178 entries under "article"

I turned off analytics

I don’t care about what gets ranked on Google, I’m not trying to optimise for the people who come from that channel.

People who arrive via search are just looking to get a question answered and move on. That’s great and I hope I can help them, but they are not the reason I’m here. This site is here for the people who stay a while, have a look around and then send me an email to start an interesting conversation.

I've been feeling similar lately, but erring on the side of continuing until there's a specific reason to stop; there's some underlying fear of losing something in the future that I can't describe. The data is kind of boring—maybe the whole notion of this analytics exploits a 'wanting to know where people come from' and the deep-seated desire for connection. I'm curious in your case, why not 'just' make a filter to see the non-search data?

I definitely believe in meaningful connections as the fundamental focus for myself; measuring this might be valuable but not necessary for me, I'd prefer to hear people's stories of change over seeing numbers. Wishing that your 'search query' returns results 🙏🏽☀️.

in search of a new tab

[Each new tab feels like a choice: how do I want to spend my time?]

What a 'new tab page' this is! I prefer queries (via keystroke launchers like Quicksilver or 'Command-K') over big lists, but this is beautifully personal and makes me drool; stable options can leverage muscle memory and reduce distractions. 👍🏽

Provokes me to wonder about social patterns and 'formats' like /now or 'daily note', ways of organizing that many people can practice and share so that we can all learn from each other.

Individual initiative, corporate inertia and good bad advice

Good luck finding books that somberly advise corporations on how to encourage a dangerous reliance on unsupervised individual inspiration.

A company needs to be able to treat its employees as interchangeable and expendable, both individually and collectively. It needs to be able to periodically layoff 17% of its workforce to cut its margin overhead by 1% and temporarily boost its stock price by 5%, without having to endure existential upheaval to its ongoing business processes. It needs to be able to double and redouble recklessly in size for the same dubious market reasons, without those people all piling up in the lobby where their chaos is visible from the street.

The key to these flexibilities, as we have understood at least since Henry Ford, is to formalize the operational roles so that their function in the overall system is symbolic and anonymous. As long as people are just units inserted into well-defined slots, the machinery doesn't need to care who they are.

The secret truth of business advice is that it's mostly about how to grimly extract residual value from the luck you already had, and the unearned love you were already unguardedly given, because there's really no method for making more of it.

what happens in the conversations I have with the ppl I'm coaching

[I offer: space away from the rat-race to reflect, breathe more deeply, move deliberately; a good bullshit detector; place to practice, prepare, or role-play tough future conversations; help to find the right amount of stretch in your development goal without overdoing to short circuit progress; encouragement if you need someone telling you to quit your job.]

[Improve your interpersonal dynamics by seeing the relationship as something that can be co-designed in process rather than 'agreed upon'.]

[My formal training is in engineering and agriculture. I coach because people ask me, not because I'm certified.]

[Smaller organizations might not be able to afford leadership coaching from professionals but can afford peer-to-pear from like-minded companions.]

The Signals: A Guided Primer

[Welcome:

1. Does everyone feel invited to participate?
2. Does the space guarantee users a safe experience?
3. Does the space encourage the humanization of others?
4. Can people express themselves without compromising their identity and data?

Connect:

5. Does the space cultivate a sense of belonging?
6. Does the space encourage fruitful connections between groups that aren’t naturally alike?
7. Does the space strengthen emotional, structural, and participative ties to geographically local communities?
8. Does the space make it possible for people to be heard by those in positions of power?

Understand:

9. Does the space allow for shared concerns to be raised for broad attention by society at large?
10. Is the information being elevated and shared reliable, factual, and true?
11. Does the space build civic competence and encourage democratic participation?
12. Does the space promote thoughtful conversation and room for respectful disagreements?

Act:

13. Does this space boost a community’s resilience in the face of significant stress or adversity?
14. Does this space facilitate our ability to participate in each others’ lives and shape society?]

How do I play a YouTube video in the background on my iOS?

