Substrate

“thoughts from the past few weeks - think a lot of folks confuse the terms: social, messaging, communication, and consumer - you're stuck in blue bubble purgatory as friends until you have a synchronous convo 🗣 or IRL coffee - calendar battleship is a real drag for everyone”

“And of all the things I did this year that I'm proud of — finding my dream job, running my first 10K, beginning to write poetry again — Buttondown's growth and success might be the biggest one.”

Forget about Quora's security breach. Their ongoing efforts to block access to their content, including a multi-year ban on the Internet Archive, are reason enough to never use them.

“That makes sense, except it doesn’t. Shouldn’t large organizations have more of a capacity for handling “m risk” and seek to leverage that to gain long term advantages?”

The more senior you are, the longer timescales you operate in. Weeks/months become year/5 years/+. And the feedback loops much longer as well (many years).That transition is tough, but what is most difficult is adapting your notion of patience and when to apply impatience.— Julia Grace (@jewelia) August 16, 2018

I literally made a sticker pack to help the recipient know you sent a tweet to them with multiple images or video https://t.co/BoIFaqwqB5— Trevor Kay (@trevormkay) September 26, 2018

“Places—individual stores, neighborhoods, and entire cities—are fragile, and the internet makes them more so.” “Marshall McLuhan wrote that every new medium contained another medium as its content: Speech, for example, became the content of writing, as writing became the content of print. Cities, which grew independently for so long, might now be the content of the internet.”

For the last four years I’ve been working on a book for programmers who want to learn mathematics. It’s finally done, and you can buy it today. The website for the book is pimbook.org, …

“I bought a roomba, please reply with a good name.”

Why September 21 is so much more than a random calendar date.

Making a claim that something will never be the case can feel like an invitation for the universe to prove otherwise. Fortunately for us, Swift lives up to this higher standard thanks to the unlikeliest of types.

Void has no members: no methods, no values, not even a name. It’s a something more nothing than nil.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s memoir Small Fry is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

“(I am writing this across the room from an absolute unit of a black lab, whose name I imagine to be Bear or perhaps Winchester, whom I am summoning the energy and wherewithal to go up and pet.)”

Each quarter Chris Yeh and I convene about 20 of our friends on the peninsula and 20 of our friends in San Francisco for a conversation over lunch. Each lunch, called the Junto, has a theme. So far…

“As a small business owner (@tattly) I am always trying to support other small businesses. In this thread I'll mention a few small online shops I love in context of holiday season gifting. Add your recommendation in the thread?”

Tomorrow's the last day to back The Peach Pack, Ami's followup to You Think You Know Me, a fun and thoughtful game worth supporting.

At the service, I read the eulogy below, which tried to explain why he was special to so many of us. Writing it was easy, at least in part because he wrote the best bits himself. The hard part was reading it. He laughed at his own jokes and at yours. He made it very easy to love him.

“Open sourced a small tool I use to put "Busy" events on my work calendar when I create events on my personal calendar, powered by @IFTTT and Amazon Lambda: https://t.co/22MCaIgbP9 It's run 718 times over the past year and a half with zero maintenance!”

“I’m neither wise nor smart enough to answer the question Is Amazon good for Seattle? But the position of most non-Amazon tech companies in Seattle is that they’re thankful for Amazon’s presence, if for no other reason that they act as a lightning rod for all criticism of Seattle’s rapid upheaval.”