Websites and resources that I’ve found that I want to share. I’ll try to organize this better as it grows. But there’s a severe lack of discoverability/sharing of smaller sites.
Imagine an open version of Twitter or Facebook News Feed, with no psy-op ads, owned by no oligopoly, manipulated by no algorithm, and all under your full control.
If you consider yourself a learner, you can genuinely enjoy discovering you are wrong because that means you are less wrong than you were before.
A typewriter is an excellent tool because, even though it’s slow in a relative sense, every aspect of the machine itself operates as quickly as the user can move. It is focused. There are no delays when making a new line or slamming a key into the paper. Yes, you have to put a new sheet of paper into the machine at the end of a page, but that action becomes part of the flow of using the machine, and the accumulation of paper a visual indication of work completed. It is not wasted work. There are no fundamental mechanical delays in using the machine. The best software inches ever closer to the physical directness of something like a typewriter.
How can we push digital creative tools to their full potential as co-creators, thus harnessing the full power of creative thought and computational actualization to enable human innovation?
This sounded like a prank. You’re telling me that a problem I’ve witnessed for decades could be solved with a 1960s algorithm, and I don’t even have to be particularly careful? But I tried it out. I started crudely drawing over the peaks, one by one. Things were weird at the beginning, but then I saw something astonishing
Some things can’t scale. Some things are not “designed” to be scaled. They’re probably not even meant to be scaled. Scarcity is a quality of certain things and it’s what makes them special.
I develop nascent ideas in part by typing in keywords, spelunking my own memex for things I’ve previously spotted, connections I’ve made, turns of phrase… most of which I had forgotten, but there they are. And old ideas come back and get recombined and become fresh again. That database of notes is my greatest asset.
Memexes, mountain lakes, and the serendipity of old ideas by Matt Webb
I have a bit of a reputation of being a very techno-savvy person. People have had the assumption that I have some kind of superpowerful handcrafted task management system that rivals all other systems and fully integrates with everything on my desktop. I don’t.
When I write, “Bob was an asshole,” and then, feeling this perhaps somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, “Bob snapped impatiently at the barista,” then ask myself, seeking yet more specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to, “Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife,” and then pause and add, “who he missed so much, especially now, at Christmas,” – I didn’t make that series of changes because I wanted the story to be more compassionate. I did it because I wanted it to be less lame. But it is more compassionate.