Here's something that matters. Somehow ChatGPT gets the story right about my various contributions. You'll see all kinds of BS in Wikipedia and other various highly rated sites. Somehow ChatGPT sees through the bullshit, and usually gets the story right. So when people say that human reporting is better than machine reporting, I think this may be one of those cases where conventional wisdom is wrong. The human record is relatively easy to manipulate if the researchers are lazy and/or dishonest. #

People get all moral about AI, but I for one would never go back.#

Wouldn't it be great if there was a social web toolkit with the basic building blocks so we could experiment with different UI and behaviors. Why, after so many years are we still so controlled. When and why did we give up?#

On MSNBC yesterday I saw a discussion where two black panelists were asked to comment on Trump's idea that black people go for him because they can relate to his awful prison mug shot. How incredibly insulting. It's just like what Trump says about Jewish Americans being loyal to Israel. Such an un-American idea. We all got here different ways. Some for a better life, some for life at all, others as slaves. But the United States is a big-hearted idea -- the United States. It's unfortunate that such a small-minded disunited person is so powerful now. We still have a long way to go.#

Google and The Innovator's Dilemma in 2024#

• It's overwhelming how much ground Google has to cover to get AI into all their products, but that's what they think they have to do, and I more or less agree. They feel they have to because their main product, search, is threatened by ChatGPT. #
• Clayton Christensen called this The Innovator's Dilemma in a book published in 1997. It's why Netscape was able to undermine Microsoft when the web came out. Microsoft had a huge beast they had to move, Windows, and all its apps, and while they had a hardcore, scrappy and rich culture, they couldn't overcome the inertia that comes from being dug in, with their cannons pointed at the already-vanquished IBM, not the upstarts that came from the VCs in Silicon Valley. #
• Microsoft and the rest of the PC industry had written off Unix, but there it was, again -- ugly as ever, but with networking that really worked and was easy, and the users wanted networking even though Microsoft wanted them to want Office. #
• Google did the same with AI. As did Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. They had AI projects, and used AI in limited areas, as did Microsoft with Unix in the early 90s. But they couldn't bet everyting on it like a startup can. Now they have to. But the they don't have the tools needed to fight the new war. That's the dilemma. #
• This is the toughest corner any tech company has to turn, but there is an approach that could work for Google. Their strength is distribution. They have all the users. They can take a product that's ready for the world to market in a day. But they can't develop it. You can't snap your fingers and have a good new UI for every one of their products, ready in a year, although they will try as MS tried to adapt Office to the web. They don't have the right people or corporate culture to do that. Instead you have to hope you can find a great bootstrapping startup outside to work with, and use their strength as a distributor to help them. This is what I recommended for Microsoft in the 1990s, and I think I was vindicated, it would have imho worked a lot better than the path they chose. #
• But now, their third time around this loop, Microsoft has learned! With their OpenAI partnership they've done exactly what I recommended in the 90s. They still have to convert all the old software and their user interfaces around the new capabilities, but at least they also own a share of a bootstrap that's now booming.#
• PS: I am blessed to have lived long enough now to have been part of now six different rearrangements like this. I love that we have now gotten there again. There's absolutely no doubt now, imho. The six rearrangements -- minis, PCs, GUIs, web, Napster, and now AI.#
• PPS: This is all my opinion, and from the polls I did yesterday, it's obvious that many of the people within earshot don't agree or have seen the light yet. #

The Knicks and the Epic Fart#

• Dave to ChatGPT: I just read a news story that the Knicks won the last game in the playoffs because of an epic fart in the locker room. Can you draw a light-hearted illustration of that event?#

• Version 1#

• Then I asked for a serious and dramatic illustration.#

• Version 2#

• I imagine you can bet on who the farter was. #
• My guess would be Hartenstein. #

Where personal knowledge management app fits in my workflows

Logseq is where I keep the ideas I want to come back to later. I view my personal knowledge management app as a great place for working ideas–ideas in limbo. It’s great for storage, but it’s not great for creativity. When I’m ready to write a blog post, I open copy my notes into Apostrophe and start polishing them there. And once I’ve finished my post, I usually delete my notes from Logseq. Because I’m done. The post is live. If I need any of that information again, I’ll refer to the finished post.

