Let's talk about a Christmas Carol and its lessons....

[The systems and experiences that shape people can explain them without excusing them.]

If you refuse to examine how you became who you are, you'll mistake your coping mechanisms for virtues.

Filó Machado: FÉ CEGA / FACA AMOLADA

pure musicianship with mostly guitar, beatboxing, and vocal rhythmics leading to some very happy music; complex harmonies remind me of Toninho Horta and Jacob Collier (especially the changing shirts).

How we grade presentation night

[I often explain informal series of 5-minute talks as "open mic" with slides.]

[We can grade them as "learned something new", "knew this but enjoyed it", or "unknown"; "unknown" is not bad and not a property of your talk: it has to do with the relationship between your talk and the receiver."]

My iOS apps are on the App Store again; if you ever wanted to have sonogrid or the others, now might be a good time to get a copy.

AudioScrub

slow down music, change keys, loop.

essential tool for transcribers, improvisers, music students.

also available with a subset of those features as a PLAY Edition that remote controls Apple's Music app.

sonogrid

"drum machine on steroids".

make simple loops that overlap in complex ways, explore visually and playfully, send midi out if you to connect with other systems.

Quick Record

audio recorder with iCloud sync that can start on launch; select audio quality, add tags.

Ticker

fun scrolly metronome that shows classical music markings.

Carrot Price

"now you know which one is cheaper".

unit cost calculator with my beatboxing sounds.

---

I wrote in going fully web about my reasons to take them down and, although I continue to feel similarly, was recently convinced by Heddi to consider restoring them there.

Here's what motivated me:

1. People who previously paid for them could not get a copy for new or other devices. I thought this would be possible even when not officially on the store, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. After contacting those who had issues about this years ago, many quickly replied back with very visible gratitude to have access to AudioScrub again; seems it still fits their needs better than whatever else is available.

yes!!!!! Thank you🎉🎉🎉 Still the best one out there

Thanks so much for communicating this to me. I’ll pass the word on to friends and colleagues who I know will benefit greatly from these 2 apps.
I myself use these apps daily, as it helps the learning music process greatly!

That’s amazing, congratulations! And thank you for letting me know, I really appreciate it.

I will definitely try it today on my iPad. I love your app.

Hello, so great to see your music app again!

i have already bought it !! Thank you very much. A nice Christmas present.

2. I worked hard on these and remain quite proud of them; not sure if it accomplishes much to nuke my history in the way that I did. Even though they were built for another era, everything still works great and I've never stopped using them.

3. It's been quite a puzzle to create income from pure web apps with my ideal structure of no personal data stored or collected, no login or signup to start, ideally open-source. While I figure out how to make that sustainable, it's helpful to have some other income streams.

No plans to update these for the moment, but I think it's a good step to keep it available.

How to free your mind from BIG TECH propaganda

[Techno-optimists promote the idea of progress as a high score that constantly accumulates (often conveniently through their platforms); this masks the way new technologies commodify and become baseline needs, their absence leaving us not simply with 'less', but an incapacity to function in society that expects it everywhere.]

[I appreciate that they shared this in a public space and not via direct message or email because it enables others who might find the information useful to discover it.]

[Direct messages can contribute too, but the risk is higher that no one will see it.]

Destigmatize being dumb

Any system that rewards finding flaws will improve. Apple, Google, etc will pay you a lot of money if you can find a security flaw in any of their systems. The military does this with matters of life & death (if admitting failure is punished, people hide failure). If you find an inefficiency in the economy, you can make a lot of money fixing it (through betting on the stock market, or starting a business).

Mestre Gato Preto: The art of the berimbau

mostly berimbau without singing, solo and with the drum section, great swing

On motherhood

[Just as you find your footing, they start to change. I swear she grows with each blink.]

learning and teaching are two sides of the same coin, so caring or not caring about one implies the same about the other

What does it mean to be seen, all the time, by everyone?

[We are not individuals or ever alone: just the current contact point into a community.]

[Act in ways that would fill the healthiest people you know with pride.]

How to quit Spotify

In 2024, Spotify stopped paying artists for songs that had fewer than 1,000 streams, despite the fact that 81% of musicians on the platform don’t cross that threshold.

pop star Lily Allen says she makes more money selling pics of her feet on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify royalties.

LOW BRIDGE ROTATION: The only guide you'll ever need

[When your knees are almost touching the floor, most of your body weight is already on that side to support your backbend.]

[Use a wall to practice lowering into bridge while resting on the edge of your palm.]

technical or nerdy ones mind might enjoy "reading the docs/spec/manual" while everyone else looks for "show me how to be amazing"

[Help them move from "can't do" to "can with effort" to "effortless mastery", ideally skipping the second step.]

[Help them practice toward better outcomes by designing exercises that bring them within a session or two to 95% reliability for a small skill or task.]

[Through perceptual exposure, your brain is learning without telling you what it learned.]

[Good perceptual exposure training needs lots of high quality examples that seem different on the surface but aren't.]

[Ideally, the exercises don't explain but enables the learner's brain to "discover" a pattern.]

[A common theme when newbies get derailed is that they can't express their frustration to the product maker. You can at least acknowledge their experience and encourage them to continue or hint at what could make progress easier; tell them the struggle is normal and that it's part of getting started.]

[The manual's sin is not complexity but making people feel like they're idiots for not understanding.]

[Anticipate the faces they're likely to make and compensate for their inability to show you.]

[Find what needs compensating by looking in the top comments in discussion groups for the tool or its larger more compelling context.]

[Design a performance path with skills that motivate them towards mastery can also magnetize them away from derailers. Use existing paths based on training programs, discussion forums, or definitive guides. If you create a path, order skills from beginner (less time/effort) to expert and group by rank.]

[They need to believe they'll improve, then actually improve, and also realize they've improved.]

[The first thirty minutes is a critical period to support them doing something new or that they didn't know they could do: their first superpower]

[If they're worried about breaking something, they'll hesitate to touch anything. Make recovery easy. Help them feel free to just try things. Consider it a "Wild Experimentation Mode."]

["This product is awesome" really means "I'm awesome".]

[Most focus on product quality before quality of user results.]

[Businesses claim "world-class service" for their customers, but their customers are likely more interested in being a "world-class customer".]

[Make a better master rather than a better tool.]

[The post-UX UX of results begins after the clicking is done. What does it now enable them to do or show or say? How are they more powerful?]

[Substitute "How can we succeed at X?" with "How can our users or their users succeed at X?"]

[Imagine a scenario where your users are out-performing your competitions users in the bigger context.]

[Your price represents not just the product but also the documentation, support, and future roadmap.]

[Sage accounting software sucks, but you buy reliability in knowing it will update for new tax laws, your bookkeeper's likely familiarity with the product, and the support of staff who respond to forty thousand callers a day.]

[Black and Decker introduced their DeWALT drill series by giving away pulled pork sandwiches and holding drill-off competitions at construction sites, and being present at rodeos and NASCAR races where their end users hang out.]

