In my last newsletter, I talked about seasonal playlists playlist. Pair that with the Commonplace Book Club from the Noted Substack and you get this habit of collecting tiny details. I’ve kept a continuous journal habit for over a decade and love to collect quotes, song lists, moments, stickers, and so much more.
“Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later.”
— Kevin Kelly
Margin and buffer
Margin, ownership, and boundaries
Buffer is making sure there is overflow. It’s like redundancy, although it doesn’t have to be necessarily overflow.
Margin is more about the bandwidth. You give yourself enough to recover from. Buffer is for stock. Margin is the space you make mentally, although the definition is typically around the edge of a boundary.
Latticework is a system that unifies annotation and freeform text editing for augmented sensemaking. It allows users to fluidly move between “foraging” through source documents and “sensemaking” in a working document, with interchangeable highlights, copied snippets, marginalia, and textual elaborations. Latticework uses a pane-based layout with bidirectional navigation and previews to help combat disorientation, and provides collapsible snippet links to manage working memory overload.
Adjust your voice: Take a deep breath or two to drop your voice down from the squeak of social anxiety to its normal, wonderful, natural register. Your voice doesn’t start in your head, as we might imagine, it starts down between your gut and your heart with the pull of your diaphragm.
Adjust your body language: Roll your shoulders back to pull your frame upwards and raise your gaze. This will shift your posture from the shape of a question mark to an upside-down exclamation point. You want to your spine look like (¡) not (?).
Relax your face: Relax your face. You don’t have to smile if your mood doesn’t match it—a fake smile erodes trust—instead, just relax away your leftover facial tensions so you don’t accidentally send an expression of hate or worry or disdain to a person you haven’t yet met.
Start adjusting before you speak: “Hello” happens long before you speak. We can tell from across the room when a salutation might soon occur. Start your hello adjustments (mind, body, voice, attention) sooner than later. A challenge: can you walk into the room already adjusted?
Speak with curiosity: You can uncover something interesting about nearly anyone if you converse with curiosity instead of apathy, greed, mistrust, or resignation.
Respond with an “I believe” statement: If someone asks you “what do you do?” resist the temptation to respond with your job title. Instead, respond with an “I believe” statement. Example:
“So, Jim, What do you do?”
” I believe story, art, and design can bend the arc of humanity’s progress, and I try to bring that into everything I do: from movies to startups to paintings to books and to ballets.”
Make eye contact: When you greet someone, look at the other person’s eyes. Do not look at their feet or your feet or the ceiling or the person behind them or your phone or your watch or your elbow or anywhere else. Eyes to Eyes.
Ask questions and listen: After you introduce yourself, ask a question. Listen to their response carefully and ask a question that allows them to develop their idea further. You already know your own ideas, so why not focus on theirs? The conversation will be more fun if you uncover interesting ideas hidden behind the foreheads of others.
Remember details for next time: Once someone does tell you something, store it away in your mind for the next time you meet. When you see that person again… a day, a week, a year from now… bring it up—so how was that trip to Spain? I remember it sounded wonderful… And weren’t you about to do something interesting at your Tunnel Drilling Startup?
Costco has hacked the psyche of the American consumer, appealing to both the responsible-shopping superego (“Twelve cans of tuna for $18!”) and the buy-it-now id (“I deserve that 98-inch flat screen”).
Ostensibly, Costco is a discount store, a place to save money and stretch your grocery dollar, but it is also an aspirational shopping experience, feeding that most American of appetites: conspicuous consumption.
Costco is revered for its high wages, attentive customer service and “deep commitment to integrity,” said Jeremy Smith, the president of Launchpad, an Oregon-based food brand incubator that specializes in placing products at Costco.
Over the past weekend, I went to !!Con 2024 in UC Santa Cruz. I always feel each talk, while 10 minutes, has. a lot to digest. I decided to pick back up my pen and paper journal, the Lecturrum 1910 and Uniball pen. The end of these niche conferences signals a sadness inside, and I hope to fill that void with something else beautiful. Also noted, this was the same week XOXO held its last conference.
I’m fairly late this week when it comes to going through the notes from the previous week. Labor day came and went, and I wanted to focus on other things beyond the computer work.
Around the technosphere
DIY Methods 2024 - A Mostly Screen-Free, Zine-Full, Remote-Participation Conference on Experimental Methods for Research and Research Exchange
I read through Hypermedia Systems in two sittings, and found the approach of htmx to be an interesting update to the earlier web days. While it doesn’t lean fully into Jeremy Keith’s idea of progressive enhancement, it lends itself towards that goal.
