Persoonlijke aantekeningen door Niek de Greef over cultuur, politiek, media en maatschappij. Doorleefde essays over het hedendaagse leven.

Links of the past few days

Transcribe text safely with mygoodtape.

Read old books without having to own them on open library.

Substack CEO kills Substack. For me at least. All the things you fear when using someone else’s platform to create content become real. Read an perfect analysis of an interview with him
on techdirt here.

Run your own WordPress instead, or other web tool. When on your self-hosted WordPress (not wordpress.com), use their WordPress newsletter tool.

Paul Graham (from Y Combinator, not the photographer) on how to do great work.

In this issue from David Perell’s newletter I read

Many Silicon Valley investors say that fast response times for important messages correlate highly with a founder’s long-term success.

Gets me going, because such a sentence lacks reason and humility:

  • Who are the Sillicon Valley investors, and why are they attributed any general wisdom?
  • Who are these successful founders?
  • Correlation is something else then causation.
  • Fast response times for important messages likely also correlate to early death by stress.

Learned a new word for an interesting phenomenon, skeuomorphic, via The Wippet.

skeuomorphic wall
Nikko, Japan

Links friday 18 aug 2023; the zen of coding and more

Good to know these hand made USB cables with hidden implant exist.

I am all in favor of editing flat files. They are portable, easy to change editors, platform independent, and very easy to search across, just using your Linux, Windows or MacOS search capabilities. All my notes are in simplified markdown. When I need to generated html from it, this service is so easy: markdowntohtml.

Craid Mod’s article about what I would call the Zen of Coding.

Alan Jacobs’s article on why he doesn’t use Canvas specifically, and warn for data harvesting and ‘surveillance capitalism’. Instead, as I do, he prefers open source en open web technologies instead. Plus some wise words on ChatGTP and how it will not help his students any more than other tools.

Pizza toast

Pizza toast is a Japanese invention. Craig Mod made a beautiful movie about a Japanese cook crafting pizza toast with incredible dedication. Pizza toast is best consumed on a low table, cross-legged on on your knees. You carefully break one of the pre-cut quadrants loose and eat in with small bites.

To make pizza-toast, the thick Japanese toast bread is best. I have only seen slices as thick as 3-4 cm in Japan. At home, I use our Dutch bread, but it doesn’t come close. Japanese pizza-toast is superior.

From small to big is just moving on

Great things are made up of lots of little things. Something big is made by making lots of little things.

Every day 1 sketch makes 365 a year. That already begins to look like a “body of work.”

Writing 100 words a day make 36500 in a year. That’s already half a novel.

Nassim Taleb and optimizing work

I love crafts, tinkering, crafting, and doing things myself. Not only is it cheaper, but you also learn a lot more and have more fun doing it.

Nassim Taleb wrote

Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more “efficiency” out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it.

I make one exception: tax returns. I have always done that myself, but with a company, I couldn’t do it anymore. For some things, you need an expert, like the tax return of your small business.

And sewer repair.