[The goal of having multiple versions at different prices is to be capable of selling to customers with different maximum thresholds. Versions could be created based on features, earlier access, economic demographics (students, hobbyists, professionals), geography, customer industries, platform (Apple users may pay more).]

[An app might be lower-priced in a country whose currency is lower-valued, but localized in their language which renders it useless to those in countries with higher-value currency.]

[A 'jumbo' size with zero sales will increase sales for the 'large'.]

Joshua Maponga: How to Decolonize Africa’s Systems

[Before school, identify problems in your community. Study them in school and find solutions. Develop a proposal and business plan. After graduating, return to your community and solve those problems.]

[We plant coffee, which we can't eat, then export it to earn money that we can use to buy food, rather than simply planting food we can eat.]

[Our language contains the relationship between natural entities and their functions (for example mususu helps the susu); using European names distances us from our intuitive understanding of what's around us.]

[Our government invests in students only to have them leave to colonial economies to enrich their systems.]

Simon Stuij: Alles Raakt Mij

tight drumming, nice contrast between sections

breathe.: London

would love to know the genre that is named for this chord progression.

Why Nobody Can Afford Canada Anymore

[Canada wasn't hit as hard during the 2008 financial crisis but printed money and lowered interest rates anyway. This funneled too much investment into real estate and enabled housing prices to continue inflating for another decade or two.]

How the dark wizards of marketing conjured Black Friday

[AMEX provides marketing templates to promote contactless payments, which results in organizations like Transport for London and others advertising with similar language saying "Contactless is here".]

Arbeit, Lohn, Profit

[Workers have been convinced to put their savings in pension funds that invest in the stock market, which in turn puts more pressure on workers to perform better; this also shifts responsibility for a social system into the private realm.]

[Businesses are fundamentally political communities, no different from any other pooling of resources to achieve a collective goal.]

[A C-level executive who knows the company and its breadth of considerations at any moment is forced to reduce everything to financial language and concepts in a board meeting because the majority in attendance are shareholders. If half of the audience were representing the workers, the executive would need to balance two kinds of considerations, as a politician would.]

Perverse incentive

The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre occurred in 1902, in Hanoi, Vietnam (then known as French Indochina), when, under French colonial rule, the colonial government created a bounty program that paid a reward of 1¢ for each rat killed. To collect the bounty, people would need to provide the severed tail of a rat. Colonial officials, however, began noticing rats in Hanoi with no tails. The Vietnamese rat catchers would capture rats, sever their tails, then release them back into the sewers so that they could produce more rats.

Payment for treatment generates a perverse incentive for unnecessary treatments. In 2015, a Detroit area doctor was sentenced to 45 years of prison for intentionally giving patients unnecessary cancer treatments, for which health insurance paid him at least 17.6 million dollars. Unnecessary treatment may harm in the form of side effects of drugs and surgery, which can then trigger a demand for further treatments themselves.

In 2002, British officials tasked with suppressing opium production in Afghanistan offered poppy farmers $700 an acre in return for destroying their crop. This ignited a poppy-growing frenzy among Afghan farmers, who sought to plant as many poppies as they could in order to collect payouts from the cash-for-poppies program. Some farmers harvested and sold the sap before destroying the plants, receiving significantly more money for the same amount of poppies.

The Tax Reform Act of 1976 provided for loss of tax benefits if owners demolished buildings. This led to an increase in arson attacks in the 1970s as a way of clearing land without financial penalties. The law was later altered to remove this aspect.

[The owner of eyeglass e-commerce store DecorMyEyes found that online complaints put his site at the top of Google searches. He then responded to bad reviews with insults, threats, and other harassment to continue ranking high.]

Funding fire departments by the number of fire calls that are made is intended to reward fire departments that do the most work. However, it may discourage them from fire-prevention activities, leading to an increase in actual fires.

Stock Market Crash? Don’t Panic, Get Rich Instead

[US market historical downturn patterns include: 1) pullbacks of 5–10% every year, 2) corrections of 10–20% every 1–2 years, 3) bear markets of 20–40% every 5–6 years, and 4) crashes of 40% or more every 10–20 years.]

This effect makes the newsrack and the traffic light interactive; the newsrack, the newspapers on it, the money going from people's pockets to the dime slot, the people who stop at the light and read papers, the traffic light, the electric impulses which make the lights change, and the sidewalk which the people stand on form a system - they all work together.

the urban taxi can function only because pedestrians and vehicles are not strictly separated. The cruising taxi needs a fast stream of traffic so that it can cover a large area to be sure of finding a passenger. The pedestrian needs to be able to hail the taxi from any point in the pedestrian world, and to be able to get out to any part of the pedestrian world to which he wants to go. The system which contains the taxicabs needs to overlap both the fast vehicular traffic system and the system of pedestrian circulation.

The playground, asphalted and fenced in, is nothing but a pictorial acknowledgment of the fact that 'play' exists as an isolated concept in our minds. It has nothing to do with the life of play itself. Few self-respecting children will even play in a playground.

[In a natural city, play happens in a thousand places within the cracks of adult life. Children become full of their surroundings through play, unless they're in a fenced-off cage.]

[Putting a concert hall beside an opera house is almost never practical to either audience, and only a consequence of that simple-minded part of us which puts things with the same name in the same basket.]

[Theories describing leadership by 'government' rather than 'governments' expect it will rush to the rescue whenever the market 'fails' and rely on economists to advise when and how, without any concept of private individuals to solve collective problems among themselves.]

Too much time on your hands

[Inventing your own module instead of using a pre-existing one increases your maintenance work down the line as well as the learning curve for new contributors who need to get acquainted with non-standard tooling.]

Even if you don’t reinvent the wheel, being very particular about various aspects of your project that aren’t really critical (say, code formatting) is mostly about marking your own territory. Behind the facade of enforcing quality standards, you are primarily asserting your ownership of the project and demonstrating this power to other contributors.

new to me: when the mind wanders while reading, skip ahead instead of going back

I commit myself to follow the set of rules we have devised in all instances except dire emergencies if the rest of those affected make a similar commitment and act accordingly.

Once appropriators have made contingent self-commitments, they are then motivated to monitor other people's behaviors, at least from time to time, in order to assure themselves that others are following the rules most of the time. Contingent self-commitments and mutual monitoring reinforce one another, especially when appropriators have devised rules that tend to reduce monitoring costs.

[Seeming simplicity is not equivalent to generality. Setting variables to a constant usually narrows the applicability of a model rather than broadening it.]

['I will if you will' becomes credible through monitoring that makes deviations visible.]

[Variables indicating benefits of proposed rules:]

1. Numbers of appropriators
2. Size of CPR
3. Temporal and spatial variability of resource units
4. Current condition of CPR
5. Market conditions for resource units
6. Amount and type of conflict
7. Availability of data about (1) through (6)
8. Status quo rules in use
9. Proposed rules

[Variables describing forecasted costs of changing the status quo:]

1. Number of decision makers
2. Heterogeneity of interests
3. Rules in use for changing rules
4. Skills and assets of leaders
5. Proposed rule
6. Past strategies of appropriators
7. Autonomy to change rules

[Variables describing resulting costs for monitoring and enforcement:]

1. Size and structure of CPR
2. Exclusion technology
3. Appropriation technology
4. Marketing arrangement
5. Proposed rules
6. Legitimacy of rules in use

[Variables affecting internal norms and discount rate:]

1. Appropriators live near CPR
2. Appropriators involved in many situations together
3. Information made available to appropriators about opportunities that exist elsewhere

[Better to view institutional choices as informed judgements about uncertain benefits and costs as opposed to mechanical calculation.]

whether grazing areas are used to produce milk or wool or meat can affect the ability of the appropriators to learn more rapidly about adverse conditions, should they arise. Milking occurs daily, and variations in yield are rapidly apparent to the herders. Wool is sheared less frequently, but the quality of wool is immediately apparent to those who herd sheep. The quality of meat produced for market is monitored less frequently and may not even be known by herders. Consequently, the quality and timeliness of the information that CPR appropriators obtain about their resource vary according to how a resource unit is used, as well as across resource types. The problems of groundwater pumpers in obtaining accurate and valid information about the condition of their CPR are more daunting than those of herders, regardless of the final products of herding activities.

[In a setting where external government has little effect on internal choices, the likelihood of appropriators adopting rule changes positively relates to whether:]

1 Most appropriators share a common judgment that they will be harmed if they do not adopt an alternative rule.
2 Most appropriators will be affected in similar ways by the proposed rule changes.
3 Most appropriators highly value the continuation activities from this
CPR; in other words, they have low discount rates.
4 Appropriators face relatively low information, transformation, and enforcement costs.
5 Most appropriators share generalized norms of reciprocity and trust that can be used as initial social capital.
6 The group appropriating from the CPR is relatively small and stable.

The typical assumptions of complete information, independent action, perfect symmetry of interests, no human error, no norms of reciprocity, zero monitoring and enforcement costs, and no capacity to transform the situation itself will lead to highly particularized models, not universal theories.

1. [Define clear boundaries for the resource and who can share in it.]
2. [Proportion the sharing based on local conditions.]
3. [Empower those affected by the rules to modify them.]
4. [Monitor with stakeholders who are accountable.]
5. [Sanction those who violate rules with gradual escalation based on context and severity.]
6. [Prepare low-cost local conflict-resolution mechanisms in the event of disagreement.]
7. [Recognize the right to self-organization without challenge from external authorities.]

Irrigation rotation systems, for example, usually place the two actors most concerned with cheating in direct contact with one another. The irrigator who nears the end of a rotation turn would like to extend the time of his turn (and thus the amount of water obtained). The next irrigator in the rotation system waits nearby for him to finish, and would even like to start early. The presence of the first irrigator deters the second from an early start, the presence of the second irrigator deters the first from a late ending. Neither has to invest additional resources in monitoring activities. Monitoring is a by-product of their own strong motivations to use their water rotation turns to the fullest extent.

personal rewards for doing a good job are given to appropriators who monitor. The individual who finds a rule-infractor gains status and prestige for being a good protector of the commons. The infractor loses status and prestige. Private benefits are allocated to those who monitor.

Because the appropriators tend to continue monitoring the guards, as well as each other, some redundancy is built into the monitoring and sanctioning system. Failure to deter rule-breaking by one mechanism does not trigger a cascading process of rule infractions, because other mechanisms are in place.

The first step is that the village forester marks the trees ready to be harvested. The second step is that the households eligible to receive timber form work reams and equally divide the work of cutting the trees, hauling the logs, and piling the logs into approximately equal stacks. A lottery is then used to assign particular stacks to the eligible households. No harvesting of trees is authorized at any other time of year.

[It was considered reasonable for the land violations detective to demand cash and sake from infractors and use it for their own enjoyment. In addition to those penalties, contraband harvest was confiscated along with equipment and horses, the latter two only retrievable by paying a fine to the village.]

Maribel La Canija: Mediterráneo

many 'typical/cliche' progressions but nice surprise resolutions, crunches, and resolutions. timefeel includes triplets. bass solo has this "suspended in the air" feeling i tend to seek out.

KNOWER: It's All Nothing Until It's Everything

deadly intricate rhythmic precision juxtaposed with smooth flowing head-banging melody.

Open Source Power

in an open software culture whose central ethos is continuous iteration and improvement made possible by openness, our licensing stack and its ingrained principles are apparently immutable.

GreenPilled: How Crypto Can Regenerate The World

[Turn endeavours for change into a multiplayer coordination game where participants can all win by collaborating before, during, and after.]

The genius logic of the NATO phonetic alphabet

[Although commonly known as the 'NATO phonetic alphabet' and for 'military use', it's really a 'spelling alphabet' invented by the ICAO for flight communications and with pronunciation improvements formalized by NATO.]

[Alfa and Juliett are spelled unconventionally to minimize oral misreadings in other languages.]

[Quebec is uncoincidentally on the list because the primary researcher was based in Montreal.]

A Fun Product Business for People Who Love Their Community

[Create a pocket-sized 'community passport' that's valid for one year with offers from at least 20 participating local businesses in a specific niche (like coffee, ice cream, beer, books, music) and price it at $1 per business; promote to local community groups and media or influencers in that niche.]

📢 Introducing Really Good Business Ideas

The search landscape is changing with generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT). A newsletter lets me keep my content gated from these tools in order to preserve the value of my work.

The Benefits of Bubbles

[Current AI investment is dominated by GPUs, which deprecate within years and are superseded quickly; the more speculative spending goes here, the less likely this bubble leaves us with potent foundation for cheap use over the long-term.]

The first thing to understand is that there are probabilities at work. A trader with 55% winning days will average two or three 5day losing streaks per year and probably one 6day losing streak. A 6 day losing streak is enough to make the best trader feel like a complete moron. But he isn't. It's just probability

[Markets with bearish sentiment without many positions is primed to fall as new entries reflect their perspective, whereas with many positions is more st risk of reversal as there may be no one left to sell.]

['Buy the rumour, sell the fact' refers to markets pricing in an event ahead of time and then reversing when it takes place. Often the moment of a news release is the apex of this sentiment and you may notice counterintuitively that good news getting priced in over time ends up reversing on its announcement]

Instead of gyrating back and forth for a while before finding equilibrium, the market now finds equilibrium very quickly after the release of economic data. Hedge funds and banks use regression analysis before the data release to estimate how far each asset should move on various outcomes and they execute trades via algorithm at the moment of release. They will buy or sell until all asset classes are approximately in line with where history suggests they should be and this will happen in microseconds. There is nothing left on the table for the human traders because all the liquidity in the market is hoovered by the bots in the first few microseconds.

