As you might know, Seattle is annoyingly smokey due to the wildfires around. It may be better than Bay Area, but the Air Quality Index is “Very Unhealthy”.
Khruangbin is an American band. It is mostly instrumental, if whispering “Maria, Maria” is not considered as lyrics.
solderpunk, the founder of Gemini protocol has written about his “offline first”, more intentional computing.
I have tried that when I was in Japan. I had cancelled my home internet in 2010 and had only used Wi-Fi in McDonald’s and such. Blue Square Cafe in Shinjuku was my favorite at that time. The experiment lasted four months.
While it was fine, evidently speaking, I didn’t love that much. So, I haven’t tried the experiment again. For me, cancelling a home internet is impractical now due to WFH and other family members. But being intentional is something I could do still.
By the way, his gemlog (Gemini + Blog) and the discussions highlighted there were interesting, such as Reimagining the internet.
noyaml.com nicely summarizes YAML’s pitfalls.
Developers over 30 may remember the age of XML. YAML was refreshing at that time and did have some good ideas such as having built-in types. Lisp’s S-expressions have been having built-in types for decades though.
That being said, YAML is overly complicated and we have used that too far.
I think TOML is good enough.
In BSD world, there is UCL (Universal Configuration Language), which looks nice. There is also HashiCorp’s HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language), which is inspired by UCL. Why don’t they use UCL as is? It is answered in this GitHub issue.
Then there are “JSON for humans” formats such as JSON5 and Hjson.
Tristan Harris, a former Google employee who is appeared in Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism has been doing a podcast with Aza Raskin.
The podcast, Your Undivided Attention is long and often dark. It is more like Througline than Planet Money. That being said, the podcast is really interesting and relevant. I’ve listened Mr. Harris Goes to Washington recently. The episode is a good recap of what’s they are discussing and worrying about.
I especially like this part.
What if we got each human being on earth to be narcissistically posting their news, their commentary, and photos of their cats and dogs and breakfasts, and they’ll do that work for free. We don’t have to pay them because we just show their friends the number of followers they have and now they’ll actually just addictively come back and want to get as much attention for themselves as possible.
But what’s really happened is that they’ve become kind of like the information or attention gig economy workers, they’re like the Uber drivers, but they’re driving around attention.
This is one of the reasons I don’t use Mastodon. While it doesn’t have a central authority and a blackbox algorithm, it still make me an attention gig economy worker. You could argue that the internet itself would be though.
I like meditation. For computer nerds, I would explain that meditation is like stopping all background processes in your mind.
I have used Headspace and it was awesome, but it is also expensive. I know that making a modern mobile app is a continuous effort, but $69.99/year is not for me.
Medito is a free alternative app. Interestingly the app is owned and developed by a non-profit organization in Netherlands.