From the Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, they had on Jill Lapore who is a historian and professor at Harvard. She mentioned how political conventions in the 19th and early 20th century looked a lot different. They would pick candidates by rallying others to vote on their candidate of choice. And the chosen candidate didn’t make appearances. It wasn’t until FDR that changed
This was in the 70s, and also this to a Trump campaigner now that RFK jr has officially endorsed him
The candidate you’re campaigning for, in whose administration you apparently intend to serve, wants our laws rewritten so that drug dealers, particularly those who sell narcotics, face capital punishment. Given that you sold cocaine in your youth, how do you feel about his advocacy of a regime that might have resulted in your own execution at age 19?
I’ve been a fan of making seasonal music playlists for more than a decade. I started in iTunes, making new music and fitting them into playlists for road trips on my iPod. Looking back, these playlists feel like a snapshot of my life and where I was. It evokes specific memories of who I was with and where I felt I was at that time of my life.
There was this time when my friend Teagan and I were road-tripping through the coast of the Pacific Northwest while listening to a song Moby made as part of NPR’s “Project Music” called Gone to Sleep. While on the narrow highway amidst windy roads cliffside, as well as the void of light through the redwood forests during the nighttime, I had an eerie, yet hopeful mood. There’s a video game called Pacific Drive that I haven’t played, but I must wonder if it captures a similar mood in its soundtrack.
In the late 90’s at the supermarket checkout aisle, I remember looking at the back cover of “Now That’s What I Call Music” compilation CDs. The curator took the billboard’s top 20 list and burned them onto a CD. I remember challenging myself to make a more personal CD for the music I was listening to and started ripping them and putting them into my CD player. It was always a challenge trying to fit the 70-minute form factor. The result was always a mishmash of the music I was listening to at the time. Whether it was rediscovering rock bands of the 70s, or new pop hits, it all got smashed together unordered. And inevitably, I would hit skip on songs I knew didn’t fit after the 10th listen-through.
Much later, I found myself in the Metafilter community where I would participate in a seasonal CD swap. An organizer would connect a small group and you. Each swap had a catchy title, usually alluding to a song, like “Swap Me Maybe”, “The Songbird Swap”, and “Swap Battle”. I loved taking a walk with my music player and strolling to someone else’s curation. As one of those people who have said “I listen to a little of everything”, the eclectic range appealed to me. It might have been a warm surprise from Ray LaMontagne, or an electronica beat of Phantogram.
I feel like the tides changed when I converted to a streaming service. I know the argument sounds like a broken record about not owning a physical copy of the music. Beyond that, the playlists that have been curated for me don’t feel as personal as receiving a mixtape cassette. The Algorithm supposedly knows my tastes and creates a warm echo chamber of what’s come before. But if I’ve learned anything from different music eras, disruption is required to challenge the listener. We need Stravinky’s The Rite of Spring to drive into our brains atonality. Or Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica to challenge our ears with discordant rhythms and motifs. I would like to think the Algorithm works by keeping you in the echo chamber long enough that everything starts to sound the same, and the potential for a playlist to be great becomes mediocre.
With the advent of short video platforms like TikTok, Vine (RIP), Instagram Reels, Snapchat, and so many others, the music that plays along is the sound bites. You can’t fit an album into that form factor, and the music industry has transformed with it. Add to that the oddly structured price per stream and you get a mix of more singles that can hit viral numbers. I’m not interested in dissecting if that’s good or bad for the industry. I’m more interested in how that affects my personal music listening habits. The streaming giants have created music ecosystems around machine-learned playlist creations based on what is similar and viral, and rewarding those who have figured that formula out with the biggest payouts. All of this said, this also feeds into the Algorithm’s playlist selection.
With our current modes of listening to playlists, I have to wonder, where can I fit my voice in playlist curation? I haven’t changed my habit of making seasonal playlists, but the ways I discover music have.
There’s an idealized version of the playlist creation process I have in mind. I would take the time to listen to dozens of albums end to end and pick and choose the handfuls of songs that have resonated with me. But more and more, the Algorithm prevails. I try hard to go with a select few curators who have great tastes. Or radio stations that still employ DJs to spin their favorite tunes.
