May Sarton on solitude and its interplay with relationships
“That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone.”
“people that work from home” are not equivalent to “people who are available do your bidding 24/7 just because they work from home”
“people that work from home” are not equivalent to “people who are available do your bidding 24/7 just because they work from home” thanks additionally, as someone who has had this happen to them, it’s really shitty to make fun of people who are home “a lot” or to assume they’ll always be there and then get upset when they *do* go out and have appointments and plans just like “a normal person” there have been points in my life where i’ve been home a lot, and had to make myself leave even if i was lonely, and it was critical to my health. more recently, i’ve had more reasons (and energy) to leave. there are so many reasons people stay inside. be nice and understanding
“help I fancy a priest, luxury water, and desi lit”
I now refer to any dorky dude who has confidence, an inexplicable passion for something not in the mainstream, and maybe a slight drop of compassion in their speech as possessing Hot Priest Energy. I’ll leave it at that.
This maintains proposals for changes and user-visible enhancements to the Swift Programming Language. - swift-evolution/proposals/0244-opaque-result-types.md at b1caeccf5d273a1cc53b331d41ea169f7729...
At some point, sadness will creep up your hands while you write and you won't know why. There are feelings writing can unearth long before the words to describe them. It's okay to stop. All blood pulses back to the heart. You don't need to open a vein t
At some point, sadness will creep up your hands while you write and you won't know why. There are feelings writing can unearth long before the words to describe them. It's okay to stop. All blood pulses back to the heart. You don't need to open a vein to find your pulse.
But I've also become allergic to that language—the rhetoric around "solving problems" and "building things" that springs from the privileged mindset of the lone techno-savior. I suspect this mindset is one reason the old-school punks didn't quite make it. Sometimes, there are no clear-cut problems and nobody needs to build anything new. Sometimes we just need to talk about it. If we build anything, it should be not software, but consensus. I, too, want to help shape these emerging computational layers to be less coercive and extractive, more expressive and equitable, before it's too late. So I think the most effective thing I can do now is to join various publics, listen to how people understand and engage with technologies, and let that understanding shape my work as I work to shape that understanding. I don't know how to do it yet, but I'm trying.
listening to a podcast at a multiple of its intended speed goes against the grain of the medium, which is better suited to soothe, comfort, entertain, or saturate the environment than to impart knowledge. In this sense, using computers makes us act more like computers.
and exercise and yoga and turning off devices and caffeine and pep talks—these can all help with our metaphorical recharge, but they’re not a perfect formula like a plug into a correctly-shaped hole. Sometimes are bodies and minds are stubborn mysteries. I have been thinking lately, as usual, our language about wellness is bending toward the language of machines. the one and only infallible, deep-in-the-bones, rejuvenating source of energy, has been the love of good people. the warmth of friends I haven’t seen in a year, and who have lit my face up with a grin so expansive that I find my cheeks sore at the end of the day.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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
