Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war.

As an instance of [friction], take the weather. Here, the fog prevents the enemy from being discovered in time, a battery from firing at the right moment, a report from reaching the general; there, the rain prevents a battalion from arriving, another from reaching in right time, because, instead of three, it had to march perhaps eight hours; the cavalry from charging effectively because it is stuck fast in heavy ground.

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

You have to hold the thing in your hands, collaborate with teammates, and talk to users to find the right design.

you can maybe describe what those steps mean […], but even if you can’t, you are still changed by their meaning! You know something’s happened to you but you don’t know what it is.

I didn’t explore the idea strongly enough, or readers don’t want to take seriously the much more (quietly) radical ideas in McPherson’s book: that limits on our existential choices are part of how we make our peace with life, that Tyler Harper’s “therapeutic libertarianism” — or what Christopher Lasch, by way of Adorno, called the “cult of authenticity” — is the default mode of so much contemporary socio-political discussion, and an active agent that deforms one’s character. Taking limits seriously is an enormous challenge, one that I assumed would come across in the piece. But then, it’s easier to domesticate constraints to the ones we pick and choose, cafeteria-style, for some modest stylistic innovation.

No, not a soul, intimidating stillness. Uncannily, though, in the midst of all this, a fire is blazing, lit, in fact, with petrol. It’s flickering, a ghostly fire, wind. On the orange-colored plain below I can see sheets of rain, and the annunciation of the end of the world is glowing on the horizon, glimmering there. A train races through the land and penetrates the mountain range. Its wheels are glowing. One car erupts in flames. The train stops, men try to extinguish it, but the car can no longer be extinguished. They decide to move on, to hasten to race. The train moves, it moves into fathomless space, unwavering. In the pitch-blackness of the universe the wheels are glowing, the lone car is glowing. Unimaginable stellar catastrophes take place, entire worlds collapse into a single point. Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder. The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation.

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

As young children, we listen to adults talking before we understand what they’re saying. And that’s, after all, where we start — we start in a position of not getting it. It’s true of listening to music, too. The emotional impact of music is so incommensurate with what people can say about it, and that seems to be very illustrative of something fundamental — that very powerful emotional effects often can’t be articulated. You know something’s happened to you, but you don’t know what it is. You’ll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again. After all, they are only words on a page, but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words. And if somebody said to you, Well, what is it? or What do your favorite poems mean?, you may well be able to answer it, if you’ve been educated in a certain way, but I think you’ll feel the gap between what you are able to say and why you go on reading.

Cold writing is a feeble medium for heart hot ideas.

The Internet is going through a major upheaval. Mega-corporations are trying to box consumers into proprietary platforms. A frothy VC market chasing after the Next Big Thing is beginning to see major warning signs. Top operating systems vendors have gotten the smackdown for their monopolistic business practices, being forced to offer real choice for access to third-party browsers and other key software. A growing backlash against technology’s dominance threatens to stall the heady growth of the industry. The nerd set is fighting back against capitalist entrenchment, building new open infrastructure that respects user privacy and eliminates gatekeepers. A revolution is underway to make it even easier to publish on the web, push content and software features across networks, and find meaningful successful as an indie producer.

Wait, which decade am I describing here? The late 90s? Or now??

Usually there are several possible responses to a question, which means you’re traversing a tree. But essays are linear, not tree-shaped, which means you have to choose one branch to follow at each point. How do you choose? Usually you should follow whichever offers the greatest combination of generality and novelty. I don’t consciously rank branches this way; I just follow whichever seems most exciting; but generality and novelty are what make a branch exciting.

If you come across a question that’s sufficiently puzzling, it could be worth exploring even if it doesn’t seem very momentous. […] you commit to a specific string of words in response, as you would if you were talking. This initial response is usually mistaken or incomplete. Writing converts your ideas from vague to bad. But that’s a step forward, because once you can see the brokenness, you can fix it.

