The Blog Archive

Jason Fried of Elon Musk, via his Twitter: I find most of his business decisions snugly wrapped in *practicality*. Much of the stuff that’s branded risky actually feels like risk reduction to me. Like most things, it depends which lens… Read more: Mistakes rooted in forward motion

From the ‘Recommendo‘ newsletter: Someone on Reddit asked “What’s your best advice from your profession?” and below is a summary of the most upvoted answers. — CD Doctor: Never be afraid to get a second opinion. If your doctor is… Read more: Best advice from your profession

When a podcast host says, “Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts,” they refer to a key aspect of this medium. Currently, the processes of creating, publishing, and discovering podcasts are inherently open. By open I mean anyone has the ability… Read more: “Wherever you get your podcasts”

In a conversation with a friend about generative AI and autonomous agents, I wondered if one could create a pipeline to evaluate if any given article on the web would be interesting to a me: I have years’ worth of… Read more: AI’s about to make knowledge infinitely personalised by making it infinitely malleable

"Norway says it isn’t hoping to simply replace ICE engines with electric counterparts 1:1 but motivate people to get out of their… vehicles and walk, cycle, and take public transport, the latter which was particularly hit hard by the COVID-19… Read more: Less petrol vs electric, more private vs public

During her eight-decade long career, Bhosle has not only established herself as a musical giant but also as a versatile artiste. Yet, she believes that her "connection with music has grown stronger" with age. "I no longer just sing a… Read more: 8 September, 2023 07:46

The writer Jason Kottke, ten years ago on why he writes his all-encompassing blog: A friend of mine says, “Nostalgia is death,” but I hope my approach is more than pining for the olden days of weblogs. Kottke.org is a… Read more: My own personal World Book

From a quote from a Kottke.org post: It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time… Read more: Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art

From Reddit comment about the Chinese city of Chongqing: The og city of Chongqing was built along the Yangtze River hemmed in by mountain plates. In the 20th century, the city-long a local hub between Qinghai/Sichuan/Southern China-sprawled like wildfire, from… Read more: City in four dimensions

The inventor of the programming language C++ talks about an education beyond just technology: So you can’t just do code. You have to do something about culture and how to express ideas. I mean, I never regretted the time I… Read more: You can’t just do code

The 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… Read more: Silent Shores of Eternity

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… Read more: I created a custom ‘paper’ size to print and read PDFs on my phone

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. Maykell Loomans, via Shawn Blanc. Reminds… Read more: Not as a task but as something to relish

Why is it difficult to create ‘worldly yet carefree’ (WYC) humour of the Seinfeld kind in today’s times? The slightly more troubling answer is that even though the world is not fundamentally in worse shape in 2023 than in 1993,… Read more: The corrective power of the lens of humour

Om Malik: 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… Read more: Google search vs generative AI incentives

Matt Mullenweg: 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… Read more: Open source and the fabric 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… Read more: Some notes from my experience with mindfulness meditation

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… Read more: Digital cameras and delayed gratification

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… Read more: Quitting

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… Read more: Mac family balance 2023

I wrote this as a Twitter thread on the 1st of June 2023: Reddit, like Twitter, is poised to become a one-app service. Great apps like Apollo will shut down at the end of the month. Here’s the tragedy of… Read more: Reddit and our fragile online experiences

An interesting thought in the context of this year’s Apple WWDC: I think it’s past time Apple rework its keynote strategy, building these videos around features and not OSes, but that’s a blog post for a different day. For now,… Read more: Feature-oriented vs OS-oriented

Apple Notes gets inter-note linking in iOS 17, among other features: I’m also impressed by Notes’ addition of internal linking to other notes. The update should allow for vastly better organization of information in Notes. I’m envisioning it as a… Read more: Apple Notes and inter-note linking

Daring Fireball on a demo for a connected wearable device that takes an anti-phone position: Chaudhri thinks something is wrong that so many of us turn to our phones to photograph or film major moments in our lives, rather than… Read more: 27 April, 2023 18:39

I’m quite sensitive to sounds, so I use white noise extensively to focus and to drown out distracting noises. Today I learnt about brown noise: brown noise is the familiar, staticky sound of white noise (that is, all the audible… Read more: Brown noise

One of the most dramatic examples of the distortions caused by the Mercator projection: swapping Greenland and Mexico.

From Jason Kottke’s post marking the 25-year anniversary of his eponymous website: It’s an absurd understatement to say that the web has changed a lot in the nearly 30 years since… it’s now a massive, overwhelmingly corporate entity that encompasses… Read more: Foraging the web we knew and loved

The Apple Mail app in recent versions of iOS and Mac OS includes the new Follow Up feature: If you send a message and don’t receive a response for several days, the email automatically moves back to the top of… Read more: Mail app can’t tell which messages need follow-up

Any organisation that wants to be trusted long-term should ideally publish from a URL it owns and have an RSS feed (that functions as a notification mechanism). Doesn’t matter if it’s short- or long-form. From Axios: PBS has not tweeted… Read more: A URL you own and an RSS feed you offer

This post is, well, for posterity. To record that the Elon-Musk-owned Twitter Inc auto-responds to all press inquiries with a "poop" emoji: Going forward it will automatically reply to journalists’ inquiries with a single poop emoji, Musk announced… When asked… Read more: 💩