Urglish
Some career advice.
Some of the ideas are a bit contradictory, which I suspect is the nature of all useful advice: you’ll have to work through the conflicts and details yourself. One of the reasons I write online is so that folks can discover me, and being discoverable has lead to many of the best things in my life. if you stay somewhere that you’re very comfortable for too long, then you’re missing out on so much future growth.
more and more I think this extends to everything: the best way to do anything well is to quickly get feedback on how you’re doing
The rise of few-maintainer projects
That two experienced developers could hold such conflicting views on commit access belies a quiet but growing tension between past and present norms in open source. The salient issue for maintainers today is less about growing contributor numbers and more about navigating the flow of developers who are clamoring for their time. In a world where single maintainers like Dominic Tarr maintain hundreds of tiny modules, we need to reframe the question from “Why would he do that?” to “How do we design for trustless interactions?”
Time, Self, and Remembering Online
I recently stumbled upon this tweet from Aaron Lewis: “what if old tweets were displayed with the profile pic you had at the time of posting. a way to differentiate between past and present selves.” I’m going to set aside for now an obviously and integrally related matter: to what degree should our present self be held responsible for the utterances of an older iteration of the self that resurface through the operations of our new memory machines? What I’m reading into Lewis’s proposal then is an impulse, not at all unwarranted, to reassert a measure of agency over the operations of digitally mediated memory. Yes, that was me as I was, but that is no longer me as I now am, and this critical difference was implicit in the evolution of my physical appearance, which signaled as much to all who saw me. No such signals are available to the self as it exists online.
Self Checkout
In other words, the ‘success’ of technologies like self-checkout machines is in large part produced by the human effort necessary to maintain the technologies Their broader point is that automation doesn’t eliminate human labor; it often leads to its disguising and devaluation Customers have to bridge the gap between the norms of human customer service and the company’s imposition of inhuman staff shortfalls without completely losing their patience or simply taking what they couldn’t find a reasonable way to purchase. That is, they rely on the kinds of consideration from users that the companies themselves don’t practice. They have prioritized user growth, data collection, and advertising over providing a safe, reliable service to users. It’s no wonder that some users will adopt the same attitude and the same goals: try to spread unwanted messages as far as possible.
#91: Music for Airports
Now, we can admit, at sufficiently high resolution we’re all effectively homeless a lot of the time. Last week, I attended Ribbonfarm’s annual meetup in Los Angeles (which was fantastic). In Venkatesh Rao’s closing remarks, he observed that the audience wasn’t so much a community as an airport: a bunch of people on individual trajectories sharing the same physical space momentarily before dispersing again. If we can instead learn to design parts of the world for airport-like assemblages and the fractal nature of physical existence — the world we currently inhabit — we might actually find that we get more of what we’re seeking from communities.
Millennials
Restorative Environments
Fascination in the Kaplan’s sense is a magical (that’s my word) quality of an environment where your attention is held but not drained.
Gather Your People
The problem is that if you’re not reflecting, you’re not learning. And if you’re not learning, it’s quite easy to get stuck or to find you’re working on the wrong thing. Reflection is like sleep—you need it but you tend to only appreciate it after you’ve had it. You could poll everyone, but honestly it’s easier to just pick a date and see what happens.
Big Mood Machine
Indeed, what Spotify calls “streaming intelligence” should be understood as surveillance of its users to fuel its own growth and ability to sell mood-and-moment data to brands. When a platform like Spotify sells advertisers on its mood-boosting, background experience, and then bakes these aims into what it recommends to listeners, a twisted form of behavior manipulation is at play. It’s connected to what Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, calls the “behavioral futures market”—where “many companies are eager to lay their bets on our future behavior.”
Literally social insurance
many people now rely on their employer to pay the premium for insurance against the erosion of their social life. Hardly a cause for either company’s success, but certainly a tailwind. Ironically this would mean that WeWork didn’t stand on the shoulders of Facebook as a user acquisition machine so much as it cleaned up what Facebook left in its wake as an alienation machine.
All Eyes On Jillian Meehan
but because she’d gladly fill me in on all the new things she’s loving and not let me leave her apartment until I’ve tried them all. and then promptly forget to drink it for an hour
Brandon’s implementation of `either` on two prisms
Given the following definition of `Prism`: ```swift struct Prism { let preview: (A) - B? let review: (B) - A } ```
Quick Notes on Yesterday’s Post
Within hours of yesterday's post, I had some new information to consider.
Composable Reducers and Effect Systems
Profunctor Optics paper
Compositionality: A Manifesto
one that emphasises the study of a whole through not only its parts, but the precise way it is built up from its parts. We will welcome papers on implementation.
Reactive Cocoa Developer Conference • Panel Q&A and Discussion
The full panel Q&A and discussion with Josh Abernathy, Justin Spahr-Summers, Uri Baghin, Dave Lee, and Jon Sterling from the 2014 Reactive Cocoa Developer Conference hosted by GitHub.
