Rahul GaitondeThe USA abolitionst Frederick Douglass used rhetoric effectively to lionise his contemporary John Brown:
“His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light, his was as the burning sun. Mine was bounded by time. His stretched away to the silent shores of eternity. I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave. I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for the slave.”
A few weeks ago I created a custom, ‘paper size’ to print PDFs of articles on the web. The paper had the dimensions of a mobile screen instead of an A4 sheet.
The results are striking. The same article appears very differently on each paper size. Left is A4, right is my custom size.
Here’s how I calculated the dimensions of the paper in cm based on screen size in pixels.
And here’s how I select the custom paper size when printing
It’s one of those things I should have done years ago.
The biggest lesson for me among all this was–and this may sound ‘woo-woo’: seeing a structured day, a quiet cup of coffee, or a workout not as a task but as something to relish.
Reminds me of my own experience with watering my plants I wrote of over three years ago:
But it’s the daily maintenance — watering, rotating, trimming, spraying — that takes up most of my time. I scheduled this during my mornings, multitasking while getting ready for the work day…
.. Because I was distracted and hurried, I poured water from a tumbler into my pots instead of sprinkling it, causing the characteristic depression you see around stems.
… I quickly asked myself if tending to my plants was something I liked doing, or if it was the end result, healthy balcony gardens, that I was interested in. If it was the latter, I’d be better off delegating daily maintenance to someone. But I did like the process. More than the outcome, in fact….
… Doing this consciously [now] has changed not just the plants’ health but my relationship with them. The garden is exactly the same but it is now a small source of joy and curiosity, instead of of irritation and anxiety.
The slightly more troubling answer is that even though the world is not fundamentally in worse shape in 2023 than in 1993, we know so much more about it, and see so much more of its irredeemable ugliness, it just takes a lot more work to maintain worldly-yet-carefree attitude…
The third and most troubling answer is that the world has _actually _slipped out of our grasp and into an ungovernable downward trajectory. That it’s not just that we hear more of the bad news, but that there _is _more bad news. And our growing collective agency is no longer staying comfortably ahead of our growing collective problems.
If humour is one lens though which we see our world more clearly, the corrective power required of that lens seems to have grown substantially over this last generation.
Humans certainly are not feeling very incentivized to share. Look around you, and you can see creators are reevaluating how their content is used to train AI models. Whether it is Hollywood writers, comedians, or musicians — everyone is waking up to the idea of what can and should be put online. “Artists who feel their work was scraped by AI without credit or compensation are seeking recourse.”
Where does fresh content come from in the future? Will we even be incentivized to create something new? Or all future AI refinements be based on erroneous pseudo-babble on social networks like Twitter and Reddit?
Google did end up indexing most of the web. But its search engine doesn’t keep people on Google properties; it (ostensibly) pushes them away to the websites in search results. Google search’s business model is aligned with the interest of people that give it its input. That’s why people want their sites to be indexed by Google, and why the SEO industry has been so long-lived.
Today’s generative AI tools give nothing back to the people whose information they’ve indexed and made available via their large language model. A ChatGPT conversation could pull info from dozens of website posts and articles and credit none of them.
That’ll need to be solved for new, fresh, innovative information to flow in for AIs to process.
Not all open source projects achieve the famed positive flywheel; it takes decades, and most will fail in the process. The ones that reach exit velocity, though, become part of the fabric of civilization. At that point, it makes more sense to build on top of them rather than recreate the wheel.
Open source projects are by their nature more resilient, long-lasting and neutral than closed ‘service’ centric software. The incentives that influence their roadmap are very different from more commercial software. The outcomes they optimise for are often more narrow and more long-term than those built by tech companies.
And so open source projects that cross some sort of threshold (longevity? contributors? users? I’m not sure) end up being embedded in the machinery of the internet.
Mindfulness works for me more than any other method.
My practice of mindfulness is simply observing one’s own breathing. There is no counting, no attempt to breath deeply, no holding one’s breath. The only attempt is to observe this essential function, breathing, at its own pace, for the duration of the meditation session. That is it.
In the beginning this will likely be hard to do beyond a couple of seconds, since the mind wanders. Often for over a minute. Whenever one does realise it has wandered, the idea is to simply revert to observing one’s breathing.
There is no judgement of oneself and an acknowledgment of the inevitability of distraction. This simple nonjudgmental approach helped me build a better relationship with myself.
