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Catching up on the drama with Redis changing its license. Not too worried about it. Older versions are fast and stable… when used correctly with enough memory, which is something we’ve run into. Don’t see anything here that would make me switch away.
Two things that prompted the memory of quitting social media I just posted:
- Reading Nobody is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. I second @JohnBrady’s recommendation, which is how I found out about it. Obviously it’s a short and engrossing book since I read it in less than a day. (It may have distracted me from work a bit yesterday…)
- This from Rhyd Wildermuth:
In the process of breaking my years-long addiction to social media, it was the internalized self-limiting framing of writing with which I struggled most. This kind of reduction and flattening are seen best in the formulaic way in which the algorithms train us to write, the repetition of meaningless phrases like “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but;” “Unpopular opinion, but”, “Okay, sooo,” or the meme-derived rephrasing of opinions in the form of conversational comparisons between “literally nobody ever” and the target of the post.
Becoming trained to read and write by computers, we begin also to think like computers. Our writing becomes as processed as the food available in supermarkets and our thinking as standardized and as unremarkable as its flavors.
In the process of breaking my years-long addiction to social media, it was the internalized self-limiting framing of writing with which I struggled most. This kind of reduction and flattening are seen best in the formulaic way in which the algorithms train us to write, the repetition of meaningless phrases like “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but;” “Unpopular opinion, but”, “Okay, sooo,” or the meme-derived rephrasing of opinions in the form of conversational comparisons between “literally nobody ever” and the target of the post.
Becoming trained to read and write by computers, we begin also to think like computers. Our writing becomes as processed as the food available in supermarkets and our thinking as standardized and as unremarkable as its flavors.
They’re back…
Atlantic Brant’s are back for a pit stop before heading north. More pictures from this morning’s walk here.
If you’ve never heard the call of an Atlantic Brant, listen here. “The Atlantic brant makes a low, guttural ruk-ruk sound, and its call pattern is flat, rising, and undulating. Brant also make a guttural crrrronk when flying or on the ground, and a shorter, sharper cruk alarm call. (via Google)”
The clearest and most disturbing realization I had after quitting Big Tech/algorithmic social media was that my mind had been colonized by the timeline. I thought about what it told me to think about, to the exclusion of what I may have pursued on my own, synchronistically and independently.
Back in the 80s before many of you were born, you could buy a word processing program, which was basically a text editor, and you could use it to write and then when it came time to send that writing to other people, you would print it.
And get this the printer could take its input from any of those writing tools. There were no tiny little text boxes. The printers didn’t come with their own editors, you had choice and therefore there was lots of competition. Amazing, right? Pretty fair write-up on Platformer about the Apple case, both the parts that are weak and the larger problem:
…while Apple will surely protest this case with every fiber of its being, in the end the company has only itself to blame for the backlash it’s now experiencing around the world. No one can question the excellence of the company’s product line. But the arrogance with which it dismisses efforts to regulate it, and the greed that is evident in the ever-rising cost of iPhone ownership, undercuts that fine work.
…while Apple will surely protest this case with every fiber of its being, in the end the company has only itself to blame for the backlash it’s now experiencing around the world. No one can question the excellence of the company’s product line. But the arrogance with which it dismisses efforts to regulate it, and the greed that is evident in the ever-rising cost of iPhone ownership, undercuts that fine work.
P&B: Taylor Troesh
This is the 30th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Taylor Troesh and his blog, taylor.town
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Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
Hello! I’m Taylor (mayor of taylor.town).
I collect hobbies, build things, incite chaos, and engage in elaborate tomfoolery. I work as a developer, designer, DB architect, and other things.
What’s the story behind your blog?
I created my first personal website to quickly teach myself how to make websites, because I fudged my resume and accidentally landed a job as a web developer before I was ready.
My website became a blog when I posted my digital notebooks online circa 2015. I maintained hundreds of markdown files on various topics and ideas, but I was too embarrassed to publish most of the actual notes, so I replaced the body of each file with “Coming soon!”. My private ideas.txt file sits at 110,427 words right now. This does not include hundreds of unfinished essays, papers, books, stories, games, gadgets, etc.
As I grew more specific and organized, my notes became easier to digest. In 2019, I started writing about my opinions, my fears, my inspirations, and my paradoxes.
But I didn’t start writing seriously until I stopped drinking in 2022. Writing was welcome respite from alcohol withdrawals. Without booze to fill my emptiness, I suddenly found myself with plenty of “boring” hours. So I kept writing. And now I can’t stop writing.