[P&L targets remind you of the point where your job is done and so to book profits rather than increase leverage.]

[If the average moves on two instruments are respectively 1.2% and 0.6%, you wouldn't want the same position size in both.]

[The market only cares about how economic data releases compare to expectations; so not in relation to last month or year but rather the median awaited by economists and traders.]

[When markets react to old or random news, focus more on what's happening rather than whether it makes sense.]

[If you backtest and find an optimal moving average that worked in the past, that doesn't guarantee success in the future. Better to pick what fits your timeline granularity.]

How Bible Sales and Chipotle Explain the Economy

Automation erases the “training ground” work that once created experts. When machines do the junior tasks, no one learns the senior ones. Apprenticeship collapses. CEOs, driven by short-term preservation, hype AI as salvation because it buys them another quarter.

Trading is a serious intellectual pursuit that is also incredibly fun. The joy of attempting to solve an unsolvable puzzle. A nearly impossible daily test of discipline and selfcontrol. An endless emotional rollercoaster of instant feedback, frequent disappointment, sudden euphoria, and nearly unbearable periods of crushing selfdoubt.

A Simple Marketing Worksheet

• Who's it for?
• What's it for?
• What is the worldview of the audience you're seeking to reach?
• What are they afraid of?
• What story will you tell? Is it true?
• What change are you seeking to make?
• How will it change their status?
• How will you reach the early adopters and neophiliacs?
• Why will they tell their friends?
• What will they tell their friends?
• Where's the network effect that will propel this forward?
• What asset are you building?
• Are you proud of it?

Nokiafied

Convert your videos into super low-quality Nokia phone style videos for memes. Upload any video and it'll be degraded to that classic early 2000s Nokia aesthetic.

Cyd - Claw back your data from Big Tech

Backup and delete all of your tweets, and migrate them to Bluesky.

Save a searchable copy of your data from tech platforms locally on your computer.

Migrate your tweets from closed platforms like X into open platforms like Bluesky.

Cyd runs directly on your computer, not on our servers. We don't have access to any of your accounts, or to any of the data in them.

[Trusted marketers earn enrollment because they make a promise and keep it. With trust comes attention that lets them tell a story uninterrupted. The story can lead to more enrollment, more promises, more trust.]

[Everyone is famous to 1500 people. In our culture, fame breeds trust.]

[It takes more (stress) for a customer to say yes than to walk away.]

[Make sure your most loyal customers have a megaphone to tell others: people like us do things like this.]

[Building new things for your customers (instead of finding new customers for your things) implies investing in their lifetime value.]

[A supermarket might expect the lifetime value of their regulars to be thousands of dollars, so they would do well to 1. sponsor events for new residents in the area and 2. do right when a local complains about the fruit not being ripe.]

[People won't tell their friends because you wanted or asked. You need to make your offer worth sharing.]

[Facebook during their initial growth was well-positioned as a status signal for insecure and high-status students who craved to move up in some invisible hierarchy.]

[One kid brings a yo-yo to school but it doesn't create much traction. A charismatic fifth-grader who is good but not intimidating opens the Yo-yo Union club to all with three spare yo-yos to share; then there's three early adopters leading the way and soon there's thirty kids with yo-yos on the playground.]

[We only notice ideas that cross the chasm beyond neophiliacs.]

A regulação do streaming e a invenção dos cineastas de aplicativo

['motoboys' are both victim to a high rate of fatal accidents in Brazil as well as the country's largest organ donors, but a universal healthcare system pays the bill and not iFood.]

[You serve many but profit from few; whales pay for minnows.]

If the goal is to get it over with, get the person off the phone, deny responsibility, read the script, use words like "as stated" and "our policy," then, please, sure, yes, keep doing what you're doing and watch it all fall apart.

['Cheap' can mean 'scared', a last refuge when there are no other ideas.]

[Status is an omnipresent layer in how people make decisions. It's always relative but what is perceived by others can differ from is believed internally. Some people want to hold on, and some want to move up; some even want to move down because it may mean safety and less competition.]

[Consider what the person you're serving measures with respect to their status before they make decisions.]

"Who eats first" and "who sits closest to the emperor" are questions that persist to this day. Both are status questions. One involves dominion; the other involves affiliation.

[Amateurs create what they like, whereas professionals create what other people will like.]

[Spam scams are poorly worded to filter you out quick. They seek people who are dominated by greed and avoid wasting time on the careful and well-informed.]

[A brand is not your logo: it's a shorthand for the customer's expectations when they buy from or meet with you. Your brand is the promise they think they're making.]

If people care, you've got a brand.

[Start not with solutions but with people you seek to serve and a problem they want solved.]

[Commodity work isn't lucrative when other options are a click away.]

[Charging ten times more isn't about quantity: it's for a different story.]

[Grateful Dead favoured extremes on the XY axis (live recordings over polished albums, long jams for their fans over short radio hits) and owned them.]

[Beside the intended audience, there's also an accidental audience who ends up getting more satisfaction from tearing down the work.]

["For those who want A and believe B, choosing C is perfect." Based on who they are and what they want and know, everyone is always right.]

[Launching an extreme (fastest, cheapest, most convenient) means breaking the former extreme's status.]

"I made this" is a very different statement than, "What do you want?"

[Specific is kind of brave as it's accountable: it either worked, matched, spread, or it didn't. Are you hiding behind everyone or anyone?]

[Find a corner of the market that can't wait for your attention, where you are the perfect answer.]

["How can I start a business?" is contrived, whereas "What would matter here?" relates to real needs of others.]

Focus on the smallest viable market: "How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?"

Instead of looking for members for your work, look for ways to do work for your members.

Everyone is lonely, insecure, and a bit of a fraud. And everyone cares about something.

[Pet food caters to the owner; humans don't even know what it tastes like.]

[Conspiracy theories might attract out of a desire for uniqueness or belonging in a small group.]

[When you show up with a flotation device to help someone drowning, they don't need ads to understand or be persuaded.]

[Old-fashioned marketing centers the one buying ads, and is done to the customer rather than for them.]

Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven't made an impact until you've changed someone.

[Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve their problem.]

Marketers don't use consumers to solve their company's problem; they use marketing to solve other people's problems. They have the empathy to know that those they seek to serve don't want what the marketer wants, don't believe what they believe, and don't care about what they care about. They probably never will.

[Humans tell themselves stories. We should consider those as indisputably true and not persuade otherwise.]

[Not the drill bit, not the quarter-inch hole, not the shelf, but rather the satisfaction of doing it themselves or the admiration from a spouse or a room free of clutter. Understand how the utility of an object is to serve their real wish: to feel safe and respected.]

[We buy how it makes us feel, and there aren't so many feelings to choose from. To deliver belonging, connection, peace of mind, status, or other desirable emotions likely means something worthwhile.]

