marniewebb

Non programmer and I found Pragmatic Programming excellent. Help me problem solve better in general, communication better with our development team, and understand more about their processes.

California resident here. Female and in what was then called junior high school when Senator Feinstein became Mayor of San Francisco.

She was one the people who changed the profile of power. That profile can only change so much at a time and change it to accommodate women was and still is a very big deal.

I didn’t always agree with her but I always thought she was committed to public service. And, like any long-serving senator, she changed her mind. Time and growth will do that, especially in a legislative body that should be built on compromise and inclusivity.

It’s sad to me that the end her career became dominated by not stepping down. I don’t know much — or anything — about back room politics but can imagine it was a decision calculated and agreed to by more than her or her staff.

I read an article a few months ago — I can’t find it now because of today’s news flood for her name — that talked about the way she wrote letters, position papers, instructions for years. She communicated in writing. And that is part of what gave her a high functioning staff and one that could support her in this last term. She had spent a lifetime in public service documenting what she thought.

In President Biden’s statement, he wrote that she was often the only woman in the room. Every article is chronicling her firsts. That she was the first woman to represent CA in the senate and that she was tenacious and held on when other people thought she should go quietly seems to me a perfectly logical pairing.

I love this thread.

TV: On My Block, which has a lot in common with Reservation Dogs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_My_Block

Book: America Is Not The Heart, just a fantastic novel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_Castillo

Movie: Hearts Beat Loud, but maybe just on my mind because my daughter is getting ready to leave for college https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_Beat_Loud

Music: Destroy Boys, maybe less underrated and more promising https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroy_Boys

I’m currently involved in a project to develop a tech intervention to support outreach workers in providing emergency shelter to unhoused individuals[1].

Part of the goal is to get data on why people don’t accept available shelter and how to address those blockers by creating more shelter spaces that meet more people’s needs. We know we will see the ability to keep companion animals, safe storage for personal items, and the ability to stay with family members as reasons people don’t take shelter. It’s easy to empathize with that. If I were a woman on the street with my mid-sized dog (companionship and protection) with all the possessions I had left (after months at least of hard decisions about what I couldn’t take) and a 13-year-old son (we are likely to get separated in shelter placement) I would be resistant to most of the options available to me. And that doesn’t even begin to address what led me to the streets in the first place (job loss, family support system loss, domestic violence, health expenses).

This is my opinion, but based on some observational experience, the only people for whom living on the streets is “easier” are those who are young, healthy, and have a family support system to return to.

This recent article in the Guardian provides a good overview: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/17/san-diego-ar...

[1] https://insider.govtech.com/california/news/san-diego-county...

I have an information triage process that ends with DEVONThink. I save bookmarks to drafts app, go through them when I have time. And if they are worth it, I save then in DEVONThink where I go through and mark them up.

I’ve used ChatGPT to generate value scenarios, possible use cases, and descriptions of use for internal white papers. If another colleague were helping with this, I’d credit them in the acknowledgements at minimum. If I had gotten a list from a published paper, I’d credit it — even if I changed it considerably.

I do this for three reasons: (1) giving credit; (2) letting readers find more details so they can better interrogate the paper; and (3) proving transparency of sources generally.

With that in mind, it seems I should credit ChatGPT, especially to meet the second or third reasons. And that crediting should include my prompts and, in an extended session, multiple prompts.

The hard part is the first reason credit. The way it works today, I can’t give credit to the pieces that help build the response I’m using in a very precise way. I’d love to see a better way of doing that.

This.

I love https://rubyforgood.org/ they organize projects so there can be real impact.

I get this worry. I didn’t read it this way though. I read it as being more about being conscious in choosing how to spend you time and not assuming that productivity leads to open amounts of person or quality time.

I am lucky; I love the work I do and there is an overlap with what I do as a “hobby.” The place I find myself in this trap is that often the places I am most “productive” are not the places I can do the highest value work, which tends to be slower and harder.

My system is very much like this. I capture most things to Drafts app with a “to process” or “to read” tag. And then review and handle at least once a week.

If it’s a resource that I want to refer back to (like how to do something or a tool I found interesting) I keep it in Drafts in a resource workspace appropriately tagged. If it’s a resource I keep and share a lot, I move it into Obsidian and write text around it to make sharing easy.

If it’s a longer item — say a paper that’s building my knowledge in a subject area — I move it into DEVONThink and annotate.

I do need to recall and reuse things and I find having different tools and workflows for different kinds of information helps me.

H2O — https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/ — is a now-defunct collaborative syllabus project from Harvard that gets at a lot of this I think. It’s basically a list maker with a lot of additional capabilities. While it’s made for small list of things it’s easy to imagine this is a piece of the solution.

