Say, for whatever reason, you were in desperate need of Bill the Cat ASCII art in your app. Maybe you were very drunk and had a bet. Maybe you were working with some kind of Unix awk client. I dunn…

I think one reason I’m drawn to writing and art is that I don’t have to be competitive — if I’m competing with anyone, it’s against myself, or a bunch of my favorite (most of them dead) artists, or it’s a kind of friendly competition spurred on by seeing other folks’ work in the world. And even then, I’m not competing to be the best at what I do, I’m trying to be the only one who does what I do.

I first read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” on Twitter, which explains something of why her work is both beloved and dismissed. It’s a boring discussion: I enjoyed this, but is it art? I won’t stoop to take the bait of it here. “Wild Geese” is one of those telegraphic poems that announces its meaning without flourish from the very outset: You do not have to be good. I feel worthy of being in the world when I think of “Wild Geese.” I feel that the world has use for me. It’s a poem of arresting lucidity and wisdom. It would be stupid to call it simple in that way that suggests that simplicity is a moral good or an aesthetically preferable state. But I also won’t say that it is complex, as though one needs to apologize for the spare nonpyrotechnics of the piece. Instead, I’ll say simply that “Wild Geese” is a poem that made me want to breathe again. The speaker, in an act of breathtaking generosity, offers the reader, no matter how lowly or afield they have found themselves, an opportunity to reenter the world. There is an entreaty to follow the natural grain of one’s character, to heed one’s desire.

You see, it's very different than other branches of math. Rather than being another sibling lined up in the family photograph, it's more like a common gene that unites them in the first place. With this vantage point, it becomes evident that different areas of math share common patterns/trends/structures. This becomes extraordinarily useful when you want to solve a problem in one realm (say, topology) but don't have the right tools at your disposal. By transporting the problem to a different realm (say, algebra), you can see the problem in a different light and perhaps discover new tools, and the solution may become much easier. a "template" for all of mathematics: depending on what you feed into the template, you'll recover one of the mathematical realms. Naturally, then, you're prompted to also ask about relationships between categories. These are called functors. But why stop there? What about the relationships between those relationships? These are called natural transformations. (And yes, you can ask a hierarchy of questions: "What about the relationships between the relationships between the relationships between the...?" This leads to infinity categories. [And a possible brain freeze.]

Mercedes is a graphic designer and illustrator from Buenos Aires, Argentina currently based in Dublin, Ireland. At the moment she is working as a brand …

“@jckarter @Javi @mdiep The space of things that are typey enough to need labels but not typey enough to get a name and call a struct is pretty small.”

Jeff Tweedy mentioned this Dolly Parton philosophy in his memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Come Back): Dolly Parton once said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.” Or something like that. As I’ve gotten older, those are the people

The typical audio environment for HomePod has many challenges — echo, reverberation, and noise. Unlike Siri on iPhone, which operates close…

pic.twitter.com/DRD9DUZh5Y— bb ghost (@emilywithcurls) February 2, 2019

hot take it should be completely normal for people to come to forums and post a simple question, get directed to an existing thread, and everyone says "thanks / you're welcome" instead of the hostility i've seen towards this on forums for 20 years— Sega Protogenesis (@gravislizard) February 2, 2019

But of course, the magic of the poem, and that of many of Oliver’s poems in particular, is how it creates this sense of being implausibly singled out and told what you were waiting to hear.

I fell in love with Tumblr the day I first saw the product.

Make friends, make love, make lots of things. Make something great. Because that is what will make you happy for the rest of your life. I don’t think it’s luck. I work insanely hard, all the time.

At Grailed we’ve turned to functional programming for inspiration on how to write testable, well-structured view models.

This domain may be for sale!

Just remember: most people want to meet you as much as you want to meet them, especially in social situations like this. No one would prefer to stand there and stare at their phone when there are tons of fascinating people around.

Try the innovative new bedroom lighting designed with sleep in mind. Buy the Glow Light from the sleep specialists at Casper & experience a better night's rest.

A case of dis-functional programming.

A talk at the Difficult to Name reading series about the disappearing web and what we can do to stop it.

Jersey City-based artist/engineer Jenn Schiffer makes art with code, teaches code with art, and open-source tools for playing with both. Her hilariously deadpan writing satirizes tech culture and programming tutorials, roping in clueless mansplainers for literally years after publication. Follow Jenn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jennschiffer And on Medium: https://medium.com/@jennschiffer Her official site: http://jennmoney.biz/ Recorded in September 2016 at XOXO, an experimental festival celebrating independently produced art and technology in Portland, Oregon. For more, visit http://xoxofest.com. Introductory music: "Flaws Run Deep" by Jim Guthrie. Video production by brytCAST. Video thumbnail by Searle Video. Captions by White Coat Captioning.

aah I love this How To Make Coffee choose-your-own-adventure comic my coworker @akvanh made for the @honeycombio kitchen!! \o/✨my favourite is the "cleanup" step (: pic.twitter.com/NYRb08C3vq— daiyi! ✨ (chris) (@daiyitastic) January 31, 2019