178 entries under "article"

Fishbowl

[An unconference gathering structure with chairs in the middle of the audience where anyone can sit to speak but it requires another person in the center to leave; one chair left empty invites new people to join anytime.]

Neologisms

Hospice Mode: The stage your when your phone / fitness tracker / laptop is in its final months and you're just prolonging its death through a series of coping techniques. Carrying around extra battery packs. Patiently giving it 10 minutes to restart. Resetting the system at regular intervals.

Manel: Panel made up entirely of men. Usually honouring work done entirely by other men.

Pinkering: Named for Steven Pinker - a common phenomenon among do-gooder elites who cite the long arc of human history in order to downplay and minimise any immediate suffering.

Privacy Veganism: Unnecessarily shaming people who aren't willing to delete their Facebook account when it’s a functional necessity in their social context

Mailbag #2

[You can avoid keeping up with news directly by listening to podcasts that might give a sense of important issues indirectly.]

Open Source Is a Restaurant

Open Source is a restaurant. At a restaurant, you eat your meal first, and then you are expected to pay for it. Yes, we could dine and dash. But we don’t. When presented with a tab for a meal we have just eaten, we pay the tab.

The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram

Actual power is controlling the means by which lesser power can be displayed—i.e., congrats on the 500K likes on your polling numbers, @jack still owns all your tweets. Actual power keeps a low profile; actual power doesn't need a social media presence, it owns social media.

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed

Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We've been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don't have, We buy so much because it always seems like something, is still missing,

For the economy to be "healthy", America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don't feel like they need much they don't already have, and that means they don't buy a lot of junk, don't need to be entertained as much, and they don't end up watching a lot of commercials.

Controlled Vocabulary

Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designers of the schemes, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, which have no such restriction.

Choices of authorized terms are based on the principles of user warrant (what terms users are likely to use), literary warrant (what terms are generally used in the literature and documents), and structural warrant (terms chosen by considering the structure, scope of the controlled vocabulary).

The terms are chosen and organized by trained professionals (including librarians and information scientists) who possess expertise in the subject area. Controlled vocabulary terms can accurately describe what a given document is actually about, even if the terms themselves do not occur within the document's text.

SCAMPER is a procedural idea generator

S: Can I substitute a material? A key ingredient? A process? What happens if I substitute an emotion? Can I substitute the packaging for something else?

C: Can I combine different components to create something new? Can I bundle things in a new way? Can I combine different use-cases, such as author and reader, or seller and buyer?

A: Can I adapt a process from somewhere else? A component from something else? Can I adapt it to existing infrastructure? Can I adjust something just 3% to create something new?

M: Can I modify the form factor? Shape? Color? Can I magnify the key idea? What happens if I magnify an attribute beyond all reason? Or minify it?

P: Can I put a component to other uses? A mechanism? A process? An idea? A set of rules? Can I transform a waste product into an input? Can I put it to use in another context? Can I translate it into another medium? Create spinoffs?

E: Can I eliminate a rule? Can I simplify it? Make it compact? Eliminate a feature? Remove a complication?

R: Can I reverse a relationship? An assumption? What happens if I reverse my point of view? Can I rearrange the sequence? The layout? The structure? Can I rearrange the components to create something new?

A Fediverse, if you can keep it

Companies might serve as on-ramps, but at the end of the day this is a network of people sharing things with other people. You’re not blocking Meta; you’re blocking countless people who would otherwise stand to benefit from the open nature of the network. And the cruel irony here is that preemptive blocking is what will ultimately destroy the Fediverse as we know it. People want to connect with one another, and they’re going to do it one way or another. (And we’re right back to WhatsApp again.)

How do we evaluate people for their technical leadership?

Programmers’ chief value does not come from producing code. It comes from knowing enough about the situation to solve automation and scaling problems. Code that doesn’t solve those problems is worthless to the organization. If code that doesn’t solve those problems gets deployed somewhere, it’s worse than worthless because it incurs maintenance costs in addition to being worthless.

Perhaps even more importantly, though, they ensure that the wrong thing does not get done. And that is what makes them look worthless: their chief outcome is the absence of something. […] It’s the breaches that didn’t happen because someone double-checked what this SQL did. It’s the multi-server failure that did not occur because two separate engineers saw the warning signs and one responded to the other in a messaging channel. It’s the disaster feature that got killed because someone who understands inclusion demonstrated how it might be used to attack a marginalized constituency.

Money as Addiction

[As addiction to cigarettes changes your body and turns your into a different person, material progress changes our baseline expectations for what is necessary to live. Solutionism wants to measure progress cumulatively, but this ignores how each stage of development rebases our 'zero point'.]

I've been trying to articulate the false sense of pioneering characterized in the fintech reference at the end: the story that businesses tell themselves and the world about 'heading towards the future' while essentially anchoring us deeper into this monetary system; today's version in my head is "There are no leftist startups." Yes to acknowledging where we are. 👍🏽

Talking files, protocols, and data ownership in TfTs

[It's a useful contribution to try what we've made and complaining about the ways it doesn't work for you.]

Coaching - heal the cycle

I offer this work on a sliding scale based on income; I ask 1/1,000th of your annual income per hour. So if you make $45,000 per year, I ask for $45/hr. If you make $150,000/yr, I ask for $150/hr.

How to Use C.R.A.P. Design Principles For Better UX?

[Use contrast of shape and colour to draw the eye's attention to important parts of the layout.]

Support Kottke.org With a Membership

About 45% of those who have been a member of kottke.org are currently not active paying members. That's a lot of churn! If even half of those folks would re-up, I could do some additional cool shit around here, I think. That said, the number of active members has remained relatively steady over time, which I'm thankful for.

All you need is links

A hyperlink is a triple where the subject is the page, the predicate is the link text, and the object is the thing being linked to.

Using the object name as link text could be wasteful.

Subtext explorations on Hashtags

Collecting into tagged buckets is not sense-making, only a coarse-grained first approximation. Sense-making should fold into Orientation, and make it possible to expand your repertoire of Actions. That means synthesizing collected information into new knowledge. This is something linking supports, and tags do not.

Create good problems to have

[Start using an approach with obvious shortcomings and use the flywheel of growth to improve.]

[Starting simple creates low-hanging fruit for newcomers to get involved, which helps increase traction.]

all of it.

what was it, aaron?

which atrocity drove your desperation to
set your body on fire to match your burning spirit?

was it the baby starving to death on camera?

was it the children eating food for livestock?

was it the artillery shot towards children
celebrating at the border?

was it the millionth mother
grieving her dead baby?

or was it
the silence?

Substack's Dilemma

“I will pelt you to death with marshmallows” is not very credible, though it might conceivably be done if one had a great many marshmallows.