Two nights ago, I deleted everything. Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. I deleted every Apple Note I’d synced since 2015. Every quote I’d ever highlighted. Every to-do list from every productivity system I’d ever…

God help me, fediverse, we have got to stop being so pedantic. In university, I got a degree in English. I expected lots of reading, lots of writing, and lots of talking about reading and writing. I was pretty excited to get past my first year courses and into the really good stuff, where it would…

I know this is a rather dramatic headline and that some people might incorrectly assume that I’m mad about some particular piece of hardware or software, but it should come as no surprise that I’m hopping mad at Tim Cook for how he’s ingratiating himself to President Trump again. The President has…

tl;dr Brooks' hypothesis in “The Mythical Man Month” is that the nature of software development means that no further “order of magnitude” improvements to productivity remain to be found has proven re

Tagged with digital preservation, static sitesPosted 16 October 2024 In my previous post, I talked about how I’m trying to be more intentional and deliberate with my digital data. I don’t just want to keep everything – I want to keep stuff that I’m actually going to look at again. As part of that…

Community Pedal Power is excited to celebrate one complete year of operations for the E-Bike Lending Library! The E-bike Lending Library is a free resource for anyone to try out a variety of different e-bike brands and styles. Over the past year, the E-bike Lending Library has loaned bikes more than…

The Olympics are a celebration of athletic prowess, an event that incidentally highlights the diversity of the human body. Take height for example. Simone Biles, the GOAT, hurtled herself through her Paris 2024 floor routine at 4’8”. Meanwhile, on the basketball court, some players seemed to barely…

SOMERVILLE - Electric bikes are popping up everywhere in the Boston area and you don't have to feel left out if you haven't tried one. A Somerville man who loves them will let you ride an e-bike for a week for free. "About 50% of the people who have tried a bike already bought one," said Christopher…

For more than a decade, the tech industry has been defined by two economic zeros. The “zero interest rate policy” (ZIRP) across the western world saw the price of money plummet, letting startups run at a loss for years and giving investors massive appetite for risky bets that might pay off in a big…

Origins Muse began life as part of a human-computer interaction lab called Ink & Switch. The lab's charter involved inventing a new computing environment that would better serve people doing important knowledge work: scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, designers, architects, and so on. Mark…

Content Moderation from the your-reputation-is-what-you-allow dept Tue, Dec 26th 2023 09:33am - Back in April Substack founder/CEO Chris Best gave an interview to Nilay Patel in which he refused to answer some fairly basic questions about how the company planned to handle trust & safety issues on…

Untangling Threads Back in the fall, I wrote a series of posts on a particularly horrific episode in Meta’s past. I hadn’t planned to revisit the topic immediately, but here we are, with Threads federation with the ActivityPub-based fediverse ecosystem an increasingly vivid reality. My own emotional…

You have to read this piece by @emteehall RIGHT NOW. It's important and urgent and utterly amazing and infuriating. www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/…

Adjust Share When I was a kid, in the touch-tone era in the Midwest, I often dialed, for no real reason, the “time lady”—an actress named Jane Barbe, it turns out—who would announce, with prim authority “at the tone,” the correct time to the second. I was, in those days, a bit obsessed with time. I…

“It's a bilateral failure for the designer and the player to meet on an understanding that this is an intentional work of art by a human being and instead to treat it like it's a functional plastic tool made in a factory that is there to generate a particular biochemical response in your brain.…

“So, how would you describe your marriage? What happened?” Every time someone asks about my marriage, or about my divorce, I pause for a moment. Inside that imperceptible pause, I’m thinking about the

I love nothing more than to read blog posts written by nerds fueled by stubbornness and spite. Reading this glorious post on why a pedestrian bridge to seemingly nowhere exists is like listening to a full season of a true-crime podcast. No spoilers, but there is definitely a satisfying conclusion.…

Energy makes time 04 Aug 2023 by Mandy Brown BECAUSE I WORK WITH a lot of high performers, the kind of people who are frequently responsive to both the unending needs of their workplace and the unendi

For almost a complete decade—starting with discovering Haskell in about 2009 and right up until switching to a job where I used primarily Ruby and C++ in about 2019—I would have called myself first an

“The purpose of zoning is to prevent affordable housing” indyweek.com/news/opinions/op-… (needs to be shared with our city leaders)

Tim Wehage grew up in South Florida. At home, the TV was often tuned to Fox News, where he heard a lot of rants about liberal hypocrisy, but he didn’t consider himself political. After high school, he

THAT’S MY BRILLIANT COUSIN LISA!!!! I am so proud of her and excited for her. Parents, you’re going to want to read this and I am not biased in the least. GO LISA!!!!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ www.newyorker.com/culture/the-…

Photograph by Dietmar Nill / NaturePL On a biodiverse sky island elevated from the barren Arizona desert, Dr. Aaron Corcoran flicks on powerful ultraviolet lights. “You set up a light here and you get almost clouds of insects,” he said. “And then the bats very quickly figure out, that’s where the…

I’ve recently been telling anyone who will listen that I am excited to be on the precipice of using Sorbet to write a type-checked edition of Mocktail that has the potential to unlock productivity wor

By Jessica Wilkerson Issue 121, Summer 2023 June 06, 2023 Public Courts, 2019, watercolor on paper by Charlie Roberts. Courtesy the artist and Woaw Gallery I spent my childhood in the country about fi

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Alia Smith. The other night, I was making dinner when I realized that we were completely out of ginger. Our grocery store is pretty close by, but it’s too far to

I read Yegge's post about LLMs for coding and I get it. I totally see this! about.sourcegraph.com/blog/che…

“I’ll wipe my hands on my penis.” Essayist and activist Sophie McAllister is confident she’d never uttered those words before this week. Now, she tells Rolling Stone, she must have said them over a hu

E lon Musk is a singular visionary driving humanity toward a better future—or at least that’s what he and his admirers want us to believe. For the past two decades, supporters and news outlets have pr

This year, the best Thanksgiving dinner conversations are going to be about geoengineering https://t.co/M6k2GCFy29

So I was blocked by someone (that really should know better, I'm honestly disappointed/sad) for saying that "overpopulation arguments to deal with climate change" are disgusting and racist. This is not a new idea, and the env. movement has demons here. https://t.co/g64RPbThW2

"But the real danger on Halloween is not Satan, weed, or even the novel coronavirus. It’s car crashes." https://t.co/iAzX6QNYDC

India, and other liberal democracies, must prevent any app, foreign or home-grown, from coming to dominate our information space. Why an ‘ everything app’ is bad news for liberal democracies and free

Reviewing this list really makes me appreciate what a great time it is for science fiction. The Martian, Murderbot, Wayfarers, Broken Earth, Machineries of Empire, Three Body Problem, Children of Time, Binti, Divine Cities, Teixcalaan… all this decade? https://t.co/wmxRY2mVR5