My friend D and I created an end-of-year playlist that has rules. The songs chosen must have been released that year, is something we find has resonated most with us that year and must fit on a 70-minute CD. It mixes what I felt in those seasonal playlists and puts my thinking cap on what is worthwhile to include. Since space is limited, you can’t put all of the year’s hits. I find creativity in these constraints and mindfully listen to that playlist over and over until it feels right. That’s what I think makes a great curated mixtape. And it gets to be saved and listened to whenever, like a few months from now, or listened to a decade later as a retrospective. Let’s bring back the era of mixtapes.
Last week, I finished Burn Book, which I ahem burned through. I found myself wanting to read faster when I borrow the book from the library. Shout out to Libby! The book introduced me to a play from Spalding Gray called “Interviewing the Audience” that I would love to watch a recording of, if they exist.
Ultimately, we want to maximize quality time spent reading long-form documents, not substitute for it.
Daniel Doyon, Readwise July 2024 Updates
Do The Hard Work That’s Required - AI is not a shortcut. Do the reading. Do the things required. Don’t think that AI will just make something great.
AI tools should help you do the hard work that’s required to make something great; AI tools should not replace the hard work that’s required to make something great.
Harvesting problems have straightforward solutions and no shortcuts: You just get a big basket and pick every damn strawberry in the field. You solve these problems with pure perseverance, slogging away for weeks, months, or years until they are done.
Some problems are like fishing. You know that there are fish out there in the ocean, but you don’t know exactly where. If a great fisherman knows where the hungriest fish are and how to set their lines just right, they might catch everything that they need in a few hours. Fishing problems can sometimes be solved shockingly fast by motivated teams with a bit of luck.
Some problems are like panning for gold - going out to a river or stream where there might be gold, getting your pan out, and seeing if you can find traces of the shiny stuff in the sediment. If you find gold, you can become generationally successful - think of the massive moats created by Google Search or the AirBnB network.
Select | Dasel - CLI tool for selecting and updating JSON, CSV, and other one file data files
I feel like creating a page that collects these book collections.
Around the World
Collab Fund - Fill The Bathtub - With all of the BS we are fed today, we want to get the facts and for politicians to tell it straight. Hence the term, “Fill the Bathtub”.
I was listening to the Good Food podcast, and I am frankly appalled there’s a scalping market for restaurants. But of course, it’s not a black and white issue. But still, this shouldn’t be the case.
If you haven’t heard, Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain died within. a week of each other after both being acquitted from fraud charges. The coincidence is telling but also tragic.
Each entry on this list of common misconceptions is worded as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. These entries are concise summaries; the main subject articles can be consulted for more detail.
Meredith Arthur in Beautiful Voyager presents a three part series on “The Ultimate Stress Relief Cheat Sheet”
it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
This is about squeezing out the competition until you’ve become the big monopoly, then you are the only place consumers can go to as your product degrades while raking in money.
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.
If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go. That’s terminal enshittification.
Capitalism can be warped as a way for making valuable products for users.
On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.
Levees against enshittification
There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses:
Competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.
Regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.
The next two are more tech-specific
Self-help. Computers are extremely flexible and so are the digital products and services we make from them
That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company’s shareholders
Workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn’t mean that tech workers don’t have labour power. The historical “talent shortage” of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another, better job. (View Highlight)
What drives each of these forces to making better products, and companies, is a higher mission.
Mottos matter in terms of hammering a sense of mission.
Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”
Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected”
Erosion
One by one, each of these constraints was eroded, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.
Regulatory wins like GDPR pushed out small EU ad-tech companies because of their invasiveness. That said, when Big Tech runs through adversarial interoperability, it’s “progress”. If you do it, it’s “piracy”. And if you try to make an alternative (like Facebook), you get slapped with a DMCA violation or Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive.
When you have a walled garden, like your own app, you can no longer run ad blockers.
adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony.
Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”. >> Source Needed. Probably here: Table of Contents - Jay Freeman (saurik)
Reversing Enshittification
We must restore the four constraints that prevent enshittification.
Example:
Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has run more than 80 pieces trashing Khan, insisting that she’s an ineffectual ideologue who can’t get anything done. Sure, that’s why you ran 80 editorials about her. Because she can’t get anything done.
Enshittification is not the same as Capitalism.
The cynics among you might be sceptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn’t “enshittification” the same as “capitalism”? Well, no. (View Highlight)
“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
While laws can’t undo companies from reversing enshittification, but it might make them see you more as a human. And maybe push their platform back in the right direction. (Either that, or just better off and die).