[All communities need a mind programmer they trust. Today we call it "memetic engineer", "influencer", or "political leader", whereas before it was "priest" or "shaman".]

with correct deep breathing, the ribs gently massage the spine and internal organs.

Blood circulation throughout the body happens via blood vessels (veins, arteries, and capillaries). There are around 100,000 miles of blood vessels in an average adult body! These lie across or underneath, or are surrounded by muscles. Relaxed muscles that are not stiff and over-contracted won't squeeze and pinch the blood vessels, meaning they transport blood more effectively.

Remain relaxed, even when you are doing exercises that may seem at first to be primarily strength building; consider all the movements to really be a stretch.

1. [Identify edges objectively.]
2. [Calculate risk for every trade.]
3. [Accept the risk or reject the trade.]
4. [Act on edges without hesitation.]
5. [Take money off the table when it's available.]
6. [Monitor susceptibility for errors.]

[Partial take profit reduces risk on the stop by that same proportion.]

[One hierarchy of stages for taking profit can be 1. initial moves in your favour; 2. support or resistance on a larger timeframe (with a move of your stop to the entry point); and 3. significant high or low on a larger timeframe.]

[Variables used to deal with market dynamics can go in and out of effectiveness as market participants and their interactions change.]

Franz

Open-source alternative to Beeper which makes much code available but not their main client.

[supports] Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zendesk

a football player who trains with weights and sprints is "conditioning" his body for playing football.

A sub 2.15 marathon runner is not "fit" to dead lift 600 pounds of iron, and a world-class power lifter is not "fit" to run a sub-28-minute 10,000 meters. Using our narrow definition, neither athlete would be "fit" to perform any number of movements on the gymnastics balance beam. The Olympic gymnast would not be "fit" for sumo wrestling, and so forth.

Strength is a muscle's ability to contract against the resistance of an external object (a weight) or one's own body weight.

Power utilizes strength within an explosive burst of energy.

Agility encompasses the possibility of executing power movements in rapidly changing directions

[Regardless of their belief, everyone wants to be believed because it feels good, and being disbelieved can easily feel harsh, like an attack.]

1. Beliefs seem to take on a life of their own and, therefore, resist any force that would alter their present form.
2. All active beliefs demand expression.
3. [Beliefs keep working whether or not we are aware of them.]

[If you woke up one day and everyone acted as if you didn't exist, you'd probably try to shake someone out of it. Beliefs will act the same way if purposefully ignored and force their presence to be acknowledged.]

Thinking outside of the boundaries of our beliefs is commonly referred to as creative thinking.

[The pattern-making sensibilities of our mind are tricked into confounding a unique now as potentially not unique when it seems to share similar properties with another occasion.]

We can "know" exactly what an edge looks, sounds, or feels like, and we can "know" exactly how much we need to risk to find out if that edge is going to work. We can "know" that we have a specific plan as to how we are going to take profits if a trade works. But that's it! If what we think we know starts expanding to what the market is going to do, we're in trouble.

[The objective is not making money, but consistency. The skills involve having an objective state of mind less easily blinded by pain-avoidance mechanisms; to let things unfold and be capable to take advantage when there's an opportunity.]

[Market info is only threatening if you expect it to do something for you; otherwise, you have no reason to fear being wrong.]

[Your edge is only an indication of one thing more likely to happen than another; the only evidence needed is whether the variables used to define the edge are present. Other information is noise and makes as much sense as trying to prove the next coin flip will be heads after ten flips came up tails: the odds are still 50/50 regardless of what you find.]

[If you believe you called the market once, you'll probably try to do it again, thereby setting yourself up for a trap; things are never the same again.]

when the positive or negative energy from our memories or experiences become linked to a set of words we call a concept, the concept becomes energized and, as a result, is transformed into a belief about the nature of reality. If you consider that concepts are structured by the framework of a language and energized by our experiences, it becomes clear why I refer to beliefs as "structured energy."

Since we can't expect something we don't know about, we could also say that an expectation is what we know projected into some future moment.

Move your FOSS project to an org!

[When you're the only owner of the repository, people are] more likely to see you as the (only) person responsible for fixing things when they break, or reviewing external contributions.

users are able to advertise their membership to the project, shown both on their profile and on the organization’s profile

the project is more identifiable as a team endeavour, as the association to your account is visually less prominent

Bufferland

To countless low-wage employees across the world, low-cost products will seem attractive - even ‘liberatory’ - but, when you zoom out, they are the ones cheaply producing the cheap things that are being sold back to them.

whenever a company is claiming to ‘democratise’ something, they’re basically saying that they will drive down costs on the production side of the equation to get the consumption side hooked on the resultant cheap thing, after which they will be in a position to extract.

It sometimes feels like easyJet’s management presents customers with a devil’s bargain: we’ll give you cheap travel if you agree to hand over your dignity and be treated like the crap you are.

[In business models squeezing both customers and employees, senior management plays them against each other as enemies.]

Bufferland exists to provide a shallow layer of human care within an otherwise bureaucratic profit machine, but today easyJet is also using it to recoup its losses from yesterday’s cancelled flight.

Companies like easyJet drive down prices through so-called ‘economies of scale’, but they also make heavy use of Economies of Silence: the frontline employees act as punching bags for customers, like an emotional shock-absorber, but this also serves as a system of noise-cancellation for management, freeing them from the emotional responses that would come from actually hearing the customers’ voices.

Events that have probable outcomes can produce consistent results, if you can get the odds in your favor and there is a large enough sample size.

[If casinos have a 4.5% edge on their customers, it translates to netting 4.5% on all money wagered there with that probability.]

[Technical analysis is mathematical, whereas mental analysis is psychological and uses technical indicators as a proxy for collective behaviour patterns.]

Each trade contributes to the market's position at any given moment, which means that each trader, acting on a belief about what is high and what is low, contributes to the collective behavior pattern that is displayed at that moment.

At the moment he puts a trade on, and for as long as he chooses to stay in that trade, other traders will be participating in that market. They will be acting on their beliefs about what is high and what is low. At any given moment, some percentage of other traders will contribute to an outcome favorable to our trader’s edge, and the participation of some percentage of traders will negate his edge. There’s no way to know in advance how everyone else is going to behave and how their behavior will affect his trade, so the outcome of the trade is uncertain. The fact is, the outcome of every (legal) trade that anyone decides to make is affected in some way by the subsequent behavior of other traders participating in that market, making the outcome of all trades uncertain.

Since all trades have an uncertain outcome, then like gambling, each trade has to be statistically independent of the next trade, the last trade, or any trades in the future, even though the trader may use the same set of known variables to identify his edge for each trade. Furthermore, if the outcome of each individual trade is statistically independent of every other trade, there must also be a random distribution between wins and losses in any given string or set of trades, even though the odds of success for each individual trade may be in the trader’s favor.

[Casinos don't need to predict the future to create consistent results: as long as the odds are in their favour, a large enough sample size will give their edge a chance to work.]

