Work in progress

I’ve had this sitting prominently in my Muse workspace for a while. Seems like a good time to deploy it now.

What if it’s all work in progress? Just sharing/publishing the process as we go along?
What if it’s all work in progress? Just sharing/publishing the process as we go along?

Barry Hess, You’re a Blogger, Not an Essayist:

I’m not going to look down on you for micro-posting on your blog, either. Heck, I might do it myself. I don’t prefer it, though. A blog isn’t Twitter. Just like I don’t think of a blog as something containing 2,000-word, heavily researched posts.

You don’t have to be an essayist. (Though you can be one if you want!) Don’t let those essayists discourage you from blogging.

Just write. Just blog.

Cosign.


Weekend in Portland

Day one, travel day. Air travel is fine. Green carpets are green. It’s cold and dreary, as expected. There may be snow. We persevere.

A Boeing 737 with the good doors.

That canyon is grand.

The SWA livery looks particularly nice against this sunset.

Gotta get the PDX green carpet on the social media.


Obsidian + LLMs

My experiments (with obsidian-copilot) have yet to yield a satisfying intersection between LLMs and Obsidian. I generally find OpenAI’s models write too much like breathless clickbait instead of an interesting human. I don’t want a summary or rewrite of my notes generated in that style. For querying/searching/discovery, OpenAI’s notebook-esque web interface is fine.

I’m still hoping to come across something that uses indexing and embedding to help me organize and connect notes I wrote, by my hand, in intriguing and novel ways. 🤞🏻

That said, if you’re already running an LLM locally via llama, obsidian-ollama looks like an excellent way to integrate it into your note-writing/knowledge management scheme. The code of this plugin is easy to follow and nicely structured, making it a good one to look at when the temptation to write Obsidian plugins comes. (Which, for me, arrives as a potential distraction more often than I’d like!) Disclaimer: I haven’t tried this one yet!


Journal for work/life/everything

Ray Grasso, Long Live the Work Journal:

Keep a journal for work, champions.

It’s pretty easy to get started—just create a text file.

Throw in a new heading each day and write down whatever you did—a single line for each task is usually enough. I put the newer dates at the top so it’s less scrolling to get to the most recent content. Over time you end up with your own little private reverse-chronological blog-in-a-file.

Each day, dump in commands you’ve run; links to documents you’ve created, reviewed, or read; tasks you want to get done; or goals you want to achieve.

You’re building a little outboard brain where your work history is just a short grep away.

Endorsed. Journals are the best PKM impact-to-effort ratio out there. I like DayOne, been using it for more than ten years and thousands of entries. But, anything works! Your notes app, a text file, a document in your preferred word processor. Anything you can search later and access anywhere is good!

The most important thing is to turn what’s in your head into “words on paper”. That’s when the magic happens!


The status quo

Most fascinating game there is, keeping things from staying the way they are. – Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

The status quo is a hell of a thing. Path dependence makes this a challenging game.

The biggest challenge you could take on in life: change it for even the slightest better. A virtuous challenge too, in an Aristotelian virtues sense?


Low-key CSS libraries

I like the idea and execution of Tailwind. That said, there’s something nice about dropping a CSS library reference into a new HTML file and getting styled content without adding any classes or other legwork.

The nice thing about these libraries is they imagine, to some extent, a world where the stylesheets browsers use as defaults didn’t look so bland.

  • new.css – if browser defaults looked real nice
  • mvp.css – if browser defaults looked like Bootstrap or the Tailwind examples
  • nes.css – if browser defaults said “heck, we’re going with it” and emulated the look of classic Nintendo game menus
  • tufte.css – if Edward Tufte had been put in charge of default browser stylesheets

Software makes you more productive, otherwise it’s (weird) art

Rands in Repose, Seven Steps to Fixing Stalled To-Do Tasks:

The never-ending question you must ask regarding whatever productivity system you’ve built is, “Does this system make you more productive?”

The purpose of all this software is to get stuff done (make things), not to fiddle and shuffle tasks around! (This goes for individuals and teams, FWIW)


2023 by the bullets


Low-key tools-for-thought

I have an elaborate, perhaps baroque, setup of journals, notes, tasks, highlights, read-it-laters, feeds, and canvases-for-thinking. I consider it a crucial, and very idiosyncratic, piece of “knowledge worker infrastructure”. Furthermore, I don’t think I could handle a lot of the work and projects that I do, to the extent that I do, without it.