I think we have to separate caring for our fellow community members from and supporting people in being productive members of society. So many people are with stable homes because they weren’t able - for whatever reason — to be a productive member of society (and there are plenty of arguments about what productive means). We should still care for them.

This feels like it could be solved partly, and more effectively, by a step wise show your work process. So if it’s Of Mice and Men, it could be a reading journal, then important points, then an outline, then an essay.

If they successfully use ChatGTP to do this, they likely have engaged with the text.

I got my 18-year-old one of those Jensen cassette players for Xmas this year. She listens to it in bed with a pair of chunky audio technics headphones on. She likes listen to things that she handles and organizes and starts and stops in the real world.

My teenage daughter and I talk a lot about mental hygiene. We compare it to dental hygiene: you do stuff everyday to reduce the need to see a dentist and improve your experience when you do.

The big things on the mental hygiene list are:

- Morning pages - https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/ - walking - intense exercise - keeping a daily/weekly/monthly planner - cooking good food that you like - eating meals with other people - an evening shut down routine

The artifact we often use is “zoom recording of the meeting.” Which is less than useful.

For non-sensitive meetings, we record to otter and then edit the transcript using highlights, marking to dos, etc. We’ve got an otter folder structure that mimics our other folder structures. We most commonly do this for document review meetings (I work for an NGO. We write a lot of grants.) This takes time but it creates good notes, allows everyone to be a participant in the meeting.

We have other meetings — like weekly target review meetings — that use Asana as the basis for capturing notes. This works well for things that are really tactical.

I used Yahoo! Pipes to help manage the firehouse part of RSS. I filtered on keywords, used it manage duplicates across feeds and a few other things. It would be great to have that kind of functionality in a reader.

Bookmarked https://pipes.digital/ but haven’t yet played with it.

Edit: fixed link

As one of those business people, I find I’m not very good at requesting reports. There is a gap between what I think is interesting and what actually is interesting. I use spreadsheets (and sometimes visualization tools) to help bridge the gap and make a better on going request to our reporting team.

Often, this is learning for me. I have a bunch of Stephen Few’s books and use exported CSV files to figure out which reports are useful to me and my org. When I find them, I do make a request for standardized reporting. These often become the basis for regular review meetings. In those meetings, we still come up with instances where we need to export to CSV and get into the data to understand what we are looking at.

Our work is going through a big shift this year that means our historic data is not helpful in predicting trends. That’s increased the need for this kind of engagement with the underlying data.

Drafts app is awesome for quick capture and then to integrate with other systems for processing. The recording function for it works pretty well.

Fiction: - Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli: mixes the personal and political so skillfully - The Magician by Colm Tóibín: Thomas Mann, the German, author is the main character. Shows our own moment in history in relief.

Non-Fiction, work: - The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition by David Thomas, Andrew Hunt: I’m not a programmer and still found this one of the most useful books I read this year. - Working Backwards by Colin Bryar, Bill Carr: The Amazon/Bezos love choked me a couple of times but I’ve put in practice some of what learned in this book to good effect.

Non-Fiction, history: - Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy D. Snyder: This is a hard book to read. Not slow hard. Terrifying and apocalyptic and true hard. Gives a lot of context to current events. - The Enemy of All Mankind by Steven Johnson: Pirates. The seafaring kind.

For me, what makes these tools useful is the time I spend in review. Which often feels like the opposite of productivity.

Readwise or similar?

+1 I adopted a cattle dog two years ago. A real habit builder.

> Why? Because once it's written down there's a paper trail and accountability.

This. It’s the hard part of getting people to commit to operational plans on the business side as well.

I loved those books when I was in high school. I wonder how they’d hold up today.

This reminds me of tinderbox - https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ Which I want to love but always feels like it has such a hard learning curve. I love how fun kinopio feels. Definitely taking it for a spin.

From the abstract: “We intend to improve incentives in science by developing smart research contracts mediated by peer-to-peer review networks. These will collectively reward scientific contributions, including proposals, papers, replications, datasets, analyses, annotations, editorials, and more.”

> What it is instead is a forum for trying to identify, discuss and address where existing pratices are unwittingly biased. For example, do the statistics of progression and departure in our organisation show any areas in which we're failing certain subgroups? Does our publicity reach everyone we want it to and carry the message that we intend? Do our processes inadvertently cause physical or mental difficulty to anyone?

This is a fantastic statement of what a program should be. And I'm totally going to us it to describe ours.

This.

Big tech -- and big pharma, and all the other bigs -- are built to be optimized with a system of shareholder value. They weren't built to optimize for civic engagement and thoughtful dialog.

If we want the second -- some of it anyway -- we have to be prepared to give up -- through regulation and governance and then through behavior -- some of the first.