In my social circles, many people have read James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which is subtitled How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human World Have Failed. A key concept from the book is “legibility”, what a state can see, and how this distorts what states do. One could easily write a highly analogous book, Seeing like a Tech Company about what’s illegible to companies that scale up, at least as companies are run today. A simple example of this is that, in many video games, including ones made by game studios that are part of a $3T company, it’s easy to get someone suspended or banned by having a bunch of people report the account for bad behavior. What’s legible to the game company is the rate of reports and what’s not legible is the player’s actual behavior (it could be legible, but the company chooses not to have enough people or skilled enough people examine actual behavior); and many people have reported similar bannings with social media companies. When it comes to things like anti-fraud systems, what’s legible to the company tends to be fairly illegible to humans, even humans working on the anti-fraud systems themselves.

Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.

Keeping a “writer’s notebook” in public imposes an unbeatable rigor, since you can’t slack off and leave notes so brief and cryptic that they neither lodge in your subconscious nor form a record clear enough to refer to in future. By contrast, keeping public notes produces both a subconscious, supersaturated solution of fragmentary ideas that rattle around, periodically cohering into nucleii that crystallize into full-blown ideas.

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

February 25. Continuing on positive emotions, this subreddit post disagrees with my statement that nobody would consciously avoid feeling good. Clearly this subject is less straightforward than I thought, because it’s hard to separate “feeling good” from the stuff that you feel good about, from social displays of feeling good, and from the whole internal ecology of how you feel.

When I think about my personal perspective, it’s mainly about motivation: feeling good about doing things. That’s why, despite high grades and test scores, I didn’t get into an elite college, and never passed an interview for a salaried job, because everyone could tell I wasn’t really into it. I failed at homesteading because tasks that I valued in an abstract way turned out to feel like chores. I’m constantly trying to 1) find stuff that I feel like doing, or 2) hack my own perspective so that I feel like doing stuff, or if both of those fail, 3) force myself to do stuff, which is exhausting. So that’s the context from which I don’t understand why someone would avoid feeling good if they have the option.

And Noah comments:

Happiness is not a meaningful state without something to compare it to. If there was no suffering, we would have no word to describe happiness, it would simply be the natural state of things. It would be invisible to us I imagine, like the background space of our awareness.

That sounds wonderful! And it reminds me of the Christian idea, that the fall of man happened through knowledge of good and evil. This never occurred to me, but maybe the principle that you can’t have something without also having its opposite, is only true on a cognitive level.

Trying too hard to say something just right can result in it not being said at all.

She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading… She has been with me in sickness and in health, certainly far more sickness than we could have anticipated. I will be with her, strengthened by her example. She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security. That’s what a marriage is for. Now I know.

Because it’s like, when you start rubbing against each other, in that sense, a feeling comes up like “I don’t like this. I’d rather go and hide away.” Staying with that is a powerful way of getting to know yourself and others, deepening conversations and relationships.

I think it’s so important to embrace conversations, particularly ones with people who make salient points with whom you don’t agree. That’s when you really learn stuff. “You think this and I think something different. Change my mind. Let me come into your perspective.” You don’t need to feel threatened by that. Because it’s not like you as a human being are weakening as your opinion is changing.

I think the job of someone who’s in charge of the beginnings of the process, is to encourage an environment where it’s cool if something doesn’t work. Because a lot of that stuff is the friction that creates the spark that makes the idea happen. The myth that the frictionless environment is the most effective is just not true. It’s not true in your life, it’s not true in your workflow, and it’s not true in your music.

it’s been important to form a routine because it lets me curate my habits. Since I was young, I would get incredibly interested in something and build a routine around it. Then once that routine breaks, it’s like I’ve forgotten it ever existed. Even if that routine went on for months, I struggle to get back to it. When a good one sticks, I want to protect that. There’s an inner conflict of breaking my routines. The safety of the known. I wonder if fear of the past failed routines makes me overvalue routines that are currently sticking. But then there’s a dullness of the known.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

A powerful way to improve the Web platform is to provide new primitives. A primitive is a capability that, on its own, likely doesn’t do much that interesting. But a good primitive will be designed to interact usefully with existing (and future) parts of the stack, and this will enable it to enrich the platform across the board.

the idea that lack of effort to maintain the talismans and protocols of representation would result in a void. Put more simply: You’re the keeper of yourself and of what matters. There is no consistency that will protect you.

