lifefeed

That's another thing I'm tired of: manually managing the algorithm. Using private windows, on top of downvoting and hiding stuff I only wanted to see once.

I like the "idea" of the algorithm, something that finds cool stuff for me. In practice it's just one more thing I have to keep a mental model of.

The lack of nuance is killing all these sites for me, not just Netflix, which I gave up on managing. It's when sites carefully note what I look at, and start making drastic changes based on that.

It's like if I go for a walk, metaphorically, and I see a giant pile of shit, and that's a genuinely interesting thing to see, because Jesus Christ that is huge. Then the algorithm notices I stopped to look at that, and the next time I go for a walk everything is filled with shit. That's what my Instagram feed is right now, metaphorically speaking. A never-ending field of shit.

I think in terms of niches and fitness

Programming languages are under a Darwinism-like pressure of programmer's attention. They have to fit a niche, and the ones that fit the niche best, survive. What another commentator calls killed features is, to me, a way to fit a niche.

Sometimes that niche is fun, like Python. Javascript's niche is that it's literally the only option. I suspect some languages (Java) fill a niche because they've been there for so long there's no oxygen for anything else to have a chance.

Time to create a draft IETF standard.

what material are the shirts made of?

I'd like to see a layout system that maximizes rivers in the text. Lets make reading weird.

I loved that site too.

Nowadays everything is so optimized and efficient, I've become nostalgic for the days when webpages sometimes sucked. At least they had personality, even if they were hard to use. It's like cars, I like looking at super old old cars in museums and wondering what all those pedals and levers do, even if I'm happy to not drive them.

> In more than thirty years as a writer, editor, and publisher, I have, to my best reckoning, introduced, abridged, issued or reissued, and read nearly every major work of inspirational literature produced or translated into English.

I'm always wary of people who spend too much time in the world of inspirational books. It's healthy to read a little, and to "sharpen the ax" every so often, but reading too much of this stuff is mind-numbing outside of historiography reasons.

Well, shit.

This is a small bit, and I don't know anything about Zuckerberg's personal life, but "he refuses to get out of bed before noon" is normally more a sign of depression than laziness.

It's been a while since they made a bold choice. When I bought an iPhone a couple years ago, even the apple store employee kinda shrugged his shoulders when I asked if the new 14 phone was better, besides the camera, than the cheaper 13.

You get to walk around the underground backstage yourself if you take Disney's "Keys to the Kingdom" tour. Basically, everything the public sees of Magic Kingdom is on floor 2.

I've tried a few dotfile management tools, and yeah they're always overkill. Plus it's one more dependency to handle when I'm setting up a new environment.

I did the same. I have a little dotfiles repo[0] on github that I clone on a new machine, then I execute a setup.sh file that installs a messy set of aliases and functions to set up my cozy unix world.

[0]: https://github.com/jmcguire/dotfiles

I got a little fish in my first capsule (along something useful that I can't remember, maybe a suit). I kept it the whole game, then passed it on in my own capsule. It's silly, but I still think about that fish.

I had the Dungeon Notebook. It was fun. I played it until I got bored, which was quick, then gave it away.

The ability to "give away" these little games are part of the fun. I'd like to see a game like this where "giving it away" is part of the game. Something you can pass around a school or a con. Like an analog version of Chain World, which was a mini-Minecraft-on-a-USB-stick that you were supposed to pass on. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_World )

I wish I could find the original article, it was a link from a link from the bibliography of Chip War.

I think it was things like how you couldn't initially purchase music, and had to sync to iTunes to do that. I think there was more.

I did find this article, on iPhone being basically just a battery: https://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2011/05/blackberry-makers-thoug...

I cant find the quote and article now, but I read that before it was released no one else believed a computer like that could have any reasonable battery life. Then they opened it up and discovered the iPhone was really just a battery with a small logic board attached to it, and a lot of the heavy computational lifting was done when it connected to your computer.

I like the idea of vinyl for kids too, because of how tactile it is, but man, begin with a cheap player and cheap records. No matter how old they are, they will play with it like a toy.

The good news is my father's old slightly warped prog rock records are finally getting a lot of use.

I think this author is talking about a subset of non-fiction books, and we may as well call them "non-fiction idea" books, where the writer has a single idea they want to convince you of. On Tyranny does that. And sure, maybe books like Checklist Manifesto and The Goal could have been reduced to a hundred tight pages.

The hundred page idea definitely doesn't apply to non-fiction in general though. I can't imagine a history book or a biography covering what they need in a hundred pages. I don't think Chip War could be reduced.

try propelauth, for example https://www.propelauth.com/post/chrome-extension-authenticat...

Having a pocket-sized wifi-only kindle is what saves me from doomscrolling. Instead of spending god-only knows how many hours a week on social media, I read. It's an mental health game changer.

Also by the time a parent dies it's possible those old books are not in great shape. It only takes one mistake for a whole shelf of books to end up damp and musty, and sometimes no one notices how bad it got.

The one downside of ebooks is there's no way to donate them to a library. I have a hundred and something books on the kindle that will never be read again.

Although I guess I don't "own" them, I only license them.

n+1 once said McSweeny's (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/) is just Mad Magazine for the literary set, and today is the right time to share that.

Daniel Lemire's entire blog: https://lemire.me/blog/ .

It focuses on low level optimizations, often by using SIMD, avoiding division, and being generally clever. It's nothing I use in my job, but I enjoy reading every post.