[For any pattern to be "exactly" the same as in a previous moment, exactly the same traders would need to be present with the equivalent mental state; therefore virtually impossible. So every market moment is unique even though it may rhyme with a previous occurrence.]

[Being aware of uncertainty and probabilities doesn't automatically translate to profiting from it.]

When you've trained your mind to think in probabilities, it means you have fully accepted all the possibilities (with no internal resistance or conflict) and you always do something to take the unknown forces into account. Thinking this way is virtually impossible unless you've done the mental work necessary to "let go" of the need to know what is going to happen next or the need to be right on each trade. In fact, the degree by which you think you know, assume you know, or in any way need to know what is going to happen next, is equal to the degree to which you will fail as a trader.

Traders who have learned to think in probabilities are confident of their overall success, because they commit themselves to taking every trade that conforms to their definition of an edge. They don't attempt to pick and choose the edges they think, assume, or believe are going to work and act on those; nor do they avoid the edges that for whatever reason they think, assume, or believe aren't going to work. If they did either of those things, they would be contradicting their belief that the "now" moment situation is always unique, creating a random distribution between wins and losses on any given string of edges. They have learned, usually quite painfully, that they don't know in advance which edges are going to work and which ones aren't. They have stopped trying to predict outcomes. They have found that by taking every edge, they correspondingly increase their sample size of trades, which in turn gives whatever edge they use ample opportunity to play itself out in their favor, just like the casinos.

[Typical traders avoid predefining risk because "it isn't necessary", which implies they believe that they can and do know what will happen, as well as that they're correct.]

When you're convincing yourself that you're right, what you're saying to yourself is, "I know who's about to come into this market. I know what they believe about what is high or what is low. Furthermore, I know each individual's capacity to act on those beliefs (the degree of clarity or relative lack of inner conflict), and with this knowledge, I am able to determine how the actions of each of these individuals will affect price movement in its collective form a second, a minute, an hour, a day, or a week from now."

[Watching a market with no intention to trade is frustration-free because nothing is at stake.]

Choosing to 'skip over parts' is reading because reflects a choice about what's being processed.

If I've absorbed something through my own lived experience or heard of it in another context, I'm still "reading" the idea as I recognize it well enough to skip over.

Cultural or self-inflicted frowning upon 'screens causing us to skim rather than read' creates pressure to do things 'properly', but comparisons are not relevant: set your own objectives and make your own meaning.

Skipping is about feeling when you're not connected so that you can move to yes.

The average entrepreneur faces mild shame and maybe bankruptcy proceedings if their venture doesn’t work out, but even then they tend to maintain strong networks, saved money and cultural clout.

the greatest risk-takers in our society aren’t the tech bros on the cover of Wired Magazine, or the person with a Forbes profile.

A person who takes really hardcore risk might face starvation, destitution or deportation if their gamble doesn’t work.

[The Japanese may often speak vaguely because of historical norms where people were beheaded when not replying as expected.]

[There's often much activity in the final minutes of a trading session as computerized signals activate based on closing prices.]

[The open is a rudder for the day and provides a first clue about direction.]

[The more anxious, the earlier they want to trade.]

[Large orders at the open or close with the intention of affecting prices are called "morning attacks" and "night attacks"]

A trend reversal signal implies that the prior trend is likely to change, but not necessarily reversing. [A car's brake lights indicate an incoming slow or stop, but not whether it will continue or reverse afterwards.]

['hammer' in Japanese is takuri, which means "gauging water's depth by feeling for the bottom"]

[harami is an old Japanese word for pregnant and used to indicate a market 'losing breath'.]

['Belt-hold' comes from sumo wrestlings yorikiri, meaning 'to push the opponent out of the ring while holding onto their belt.']

I made a small web app called memo to quickly jot down points, framing it as "a notepad you can't edit".

Similar to a piece of paper, you just note things down without editing or 'managing' much.

There are no buttons for each item: you can only add new things, and then copy or delete everything.

The interface supports routines I describe in work, then don't: capture points to deal with them later without distracting from whatever's happening at the moment.

Coming from other note taking apps like Simplenote, Apple Notes, or even Hyperdraft, it's nice to not manage conflict: "did I edit that already on another device?", "I synced but the changes aren't here yet", "I'd rather not think about that, let me make a new one and then copy/paste between later". Here, there's no need to trust in special sync — "just add and it will come together".

I find that 'not editing' also means 'not judging', thus allowing things to flow out as easily as possible—it can easily be cleaned up later; this is useful in brainstorming, writing long-form, and other modes.

So it's a little box to type in that's always ready when opening the app, and it syncronizes points to other devices, and none of the data is held hostage by me because you can bring your own storage. Great, but that's it?

Well, it's a 'real' app that I use everyday, but I think it's also a useful example of interoperability with other tools.

If you want to edit or delete individual items, you can connect the same data to this simple list app; the changes will sync back to memo.

If you like checking things off as 'done', use this todo app; they will show up completed (crossed out) in memo.

Some people want to keep everything forever, like a physical journal. Maybe someone could make another app that presents a nice 'archive'.

This is very primitive but it feels cool that separate apps work together pretty seamlessly. It's all possible because: 1) they each let you bring your own storage, and 2) they all share a similar format.

I think it would be nice if this was normal with apps and technology. The web is full of people making fun little tools but they're not connected to data in other places; I tend to imagine that by simply tweaking them to read and write data this way, we get some very cool new possibilities, and even give older projects new potential without much change.

Having different tools to deal with the same data is useful as an 'app user', but I love it as an 'app developer' because interop simplifies my life: I don't need to build all the features in my app — other apps can fill the gap, and together, we share one growing base of people who mix them in their workflows.

Try memo or the interop demo and let me know what comes to mind.

Feed me up, Scotty!

RSS feeds for arbitrary websites, using CSS selectors.

Smartphones and being present

if you're trying to lose weight, you shouldn't carry cookies around in your pockets. And my phone is the bag of cookies in this metaphor.

Week 4: A respite from winter

[narrative analysis] is often about nailing down the one, most important story the market wants to trade and then tracking the evolution of that story.

It is very difficult for markets to hold two competing themes in its collective hivemind at once, and so the focus oscillates back and forth instead of going in two directions at once.

Just because a narrative is well-known, that does not mean it’s exhausted.

OpenAI's inflated valuation, as I understand it

[The only way for labs to capture enough value would be to either invent superintlelligence or have a monopoly.]

[this study claims] that the length of tasks LLMs can complete is doubling every 7 months

[Models are currently commodified, but their labs are not priced as such.]

[If all 163 million working Americans bought a ChatGPT subscription at $20/month, it would provide 40 billion in annual revenue, which is only about 10% of what would justify the current valuation based on more the traditional method using price to earnings ratio.]

For my thirty-seventh year, I wanted to write a shorter annual reflection, so here are some important layers since last year, followed by something I'm currently sitting with that feels profound to me.

