I was a 10x engineer. Now I'm useless.

[There's no middle ground where you only decide to do crack on Mondays and Wednesdays.]

Let's talk about Trump, 200 billion dollars, and a promise....

[Running countries like a business means the shareholders (financial donors) are best served when the company (government) extracts as much as possible from consumers (you) while giving them little in return.]

Is the story of your relationship true?

[We can still over-weigh past hurt in our relationships even after repair.]

[At any given moment, relationships contain eight combined narratives, from

• you: about yourself, your partner, and the relationship
• your partner: about themselves, you, and the relationship
• the relationship itself: about you, and your partner]

Vandana Shiva | On Cultivating Fearlessness

[Just as yield doesn't measure agricultural productivity, mechanistic thinking is a poor fit for the living world.]

[When you try to make things better, what seems a small contribution can have multiple ramifications because our world is interconnected. Being overwhelmed by your actions seeming insignifican is a result of conditioning from mechanical thinking that reduces us to isolated entities. We don't carry the world on are backs, we are just one of a trillion species that each creating microscopic impacts.]

[Mechanical thinking conditions us into believing that things are separated so that it can sell us natural things as products we can buy repeatedly forever.]

[We're trained to consume, and consider living without unsustainable products to be a "sacrifice". But if living within natural restaint can be a source of satisfacion and peace, and freedom from the insatiable desire for more, it's really consumption that requires us to "sacrifice".]

I'm sorry

[I asked strangers in Egypt who they would apologize to if they could.]

Beyond Horseless Carriages: Building Communities for the Decentralized Era

[Fediverse: communities of 50–100 people, "a slightly bigger group chat". Bluesky: planet-scale network. What could go in between? Blacksky is 'Reddit-sized' or like a large forum at around 100–200k people.]

[Moderation can also be a form of "community care" that people actually enjoy and appreciate, rather than just a task to be done.]

[Contradictory when almost nobody in the community does moderation or understands the primitives, yet most seem to think it's decentralized. If the main provider goes away tomorrow, will you know how to keep the infrastructure running?]

[People are busy and have kids: they don't need to know what a PDS is.]

[Build what helps people find joy and feel good about themselves.You can't scare them into using decentralized tech "for their own good".]

UI/UX Benefits and Trade-Offs of Local-First Apps

[Beware generic solutions: they don't know your needs.]

[Instead of directing users to "please resolve this conflict", the UI could say "Bob made a different suggestion"]

15 years of Local First: a best-of report from the field

[When humanity's achievements are tabulated a hundred years from now, the Ebola vaccine will be listed, and I'm proud that our work with CouchDB and offline-first software helped make it happen.]

[Documentation is a 10x multiplier for your development speed.]

clown core: Diarrhea Inferno Welfare Burrito

gradual voice-leading and suspensions with fast-paced drumming

clown core: existence

wild creepy sensory overload

How Indian students end up exploited in Germany

[Indian students come to Germany sold on a vision of prosperity by expensive private university marketing, then find themselves unable to leave and forced into delivery work.]

[Delivery companies like Uber Eats and Wolt rely on 3rd party agencies to recruit and hire drivers as 4th party contractors. These agencies interact anonymously through WhatsApp numbers, make arrangements to pay in cash at sketchy locations (often less than anticipates), and regularly declare bankruptcy before starting the scheme again avoid paying taxes and social security.]

Löwenzahn: Peter hat viel Zeit

a million ways to tell time without batteries, plus a battery from fruit

The entire global monetary system explained in under 15 minutes

[The monarch gives them tokens in exchange for labour, then demands it back in the form of taxes.]

Evan You – From Art School Kid to Open Source Legend

[In the same way that "how do you monetize a startup?" is too open-ended, it's necessary to be specific and creative in how you fit an open-source "product" to potential "markets". Monetization capacity of an open-source project depends on how it's applied: frameworks have larger scope and reach many developers whereas an esoteric build tool may have a smaller audience.]

Who profits from a world without cash?