Josh Cunningham wrote a piece called Imagining a Personal Data Pipeline. I started exploring his project, pdpl-cli, which helps you download your personal data and pipe it out to your desired output. I’ve been thinking extensively about this problem for a number of weeks now since I’ve exported my Google Contacts into Obsidian. However, with the lack of database support, I thought about self hosting it. Enter the Personal Data Pipeline.
Overview of the data pipeline
It’s essentially ETL jobs with integrations to third party services to “recipes” that you can write in yaml and customize to your desired outputs. I think this helps a lot more than determining data schemas for specific third party data integrations and having the raw data in a personal data lake. (Or really maybe a document store).
The idea is to have it local-first and maybe include a sync-thing or cloud syncing as an optional add-on. There’s an emphasis on privacy, although my bigger fear is vendor lock-in. I’ve become so reliant on Google, Apple, and other services that I don’t feel like I own my personal data anymore. Also, as a web developer, the hardest part is grabbing my own data from the sticky hands of these cloud services. Also, this emphasis on files over apps makes a lot more sense to me than the walled garden approach we’ve become accustomed to.
This week marked a transition with my PKM where I made huge updates to my vault thanks to the Ideaverse v1.5 migration.
I’m slowly migrating away from the PARA flow, although it will be a long time until resources and archive are going to be migrated
A huge lift is thanks to some script automation that Claude has been helping with. Many scripts are going to be saved and added to my magic sand repo.
Currently Reading: Burn Book, by Kara Swisher. If you live in Silicon Valley and have wanted to know inside baseball with the elite who are in the area or are influencing the area, this is the book to read.
The UK sent out a decree in the 1850s that stated protein is the only nutrition that matters affected the landscape of what Britain’s ate. The slaughter of animals meant that there was a huge push to try to transport livestock to the cities transitioning to dead stock, this is had a crazy amount of effect. No one anticipated these early globalization efforts.
Nate Irwin’s team made the first digital National Park Service maps. We sat down to understand how they transformed the visitor experience one map at a time.
Do Quests, Not Goals - We should pursue “quests” rather than “goals”. Quests are personal adventures that change us, while goals are just practical attempts to change our circumstances. Quests involve overcoming internal obstacles (“dragons”) and lead to personal growth and life-expanding rewards.
Intel’s financial results were very poor, with declining revenue, margins, and earnings.
Intel is planning significant job cuts to reduce costs.
Intel’s turnaround plans are still in the early stages and have not yet shown significant results.
Intel’s failure to diversify beyond its core x86 processor business is seen as the root cause of its decline.
My Failed Personal Site Redesign - Jim Nielsen’s Blog - Jim Nielsen describes his failed attempt at redesigning his personal website. He was inspired by the comic-book style of Anh’s website and the large “DAVE” hero text on Dave’s homepage. He went through several iterations of the redesign, experimenting with hand-drawn comic strips and different layout approaches. However, he never got the design to a point where he was fully satisfied, especially on mobile.
Ultimately, he decided not to ship the new design and instead kept his existing website. But he archived the work he did as a blog post for posterity.
The first Fitbit was designed for women, with a clip-on form factor that could be worn discreetly on a bra. The founders faced challenges in developing the step-counting algorithms and manufacturing the device, but the first Fitbit shipped in 2009.
Locality of Behaviour is the principle that the behaviour of a unit of code should be as obvious as possible by looking only at that unit of code.
— Carson Gross on talking about htmx
A new version of Ideaverse Pro came out and I spent the weekend configuring it. It’s up now, and I’m getting used to having my setup change. While there’s the obvious changes, like the new theme, there’s more subtle changes, as treating some maps as collections.
SQLite actually has a CSV mode, and in-memory mode. And then it also will take queries directly from the the command line, so you don’t have to go into like little SQLite UI, and do things from there.
React Conf 2024 made me realize that the Apple Event Summary Slides are called “Bento Slides”. I updated the note to reflect that.
This summer ramped up slowly, then became scorching. And that comes with a fire watch warning. 90F/32C isn’t what I would call ideal, especially in dry heat. And a high of 129F at Death Valley is enough to make one wonder. We held a family and friends BBQ earlier this month that was well attended. Even with setting up a canopy for our guests, it remained hot to be around the yard.
Around The Blog
I’ve re-written the home page and mainpages of the website. It has more of a feed form factor plus pagination. Also, updated content is now fed back to the top. This helps re-surface curation posts and project updates.
