Speak plainly. As Brent says, lessons not learnings. Keep it simple. This is one of the foundations of blogging, btw. "Try to write correctly."#
Just a guess, but the people doing the "ice" raids are not real police any more than the "doge" people are/were actually part of the US government. In this New Yorker podcast, they dug into what "doge" actually was/is. Some weren't actually Trump supporters, they just thought it would be interesting to be empowered to fix the government. They learned the government doesn't work the way they thought it did. Spending is way up over the years, but number of government employees has stayed flat. It has already been largely privatized. Tangentially they appear to have found some things actually worth fixing. Tech culture isn't just the billionaires, far from it. There's a lot of hippie ethics in there too, you just have to look past the money, which seems too much work for some/most journalists. But The New Yorker tends to do this well, btw, sometimes. 😄#
Win of the week: cooked up a giant pot of chickpeas (added a kinda-tadka of fresh rosemary sizzling in oil at the end) for a mildly awkward neighborhood potluck (where the only other handmade food was peanut butter celery sticks 😂 apparently my idea of potluck food is outdated)
Looking forward to: finishing This Will Be Fun by E.B. Asher! I’ve been in a book slump and have been enjoying this — it’s gleefully goofy to balance out the characters’ intense angst and pain
Stuff I did:
13.5 hours consulting — sent over another deliverable 🦾
0 hours writing oops
took Thursday off for Juneteenth
watched Yancey Strickler interview Nadia Asparouhova about her new book Antimemetics… may not be quite what I was expecting but I’ll withhold judgment till I get the book
got an email about a new program inspired by my high school travels with my track coach and discovered I was mentioned in their promo materials?? 🤔 still deciding how to reply…
one virtual appointment + dentist appointment — I’ve been grinding my teeth in my sleep (thanks politics) so they 3D scanned my teeth to make a mouth guard
hung out with my sister
bonus walk with friend but skipped regular walk for bad weather
baked my go-to coffee cake — used a smaller pan which doubled the bake time
an hour of gardening to clear paths – again – and get rid of a bunch of plants with some kinda mildew on the leaves… I’ve been trying to nurture my mildewy ninebark back to health but finally hacked almost all of it waaay back
🤦♀️ I somehow failed to observe that my pine tree had candles last month, which I bought a taller ladder specifically to prune… the wood on the new growth is still green so I went for it! 🤞😬 Husband says if the tree gets too big he’s cutting it down, it’s living on borrowed time anyway, so it’s fine if I screw it up — and it is very possible I done fucked up, we’ll find out next year I guess 🤷♀️
biopolitics — “The governmental power of biopolitics is exerted through practices such as surveillance, healthcare policies, population control measures, gender-based laws, and the implementation of biometric identification systems.” Thanks I hate it.
I’ve now been using Dia for about a week. Parker Ortolani just blogged that he was skeptical of the Arc to Dia transition, but he’s now convinced:
The success of Dia over the past few weeks has brought me back my roots, reminding me of the iconic Steve Jobs quote “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
My experience with Dia has also been positive. Because I’m not a heavy tabs user — I rarely keep more than a few tabs open, and by the end of the day they’re all closed — I actually prefer the tabs going back to the top of the window. Obviously this was a needed change for the AI sidebar.
My only nitpick is the iOS-like text selection bars, which are distracting. I’m always accidentally clicking on them because of how I often double-click and drag to select text. This is on a Mac:
Using Dia is a nice reminder that there is very little lock-in with web browsers. Switching to a new browser is easy. If The Browser Company can’t make their business work, then I’ll switch to something else.
Made an 88×31 button, prompted by Zachary Kai (look at this button collection)