I thought I was going to die.
But strangely enough, that became for me, a wonderful opportunity.

When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.

I first heard this while watching Becoming Cousteau (2021).

Every explorer I have met has been driven—not coincidentally but quintessentially—by curiosity, by a single-minded, insatiable, and even jubilant need to know.

Charismatic figures are obeyed because of the extraordinary abilities of an individual personality, by virtue of which they are set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with superhuman, supernatural, or exceptional powers or qualities that are not accessible to the ordinary person.

You’re currently running an experimental version of earth.

It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.

Shellen in particular still rues losing the fight over the name. Even now, he bristles thinking about the fight and the fact that Google Reader is known as “an RSS reader” and not the ultra-versatile information machine it could have become. Names matter, and Reader told everyone that it was for reading when it could have been for so much more. “If Google made the iPod,” he says, “they would have called it the Google Hardware MP3 Player For Music, you know?”

Having and not having arise together.

Do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else.

In Japanese, the word for mountain pass is tōge. It’s written: 峠. It’s a great character, comprised of three other characters (or “radicals”). On the left is the character for mountain: 山. On the top right is the character for up: 上. And on the bottom right is the character for down: 下. So the character for pass — tōge — is mountain-up-down: 峠.

You must strive to find your own voice, boys, and the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all.

The First Law of Interface Design

A computer shall not harm your work or, through inactivity, allow your work to come to harm.

Identity is not some magic homunculus that lives somewhere to the left of your pituitary gland, but the role you play in the drama your brain naturally constructs to map what’s happening.

Halving requirements is the same as doubling capacity.

One who makes no mistakes makes nothing at all.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.

Understanding is love’s other name.

Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting.

Know the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Jokes are the unit tests of our understanding.

The map appears to us more real than the land.

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

He was thrifty, of Scotch-Irish descent, and at two minutes past three had never had an adventure in his life.

At three minutes past three he began his career as one of the celebrities of the world.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I’m lost. I’m going to find myself. If I return before I get back, please ask me to wait.

The world needs all kinds of minds.

People think about you much less than you either hope or fear.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

The Extroverts are not the problem. And the problem with the Introverts is that we think the Extroverts are the problem. And the problem with Extroverts is that they don’t think about Introverts at all.

I used to be chronically introverted. It took a while, but life taught me that I’m at my best in company and now I live for that. I’d like to have a better idea of other people’s relationship with that arc, like, is that how everyone feels or is there something unusual about being an introvert for twenty years and then finding the tools to live intensely socially.

Or am I just missing too much of the puzzle to even ask the right question…?

Emphasis mine.

Anything added dilutes everything else.
Approachable is better than simple.
Avoid administrative distraction.
Design for failure.
Encourage flow.
Favor focus over features.
Half measures are as bad as nothing at all.
It’s not fully shipped until it’s fast.
Keep it logically awesome.
Mind your words, they are important.
Non-blocking is better than blocking.
Practicality beats purity.
Responsive is better than fast.
Speak like a human.

Distilled principles of design from Kyle Aster’s (nee Neath) time working at GitHub.

See also: The Snowbanks of Time

When you look at something you’re working on, no matter what it is, you can’t help but see past the actual thing to the ideas that inspired it, your plans for extending it, the emotions you’ve tied to it. But when others look at it, all they see is a piece of junk.

You only get one chance to make a first impression; why have it be “junk”? Once that’s associated with your name or project, it’s tough to scrape off. Even people who didn’t see it themselves may have heard about it second-hand. And once they hear about it, they’re not likely to see for themselves. Life’s too short to waste it on junk.

The Programmers’ Credo: We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy.

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

I love an oxymoron, and I love this quote. No attribution because no one knows who said it first.

Emphasis mine.

The need of people to express power by writing about how much they could destroy has continued to present day. However, with more information than ever available to the serious researcher, files seem more and more professional than ever before. But make no mistake; the same caveats and warnings of previous generations are the same: don’t believe everything you read, and don’t try to blow things up based on what you read.

