johnke.meTo commemorate his 68th birthday, Kevin Kelly came up with 68 bits of unsolicited advice. Knowledge he’s gathered over his 68 years. And they’re all wonderful. My absolute favourite is
Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.
This is something I’ve only recently come to realise and I’ve been trying to apply it wherever I can. Go read the rest, they’re worth your time.
There’s an old, not very funny joke about the two hardest things in computer science being cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
But I’d like to add that the real hardest thing is taking complicated concepts and explaining them in simple language so that even non-computer-people can comprehend them. And that’s something Nicky Case is great at. Along with security & privacy researcher Carmela Troncoso and epidemiologist Marcel Salathé, Nicky came up an explanation of how DP-3T works that is so great, so understandable that I’d feel comfortable showing it to my mother so she could make sense of it.
The reason I’m linking to it, besides it being a great example of how to do explainers like this properly, is that this is kiiiinda like the model proposed by both Google and Apple for their contact tracing protocol, and that’s probably something that’s going to become incredibly important over the next few months so it’s important people understand it.
What the idealized iPhone user and the idealized Gmail user shared was a perfect executive-functioning system: Every time they picked up their phone or opened their web browser, they knew exactly what they wanted to do, got it done with a calm single-mindedness, and then closed their device. This dream illuminated Inbox Zero and Kinfolk and minimalist writing apps. It didn’t work. What we got instead was Inbox Infinity and the algorithmic timeline. Each of us became a wanderer in a sea of content. Each of us adopted the tacit—but still shameful—assumption that we are just treading water, that the clock is always running, and that the work will never end.
This might be one of the best essays on technology (and my favourite topics: the internet that was and the internet that could have been) that I’ve ever read.
I’ve already mentioned how much I don’t like Cards Against Humanity as a game, but I really admire them as a company. They’re constantly doing interesting things like buying a private island and giving 1 sq ft to each of their subscribers. This time, they’ve bought ClickHole and turned it into an independent, majority employee-owned company.
I work remotely with a team that’s spread across Europe and I just before Christmas, I calculated that I lost a full third of my week to video calls, most of which should have been emails. So I read this and shouted OMFG YES to almost every point. Obviously, every team is different and this guide isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution (nor does it claim to be) but there’s so much in here to take on board.
(Until I sort out my professional blog, you’re just going to have to put up with the occasional work/devops related post on here, sorry about that.)
I cried more than once while reading this profile of Tom Hanks. Just lovely.
Throwback to that moment last year when my entire YouTube home screen was taken up by Brad Leone, so this one really hits home.
(Also, the “Bon Appetit Cinematic Universe”? 😗👌)
Leaving aside the sexism in this article, I feel like it’s articulated a lot of things that have been bothering me subconsciously. My job is 100% remote and I work from home, so there’s a sort of expectation in our house that I’ll do almost all of the the cooking. And that’s sort of fine, because I genuinely enjoy cooking. But it’s also extremely stressful because it’s not just cooking. It’s the planning (two small picky-eating children who even smell garlic and complain “it’s too spicy!”), it’s the shopping, it’s the prepping. It’s the mental and emotional labour around cooking that makes it so stressful.
I wasn’t fully taken with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (On my letterboxd ranking of Tarantino films, it’s second from bottom), but Priscilla Page makes a pretty great argument for the film, explaining a lot of the smaller details that idiots like me might have missed, such as:
… their front gate opening to him like the pearly gates of heaven as Maurice Jarre’s “Miss Lily Langtry” plays. (When this song plays in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, the title card reads: “Maybe this isn’t the way it was…it’s the way it should have been.”)
You don’t necessarily have to train long for this, just smart. This is true for nearly any endurance event, whether it’s a 5K or 100 miles or everyday life. You have to be creative. You have to steal time from the edges of your day, teach yourself to eat on the fly, learn to function on suboptimal sleep, and keep going even when you want to lie down and cry. In other words, just like parenthood.
I’m not an elite athlete, but I am father to two children under 4 and it definitely confirm what this lady is saying - being a parent makes you very good at two things: ruthlessly prioritising and getting comfortable existing at the edges of what most people would consider ’tolerable living’. I haven’t had an unbroken night of sleep in almost four years. When I finish something for myself, even something as simple as reading a book, it’s because I slowly slowly chipped away at it and it feels like a major accomplishment.
Anyway, this lady’s whole article is terrific and is worth reading.