[Transitioning to a cashless society implies moving away from state-issued money towards 'tokens' issued by private corporations. We currently trust their casino chips because they can be redeemed for fiat currency, but without cash this is no longer possible.]

Puppy Wisdom, if we can hear it.

[When a baby dog bites, it can be painful but also totally normal. Why can knowing this give me so much patience towards an animal, yet I take it so personally when my partner does something which hurts? Getting hurt and processing it together can also be a normal part of relationships, and you can't have one without the other.]

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.

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.]

On motherhood

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

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.]

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.]

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.]

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.]

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.]

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".]

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!

It's Not Just You: Music Streaming Is Broken Now

[Artists on Spotify are paid from a common fund divided in proportion to their number of streams in each payment period. Audiobooks are also sharing from the same pool. Scammers can flood the platform with fake plays that reduces the payout from all the others.]

[Anyone can upload tracks to even verified pages for independent artists because there isn't much vetting on the distributor or platform side and the cost is almost negligible.]

[One dark practice is creating songs from royalty-free loops and setting the date as early as possible in order to block any usage of them via Content ID; this is also not vetted by distributors or streaming platforms.]

How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO

[It was fortuitous that we generally appealed to developers because we launched our plugin system to many power users who also could build new functionality for themselves and share them with the community.]

[The Obsidian team gets by with one meeting a year in part by having one or two goals at any time: this way, the focus is often clear and people can be self-motivated to push things forward.]

Ex-Google Officer Speaks Out On The Dangers Of AI!

[On our behalf, unelected Californians are making decisions about our collective future, justified through media and slogans.]

[Whereas having 50 extra IQ points in today's world makes a difference, a future where everyone can borrow 4000 will render everyone's baseline irrelevant, and therefore: 1. we are all effectively equal, and 2. we all become peasants to the 1% as the middle class vanishes.]

The Most Valuable Bit of Information You Wish You'd Known Sooner

[Forms of leverage to gain more output from your input: labour (from employed, to self-employed, to employing), media (made once, licensed infinitely), capital (no need to sacrifice time), technology (build once, many people use it); stack different forms together.]

The Money Expert: "Do Not Buy A House!"

[The same skills applied in a different market can yield more lucrative returns—try to be intentional about that.]

[When I'm feeling good, I show up. When I'm feeling bad, I still show up. That's the rep.]

[You can't judge someone by their reaction to a situation they've never experienced.]

Why You're Thinking About Unemployment Wrong

[The economy is what enables masses of people who don't know each other to coordinate and push the possibilities of society.]

[Prices are the language that businesses use to communicate to consumers.]

Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism

[In a material world, being poor goes beyond what you have to include being undervalued and therefore treated as negligible. The more equal people are in terms of what they have, the happier they will be.]

Scott Galloway: We’re Raising The Most Unhappy Generation In History! Hard Work Doesn't Build Wealth

[Information asymmetry benefits whoever has symmetry and knows the information. Bosses know how much everyone is getting paid but may discourage talking about salaries to avoid someone finding out their colleague makes 30% more for the same work.]

[Everyone you're ashamed to ask for fear of rejection will be dead. Willingness to take uncomfortable risks and endure rejection opens yourself up to outsized returns. Get out a spoon and eat shit.]

[Think of the emotions you want them to feel and practice it every day in your content storytelling.]

Why Labour and Trump will both fail

[Money is not a real resource like food or housing; it's used to determining the allocation of real resources.]

Surviving Crappy Markets 101

[Market downturns are more the norm than exception, yet bull market gains often make up for them in multiples.]

Trevor Noah: My Depression Was Linked To ADHD! Why I Left The Daily Show!

[Growing up in abusive households make you sensitive to your environment to the point where I knew by the sound of his footsteps whether or not my stepfather was coming home drunk.]

[You'll be surprised at how often your 'screw them' choice reflects something you perhaps need to be doing more of.]

CONSPIRACY

[Nudging people towards your conclusion while making them think they arrived there themselves will keep them resistant to questioning their basis for belief.]

