What I read this week #1
Some interesting stuff I read this week. Mirrored from ENOCC.com
The Imperfectionist: Seventy per cent by Oliver Burkeman
This one I discovered in Sal's blog.
The 70% rule: If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it. If you’re 70% satisfied with a product you’ve created, launch it. If you’re 70% sure a decision is the right one, implement it. And if you’re 70% confident you’ve got what it takes to do something that might make a positive difference to the increasingly alarming era we seem to inhabit? Go ahead and do that thing. (Please!)
Investing in RSS by Tim Kadlec
Opening up my RSS reader, a cup of coffee in hand, still feels calm and peaceful in a way that trying to keep up with happenings in other ways just never has. There’s more room for nuance and thoughtfulness, and I feel more in control of what I choose to read, and what I don’t.
The act of spending that time in those feeds still feels like a very deliberate, intentional act. Curating a set of feeds I find interesting and making the time to read them feels like an investment in myself.
long time no blog; thinking about collective action in view from the present
Yet I find myself wondering if social media - precisely the thing we need to collectively push to meaningfully change - isn't purpose-built to prevent us from banding together collectively for meaningful change. I don't just mean its attention-fragmenting, privacy-obliterating features; I also mean its tendency to convince us that slacktivism is all we need. You don't need to go out and organize! Just share this video and like that post, see, you did the thing, you are a Good Person who is Fighting the Good Fight.
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence by Jarrett Fuller, Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University
The paradox of designing for the web is that the simplicity of building a website with basic tools means it can adapt to the changing technology around it. “For those of us who’ve had our websites for years, each version tells a story about us from a different era,” Schwulst says. “With my new site, the goal was to build a structure that could last for years.” This is not a nostalgia for a web long gone or a resistance to change, but a reminder for those of us working in digital spaces: Legacy is not a bad word.
Process World, Object-Oriented Mind by Marco Giancotti
Marco Giancotti writes an exploration of the rise and fall of Object Oriented Programming for Aether Mug and makes references to the models of cognition which in turn influence software engineering paradigms.
I'm surprised there was no mention of Platonism, which was a clear influence on one of the first Object Oriented programming languages, Smalltalk.
Here is Alan Kay talking about this in his paper The Early History of Smalltalk:
Philosophically, Smalltalk's objects have much in common with the monads of Leibniz and the notions of 20th century physics and biology. Its way of making objects is quite Platonic in that some of them act as idealizations of concepts— Ideas —from which manifestations can be created. That the Ideas are themselves manifestations (of the Idea-Idea) and that the Idea-Idea is a-kind-of Manifestation-Idea—which is a-kind-of itself, so that the system is completely self-describing— would have been appreciated by Plato as an extremely practical joke.
You Can Make A Website by Coyote
If you have any doubts, then you're the target audience of this guide. Many people hesitate or even write off the possibility of making a website due to common misconceptions, poorly-written instructions, or simply feeling unsure where to start. So to help you over those hurdles, this guide is designed to address some of those misconceptions, walk you through resolving certain mental blocks, and present you with some tutorials to help get you on your way.
Pro-craft by Jared White
I would like to propose we start using the term "pro-craft" to describe our movement, rather than anti-AI.
craft as a verb: to make or manufacture (an object or product) with skill and careful attention to detail
craft as a descriptive noun: an art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill, especially manual skill
I am not "anti-AI"…I am pro-craft.
I've dedicated my life to being a good craftsperson, in a variety of disciplines, and I'll be damned if I let craft be devalued or dismissed.