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Alternative economics
Bookmarked Buddhist Economics: How to Start Prioritizing People Over Products and Creativity Over Consumption by .
To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.
E. F. SchumacherAgain, I cannot stop pondering how do we create a world based on “economics as if people mattered“?
Again, the only answer is that we do it by leading the way.
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Ad revenue
Bookmarked Ad revenue by .
It’s almost like an article of faith that behavioural advertising is more effective than contextual advertising. But there’s no data to support this. Quite the opposite.
Around two decades ago, I was interviewed by a local newspaper in relation to my then occupation as a web developer and independent publisher. Predictably, the journalist asked me to predict the future.
I was so convinced when I answered that it was all about contextual advertising. Ad engines would differentiate by optimising the art of understanding context and serving up the most suitable ad.
It seemed like such a no-brainer. It’s a win for the publisher. It’s a win for the advertiser. And, crucially, for the end user who’s served topically relevant ads without having their privacy violated in every which way.
I’m glad Jeremy took the time to point out that there’s plenty of research showing that the assumption still holds. And I’m glad regulators are starting to cop on to the fact that there’s a viable alternative to the current, dystopian world of targeted ads.
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You are what you read
Bookmarked You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It by .
Then a couple days later my wife sent me this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
Ralph Waldo EmersonI had never come across the parallel between eating and reading formulated so elegantly as in that quote by Emerson. Reading is to the mind what eating is to the body. As you must be mindful of what you eat, you must also be conscious of what you read.
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AI and search
Bookmarked AI cannot and should not replace search by .
I want search that directs me to the site I’m interested in instead of one that extracts value from said pages with nothing offered in return.
Me too.
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Video podcasts
Bookmarked On video podcasts – Manu.
Video podcasts are the worst of both worlds. They’re not as good as actual video content designed to be consumed exclusively as video and they’re inferior to audio-only podcasts.
Let’s just stop doing this, and agree that podcasts are sound only.
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Start from scratch
Bookmarked Goat farming and all @ Loop Etiquette by .
I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
Fourten year old forum post that says it all. Via Snarfed.
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Squeeze first
But don’t just consider the implementation cost. The real cost of increased complexity – often the much larger cost – is attention.
If you decide to shard across databases, then not only must you pay the money-, time-, and opportunity cost of building out the new architecture: you must also take the new complexity into account in every subsequent technical decision. Want to shard writes? Fine, but this complicates every future decision about backups, monitoring, migrations, the ORM, and network topology (just to name a few). And don’t get me started on micro-services.
Just think about how massive these costs are. How much feature delivery will have to be delayed or foregone to support the additional architectural complexity?
Applicable as a principle for life in general as much as it is for tech and software.
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Retro Dodo, Google and digital sharecropping
Bookmarked Google Is Killing Retro Dodo & Other Independent Sites by .
Well, that all came to an abrupt end in September 2023 when Google decided to release an algorithm update that completely obliterated thousands of independent content businesses overnight, and we are one of them.
Since September 2023, Google has hidden our site from millions of retro gamers, reducing our organic traffic and revenue by 85% and causing our business to be on the edge of going under.
Two things:
- Nobody is entitled to search traffic.
- Relying on Google is not a sustainable business model. It’s a form of digital sharecropping where you are entirely dependent on your digital overlord’s corporate interests being aligned with your own.
I sincerely hope they are able to turn it out around. Independent publishers like Retro Dodo are the good guys. We need more of them, not less. Retro Dodo’s founder also wrote a follow up on his personal blog, sharing some of his takeaways from this situation.
Caveat emptor: I do not share the view that Substack is the future of independent publishing.
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Digital sharecropping
Bookmarked Digital sharecropping | ROUGH TYPE.
One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial.
Prescient piece of writing by Nicholas Carr, from 2006. The comments are a blast, too.
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Safe visual design rules
You do not have to follow these rules every time. If you have a good reason to break any of them, do. But they are safe to follow every time.
Clear and concise framework for visual design. Can’t stop thinking about how many times I’ve broken these rules because I didn’t know any better.
Hat tip to Nick Simson for sharing.