But, I hope that constructing such a scheme, and doing all the time intensive background research and tinkering, is not something everyone would have to expend effort on to think better and more clearly.

My hunch here is that the software bundled with iOS/iPadOS/macOS is very close to allowing folks who just want to remember and brainstorm get started immediately. Currently, a couple of elements are missing. This means you have to hit the third-party ecosystem escape hatch and consider a daunting variety of applications, workflows, and identity/quasi-religions.

Herein, a wishlist of system-level capabilities that would make macOS an even better “bicycle for the mind”.


In any old macOS app, I want to highlight text (mostly) with any pointer (mouse, stylus, finger) on any device (laptop, tablet, phone) and capture/promote text. I may want to add my commentary or notes too. Afterward, I should be able to search for this in Spotlight, at the least. Even better if the whole document/page/file/etc. the text came from is indexed, so I can find highlights despite imperfect memory.

macOS already extracts contacts and events from plain text. Faces are identified in photos. Why not make text excerpts/highlights/passages a first-class thing in the system’s information architecture?


I want to identify key ideas, concepts, people, and other nouns, so I can hyperlink between them and navigate them in something like the Finder.

This verbs-and-nouns concept was key to AppleScript. I’ve read that it was part of the conceptual bedrock of NeXTStep, but I haven’t found more than a few passing sentences on that.

Why not carry that idea forward or rediscover it on macOS? Some folks want to do more than scroll, post, and transact.


Notes and Journal, along with Finder and Spotlight, seem very close to checking all the boxes here. 🤷🏻‍♂️I don’t use those apps, so I’m wildly speculating here. Out over my skis, as they say. That said, this is so close to the core of what you really need to do next-level, thinking-augmented-by-computers.

Even though I use very particular apps, I feel like Apple has the right foundations here. A journal app for capturing ideas, reflections, and life as it happens. A notes app for putting structure and organization around the ideas that emerge from those moments. Tie it together with search to resurface and rediscover those journals and notes.

A fellow can dream, right?


iA Writer and AI

Writing with AI:

Writing is not about getting letters on a page. It’s not about getting done with text. It’s finding a clear and simple expression for what we feel, mean, and want to express. Writing is thinking with letters. Usually we do this alone. With AI, you write in dialogue. It comes with a chat-interface, after all. So, don’t just write commands, talk to it.

iA Writer’s integration is the first use of LLMs I’ve seen that I’d consider original. They didn’t slap on a chat interface where one wasn’t needed. It’s not autocomplete-but-smarter.

Instead, they show authorship/origin of text as either human or machine-generated. As you edit out the AI machine’s writing, the text visually and literally becomes more your own creation. You engage in dialog with the machine and use that to improve your thinking. The machine doesn’t think for you. Bravo!


Celebrate the van Beethoven guy

It’s Ludwig van Beethoven’s birthday. Here are a few ways to celebrate the old piano-biter:

  • small: try his other famous piano sonata, No. 8 “Pathetique”
  • medium: try the third movement of Piano Concerto No. 5 “Emperor”, wherein the transition from the slow/middle movement into the final/fast movement is a brilliant sneak attack
  • large: the pretty good (but mid-tier for Beethoven, IMO) Symphony No. 3 “Eroica” aka the one where he wrote a piece for Napoleon but got mad and renamed it at the last minute
  • extra-large: the symphony that changed the game, Symphony No. 9 (the Ode to Joy one)

Previously: Beethoven’s Symphonies No. 7 and 8 are top-tier, Beethoven’s symphonies visualized.


ui.land

ui.land is an interview site at the crossroads of design and engineering.

Rauno Freiberg:

Trying to create software with tiny details that feel exciting to build, experience, and remix. Ever discovered a website that you can’t stop playing with and obsessing over? You can just sense the thoughtfulness and quality.

Paco Coursey:

  • What we call a delightful user experience is just delivering a faster path to user goals.
  • You’ll never understand the challenges, tricks, and edge-cases of a note-taking app until you build a note-taking app.

Sam Selikoff:

The best interface is one that’s not there because the desired outcome has already been anticipated.


Notes on strategy and execution

Will Larson, How to Size and Assess Teams From an Eng Lead at Stripe, Uber and Digg. This pull-quote lead me through some juicy lines of thinking:

Inflection points are just sustained implementation of a very reasonable thing. Often, the role of the great leader is not to come up with a brilliant strategy, but to convince people to stay the course with a very basic strategy.