The problem with personal knowledge management apps

Personal knowledge management apps are great for storing ideas until you’re ready to do something with them. But how do you capture these ideas in the first place? If you’re like me, you have so many great ideas you’re sure you’ll never lose track of, only to later find yourself replaying your whole day in your head, desperately hoping lightning will somehow strike twice after you’ve forgotten what you were so excited about in the first place.

Using your personal knowledge management app as your only idea capture system may work if the app is always nearby. But many of us have mobile, active lives that see us away from our computers, or in situations where typing on our phones is inconvenient (or even dangerous, such as when we’re driving).

Idea capture systems for your personal knowledge management app

Now let’s look at a few idea capture systems you can pair with your personal knowledge management app of choice.

Physical notebooks

Physical notebooks make great capture systems, as they’re among the best creativity tools of all time.

If you want a great no-pressure tool for spitting out ideas to see if there’s anything worth pursuing, you can’t go wrong with a cheap notebook. If all your ideas are bad, then all you’ve really list is a little bit of time.

I’m a fan of notebooks because I’m also a fan of writing by hand. Maybe it’s because I grew up writing by hand before computers were ubiquitous, but I find the act freeing, as it lets the mind roam. And there’s something about that mad dash to write down all the best ideas before they float away into the ether. (You can’t capture all the ideas, but maybe you can capture all the ideas that matter.)

By the way, I was intentional when I made this heading plural (‘Physical notebooks’). I encourage having multiple notebooks to write in: a pocket notebook, a commonplace book, maybe even your journal. And for this exercise, I’d include digital notebooks such as the MobiScribe Wave, on which I wrote this blog post.

Notes apps

Notes apps might not be the best candidates for storing notes long term, but they’re great as idea capture systems. That’s pretty much what they were designed for.

The best thing about notes apps is that they’re pre-installed on pretty much all modern smartphones and tablets.

Maybe you forgot your pocket notebook at home. Or your pockets were too full, so something had to be left behind. But most of us have our phones nearby at all times, so that means your digital notes app is never far away.

Voice memo apps

Voice memo apps are closely related to notes apps.

But I think voice memo apps are more convenient idea capture systems in at least a couple situations:

1. When I’m driving.
2. When I have a LOT to say but can’t focus on typing a wall of text at the moment.

I appreciate that you don’t need to be in perfect conditions to turn voice memo apps into useful capture systems. I often hold my phone just a few inches from my face as I record my memos. During playback, you may hear wind or other background noises. It’s not a perfect system, but more often than not, the idea is perfectly captured. And that’s what really matters.

Personal knowledge management apps themselves

I know I’ve spent most of this post saying your personal knowledge management app shouldn’t be your only idea capture system. But let’s not forget it can be a competent idea capture system if set up and used properly.

I like using the voice memo feature within Logseq’s mobile app. While I can easily import voice memos from other apps into Logseq, it’s nice to know I can sometimes skip a step, depending on what’s within reach when a great idea pops up.

And you can upgrade your idea capture capabilities with the right plugins, such as the Omnivore plugin, which will import highlights and notes from the read-it-later service straight into Logseq.

You’ve found your idea capture systems. Now what?

Your ideas won’t do you any good if they set in your idea capture system of choice forever. You must be sure to transfer your ideas into you personal knowledge management app.

So you need to establish a new habit. Make transferring ideas from your idea capture systems into your personal knowledge management app part of your daily or weekly routine.

When you learn to simplify creativity, you make creativity a habit. And once you’ve made creativity a habit, you’re on your way to becoming unstoppable.

Jake LaCaze thinks creativity is iterative.

# I've really struggled creatively over the past couple of months — only to be expected with the overall downturn of mood — especially with music.

I have been unhappy with everything I've started recently after the initial adrenaline rush has passed. An idea might seem okay at the outset but I quickly become disillusioned or bored with it, unable to progress.

As I mentioned on releasing "It's all in your head" it was supposed to be part of an E.P. that never happened. I began work on a second track before mentally imploding. What was there in the test version was okay, not amazing and nowhere near finished but okay.

The expectation was that I would rerecord it, get everything in place and add extra layers in software. Needless to say, that didn't happen. Settings and patches have been changed and forgotten, patterns overwritten, so there's now no way I could go back and start from scratch.