[Conspiracism is more invested in the issues of specific leaders (bad satan worshippers) than the structure of power itself.]

[The face of Jesus and Mary may be commonly found on toast and fruit in Christian nations, wheras the name of Allah might be found on cantaloupe skins in Indonesia.]

['Is it possible that…' has a very low barrier for proof.]

[One function of the 'satanic ritual abuse' conspiracy is to deny that sexual violence is banal and that culture empowers men to do it.]

Who do you trust (when you don’t trust the news)?

[If manufacturers of cars bear some responsibility for your private vehicle's safety issues, as airplane manufacturers would if flights put people in danger, perhaps so should social media companies for presenting alternative realities that lead to real world catastrophes.]

Top five business lessons

[Clients don't value your effort or service as much as how it makes them feel or the possibilities it opens for them, so charge who's willing to pay for that.]

254: Language Transfer with Mihalis Eleftheriou

[We tend to teach by showing but that's not always what's most effective; dogs and cats do that too. Sometimes it's better to explain with words what is helpful for the learner.]

[We're already translating thoughts into language.]

[Xenophobia that occurs naturally as a brain resonse needs help and solutions more than ostracizing, and learning the foreign language can be super helpful there.]

Men & Grief

[All grief is one: like touching the ocean at any of the imaginary lines we've drawn, it's all one body of water.]

[When my partner senses that I'm holding back grief and invites me with a simple gesture like a hand on the shoulder, it's hard to meet them there but I try to anyway, because to say "no worries, everything's fine" would be to negate their good instincts for how I'm feeling.]

[I appreciate things that make me cry because they give me the chance to shed a few more of the tears repressed during childhood, when I had learned that doing so was dangerous.]

Erin Kissane leaving the internet

[Pretender technologies may only appear to be the next thing, without eventually changing anything, but they can function as a playspace to try possible futures.]

[If we want better networks, we must concretely understand what happened to us, and then use that knowledge to try new things deliberately, with painstaking attention to the human cost.]

How to Stand Up for Yourself

[When someone asks 'why' after you respond to their request with 'no, you can say "it's not what's best for me right now", "it's outside my focus right now", "I need to make another choice".]

How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

[When you feel the tightening up and defensiveness that comes with someone trying to 'prove' or 'persuade' their perspective, consider focusing on what question to ask so that you can learn something.]

[Feeling triggered is a prompt to understand what provoked it.]

Peanut butter soya cucumber salad

Ingredients

• 1 cucumber, sliced
• 2 tbsp peanut butter
• 1 splash of soya
• msg
• chilli crunch
• rice wine vinegar
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• sesame seeds
• sesame oil

Method

• Put everything in a container, then close and shake well to mix.

Poncianinho’s Vlog 8 “Other Side”

[The sun made me want to practice.]

Capoeira Podcast

[Advice should be like snow: the more gentle it falls, the longer it stays.]

The road to mastery 1 by Mestre Poncianinho

[Learn to be comfortable with getting motivated to work when you plateau and not give up.]

Let’s make homemade oat milk! 🥣🥛☕️

Ingredients

• 1 cup rolled oats
• 6 cups water
• 1 pinch salt

Method

• Blend everything together and strain with a tea filter.

Many tools make a good toolbox.

[Small talk is a test to see how people respond to meaningless things and determine whether it's worth bringing up more serious things.]

Pickled Onions

Ingredients

• red onions, sliced and packed in a jar
• ½ jar water
• ½ jar vinegar
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• spices to toast

Method

• Bring the liquid, sugar, and salt to a boil and pour back into the jar. Top with the spices, shake, and refrigerate overnight.

If we were compatible, we’d know exactly what the other person meant all the time, right?

[Language is primarily for internal use to construct our own worldviews, rather than a tool for communication with others.]

The boundaries between self-love and other-love are much blurrier and more dilectical than we’re taught to think…

[What does it mean to feel disgust at bodies similar to yours?]

