“The poems offer a version of the world in which we might reach toward others’ joy in the same gesture as reaching toward our own, rather than dissecting faults and hoarding happiness.” “I am aware that this is a way of being bad at social media, just like insisting on joy is a way of being bad at poetry. I am aware that documenting my love is basic in the same way that O’Hara being my favorite poet is basic. But, at least for me, this obsessive documentation of the stupid, boring, repetitive things that string a life together is the place where social media aspires to the level of poetry.” “Love celebrates another person’s existence rather than their achievements.” “Look at this pattern of days, this holiday that means nothing outside itself.”
“To sum up - in 1978 a series of small mistakes created some characters out of nothing. The errors went undiscovered just long enough to be set in stone, and now these ghosts are, at least in potential, a part of every computer on the planet, lurking in the dark corners of character tables.”
“I don’t know, I think that this kind of email-based personal writing is like whispering when you’re the last two people left awake at a sleepover and you get to say the things you’d never say in a daylight conversation, one that actually counts.”
On Appreciating Others’ Work Despite Disappointment of a Potentially “Closed-Off” Opportunity
“Coding/life question: How do you appreciate cool things other people have done without also feeling like that you could have written it and that possibility is now closed off to you? Like I've just lost a race to Do That Thing somehow.”
“...and without the abstract episodes we’d be stuck in an endless loop of adding superficial niceties to our code that don’t meaningfully improve it in a significant way.”
“For a ‘book’ is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure, made increasingly accessible. Even if the endpoint stays stubbornly the same—either as an unchanging Kindle edition or simple paperback—the universe that produces, breathes life into, and supports books is changing in positive, inclusive ways, year by year. The Future Book is here and continues to evolve. You’re holding it. It’s exciting. It’s boring. It’s more important than it has ever been.”
“My original sin wasn’t making a Facebook account, it was abandoning my own website that I controlled (the original site was hosted on Tripod, but if I had to do it all over again, I'd pay for web hosting.) All these years later, maybe it’s time to update Jason’s Site.”
“...the endlessly rewritable surface of the screen dispenses with that arrangement” “The distinct identity that a particular cover conveys has been traded for a standardizing consistency that unifies everything displayed on a screen as data flowing in a broader stream.” “The euphoria of endless choice and convenience is counterbalanced by a sense of anomie, in which things that used to matter — like taste — don’t seem to anymore and lack an obvious substitute. Meanwhile, the platforms themselves, in their totalizing ambition, take advantage of our disorientation and choose behavior for us.” “For centuries, the cover has functioned as the gateway to a work, priming us to receive what’s within.” “But another approach is to view infrastructure as context — that which establishes a relationship between one thing and other things. Infrastructure creates adjacency where it wouldn’t otherwise exist, frequently in the form of a physical connection. For instance, the massive Denver International Airport, opened in 1995, put an otherwise relatively remote city at the doorstep of the world, replacing a small regional airport with a major international hub. Urban street systems link houses, stores, and workplaces, defining neighborhoods and cities as coherent entities. Airports and roads, however, are only the most tangible examples of infrastructure. Organizational schema like geographic coordinates or the Dewey Decimal System are also infrastructure, as is the internet and everything it comprises, at a global scale.” “The platform’s huge selection doesn’t overwhelm us because we believe more choice is good for us whether we can handle it or not. Regardless, we never have to face the blinding totality of that variety all at once.” “Legible, contextualized environments are something humans deeply desire. Urban theorist Kevin Lynch, in his 1960 book The Image of the City, called this “imageability.” He argued that “a vivid and integrated physical setting, capable of producing a sharp image, plays a social role.” Such a setting provides “the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication,” which in turn “gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security.” So a bookstore, from this point of view, is not just a place to find books, but a place to confirm a sense of belonging, one rooted in a shared sense of how things are categorized and organized.”
“I think that the opposite is true too—the writing should be able to exist alongside the image without being redundant. Writing simple summary or description of what is in the picture is not enough. To attempt and recreate what the photo is already doing is a fool’s errand because describing the contents of a picture can never compete with or replace the actual visual thing. The best we can do is try to translate what the pictures make us feel, and try and understand why they affect us in the way they do.”
“Viewed through this lens, employment takes on a feudal quality, where companies no longer provide the tools or resources for getting work done, but instead primarily offer security, a mission, and a tribe to be part of.”
With instant gratification obliterating attention spans and patience, customers don't have time to wait for slow delivery. This holiday season, Amazon is at the forefront of fast delivery.
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“10. After a task, project or pairing session, ask them what they would have done differently to expedite their learning. This will encourage them to reflect, gain meta-awareness about how they best learn and iterate for future work.”
“Mentorship, by contrast, is inherently performative. It will be imperfect. It will be messy. But it can be so valuable, and so rewarding. Embrace the messiness.”
