You certainly can’t make a cake by collecting a few eggs in Asia and walking across an entire continent to where the wheat is, all while picking up milk and sugar somewhere along the way.
You certainly can’t make a cake by collecting a few eggs in Asia and walking across an entire continent to where the wheat is, all while picking up milk and sugar somewhere along the way.
The Phrase "No Evidence" Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication
[No evidence can indicate that 1) there were no studies; 2) there were studies proving the claim is false; 3) we assume it foolish to test.]
Paper filing system, where frequently used documents automatically end up together—one can safely archive what hasn’t come up after a long period. Similar to that ‘touching moves it to the top of the list’ paradigm common in messaging and note-taking apps. I love learning about simple systems that are built with the right incentives to encourage what’s natural, without impeding flow. Organization can bring peace of mind and increase cognitive bandwidth, so it’s powerful to achieve this automatically.
I often find myself glazing over conceptual interfaces for computing because I usually just want to use the thing to see how it feels, but the nice demos on this one stopped me.
The promise of digital systems for me has always had something to do with ‘surfacing the right amount of meaningful things at the right time’. I have approximated this in my apps by requiring explicit actions to surface things because it’s beyond my capacity to imagine how to do this more automatically, and also generally distrust machines to automate this well. So how nice it is to see a vision for creating structures and associations with little friction, more or less by directing your attention. Computers should be good at this while allowing us to tweak things, to avoid relying completely on a black box:
The system can handle most of the heavy lifting by simply paying attention to how we move through our items within different contexts, but we can further manage the associations manually as we like.
Bringing things to view in the way presented here is so much more compelling than clicking around through filesystems or apps. The closest that I’ve seen and used is Quicksilver’s way of 'knowing’ by key combinations and their frequency, but this requires explicit association. Successfully capturing intent passively instead of explicitly makes it so that being a programmer is not necessary.
It’s important to have higher-level primitives baked into lower levels, rather than reconstructing them in each app–this can mean schemas, file formats, or an operating system itself. Your trail or history is valuable and shouldn’t be siloed in or built bespoke for certain apps. How can this be constructed without a universal app for all the things? (or is that just another operating system?) How can this be done in a way where the data is not siloed within this system (even though it seems to afford great flexibility across app boundaries)?
How I made $210,822 selling a pdf and a video on the internet
[Find something you know super well and give away everything you know about it for free wherever people interested in that hang around. If you manage to get attention, you will start getting questions: whatever doesn't fit into a short response can be a prompt for your info product. If you do the product, you'll have the audience at the outset because they already asked for the info from you specifically.]
[A one-hour promotion making the product available at any price over one dollar.]
I’m very attached to my kid, but I don’t expect him to be attached to me. I don’t want him to feel more tied to some people than others. I hope he ventures out into the world, makes new bonds, and feels no obligation to me. He doesn’t owe me anything. His life is his own. He didn’t ask to be born, and has no debts.
Pay What You Want and the Four Currencies
[Optional contributions in software don't work because they're more of a pain in the ass than the free experience. If you forced a minimum price of even a cent, people would likely be more generous than the minimum because they're already in the payment process.]
My former professor started writing in public recently and managed to describe transcendence in what we, here on the Internet, refer to as a “cat picture”. I’m fond of lenses that help us see the sublime in ordinary experiences. There is so much we can learn from animals and nature, such as paying attention to our natural reactions and inhibitions. Feels also like a kind of oblique strategy.
Here is Stella, instructing us on how to look at something we’ve never seen before. As our resident cat-comedian with a gift for irony, she is wondering whether this item — a conductor’s baton — can be worked in as “A” material for her next vaudeville show. The baton is also about to become a tooth sharpener, but we’ll explore that in a moment. Here, Stella is elevating attention itself into an art form, and teaching us to do the same. If that idea doesn’t resonate with you, please find your inner still-point and a moment to drink in her lucent, emerald gaze.
[The easier it is, the more likely people will do it: write the introduction email so that they don't have to.]
[If they're excited about something and remind you to bring it up later, ask them right away.]
[If they receive a second wave of ideas after the interview ends, ask permission to record again.]
My hope is just that reading these snippets may remind you of things you have forgotten, and that you can reconnect with thise oleasurable memories.
[He was there listening to his little kid play music. His enjoyment transfered to me and increased mine. His listening supported my listening. I was able to give something back to my dad.]
[Sound and silence are complementary. Take equal care when playing either.]
[Rests are less the absence of something and more the presence of nothing.]
[What people call random might simple be too complex to explain.]
[Instead of telling me what 'root' meant, he asked me what I know about roots. When I explained that plants have roots and hold up the rest, he made the connection with roots of a chord that 'supports' the other notes.]
[When I asked which G should I play, he suggested that I try all of them and see which one I was happy with.]
[By tolerating discomfort we actually broaden our comfort zone.]
The global streaming boom is creating a severe translator shortage
[Netflix lost about half a million subscribers in the United States and Canada, but gained over a million in the Asia-Pacific region.]
[Translating Korean to French through English makes as much sense as translating English to French through Korean.]
Try these two smart techniques to help you master your emotions
[Having a small emotional vocabulary makes it easier to reduce situations with a broad brush.]
[People with larger emotional vocabularies tend to have less health issues.]
[Make the butterflies in your stomach fly in formation.]
[Categorizing as 'not about me' saves energy when you're down, and is useful when you're up to put the emotions in perspective (the result of social reality).]
You should use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
Frames the issue not only in terms of information architecture or participant usability, but how it fits into the larger Internet ecosystem, including search engines. Although the title suggests a particular course, it drives the reader to use both more thoughtfully.
See also:
Piracy and the four currencies, part 2
[Piracy is unauthorized access and duplication, whereas stealing deprives the owner of something.]
Stay in touch with hundreds of people.
[Automate keeping in touch to stay in sight. A List: very important, every 3 weeks, B List: important, every two months; C List: most people, every six months; D List: demoted, every year to make sure you have their correct info.]
[Find out how they're doing without asking something in return.]
[It's easy to forget and some people will appreciate you making the effort.]
The Memex Method. When your commonplace book is a public…
[If it seems significant I will blog about why I think it's important and what it adds to the picture.]
[It's neither my last word nor a repetition of what I have to say.]
it represents the synthesis of recent events with a long run of earlier events, interventions, scandals and actions. Further, it represents the evolution of my ability to convey these complex and thorny ideas, based on the reception earlier pieces on the same subject received.
[If writing is about clarifying your thoughts, your older work will naturally make you cringe. But systematically reviewing older work to observe what you got wrong and right makes it easier to avoid your own pitfalls. The structure can even be a public recap of what happened 5, 10, and 15 years ago on this day.]
Being alone with your thoughts is a skill you can practise
[67 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women who participated in the study chose to intentionally shock themselves rather than be alone with their thoughts.]
[Having a list of enjoyable topics to consult can make it easier to think for pleasure.]
Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
[Publishing is a statement of quality when expensive and inaccessible. When it's cheap and ubiquitous, quality is determined after the fact, by how people point to it.]
Free Schools Are the Future of Education
What if the modern world had a church in schools for lifelong learning?