[Trying something to decide whether you like it or gives you perspective rather than putting you in a box.]

I was taught something, so now i know it, right?

[Nothing can be taught, there is only learning.]

[Having read about a topic or participated in a workshop does not mean knowing it, which is painfully obvious in the trades.]

Let's talk about keeping your community network going....

[Cross train your community network on manuals by letting each person pick a specific part to master and then teaching it to the group.]

[Keep things interesting by meeting up without a specific plan, deciding something fun together, and getting to it right away from there.]

[Build a network resource together through labour or by chipping in funds.]

Other People as Crutches

[Perhaps obsession with individualism shames us if we are 'less disciplined' when 'alone', while blinding us to how functional it is to live your best through other people.]

Let's talk about a rabbit hole with foreign policy....

[Foreign policy supports domestic policy, so changing the former starts with deep systemic change in the latter.]

Exploits of Play: The Cheating Other

When the masses laugh, the powerful quake.

Let's talk about how to change the world (Part 2)....

[Older people who consider themselves unable to contribute due to physical impairments have decades of life experience and can often offer advice to simplify or streamline the more intense work.]

[Having events where people can help can signal being more active than having meetings where people talk, and will attract doers.]

Let's talk about how to change the world....

[Bring independent means having a network, and having a choice about how things get done rather than doing everything yourself.]

John Cleese vs Extremism

[Extremism lets you pretend that all badness is in your enemies while all goodness is in you.]

On Storytelling

[Find shared language by replacing 'true statements' with words that convey the emotional experience around your solution.]

[Finding ways to solve multiple issues simultaneously helps tell a stronger story than a list of bug fixes or closed issues: try to holistically answer 'what actually happened?']

What is Success?

[Community is about helping each other, rather than having similar interests or agreements or approaches.]

Don't Fuck It Up!

[Randomize your MAC address often.]

[Tor is for anonymity, not encryption: you need to configure it to avoid sending unencrypted data.]

The Economics of Programming Languages

[People expect the same project execution from a single-person as with a company without the 'traffic and acquisition' money that often finances such development.]

[Businesses who commercialize other open source projects save the cost of developing them, whereas authors who try to commercialize their own projects will be out competed by any entity with more resources.]

"The Open Source Way" is for businesses.

Let's talk about books to read....

[Types of books you might want to read: 1. a religious text (other than your own if you have one); 2. the perspective of any subculture; 3. making the monster human; 4. a political ideology; 5. your childhood hero or strongest memory memory; 6. the hero of your enemy; 7. favourable about someone you don't like; 8. critical of war; 9. critical of your heroes; 10. about ancient or indigenous peoples (if they were oral, imagine what might have gotten lost by writing); 11. a distopia; 12. about a character you can't relate to at all.]

Literature exposes you to things you wouldn't experience in real life.

Yancey Strickler on Metalabel and Post-Individualism

[Revolutions inspired by Catholic church forbidding intra-family marriage gave rise to cities, universities, guilds as ways for people related by blood to meet eachother.]

how to disagree better

[Disagree without getting them defensive with phrases like "I see it differently", "I have a different way of getting there", and "I lean towards the opposite".]

Fascism, Beauty and Truth

[Having to argue for equality reveals that the situation is already failed.]

[If that's the best you've got, I can see why you're so eager to use it.]

[There's a difference between agreeing and choosing agreement as your 'move' in a specific context.]

Super glue with baking soda

[Combine baking soda with glue to strengthen the bonding.]

Let's talk about what a concept of Japanese art can teach us about masculinity....

[Masculinity embodies effortless perfection, and a giveaway that someone's pretending is to see them trying.]

Let's talk about 1916, 1984, thought, and rebellion....

[Anything that can be taught by a meme can be countered by one.]

Let's talk about what happens "if you don't get an education"....

[Don't confuse credentials with education.]

['Representatives' should also have something in common with you.]

How Jacob Collier Reinvented The Guitar

[Being uncertain and curious is a more interesting place for me than knowing what I'm doing.]