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Combine: Where’s the Beef?
Let's start discussing Apple's Combine framework by discussing what's missing
oh no all my earnestness in one place
the major skill that all of you have acquired is how to be a more thoughtful, invested, engaged person in today’s world. That’s hard to put on a resume, and even if you could, I don’t know if employers would value it: somehow “understanding how ideologies of race, sexuality, and gender are encoded in the media that surrounds us and influence our interactions with each other” isn’t as marketable as “Proficient in Excel.” There’s an old union slogan I’ve been thinking about a lot: 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for work, 8 hours to do what you will. What you do with that time “to do what you will” — go outside, read deeply and widely, go to the Bijou every night for popcorn with brewer’s yeast, run for office, go to church, advocate for things that actually matter to you — that is just as much who you are, if not more so, than the time you spend at work. Unions understood and still understand: work is part of life. But only part. We don’t have to monetize our hobbies.We don’t have to value education for its ability to provide readily marketable skills.
Manufactured Recollection
But as a result, I am remembering much of my life through the algorithmic frameworks of these third-party companies. Consequently, we view photographs not merely as relatively rare artifacts capturing particularly significant moments but as prosthetic extensions of ourselves and our interior lives. When algorithms intervene in how and when we interact with our photographs, they secure a deeply emotional inroad to our identity-forming practices. These images and the way they are algorithmically organized don’t merely remind us of the past; they help shape how we think of ourselves in the present and how we might think to document our lives and articulate ourselves in the future. — making us audiences of ourselves as the algorithms piece together our “best” stories for us. But “Memories” features rewire relationships in such a way that makes commercial platforms indispensable mediators. memories become susceptible to being evaluated according to performance metrics. we must ask what memories are left on the outskirts. What experiences are illegible to or unvalued by a commercial system? What does it mean for our subjectivities at large that we are all building our memories around same scaffolding? Over four decades ago, Susan Sontag posited that photography enables “an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.” As a multiplier of photography’s influence, algorithmically fueled “Memories” features bring us deeper into a supercharged aesthetic consumerism that shapes our personal narratives along the lines of influencer culture.
Anki User Manual
When we’re unable to answer a question, it tells us we need to return to the material to review or relearn it. In a sense, this is a sort of reality reconciliation akin to checkins, therapy, OmniFocus Reviews, and the like. The “Study Deck” item in the Tools menu allows you to quickly switch to a deck with the keyboard. You can trigger it with the `/` key. When opened, it will display all of your decks and show a filter area at the top. As you type characters, Anki will display only decks matching the characters you type. You can add a space to separate multiple search terms, and Anki will show only decks that match all the terms.
swift-evolution/XXXX-function-builders.md
This maintains proposals for changes and user-visible enhancements to the Swift Programming Language. - swift-evolution/XXXX-function-builders.md at 9992cf3c11c2d5e0ea20bee98657d93902d5b174 · apple...
swift-evolution/0244-opaque-result-types.md
Right now, if you want to abstract the return type of a declaration from its signature, existentials or manual type erasure are your only options, and these come with tradeoffs that are not always acceptable. Instead of declaring the specific return type of `EightPointedStar.shape`'s current implementation, all we really want to say is that it returns something that conforms to `Shape`. We propose the syntax `some Protocol`. An opaque return type can be thought of as putting the generic signature “to the right” of the function arrow; instead of being a type chosen by the caller that the callee sees as abstracted, the return type is chosen by the callee, and comes back to the caller as abstracted. or some composition thereof (joined with `&`)
swift-evolution/0258-property-wrappers.md
The `Box`, `Lazy`, `UserDefault`, and `Clamping` examples are worth reviewing. Composition of wrappers is right-associative.
Semantic’s “Why Haskell?” Document
While no level of type safety is sufficient to ensure all programs' correctness, the fact that the Semantic Code team spends the majority of its time working on features rather than debugging production crashes is truly remarkable—and this can largely be attributed to our choice of language. but in Haskell: its brevity, power, and focus on correctness lets researchers focus on the nature of the problem rather than the onerous task of fitting advanced research into conventional languages. Writing in Haskell allows us to build on top of the work of others rather than getting stuck in a cycle of reading, porting, and bug-fixing. a reputation for being difficult to learn. Some of that is well deserved, but half of it has more to do with how many of us first learned imperative programming and the switch to a functional paradigm takes some patience.
Sarah’s introversion comic
HowToSupportNetNewsWire.markdown
Tell other people about cool blogs and feeds you’ve found. Or: skip helping us, and, instead, help people who need help more than we do. Those people should not be hard to find.
The Unseen Forest
It’s more akin to individual groups planting the seeds that will eventually become the trees that will eventually make up the forest. Those planters aren’t in the forest-seeing business, they’re in the planting-seeds business. And those you’d think would be in the forest-seeing business have a hard time seeing such things until all those seeds have grown into trees. And that’s often not until the rest of us can see said forest too.