Still, listening back to that test recording (mostly done in one take with just an extra instrument added in software after) I could appreciate what I was going for and, more importantly, what was actually there. I decided to fire up the DAW and see what I could do with it.

It's never going to be perfect but, with a bit of focused effort, I'm happy with where it's going, just a little more needs to be done to smooth some rough edges. I think I'll be releasing it at some point over the next few days — most likely as a free download/pay what you want option but at least it will be out there and I can be proud of what it is instead of mourn what it isn't.

I realized I didn’t want to work for someone else anymore, and I was just confident enough to try working for myself. Carefully, I built a new structure for myself that gives me autonomy over my work and time, and restricted the amount of time I worked. I banned doing either client or personal work on weekends, setting hard boundaries around time for rest. I stopped writing fiction in the evenings. I’ve practiced listening to my body and adjusting my day to suit my energy levels.

And… it’s worked. My care team told me to expect it to take 18 months to two years to fully recover, a number that at first horrified me but in retrospect sounds about right. Building a system around rest also helped with my recovery from surgery this spring.

But I think I’m ready to let myself push a little harder (with intention 😉). I feel like I’ve been holding myself back as a self-protective measure.

I’ve been treating myself with care — to the point of acting like I’m fragile. My friend had a good metaphor as we were discussing this last night: it’s like if I was a runner and I broke my leg, but even though the leg is healed, I’ll still only let myself walk — even though running isn’t what broke my leg in the first place. Rationally, I can see that I’ve removed the factors from my life that contributed to burnout before — now I work for myself, I’m choosing my own work, and I set my own schedule — but emotionally I’m scared of burning out again.

What got me thinking about this is that I’ve been delaying getting back into revising my novel after my surgery in late February. I’d been a little stuck anyway, then when my surgery curtailed my energy and I had no choice but to drop activities, writing made sense as a mentally taxing activity to put on hold. I tentatively pencilled in mid-April to return to it, but here we are in mid-May and I haven’t done more than open the file.

For the past several years, I focused on building a sustainable writing habit; National Novel Writing Month’s boom and bust work cycle wasn’t healthy. But I wonder if I’ve put too much emphasis on working the same amount every day. Could a self-imposed deadline be healthier than an external one? Is there a place for hard and fast or is it wiser to always hold to slow and steady? Because while it’s theoretically sustainable to work on writing for a couple hours a day forever, in practice I find there’s a different sort of mental wear I get from never finishing the dang project.

I constantly question whether I’m making the right choice to keep working on this project, feel embarrassed at how many years it’s been on my docket, wonder whether I’ve lost the magic. I question whether I’m self-sabotaging or just mired in perfectionism and self-doubt.

I try not to feel guilty about taking so long to finish anything, knowing I’m pacing myself on purpose, but it does burden me. When I ran cross-country in high school, I’d pace myself for most of the race, but let myself go all out when I neared the end, drawing on my reserves to kick it in. Learning when to let loose was part of the running process: how much energy did I have left for a final burst? How soon could I pick it up and not fizzle before the finish line? I was always a cautious runner, keeping my overall pace down so I knew I could make it the whole way, so then I had more in me for a final sprint than a lot of other kids.

Like running, it feels good to get through a big project and feel the satisfying exhaustion of performing at my highest level and finishing something important. This only works for meaningful work — which is a lot of what I have to do these days (there’s always admin 😉). While it’s been healthy to limit my work as I heal, I miss the feeling of pushing myself.

I’ve done this before — pulled back too much on personal work to rest. I’ve found that forcing myself to sit around and read things instead of making them discounts the energy we can get from doing fulfilling work. Like then, I’ve been feeling antsy and bored with reading, and I don’t think it’s Productivity/ Capitalism Brain.

I’ve got some new work projects starting up, so I’m wary of making a big commitment just yet, but also there’s always going to be something going on. If I wait till I’m doing nothing, I’ll be waiting forever. And if I’m trying to listen to my body more, I should listen both when it tells me to rest and when it tells me I’m done resting.