[More important than recognizing the name or function of the notes played, I have an awareness of their emotional properties and how they will pull the listener into specific spaces.]

[It's popular and valid to recreate and enjoy something you heard before; try to be clear when you want that versus something new.]

[Rather than have a disciplined practice regime, I find myself in specific and tsrgeted moments of deep exploration.]

[One of the best gifts you can give to an audience is to fumble, because it's an invitation for them to join you at the edge of your own exploration where mist of the interesting stuff is. Music isn't really that serious.]

---

A master with the humility to learn on camera.

How to take smart notes

[Easier to write a few notes per day than one manuscript page per day.]

[Ideas don't mingle in an archive: let them play together.]

[The skill of independent research is determining what is the most important task at any moment; following a plan prevents you from learning this.]

---

Archiving ideas, even if you write them in your own words, doesn't prompt making connections.

So many of us throw out orange peels..

[Turn orange peels into an insect repellent for your body or plants by boiling and cooling, then strain the liquid into a spray bottle.]

[Or peel the orange part of the peel, rinse with cold water, blend, then mix with a teaspoon of baking soda and water into a paste for a natural teeth whitener you can brush with weekly.]

[Chop them up and use as fertilizer.]

How to get rid of a pimple fast!

[Make an overnight pimple treatment by combining one teaspoon of baking soda and honey with two of apple cider vinegar, then mix into a paste.]

Spinach powder!

[Turn a bag of baby spinach into powder by dehydrating at 125°F until crispy and dry before grinding.]

Let's talk about toxic masculinity and men's movements....

[Glorification of violence convinces stupid people to fight in wars of a state.]

Identity | Language | Knowledge

[When we're starved for deeply meaningful experiences, it becomes easy to counterfeit consciousness and sell us a shell of it.]

[Most of what exists is likely unknowable.]

[Religion and science collapse the super-container into incomplete representations.]

[The world is fundamentally one being first, unless we separate it into distinctions. Therefore if we destroy it we're destroying ourselves.]

Hank Green Unpacks YouTube's Biggest Problems

[There was a period when books were considered dangerous because we didn't have the social structures to deal with everyone having access. We're currently in the messy equivalent with video.]

Let’s expand the discourse about Empire

[America is a business.]

Genius way to clean carpets / couches!

[Make a natural carpet cleaner with baking soda, dish soap, 2 cups of vinegar, 1 teaspoon of salt, and some fresh lemon juice; mix until foamy. Dip in and squeeze a towel, then wrap a saucepan lid to use as leverage before scrubbing.]

Brad Mehldau: The Greatest Jazz Pianist of Our Generation

[Written chord changes are an expedient way to quickly coordinate playing together, but they lack precision to specify things like voice-leading, even from more popular songs like Blackbird.]

[I like to add a note to so-called 'stock voicings' for crunch.]

[The intellectual aspect of improvising happens as you make sense of music. What happens in real-time while playing is a natural reflexive response based on everything you've learned.]

[Can you tell the same story with just two notes?]

---

fluid switches between discussion and piano playing

Why Can't We Make Simple Software?

[Complexity is an inevitable result of internals interacting with themselves, and can't be solved by tools.]

[Starting over will not avoid complexity, but can reset the clock to give you some breathing room.]

Is it funny, or is it hurtful and ppl are laughing to defuse the tension?

[Just like tickling, pseudo-comedy evokes laughter as listeners relieve discomfort and misinterprets their response as enjoyment.]

What’s your role in creating true systemic change?

[If you call yourself an ally to certain people and aren't getting hit by the stones thrown at them, you're not standing close enough.]

[Healing without allyship is spiritual bypassing and privilege. Protesting and organizing without healing will undermine the efforts you support. Protest without litigation becomes self-serving, and litigation without protest lacks teeth. Critique without counter-growth creates burnout. Building systems without addressing the ugliness of the current one is detached.

3.5% of the population can shift the entire political reality of a nation.

[Protests spark a sense of possibility and can easily bring newcomers to want more.]