Interwebs Highlights
I liked the new format I started last month of sharing 2 or 3 things I read over the past month, so I’m going to continue having that in the newsletter. Here are two things that have resonated with me.
The True Story of Hushpuppies, a Genuine Carolina Treat by Robert F. Moss. It started with a general curiosity if Confederate soldiers had come up with Hushpuppies, and once you’re in the rabbit hole, you come out understanding the lore.
Consulting Firms Are the Early Winners of the AI Boom. There’s an analogy floating around that you can compare AI to the Internet boom of the 90s. Except there are major differences, mainly cost. Training an AI model takes a lot of compute time, and getting to the next step takes Trillions of dollars. And with that investment, it’s not a given there will be a major difference between the current model and the next one. These consulting firms are selling slightly better workflows, but organizations aren’t getting the 10x delivery they were promised.
Currently Reading
I’ve started reading Frostbite by Nicola Twilley, and it satisfies my curiosity. For example, large refrigeration warehouses is a cryosphere. Many people who start working in it quit before the end of the day due to the cold. And those who do stick it out get all sorts of sicknesses before their body acclimates.
That’s all I have for this month. Stay cool out there, and watch some Olympic sports.
This week has been quieter than other weeks. I’ve been doing less reading, fewer news articles, and honing in on more deep reading. I’m still enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3 with my wife. We have not been tuned in to House of the Dragon’s latest season. And somehow I have not been sucked into the spoiler zone either.
Knowledge Management is usually a core component of organizational learning.
Knowledge Management at Goddard is About People
Knowledge Management is “better application of collective knowledge to the individual problem. So we need to develop some systems and do a little more work to share collective knowledge and make us smarter.”
Social Media Can Enhance Learning (but relationships matter) > Learning in Public is Hard, but Worth It. If you share what you know and what you don’t know in the middle of a project, you give people an opportunity to share specific knowledge that can help you in the moment. If it works, this can help save time and money.
I’ve certainly been in this trap before. I still think about what I want to build vs. trying to sell that idea first
The only way to get a true signal in these conversations is to sell. By asking for money you shift from the niceties of a social conversation to an economic conversation, which activates a part of the brain in buyers that you care about: whether or not they will part ways with their money to use your product.
There are three types of closure that are key to understanding emergent phenomena in complex systems
Informational closure: The lower-level details do not provide any additional information for predicting the behavior at the macro level.
Causal closure: The macro level is self-contained in terms of causation - the lower-level details do not provide any additional control over the future behavior at the macro scale.
Computational closure: The different levels of the system are hierarchically organized, with each level being a coarse-grained representation of the level below it. This nested structure allows the macro-level behavior to be predicted using only information at that level.
New research suggests the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus behind an ongoing bird flu outbreak has the unprecedented ability for efficient and sustained mammal-to-mammal transmission.
The implications for this is huge! Potential mutations arise out of that could result in adaptation to mammals, spillover into humans, and potential efficient transmission in humans in the future!
David Perell interviews Harry Dry about copywriting. Harry’s website Marketing Examples is a trove of interesting copywriting to entice your customers.
Typst is “a new markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn.”
Screenshot of rendering Fibonacci Sequence using Typst
It seems very interesting as an alternative to LaTeX. A lot of emphasis on typesetting. I haven’t gotten the chance to work with LaTeX, so I’d be curious if jumping over that and learning this might be a good alternative. Plus, it has a multiplayer feature built.
It’s been a season since the last now post. Besides getting married, I’ve also went on a honeymoon, got COVID, and now re-settling back into my normal routine. This website got changed quite a bit again where the home page is now a feed. I’m still thinking through what I want it to ultimately look like, and you may see more changes soon.
Walking away from the altar
The week notes have been keeping me fresh with new ideas of what will be in store for the future.
Much of my time has been dedicated to playing Baldur’s Gate 3 with my wife. We haven’t played a lot of D&D, so there’s been a learning curve to the possibilities with this game. The world building is very rich.
Poster for Baldur's Gate 3
I’ve been meaning to write in Camp NaNoWriMo, but it’s been hard with the little downtime that I appear to have.
If I review my week notes, it looks like AI, obituaries, productivity tools, and tech have really taken my attention. I’ve been meaning to cut out the dopamine-filled addictions like social media doomscrolling and replacing it with reading. It always feels like an assault on my senses, especially with the current political upheavals the US has been facing.
