Interesting reads or links across the web.
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.- What is RSS
- What writers really do when they write by George SaundersWhen 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.
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.- Using Paper for Everyday Tasks by Xe Iaso
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
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.- Scaling up Kindness by Manu Moreale
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?- Creative Coding by Molly Mielke
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.- Fast Software, the Best Software by Craig Mod
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.- Learning and Being Wrong by Jim Nielson