[Start a YouTube video full-screen via Safari, then:

1. tap the home button or swipe up to show the home screen;

2. when playback stops, open the back ground audio controls in control center;

3. then press Play to resume playback in background.]

A map for indie living

[Phase 1: shake the tree, ask everyone; prioritize money and invoices; support yourself mentally as it might not 'appear' succesful to others or even to you; keep operations simple to start quickly.]

[Phase 2: the real transition starts here; notice what gets the strongest reaction from clients; shape the work closer to your deeper interests and passions; share with others; increase visibility, maybe by writing blogs; find peers or start your own community; don't partner or build an agency; don't lock into a niche.]

[Phase 3: raise rates; find more senior and expensive work; zoom in where the market wants what you enjoy delivering; publish consistently; formalize business apparatus and legal entities; don't hire, outsource, or operationalize; avoid getting complacent now that the money's good; don't burn out; stay visible; don't lock into a niche.]

[Phase 4: say no to the work from previous phases unless money's tight; find support from other senior indies to charge 10x your phase 1; keep learning and publishing; avoid offering 'packages' that trap you in phase 3 work.]

[Phase 5: are you presenting yourself to C-suite stakeholders?; can you take equity in your clients?; what do you want to spend your freedom on? and what is needed to sustain that for 15–20 years?; embed your real self in any book or conference you feel tempted to create; can you say no to phase 4 work?; what does phase 5 work look like?]

Kevin Komisaruk, American-Canadian Keyboard Musician

messaging that bombards us daily: fear and compliance are the new virtues to signal and will ensure our survival.

I also wonder how they process the contradiction of seeing our society celebrate those who disrupted history with peace and compassion, while persecuting those trying to do the same today.

Against Positive-Sum Thinking

Imagine luring each ant into a small individual-ant-sized box with honey, then scattering the boxes. This “maximizes the revealed preferences” of each individual ant, but it kills the ant colony as surely as boric acid.

our legal system is fundamentally oriented around individual rights, not group rights. No group has the property right to any individual. (No group, that is, other than the state).

3-2-1: Punchiness, Pain Points, Press “B” – Harry Dry's Newsletter

[Make a fact hit harder by converting units into everyday objects: from "One large tree removes 2.2M BTU from the Earth's atmosphere" to "One large tree is equivalent to 10 air conditioning units"; "0.1 square miles of the Amazon are destroyed every minute" to "50 soccer fields worth of the Amazon are destroyed every minute"; "Carbon savings of 800,000 tonnes per year" to "Carbon savings equal to 450,000 fewer cars on the road per year".]

Be Kind, Everyone is Fighting a Social Atrophy You Know Nothing About

And so we struggle to reach out, and to respond with our fragile hurting brains. We want connection, and we also find the possibility potentially very difficult when we're not doing so well. After all, if you invite someone over, they will see your messy house, and maybe judge you. And everyone's "house" is a mess right now in one way or another.

love the hack to reach out right before 'correspondence bankruptcy' to reduce pressure on the recipient 👍🏽 i also try to generally cultivate a norm of 'no response necessary' with anything i send; if it's urgent i'll call or say so.

this made me reflect on my frequent desire for solitude, often by saying or feeling that 'my social cup is full'. i never thought that it might cost me some 'social muscles' but i can see that as a possibility if it goes on for too long. nevertheless, i'd like to think that i know when i want to have company and when not, that i have good judgement in balancing this within myself.

in what seems to now be a previous life, where i felt an overwhelming lack of social interaction, friendship, or companionship, i practiced what i called 'shake the tree' once or twice a year: dm everyone with warm wishes and my current city. many were happy i sent this, many reacted with a simple emoji, many didn't respond, but it generally felt worthwhile for me.

Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust

A new world is being born. It is a world where the old rules, more often honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It is a world where vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced systems carry out in public view vast killing projects. The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.

Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and new expressions. Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, as well as over six million Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche.

Germany today is Israel's second largest arms supplier following the U.S.

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.]

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.]

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"