Leaders lead folks in exercising a plan or series of plans (i.e. strategy). Basic strategies are almost certain to outperform complex strategies. Complex strategies tend to leak energy and effort at the seams between the basic/legible parts and all the edge cases and exceptions that generate complexity.


Organize for Discovery

S-tier programming skill: organize code and behavior such that others can discover and understand it out later without your presence/consultation.

S-tier writing skill: organize a story or idea within a story such that the reader understands or builds upon it, makes it theirs.

A-tier relationship skill: organize or set stuff down such that your partner can find it later, without needing to ask you where it is. (Riffing off Merlin Mann here, I think.)

Ergo: organizing, and empathizing, are skills worth developing.


Sidestep process by sharing tangible progress

Nat Bennett:

Cannot overstate the value of regularly delivering working software.

My single most effective software dev habit is to start with a walking skeleton – a “real” if very stubbed out program that can be deployed on its real infrastructure, receive real calls, visited for real etc. – because of what this does for non-programming stakeholders.

When they see a real working thing and then they see that thing get meaningful improvements they tend to chill way out and get much easier to work with.

You can save a week of effort on process with a couple hours of sharing tangible progress.

Related: you can save a week of planning with a couple hours of programming. You can save a week of programming with a couple hours of planning.


Notes on focus

I’ve tried a bunch of things, over the years, to find time and discipline to focus on working the tasks and projects that are meaningful to me. Mostly it boils down to actually doing the work and choosing the right kind of work. 🤷🏻‍♂️


Everything’s a draft

Publish pretty much everything you write because you can’t predict what is going to be popular. There is a lower bar for quality, but barring dishonesty and literally unreadable prose, everything else should go out somewhere. Incompleteness is no excuse. Publish the first part now and the other parts later.

– Kent Beck, Publish Everything

Get the idea out there, especially if it feels like there’s depth to explore but you can’t full traverse it in the moment. And, reduce friction to sharing the promising drafts!


Zawinski's law, updated

Every program attempts to expand until it can

  • read email (the original)
  • invite a friend
  • check off tasks in a list
  • record consent to receiving cookies or storing data in the United States (GDPR)
  • store an audit trail (SOC2)

Listening, November 2023

Andre 3000, New Blue Sun – come for the over-the-top song titles, stay for what sounds to me like an ambient and (astral?) jazz album.

Earth, Wind, and Fire, “Serpentine Fire” – this is the Certified Jam of the Month™ in our household. It is literally made of slap (bass).

Return to Forever – been listening to a lot of jazz-fusion lately. If Weather Report isn’t your thing, give The Mothership Returns a try.


You can’t read the whole internet, so put your energy into something that matters to you

Oliver Burkeman, Treat your to-read pile like a river:

To return to information overload: this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don’t feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren’t an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.

I like to think of it as the productivity technique to beat all productivity techniques: finally internalizing the implications of the fact that what’s genuinely impossible – the clue is in the name! – cannot actually be done.

You cannot actually read, process, and comment upon the whole internet, or even your little corner of interesting discourse. But, you can click “Mark All As Read” and move on. River-of-news style timelines automate marking items unread instead of automating bringing you the good stuff. Reeder and NewsBlur have options for it. I bet others do too. Reclaim your attention!

Unfortunately, most advice on productivity and time management takes the needle-in-a-haystack approach instead. It’s about becoming more efficient and organised, or better at prioritising, with the implied promise that you might thereby eliminate or disregard enough of life’s unimportant nonsense to make time for the meaningful stuff. To stretch a metaphor: it’s about reducing the size of the haystack, to make it easier to focus on the needle.

There’s definitely a role for such techniques; but in the end, the only way to deal with a too-many-needles problem is to confront the fact that it’s insoluble – that you definitely won’t be fitting everything in.

It’s not a question of rearranging your to-do list so as to make space for all your “big rocks”, but of accepting that there are simply too many rocks to fit in the jar. You have to take a stab at deciding what matters most, among your various creative passions/life goals/responsibilities – and then do that, while acknowledging that you’ll inevitably be neglecting many other things that matter too.

I’m guilty here! All the best in task management, getting things done, note-taking, journal writing, and even saying no won’t get the work done. I have to take the gift of clarity and focus generated by all these routines, and do that “big rock” important thing. I have to find peace with the trade-off of doing one thing instead of all the other exciting things.

Or, maybe generative AIs will provide Walt Disney-like agency to direct and sustain diverse projects outside my expertise with Imagineering-quality output. Wouldn’t it be nice!