There will likely be feelings of anxiety too. Sometimes they are because one is not used to this level of passiveness. Sometimes they are because of the thoughts that occur when the mind wanders. Sometimes they are because the self is uncomfortable observing itself, causing tension/stiffer breathing, which also the self observes, which creates a vicious loop. At that point, I open my eyes, continue taking a few breaths, then resume.
What eventually happens is the self learns to take things at their own pace – one second per second – this is when thoughts calm down. The first time I observed a totally silent mind was a wonderful moment. Only to have it instantly broken. Even today, it is near impossible to both notice and persist with a silent mind. But over time, during meditation, mental chatter dies down to a low murmur more quickly than at the beginning of the practice. Moments of silence come and go. And at the end of the session one is both more calm, physiologically, and more equanimous, with what is bothering oneself. That also makes one feel more empowered, which improves equanimity, and it is now a positive feedback loop that extends beyond the session.
One can extend the meditation practice by observing a particular point of physical tension or pain in one’s body, instead of one’s breath. The idea is not mysteriously resolve or heal it, but to see it for what it is, instead of being bothered by it and thinking about how one will tackle it. Sometimes the act of calmly observing tension does relax it.
In any case, observing one’s breathing provides a natural rhythm.
When beginning mindfulness, twenty minutes may seem much too long. The first few days, one could try five or six sessions of one minute each, spaced a few minutes apart. It’ll take twenty minutes end to end but each time one will only observe for one minute at a time. Extend to two, five minutes and further.
Mindfulness is something I strove to maintain through the depths of depression and treatment through most of the 2010s. Even so, during periods of acute distress or physical pain, mindfulness may not be possible. I skip instead of pushing through. The observation of breath may be passive, but the process itself is very much active. Pushing oneself further during periods of stress may not be beneficial.
However passive, mindfulness is a workout. Like maintaining a plank position or standing on a balance board, stillness doesn’t imply relaxation. The point is to train one’s mind to experience just being, at the natural pace of time. ★
The NYT in Jan this year on a niche trend of using digital cameras from the 2000s instead of one’s phone:
“When I look back at my digital photos” — from his actual camera — “I have very specific memories attached to them,” Mr. Sondhi said. “When I go through the camera roll on my phone, I sort of remember the moment and it’s not special.”
“People are realizing it’s fun to have something not attached to their phone,” said Mark Hunter, a photographer also known as the Cobrasnake. “You’re getting a different result than you’re used to. There’s a bit of delay in gratification.”
I’m sure you’ve noticed this too. Clicking pictures with one’s phone takes a few seconds each. But right after, you spend minutes editing every one and sharing them with the right caption. Not to mention reading and responding to notifications on those photos. It’s easy to lose the moment.
I’ve never had a high end DSLR camera, but on a trip to a national bird sanctuary a few months ago I broke out my old Sony HX-9V digital camera after several years. It had a much better optical zoom than my iPhone and conserved my phone’s battery:
Digital cameras are probably a sane middle ground between the film cameras of old and the connected phone cameras of today. I hope they stay.
On the indecision of quitting one’s job:
That was the paralyzing thing for me, just like in the toxic romantic relationships I found myself stuck in years ago. It was the familiarity of that pain, stress, and sadness that I wanted to hold onto. There’s a certain kind of masochism when you stick around in a shitty job or a shitty relationship, there’s this belief that you don’t _deserve_ any better than what you’ve got.
Been here, more than once. If you identify with this, the right answer is to leave.
In our current era the term quit has been given a bad reputation, and it’s challenging but necessary to look past this.
Because if you spend enough time in an unsatisfying situation at work, and it bleeds into the rest of your life, you’ll find it difficult to even imagine a more fulfilling life even as you scroll and watch and read about people living those very lives. Your mind dissociates that kind of life from your current existence, as though they are two parallel realities with no possible connection between them.
And that is no way to live.
When I saw this photo from the 2023 WWDC it struck me that Apple now has a balanced Everyday and Professional Mac lineup, for the first time in a long time.
Regardless of the arrangement of the machines above,
Everyday Macs:
Professional Macs:
I hope Apple keeps this balance going for a few years. This does seem like a good set of choices. In some ways it harks back to Steve Jobs’ simple 2 x 2 chart of ‘consumer’ and ‘pro’ Mac lines in the late 1990s:
