msutherl

This reads like a rhetorical question – 'what could possibly be the application for something this deliberately bad?'

I won't speak for what "blockchain" can or will become, but you might see the hype more clearly by considering the ideology inherent in asking specifically for the "proper application." You imply that you or someone in a position you understand might "apply blockchain" to a "problem," as you commonly understand it.

I see "blockchain" more as a movement, which completely evades "application" in the common sense. People building these technologies, and organizations around them, live in a separate world that makes little reference to the broader world of which most of us are a part. They start with distinct priors, which rule out most existing solutions on the grounds that they demand political centralization (see: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...).

You can summarize this ideology as: 'if there's a sysadmin, the system is broken.'

It may very well be the case that they are creating a new world that will be marginalized and outcompeted by incumbent systems and organizations, but that's how I understand what's 'actually going on'.

Skim, read comments, and for things I want to remember, add them to an appropriate Are.na channel.

For longer articles I want to read eventually but know I won't get to for a long time, I use the "Save this page" feature of Inoreader[2].

Since I've started using Inoreader, I haven't gone back to any of these articles, but I'm ok with this – I tend to review the cache every 6-months to a year when I happen to have uninterrupted free time (like between jobs or on vacation). Previously I had Are.na channels called "To Read 1", "To Read 2", and so on.

[1] https://are.na

[2] https://www.inoreader.com/

Speaking strictly about the "look and feel," I must say I love it. It's one of the most well-designed apps I've ever seen.

Per-UX, I've found Skype very difficult to use since the last major redesign a few(?) years ago. I'm not sure if the update made it worse. I feel generally confused just the same.

Miles better than everything else: https://www.inoreader.com/

And given a suitable vector representation of the street layout, the stretch-and-compress could be given constraints so as not to warp (i.e. curve streets on) the map

I spent a lot of time trying different systems and finding I couldn't stick with one. Now I embrace the chaos of multiple systems.

I keep a bullet journal, which is mainly for journaling and long-term planning.

Some days I write a list of tasks on a piece of paper.

I put events with a definite time in my calendar (add with Fantastical, review with Calendar app, Week Cal + Fantastical on iPhone, Calendars 5 on iPad).

I put "someday" tasks and tasks that have a definite due date in Things on Mac and iOS (the new version is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used). The new Things also integrates calendar events into the "Today" view, which is quite useful. But I don't look at it every day.

Previously I used "2do" with "smart lists" corresponding to a priority matrix ("important urgent", "important not urgent", "not important urgent", "not important not urgent.") It was a bit too complicated and I switched to Things when the new version came out a couple months ago.

I also used to have a daily checklist in 2do, but after it became habit, I found I didn't need it anymore. I highly recommend a daily checklist for anyone recovering from burn-out, depression, or similar.

I've just switched to doing high-level planning in a "Master Plan" document in Quip. It's already quite detailed and covers most aspect of my life.

Otherwise lately I organize my days into 3 or 4 timed 1-2 hour focused work "zones", with as much ceremony as time affords, to the point of making special drinks, listening to specific music depending on the theme, and lighting candles.

I'm also experimenting with 3 10-minute open-ended thinking periods per day, for which I have alarms set in my phone.

The latter two habits have been very effective. I'd tried Pomodoro in the past, but I find that ceremony is important.

That sounds pretty exotic, but the major insight from the past 10 years of trying things is that finding the one right system is a fool's errand. Trying many different systems – the simpler the better – and letting them evolve naturally works best for me.

I'm having trouble finding information about what GNUnet is on the website. Is there an overview somewhere?

re: most other software: "Wow. It's just a relational database."

And now you find the same thing at http://apollo.rip or http://redacted.ch, almost exactly as it was.

On chef and cucumber: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13209760

On Knuth, C, and Haskell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12741430

On npm and In Praise of Idleness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12209300

On revenue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11307264

On cranks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931403

On "Great Men": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10166372

On the vastness of space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9937353

Advice from a doctor: https://www.are.na/block/324266

A+ dig at pg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7140065

A+ troll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7229519

Just Messenger, Events when I'm invited to them, occasionally being tagged in a post, and a couple of groups.

I did this a few years ago and haven't looked back.

I had the issue where I was suddenly following everyone again on one occasion (years ago), but since I've unfollowed everyone again, I haven't had any issues.

Some free associations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgGU8Vy3xoc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLIi_ZMBfQs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d38xbAFnCSQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hamT4XESYG0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQWCUXNsUyQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY-9cGBdxNw&list=PL8kGLx6Th4...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM251rMyfUg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oBl0xq16G0

Ah, thanks for the clarification! Turns out I could have discovered that if I had Googled: https://www.juce.com/history-and-development – so much for speculation.

This is speculative, but Max/MSP 5 – which was a very dated piece of software at the time – was re-written using JUCE for the UI, and IIRC JUCE wasn't music-focused at the time. Quite likely the current music focus has everything to do with Cycling '74 making that choice, the subsequent advent of Max4Live (which popularized Max), and the dominance of that kind of rounded-corners, pre-flat design aesthetic so common in music software since Ableton Live took over the world, which happens to be JUCE's default style.

https://numi.io/, http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/

Any clarity re: this comment[1], which seems to suggest that things are not as they seem?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13942989

> In June 2015, the FCC reclassified the ISP's as common carriers. Tada, the FTC rules no longer apply. So the FCC regulated them with roughly the same set of rules. Now they've undone this.

If you believe this guy, most linguists who speak of the "S-W Hypothesis" have no idea what Sapir or Whorf said: http://hilgart.org/enformy/dma-Chap7.htm.

—

'I push his head back' and 'I drop it in water and it floats,' though very dissimilar sentences in English, are similar in Shawnee. The point of view of linguistic relativity changes Mr. Everyman's dictum: Instead of saying "Sentences are unlike because they tell about unlike facts," he now reasons: "Facts are unlike to speakers whose language background provides for unlike formulation of them."

We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.

From this fact proceeds what I have called the "linguistic relativity principle," which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.

Concepts of "time" and "matter" are not given in substantially the same form by experience to all men but depend upon the nature of the language or languages through the use of which they have been developed.

Since Numi <https://numi.io/> has become slow to launch – and I find Soulver <http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/> overkill for quick calculations – I've been looking for a replacement. Here's how to set insect up to run "as" a Mac app.

https://gist.github.com/msutherl/b2ab6d5ae7454ea1a987ee85385...

Makes more sense when it's for and by an actual community of people, in which case it's a bit more like a party with your friends where you all give talks and take part in semi-structured activities

So glad "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees" is here – one of my favorite books and the reason I became an artist ... and then stopped being an artist.

One of my most referenced parts of the book describes an entire year Irwin spent in Ibiza (IIRC) alone and not speaking to anyone in his late 20s. The insight he gathered that year really determined the rest of the career and enabled him to step outside of the zeitgeist of the time (abstract expressionism) into something totally different.

If you're in LA, you can see a garden he designed at the Getty Center. If you're in New York, you can visit DIA Beacon, which he also designed (or non-designed really). And if you ever get a chance to see his artwork, I highly recommend it.

Such restraint, such slowness.

This doesn't work for everyone, but my approach this is to ask: what is the intersection of my unique strengths and the most important problems to address in the world? In answering this, you quickly discover you need a philosophy, an idea of what future you'd like to see for humanity, and you need to leverage experiences you've had. A few things I can recommend for starting this journey:

- Spend some time familiarizing yourself with your historical context, the political and economic systems you operate within, and ethics generally

- Do a broad survey of every single project you can find within your interest areas. If you're into non-profits, check out the http://foundationcenter.org/ library/database. If you're into startups, spend hours on Crunchbase / Angelist researching startups. Ask around. Google a lot. Make lists!

- Consider thinking through a cause prioritization framework. I have some mostly related to the Effective Altruism community collected here: https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/cause-prioritization. Bret Victor put together an amazing article re: climate change: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/. You can probably find other meta-level analyses. When you start to narrow in, you search for various industry reports, check out bls.gov, etc. and start getting used to looking for gaps and opportunities at that kind of meta-level. Note: this information is hard to find and being familiar with it is one of the main strategic advantages that good leaders have!

- Spend a good long time, multiple engagements of an hour or so, writing down what you think your unique strengths and skills are? Ask yourself: what do I do when I'm procrastinating? What do I find myself doing a lot but that feels very easy to me? Also ask people you know: "what am I good at?"

- Don't underestimate serendipity. Reconnect with people from your past. Go to meetups and networking events (but don't waste your time – scan the list before and introduce yourself to the people that matter i.e. the organizers). Explore online communities. Ask your friends if they know people that they think you should know and get the intro.

Ultimately: take a structured approach to solving this problem. Eventually you'll uncover and opportunity that you can't turn down. But don't forget the research you've done because soon enough you'll be back at square one! Welcome to the future!

The people working in R&D at these companies (i.e. Apple) are to varying extents aware of this history. Indeed there are different "brands" for a set of concepts that have be evolving since the 70s, IoT being the most popular term in public discourse as of the past few years, and "ubiquitous computing" having fallen almost completely out of favor except in academic circles.

Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish wrote an interesting book few years ago that argued that Nicholas Negroponte's and Mark Wiser's visions had indeed come to pass, as predicted over and over again, just by different names and under guises we that we didn't recognize: https://www.amazon.com/Divining-Digital-Future-Mythology-Ubi.... The story continues!

Hi Alan,

I'd like to go deeper into your notion of "pop cultures" vs. "progress", in the context of innovation, but also the arts. Can you recommend some readings that might fill out those concepts?

Also feels like worse-is-better vs. the right thing. How much engineering effort and additional maintenance would be required to develop and support such a time-model? A lot. Alas, let us re-create software systems to be radically simpler so that we can do the right thing! Still waiting for Urbit and VPRI's 10k line operating system ... but that's what Alan stands for in our industry: "strive to do the right thing," or as you put it, "solve the problem".

Au contraire, I'm happy that the last-seen-state is preserved and I'm given the option to refresh to see the current state should I chose to.

I think you meant "aesthetically pleasing", but I'm looking forward now to using the phrase "ascetically pleasing" in earnest :)

US cities that aren't car centric: Portland, Seattle, New York, Boston. Nearby: Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto. Afar: London, Paris, Berlin.

Arguably San Francisco is the most car-centric of the bunch with its comparatively non-functional transportation system.