A list of articles, sites and other resources that I found interesting or useful and decided to save to my Pinboard account.
Some of these are just useful tools, others are articles that inform how I look at the world and myself. Some of it is about stuff that's on my mind now, some of it I've had saved ages ago, but only recently read. That's how it goes, I guess. Nevertheless, it's a way of seeing what I'm thinking about.
Sometimes it’s much easier to get started when you define what it is that you aren’t going to do.
What I found interesting about this turn of events was how much easier it is, as a first step, to define your own position negatively, and how the beginnings of articulating taste are almost always through discovering what you don’t like.
We just spend so much time solving problems, that we naturally seek problems to solve, even if we don't have those problems right now.
Humans should be problem eliminators. This is unnatural and takes extra effort. When faced with a problem, humans naturally start thinking of solutions to the problem. And when we solve it, we feel good about ourselves, but we've unwittingly made ourselves captive to the maintenance of our solution. ⛓
However, if someone can take a step back and eliminate the problem instead of solving it, they'll find themselves in an excellent position and freed up to focus on tasks other than maintaining solutions.
When you solve a problem, you have a solution you have to maintain. When you eliminate a problem you don't even have to think about it because the problem no longer exists.
Fossil fuel infrastructure requires constant fuel input. Building a coal or gas power plant, like building a wind or solar project, requires a lot of materials and energy input upfront. But for a fossil fuel power plant, construction is just the beginning. In order to generate power, you need to burn coal or gas every day for decades. Wind and solar projects, by comparison, don’t require any ongoing fuel input.
This document explores the shift in React best practices from a purely client-side approach to one where the server plays a more significant role. It examines the optimization techniques that have been applied to the client-only paradigm and the new mental models that result from the unidirectional data flow of React extending to the server. It also introduces React Server Components, where the backend is embedded into the component tree and client components can render server components, and discusses server action functions being explored in React-flavoured meta-frameworks. The document emphasizes the importance of understanding the abstractions above and below for the future of a seamless blend between client and server.
It’s perfectly understandable to me that the right has given words like nostalgia, history, culture, and tradition a bad name, so that some cannot even hear them without shuddering a little. For many of the people who use these terms, they connote a vision that is ugly, fake, and deeply racist. I am not surprised, then, that leftists tend to prefer Brutalism to McMansions.
But it is a mistake to reject the cultural inheritance of humankind on the theory that nostalgia is for Nazis.
All of these are marvels from a technological perspective, but that’s about it. They are dreary. They are culturally dead. They have no connection to the natural world.
tourists come from all over the world to just to look at Hindu temples, Japanese gardens, the French Quarter, Venice, and Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona. People literally plan entire trips, carrying themselves across the world, just so they can be near these buildings and drink them in up close. I cannot imagine anyone who is not an architect visiting the Pritzker Prize buildings.
Why? Is it just because the first buildings are “old?” I do not think it is. Instead, I think that people do not visit the contemporary buildings because they do not give certain feelings to the viewer, feelings that people enjoy feeling. They do not amaze, enchant, or make the jaw drop. They lack the kind of intricacy that means you can stare at them endlessly and keep finding new things. They feel dead
There’s one study that suggested a half-hour of regular cardio exercise every day can be as effective as a prescription of Zoloft for improving your mental health … There’s also evidence that exercise can have a long-standing effect on your well-being. So, you do, say, a half-hour of cardio Monday morning, the data suggests that little bump in endorphins… that will still be there with you, if you do it Monday at 9 AM, until around Tuesday at, like, 1 PM.
Ursula Le Guin's theory of the carrier bag as the earliest human tool challenges the linear trajectory of history, which is often associated with violence and domination. The carrier bag, as Le Guin proposes, is a vessel that can gather, hold, and share things. This idea of non-linear time, the lack of heroes, and the collective rather than individualistic approach are central to anticolonial and anarcho-feminist politics. Instead of telling the story of domination over nature, we must abandon the old story and embrace the unheroic, non-linear narrative that recognizes the complexity and diversity of life. By doing so, we can give agency to non-human actors, incorporate social movements and political imagination, and increase our chances of survival.
Capitalism, or so wrote Marx back in 1844, supposedly alienates us from four different things: from ourselves, from each other, from the products of our labor, and from nature. We develop an adversarial relationship with each. “Nature”(a constructed, slippery category that shifts over time) can, or even must, be tamed: capricious rivers are diverted, genomes are edited, crude oil is transformed into fuel.
Le Guin describes her discovery of the carrier bag theory as grounding her “in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before.” The stick, sword, or spear, designed for “bashing and killing,” alienated her from history so much that she felt she “was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.”
The only problem is that a carrier bag story isn’t, at first glance, very exciting. “It is hard to tell”, writes Le Guin, “a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…”
Whenever I get ready to write really sincere notes in this notebook, I shall have to undertake such a disentangling in my cluttered brain that, to stir up all that dust, I am waiting for a series of vast empty hours, a long old, a convalescence, during which my constantly reawakened curiosities will be at rest; during which my sole care will be to rediscover myself.
A year later, Gide offers a meta-remark on the endeavor already underway:
A diary is useful during conscious, intentional, and painful spiritual evolutions. Then you want to know where you stand… An intimate diary is interesting especially when it records the awakening of ideas; or the awakening of the senses at puberty; or else when you feel yourself to be dying.
[[André Gide]]
Make an index, family tree, chart, or diagram of your interests. All of them, everything: visual, physical, spiritual, sexual. Leisure time, hobbies, foods, buildings, airports, everything. Every book, movie, website, etc. The totality of this self-exposure may be daunting, scary. But your voice is here. This will become a resource and record to return to and add to for the rest of your life.
Artists must commune with their own kind all the time. There are no exceptions to this rule, even if you live “out in the woods.” Preferably commune in person, but online is more than fine. It doesn’t matter where you live: big city, small city, little town. You will fight and love together; you will develop new languages together and give each other comfort, conversation, and the strength to carry on. This is how you will change the world — and your art.
Buying this device, even if the details are a bit creepy, shows that you care, that you’re a good parent. And because parents are shamed and nudged into buying these tracking devices, more and more of them pop up on the market. It’s these purchases that technologists equate to “natural selection,” but it’s nearly impossible for most people to opt out of a lot of these arrangements.
Often consumers don’t have much power of selection at all. Those who run small businesses find it nearly impossible to walk away from Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Etsy, even Amazon. Employers often mandate that their workers use certain apps or systems like Zoom, Slack, and Google Docs. “It is only the hyper-privileged who are now saying, ‘I’m not going to give my kids this,’ or, ‘I’m not on social media,’”
And so we’re left with a tech world claiming to be driven by our desires when those decisions aren’t ones that most consumers feel good about. There’s a growing chasm between how everyday users feel about the technology around them and how companies decide what to make. And yet, these companies say they have our best interests in mind. We can’t go back, they say. We can’t stop the “natural evolution of technology.” But the “natural evolution of technology” was never a thing to begin with, and it’s time to question what “progress” actually means.