---

1. affirming experiences, celebrating myself, from scrolling to strolling.

2. love and relationship with my partner as we spent time in Germany, Dubai, India, Kenya, and Portugal.

3. food, cooking, eating, tasting; untold amounts of dosa, chaat, shredded cheese, fried sandwiches and crispy things; many days started with masala chai; happy to discover uji power

4. childhood, family, reconnecting

5. bureaucracy, admin, visas, stress

---

I'm immensely grateful to have found a sense of place again with my projects. My questions from last year have answers, and something is emerging, not sure what.

I find myself deeply in the zone.

Most days, all I want to do is get back to it.

It's abundantly satisfying even if I'm the only person I know that might consider it relevant.

Focus, reps, optimistic vortex, strong signal, ripple effects.

Just keep going, keep building.

I understand my technology toolset at a level higher than I've ever known; I no longer fear the docs, and it gives me greater control over my materials.

Looking ahead, I just want to put my head down and make progress. Let's see next year where it takes us.

---

All yearly reflections: 33, 34, 35, 36, 37.

AI Is the Market, and the Market Is the Government

The stock market has never been the economy - it’s really a reflection of what the economy dreams it could be in a world where share buybacks translate to meaningful productivity.

as AI swallows up more and more capital, it is both the economy and the stock market - and the government.

As long as portfolios are green, the electorate stays somewhat calm. The administration is effectively borrowing confidence from the AI bubble. Speculation has become governance.

The equity market believes the AI story overrides everything else. The gold market believes something is fundamentally breaking. They’re both reacting to the same underlying reality, but they just have different theories about what happens next.

Both gold and equities are surging because they’re hedging different kinds of collapse. Gold trades on fear of the system. AI trades on faith in the story. That both are rallying tells you something about where we are.

This is what it means to live in the United States of AI. Democracy as an asset class or something. For now, the line keeps going up. But speculation isn’t stability, and the permission government borrows from investors is never really its own.

Rudy Fraser on Blacksky, Mutual Aid & Reclaiming Social Media

[Everything we create has the Ubuntu ethics of "I am because you are" and "I want for you what you want for me".]

[Structure a benefit-orients mission statement like: "We help [customers] do/feel/be [benefit]."]

[Have an FAQ for busting objections.]

If the program doesn't rock your world, you'll get 100 percent of your money back, plus 20 percent for your trouble.

if a project evolves continuously, it may be worth tracking changes for who the audience is: it currently serves X, Y, and Z people, but new possibilities or priorities would trigger different messaging.

coming from the question "who can benefit while this is incomplete?"

yes to brag here is my stainless steel pan after making eggs!!!!

1. heat the pan on high and after a few minutes drop a few drops of water into the pan. if the water sizzles its not ready. if the water forms little beads and the beads easily dance across the pan, it’s ready!
2. turn the heat immediately to low.
3. drizzle some olive oil in and move the pan to coat. then drop in a small pat of butter, then gently add your already cracked eggs
4. DO NOT TOUCH for at least 30 seconds
5. gently put a spatula beneath to see if the egg has released from the pan yet. don’t rush it, this is key! when it’s ready to move it will move easily!

Since 2020 I've developed a frequent day routine of 'work' followed by 'non-work', which looks like this:

• work intensely until a certain time, often lunch, then 'digress' for the rest of the day;
• "no messaging or social media before lunch"
• "no computing after lunch"
• log points that occur to me during the day
• the next day, spend a short moment going through previous day's points, then start the cycle again.

Of course, many days can't be shaped like this, but I enjoy when it's possible and often really look forward to this kind of plan. I could do it every day, and somehow the repetition doesn't get boring; life also conveniently interrupts with variation.

I think it came about because until 2019 I was regularly spending unlimited hours a day coding apps on iOS or the web, and, naturally, it started to cost my mind and body. So I started to seek ways to limit my computer time.

It's also a riff on my productivity trinity and 'writing without magic': allow time to work in your favour, enjoy the fruits of resting your mind from intense focus, and diversify ways of being.

---

My morning mind is sacred to me as it hasn't yet been bombarded by external distractions, so I often use it to make progress on important things and try to keep the world at bay until I'm ready; I usually feel at my highest capacity, very focused, and productive. I give my first self to whatever I feel called to do.

During the 'digress' part, I read, do nothing, take walks, listen to music or podcasts, call friends, focus on body things, hang out, run errands, correspond, cook, touch plants, etc… Ideas, improvements, and iterations come quite naturally because I'm not occupied with 'work'; it's like shower thoughts, but for the whole afternoon and evening. The goal is to ensure there's a process or modality happening different to "sitting and doing stuff on my screen".

I just note down whatever occurs to me, things like "fix typo", "contact them", "wash dishes", "lookup word", "clean shoes", "buy vegetables", "share cat video"; it's all captured quickly and without polish, just enough that my future self will understand. Then I get back to my digressions.

The next morning, whenever I'm ready to start, I skip notifications, social networks, emails, or any external communication that I can do later—"don't look at anything"—and start with what I captured the previous day. I dump it all somewhere, and try process everything without taking too long. Just grouping the mess of points into "what goes with what?" is helpful and a simple starting point if I lack clarity that day.

I try to distribute everything into other places where I collect related points, but similar to just capturing quickly, I don't stop to put it in the 'correct' part of those buckets: I just drop it at one end or the other and move on immediately; I will eventually sort it anyway whenever I end up doing something about a specific collection of points.

If there's something time-sensitive there, briefly scan for it and bump it to the top. Otherwise, go through linearly.

If there's something 'nice to have, but not practical right now', I throw it in my rabbithole list, where I can be revisit without pressure to 'get it done' or take any decisions.

It normally takes me under five to ten minutes to process everything. I mostly don't get too involved in any of the points and just function like a dispatch center putting things in a useful place as efficiently as possible. If something worthwhile takes a minute to complete, I might just do it instead of moving it, but generally I like making deliberate time to focus on specific things and letting the rest accumulate so that time works for me.

The goal is to maximize space for deep work on what feels meaningful and motivating.

Sometimes I even defer this review until after lunch so that my morning brain has more time to party.

---

It's very satisfying for me to record little thoughts today and trust that they will be seen at the right moment; to have space to be present, yet not miss details that could be useful later. I often don't feel overwhelmed because there's a simple process for dealing with whatever comes up, and it helps me get a sense for what's potent.

A larger aspiration here is to switch modes at healthy intervals: do focused work but avoid several hours or more of the same body posture, instead trying to alternate and stagger contrasting activities; ideally, I even look forward to break because it's a chance to let the previous thing ferment.

Lately I've found that it also gives me direction with bad things happening in the world, as the more I learn about what's broken, the more I want to simply move the needle and do something useful: this framework helps me focus on those things.

I hope that sharing my concept might give you some ideas but also act as a prompt to consider which ways of working would help you flourish. May we all have clearer paths forward.