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The biggest business threat
See, the thing about being a “leader” in reality, and not some delusional cloud cuckoo land for fucking MBA morons, is that you actually have to lead people
Such a great read. Burford absolutely nails it when he’s assessing what’s wrong Western, capitalist society. How do we buck the trend? How do we eschew “endless growth” in favour of sustainability and quality of life?
I guess by being the change we want to see. That’s leadership.
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Proper scale
Bookmarked Does this scale down? 📉 by .
How come people never worry about whether it scales down to a low number? Why do people never ask “is this technology suitable for us since we only have 1000 users” or “is it appropriate for us to include this technology since we only have 10 developers”?
I think the pertinent question to ask is “is this solution the most efficient one for our current scale?” And something about having the flexibility to continue to maintain efficiency when the scale changes.
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How to help someone
Bookmarked How to help someone use a computer.
Computer people are fine human beings, but they do a lot of harm in the ways they “help” other people with their computer problems. Now that we’re trying to get everyone online, I thought it might be helpful to write down everything I’ve been taught about helping people use computers
Written thirty years ago, and still every bit as relevant. Almost every advice is applicable for helping someone doing anything at all, and not just limited to computers.
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Billionaires as policy failures
Bookmarked American billionaires are a policy failure by .
… it would take you about 27 years to get to one million dollars. That’s kind of an average working person’s time in the workforce and these numbers make sense in our heads, right? Not easy, but possible.
For one billion, that means saving that $100/day would take twenty seven thousand years to reach one billion, which is beyond pretty much all recorded human history.
A Turkish proverb that perfectly describes the trick billionaires use to gain mainstream approval to keep hoarding resources:
The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe; for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.
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Personal productivity
Bookmarked All the King’s horses – The Clockwork Penguin.
Productivity and self-optimisation and their attendant culture are by-products of a capitalist system. When we buy into it — psychologically, professionally, or financially — we propagate and perpetuate that system, with its prejudices, its injustices, its biases, and its genuine harms.
These words from Dan’s insightful post really struck a chord with something I’ve been pondering the last few days. From where do I draw my self worth?
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Cloud magic
Reposted Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something by .
So, what we know as the cloud doesn’t actually exist. It’s a euphemism that obfuscates the consolidation of critical infrastructure. The cloud is metaphysical porn for wild-eyed technocrats in Allbirds who say things like, “I’m making a dent in the universe” without a whisper of irony. It’s bullshit. It’s fugazi. There is no spoon, Neo.
I remember being so confused about “the cloud” when buzzword first appeared. It just didn’t make sense to me why we didn’t just say that stuff was online, on the internet or whatever we’d been saying already. Jason adds an interesting perspective as to why we didn’t — with beautiful prose, as always — and what we can do to reclaim the internet from our cloud overlords.
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Organisations and culture
Reposted Gemini and Google’s Culture – Stratechery by Ben Thompson.
Google, quite clearly, needs a similar transformation: the point of the company ought not be to tell users what to think, but to help them make important decisions, as Page once promised. That means, first and foremost, excising the company of employees attracted to Google’s power and its potential to help them execute their political program, and return decision-making to those who actually want to make a good product.
Ben Thompson is, as always, on the money. Even if you’re not particularly concerned about the tech oligopolies, this is well worth a read for the insights into organisational culture and leadership, and how the two are, in essence, inseparable.
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How to make better documents
Reposted Make better documents. – Anil Dash by .
A really common anti-pattern that I often see is needless inconsistencies. For example, people will vary the size, color or emphasis of titles across different slides in a presentation. Sometimes, this is an artifact of their creation — slides with this font came from this team that was working together, but slides with this other font were copied from some older presentation. But to the audience, the immediate message that they’ll take away from a difference in formatting on the title of a slide is, “There must be a reason this changed, let me understand its significance.” Suddenly, your audience is trying to deduce the semantic meaning of a change that you didn’t even make on purpose.
Lots of great pointers to improve your next document in this post from Anil Dash. The quoted part is a particular pet peeve of mine. Keep this article open the next time you’re making a document. If you can check off most points, it’ll give off a great impression.
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Linkedin was down
Reposted LinkedIn was down. A lot of people were panicking. by .
LinkedIn was down. A lot of people were panicking.
Stuff like this is why I love the internet. #horseownership