Got a chuckle out of Jason’s disclaimer at the top of the destruction collection on http://textfiles.com.

The design of the site also stands tall as a reminder that websites can have a style, and not everyone has to like it.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

It is strange how people seem to belong to places - especially to places where they were not born…

Life… we understand it differently at different stages. It’s what is interesting about getting older, you realize your relationship with the past is always negotiable. There is a lot of freedom in that, because you realize you can go back to what you did such a long time ago. You can talk with the dead, talk with your lost self, your disappeared self, and you can visit those places again, and understand it differently. That makes a huge difference.

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

I like this because it goes some way to illustrating the total philosophical difference I feel compared to some. I don’t want to partition my life into work and play, pleasure and displeasure. Might all my days and all my activities reflect the whole of myself and enrich me and others in the doing of them. Let those who must specialize, they rob the world of its soul that way but I cannot turn the tide.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

Understanding each other is not enough, but it is an indispensable beginning.

I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety.

I don’t ask that the story address my experience. I ask that my experience make it possible for me to understand the story.

Your system should be as simple as possible, but not simpler than that.

Never fool yourself, and remember that you are the easiest person to fool.

I wish life was not so short; languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

We live in fragments. You are one thing at the office, another at home; you talk about democracy and in your heart you are autocratic; you talk about loving your neighbours, yet kill them with competition.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.

In fact, not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the argument that life is serious, though it is often hard and even terrible. And saying that, I am prompted to add what follows out of it: that since everything ends badly for us, in the inescapable catastrophe of death, it seems obvious that the first rule of life is to have a good time; and that the second rule of life is to hurt as few people as possible in the course of doing so. There is no third rule.

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?

When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

All I know is that I know nothing
and I’m not even sure about that.

Or if you’re French…

Que sais-je?
What do I know?

Unfortunately, most warning systems do not warn us that they can no longer warn us.

Most important things in life are a hassle. If life’s hassles disappeared, you’d want them back.

You don’t choose the things you believe in, they choose you.

I want to share with you my simple two-step secret to improving the performance of any website.

1. Make sure that the most important elements of the page download and render first.
2. Stop there.

You don’t need all that other crap. Have courage in your minimalism.

Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about.

You cannot get a simple system by adding simplicity to a complex system.

Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

The opposite of fragile is something that actually gains from disorder.

I’ve never been a cropper. Having grown up photographing with film and spending years developing black and white photos in my university apartment in Philadelphia, cropping has always felt like a hack, a lie. Of course, all photos are lies, all photos are crops. The very definition of a photograph is to add edges to the world, slice off some snippet, place it in a tiny box. Or, as the late Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain put it, “The game [of photography] is to organize the rectangle.”

I realize now that a “perfect” rectangle — pulled back so you see the edges of the negative in the exposed print (to “prove” you haven’t cropped) — is a parlor trick more than anything.

The story isn’t the art, nor its players, nor the paint, the technique, or the interpretation. The feelings are the art. The rest is just the way in.

It takes so long for us to do so little.

conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.

Widely attributed to Benjamin Franklin, as well as both Samuel Smiles and Mrs Isabella Beeton. But was in use long before any of them, hence ‘unknown’.

A place for everything, everything in its place.

The relentless accretion of code over months, years, even decades quickly turns every successful new project into a legacy one.

The moment that code springs into being and is made manifest in a system, it becomes legacy.

The essence of systems is relationships, interfaces, form, fit, and function. The essence of architecture is structuring, simplification, compromise, and balance.

Good sex is like good bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.

The media only writes about the sinners and the scandals, but that’s normal, because a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows.

No one can grow if he does not accept his smallness.

The code is the truth, but it is not the whole truth.

Meaningful architecture is a living, vibrant process of deliberation, design, & decision, not just documentation.

It requires energy to make a system simple, and to intentionally apply that energy requires that one reason about, understand, and visualize the system as built.

Although software has no mass, it does have weight, weight that can ossify any system by creating inertia to change and introducing crushing complexity.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.