At the time I read about the new "share" feature on Ben's site and I think it was just the beginning of momentum for it, as Ben was still wording it as a prototype. The post explained a bit about how the "share" link works:

ShareOpenly will do a few things first:

1. If it's on a "well-known" domain -- eg, facebook.com -- it'll send you to the share page there.
2. It checks to see if it can figure out if the site is on a known platform (currently Mastodon, Known, hosted WordPress, micro.blog, and a few others). If so -- hooray! -- it knows the share URL, and off you go.
3. It looks for a <link rel="share-url"> header tag on the page. The href attribute should be set to the share URL for the site, with template variables {%text} and (optionally) {%url} present where the share text and URL should go. (If {%url} is not present, the URL to share will be appended at the end of the text.) If it's there -- yay! -- we forward there, replacing {%text} and {%url} as appropriate.

Once you've shared to a site, the next time you visit ShareOpenly, it will be in the quick links.^[1]

And provides a simple URL + parameters example for how to add to your site: https://shareopenly.org/share/?url=url&text=text

My original implementation of this as a link included an icon from Font Awesome. The Font Awesome icons on weblog get added as normal icon fonts using an <i> element with classes and other attributes for accessibility, but get replaced with SVGs using Javascript. The icon font remains a fallback without Javascript. Eventually I'm going to strip this system out and strictly use the SVGs, adding them to templates as inline SVGs where appropriate. I've done this already for a few SVGs on weblog, and even more on themes.lol, storing many of them as variables in config.

For the ShareOpenly link itself, I added a new advanced variable (advar) to weblog config with the icon font implementation:

; ShareOpenly
; @see https://shareopenly.org/
; - $shareURL   : the URL of the post to share
; - $shareText : the text of the post to share
Share openly link: <p><small><i aria-hidden="true" class="fa-solid fa-share u-gap--right u-gap--left"></i><a href="https://shareopenly.org/share/?url=$shareURL&text=$shareText" target="_blank">Share this post on social media.</a></small></p>

Then I would add the advar short code to my weblog post wherever I want it to show up. This is usually alongside citations, links, and other "endnotes" at the bottom of a post in the "Post info" section: {%share-openly-link:shareURL=https://weblog.anniegreens.lol/2024/05/my-computer-origin-story&shareText=My computer origin story.} It ended up looking like this:

With Jon designing a new logo icon for ShareOpenly, I downloaded the SVG linked on his blog post and modified the advanced variable, adding the SVG inline. I've added the aria-hidden="true" attribute to tell screenreaders that the SVG can be safely ignored, added an inline style to keep the SVG the same height as the surrounding text, with two additional utility classes for spacing on either side of the icon. I've replaced the entirety of the SVG <path> definition with ... for brevity in the example below.

; ShareOpenly
; @see https://shareopenly.org/
; - $shareURL   : the URL of the post to share
; - $shareText : the text of the post to share
Share openly link: <p><small><svg aria-hidden="true" class="u-gap--right u-gap--left" style="height: 1em; width: 2em;" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 18 18" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="..." fill="currentColor"/></svg><a href="https://shareopenly.org/share/?url=$shareURL&text=$shareText" target="_blank">Share this post on social media.</a></small></p>

This modified advar gives the share link + icon a slightly different look, a bit leaner than the generic Font Awesome icon. At first glance it feels too thin alongside my chosen web font, but I think it will grow on me and I definitely appreciate using the official logo icon with the ShareOpenly link:

Ben shared an update recently, preceding the release of the new ShareOpenly logo icon, including information about a Wordpress plugin, and a share link constructor. Additionally, Jon Hick's shared his Kirby setup code at the bottom of his post about the logo icon.

As a weblog user, I am still partial to the advar short code I'm currently using, but you could absolutely make it more automatic by constructing the link in your Main Template and feeding it the corresponding weblog variables for the permalink and title, something like: <a href="https://shareopenly.org/share/?url={%permalink}&text={%title}">ShareOpenly</a> I would love to see how some 11ty users might come up with something more automated for their setups. Let me know how you use the ShareOpenly link if you've added it to your blog!

Most introductions I make have a specific purpose. Either it is an ask to fulfill a specific need, or, in some cases, it is just to get to know me. The more abstract (or purposeless) an introduction — usually via email — more it shows disrespect for the other person and their time. 

When I personally make introductions, I ask in advance before making one. I want to be respectful of their time. And more often than not, i keep it simple—direct and actionable. 

What I don’t want or need is social capital.

May 16, 2024, San Francisco!

34.3min

46m climbed

158.3avg bpm