---

My new memo app is a "notepad you can't edit" specifically built for this work/digress cycle.

---

Trade 3: Short DOCS

Part of the reason a level might hold is that everyone believes it will hold—and so everyone puts their bids there. If you are using PhD quantum physics and homological mirror symmetry to find your tech levels, and nobody else in the known universe is, the levels you find just might not mean much in the market.

Volume spikes at a price extreme are super useful indicators that huge volume has gone through and the move was rejected or accepted by the market.

Trade 2: Short oil

People yelling “CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION!” in all caps are technically right but practically not very helpful. There often is no causation, but there is a ton of information contained in the correlation between assets.

If corn doubles in price, those who can switch to soy will do so, pushing the price of soy futures higher. If Doordash rips higher and now looks overvalued, investors looking for food delivery apps to invest in might buy GrubHub instead.

When a Canadian crude oil producer sells their crude, they receive USD. They need CAD to pay their employees and shareholders so after they sell their crude, they need to sell USDCAD to convert the proceeds. If the price of crude doubles, the crude producer will have twice as many USD to sell and this will weigh on USDCAD.

a bridge goes both ways

Interfaces are languages

Look at any modern software application: buttons are verbs, boxes with drop-shadows are nouns, API requests are grammatical structures. We’re not “using” interfaces so much as speaking them. When you pick up a new piece of software you can usually operate it but you lack fluency, you’re still learning the dialect.

High off the fumes from bringing Vibrations home, I made a "room" for all the lyrics I've accumulated over the years from capoeira classes, deep listening albums, and learning languages, motivated because there were too many mixed into my notes and other stuff to find anything when I needed it.

informal to structured, automatically

Each song lives in a collection, which is a text file representing my personal tie to where it came from: maybe the year or place or group or album.

The lyrics in a collection are just separated by one # character, which represents a Markdown heading. New heading, new song; no need to "make one file per thing" and manage it.

…

quem ama mesmo prefere o ofício de amar.

# Joyce: Mistérios

você chegou feito um silêncio

…

With just this one semantic unit to divide the information, each song can get it's own page automatically. But I can still easily move things around if I change my mind. This fulfills my principle of "presenting things consistently regardless of how I organize the files".

Adding a topic to collections lets me combine collections from a certain context (such as my Brazilian popular music). As it shows recent items first, I have a list roughly in order of discovery without any 'blog post' system; time is somewhat relevant but it doesn't need to be super precise.

I had tried to do this with my non-chronological garden, but it was too much effort to manage pages and ended up crowding other stuff without being easier to find. Reverse chronological order is much more relevant here to me than other ways I've tried, as I often want to revisit newer things first; the order is a helpful reminder of where I got it from and orients me to other details I may have forgotten.

cool benefits

About 150 individual song notes were purged from my Simplenote and condensed into 21 collections. I no longer need to carry them around in my notes, and they're also 'liberated' as public data that anyone can benefit from as text or through my site's web interface.

Collections are presented without pagination so I can just scroll, with sticky headings for orientation, using the browser to search when needed: this way I can easily save one page offline with the Reading List in Safari and have lyrics with me even without internet access.

The page for any song has links to search the title via YouTube, or translate text via DeepL, or a 'Source' link so that anyone can edit things on GitHub.

There are bidirectional links between lyric and Vibrations pages, connecting published songs from my personal history to the lyrics.

other reflections

I'm generally not using my blog brain when I deal with music and don't always know very specifically what I'm looking for when it comes to songs I may want to reconnect with. It's nice to browse through what I've gathered as easily as physical albums or photo collections—an example of how technology can support more 'fuzzy' approaches.

I have another less public collection somewhere with compilations of more lyrics than I will ever use in my lifetime, but those are more like a large 'dataset' and not personally meaningful. The songs I've encountered along my way have more significance to me, and it's nice to express that through files, markdown, and some rough technical transformation.

My endeavour in writing this is not really to focus on the technology but an attempt to share why I do things a certain way, which can be applicable to other things.

Hugo gives me the rush of making apps, but applied to organizing information—something that disproportionately seems to satisfy me.

I would close with a quote from Heddi that describes what it's like for me to have a personal website or corner of the Internet where I can do niche things like this without some company's blessing:

"Having a platform profile is like living in a single-room apartment, whereas having your own site is a castle with unlimited rooms."

Trade 1: Short XAUEUR

If real rates [(yield minus inflation)] are falling and negative, that generally means that central banks are enacting extremely loose policy.

[Increasing US rates and real rates is generally bad for gold.]

Positioning	Bull Market	Bear Market
Long and increasing	Very Bullish
Long and stable	Bullish
Long but falling	BEARISH
Short and stable		Bearish
Short and getting more short		Very bearish
Short but buying back		BULLISH

When the market anticipates an upcoming event, it will tend to position in the direction of least regret.

[If XAUEUR isn't available on your platform sell XAUUSD and buy EURUSD.]

[If I make this 1% better each time, it will be 1.62x better after 49 times].

[A good rule of thumb for new traders is to set the stop loss an average day range away from the entry. If I know nothing else about a security, I do this. Anything smaller risks to be stopped out by noise.]

[Add 3 pips to stop loss for slippage.]

[Position size is the output, not input.]

Fallacies of distributed computing

1. The network is reliable;
2. Latency is zero;
3. Bandwidth is infinite;
4. The network is secure;
5. Topology doesn't change;
6. There is one administrator;
7. Transport cost is zero;
8. The network is homogeneous;

personal mark

There are 9 circles shaping the rocket. The circle count can be further reduced to seven or even four, but this yields shapes that are too simple and not very interesting.

It is easy to simplify things, the trick is to know when to stop.

Rethinking the Future of Bluesky: Challenges and Possibilities of a Decentralized Social Network

The fact that a banned account in one unit can simply join another underlines both the promise and the difficulty of decentralization. What one person sees as resilience, another may see as irresponsibility.

Open Social

in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

['Social aggregation' features like global search, notifications, feeds, and shared moderation are what] blows the “personal sites” paradigm out of the water. People are social creatures, and we want to congregate in shared spaces. We don’t just want to visit each other’s sites—we want to hang out together, and social apps provide the shared infrastructure.

The web Alice created—who she follows, what she likes, what she has posted—is trapped in a box that’s owned by somebody else. To leave it is to leave it behind.

Those megabytes of JSON you got on your way out are dead data. It’s like a branch torn apart from its tree. It doesn’t belong anywhere. To give a new life to our data, we’d have to collectively export it and then collectively import it into some next agreed-upon social app—a near-impossible feat of coordination. Even then, the network effects are so strong that most people would soon find their way back.

Open social frees up our data like open source freed up our code. Open social ensures that products can get a new life, that people can’t be locked out of what they have created, and that products can be forked and remixed. You don’t need an “everything app” when data from different apps circulates in the open web.