What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?
I consume absurd amounts of books, small blogs, music, podcasts, and other internet media.
From there, my inspiration ferments in a 1Mb text file called ideas.txt. When I’m not doing chores, I start from the top of ideas.txt and work my way down, making small pseudoprose edits along the way. An idea usually sits at the top of the list for a few months before it’s ripe enough to publish.
Here’s an excerpt from the top of my list on Dec 7, 2023:
Krampus and negative punishment
- holiday alignment chart
- does negative punishment work?
- santa claus is not a god: https://brill.com/view/journals/jocc/8/1-2/article-p149_8.xml
- is santa effective? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0361476X84900031 santa
- visits rich sick children: https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6355.abstract
Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?
Countless creations die in the pursuit of Ideal Creative Environments. After hearing how much quality work Tyler Cowen completes while traveling, I taught myself how to scrounge for in-between time. Through that process, I made more time for creative pursuits via extinguishing notifications and bespoke time-tracking software.
Today, most of my creative process occurs on couches – just me and my laptop. When I need more real-estate, I use my battlestation. When my thoughts become tangled, I clean my home or play with my daughter or walk outside. When I draw, I use our makeshift art studio in the basement. And so on.
Everything in a home or office eventually becomes invisible gorillas. In my experience, physical propinquity is the fastest way to modulate creativity. Unsurprisingly, surrounding myself with healthy and supportive people was a really good way to become healthy and supported.
A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?
- All my writings are markdown files (with YAML frontmatter) in a GitHub repo.
- An ugly Elixir script converts each file into HTML and compiles an atom feed.
- All of these files are served to the public via Cloudflare Pages.
- Every few weeks, I copy/paste stuff into Buttondown for my email newsletter.
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?
- More doodles! I’m still working up the courage to share more of my drawings…
- People cannot spell “Troesh” from memory, so I’m glad I chose taylor.town over taylor.troe.sh. But I’ll never know if taylor.town was a better choice than taylor.land.
- If I started over, I probably wouldn’t write my build script in Elixir – maybe Haskell or Go or JS instead?
- I wasted a lot of time on essay ideas that were time-consuming but obviously worthless. I should’ve learned earlier to sort by difficulty vs. impact.
- I’m still unsure about Instagram, X, and other socials media. I love meeting strangers via email – am I missing cool people from other corners of the web?
Financial question since the web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?
It costs $0 to host my blog on GitHub and Cloudflare. I spend $30/mo on Buttondown. I once hoped that my blog would land me some sweet consulting gigs. As of 2023, total consulting revenue is $0.
I aim to be worth $1/hour. Advertising is spooky, so I’ve been working on books and games and services to sell instead. But it’s hard to juggle making worthwhile art while working for an employer while publishing free content.
Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?
I support TodePond and Hundred Rabbits via Patreon.
I would also love to support Experimental History and Escaping Flatland, but I’m avoiding Substack for now.
Other people/blogs I follow: Derek Sivers, sonnet.io, BenKuhn, And now it’s all this, Beyond the Frame, Scope of Work, and Steph Ango.
Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?
Things I’ve made recently:
- flashcasts: audio flashcards in a private podcast feed
- scrapscript: a sharable programming language
- wigwam.directory: alternatives to bloat
- blogs.hn: a directory of small tech blogs
- the cheap web: small web manifesto
Ways to keep up:
This was the 30th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Taylor. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.
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How to deal with a growing collection of notes
Today and tomorrow I will take tons of notes on talks and workshops about note-taking, personal knowledge management and working in your digital garden. I will visit the PKM Summit here in Utrecht and I really look forward to it. For the talks, the niche nerdy bubble I’ll be in and of course the people. There will be dozens of familiair faces I haven’t spoken to in real for ages and there will be new minds to meet.
My focus for these two days is how to deal with my Collector’s Fallacy. This is a cognitive bias where individuals believe that the value of a collection of items is greater than the individual items themselves. This leads collectors to hold on to items with little or no actual value, simply because they are part of a collection. As a knowledge worker, this leads to collecting all sorts of intellectual stimulation. Without actually doing something with it. Christian over on the Zettelkasten blog has an excellent essay on this topic.
I’ve tried various strategies to deal with it but all to no avail. I feel there is still some way of dealing with the overload of notes and information in my inboxes that fits me. Not an overall framework, but rather small nuggets of various ideas and frameworks I can make my own. I look forward to actively talk and think about this. So when I take these tons of notes at the PKM Summit, I actually do something with them.