Programming
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Latest Posts
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pabloecortez
3 weeks ago
How do we fight alienation?
In 1968, Chilean artist Roberto Matta gave a speech titled The Internal Guerrilla at the Congreso de la Cultura in Havana. It's a speech about art and revolution. