in Guatemala, let me play his mother's Steinway piano for 7 minutes. My childhood friend Andrew and his wife invited me for a wonderful hang and where we were all treated to an excellent Punjabi dinner from his mother-in-law. Lots of chats with Jessica and Tristan about human development, technology, and life; we made homemade Migas.

2023.10.28 Los Angeles

First-hand experience of the sprawling car city of angels with Vivek, training capoeira with a local Mojuba chapter, Gujarati thali buffet, many jams and musical moments, a taste of Baileys and Coke (forgot it was supposed to be Dr. Pepper).

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This was a journey of connection, generosity, experiences, conversation, Strolling, cooking, music, beauty, and transformation. Certain moments that relate to my presence there instilled me with a sense of greater purpose, such as: one person unexpectedly getting closure after meeting me for the first time; another feeling emboldened to take more chances when talking to strangers; someone else leveling up their Portuguese and feeling empowered while understanding and speaking a new language.

I think it's important to acknowledge how, despite some quite transformational moments for me and others, this all started as a vague idea that I thought about frequently for months—it just felt like a cool thing to do someday, maybe. I simply ran it by my friends as it occurred to me, and then again when the possibility felt tangible or within reach; perhaps that planted seeds which prepared everything for later. This ultimately happened because it felt like the right time and because people seemed to be open and available—everything manifested easily, and it was indeed magical.

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Thanks (in alphabetical order) to Alice, Andrew (and family), April (and friends), Benji, Cristóbal, Despina, Douglas, Gatsby 🐱, Jess (and family), Jessica, Kaixi, LaJuana, Maitiu, Nathan (and roommates), Omar, Randolph (and family), Reef, Roshni, Russell, Sruti, Ted, Tristan, Vidhika, Vivek, Yatharth, and Zach, for being a part of this trip in some way and making it memorable.

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How to prevent getting sick as often..

[Mix one teaspoon turmeric, half teaspoon ginger, one teaspoon vanilla essence, and half cup of honey into a syrup and stir in a pinch of pepper. Take one teaspoon daily as a natural antibiotic to help with cough, headache, cold, and flu.]

Let's talk about what peace will look like and news for the next generation....

[When the slogans that people shout are more important than the lives of a future generation, it guarantees the continuation of horror.]

[Peace in this conflict will mean heartbreak, rather than celebration, as authorities tell the families of victims that their cases will no longer be investigated.]

Birds Aren’t Real? How a Conspiracy Takes Flight

[The crisis of belief can only be addressed after the crisis of belonging.]

FFmpeg.app

Search for human friendly intents and run the resulting commands in the browser.

Callings & Roles for Collective Liberation

Abolitionist, favors the end of forced labor and carceral punishment

Advocate, holds a cause or series of causes to heart and carries them to justice

Analyst, applies critical and systemic thinking, maps methods to understand issues

Architect, plans, and designs new structures for collective liberation

Artist, inspires people to be in touch with their humanity

Communicator, tells stories and touch the soul of millions of people

Designer, works in service to create for collective liberation

Developer, contracts and supervizes the building of new structures

Engineer, invents designs, analyzes, builds and tests complex systems & machines

Healer, heals intergenerational wounds and provides a path forward

Inventor, invents a particular process, system, culture or device that are good for people & planet

Luminary, inspires people to rise beyond their expectations

Negotiator, comes to an agreement with someone else in favor of the collective

Problem Solver, engineers tangible solutions to real life problems

Researcher, carries out academic, scientific, or investigative research

Scientist, has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences

Strategist, skilled in planning action or policy especially in climate crisis, war or politics

Trouble Maker, isn't afraid to ruffle some feathers

Visionary, receives downloads from the Universe to guide people

Writer, writes books, stories, poetry, films, TV shows, articles, Op-Eds for new paradigms

Conflict is potential

[Reacting reduces potential in a conflict.]

[Presenting multiple perspectives of an argument says nothing nor does it engage with reason.]

[The underlying motive of proving one's experience as correct is to resist relationship with the other side.]

[Stereotypes and dogma confuse us into thinking there needs to be a winning side.]

[Focus on feelings, sensations, experiences over judgement.]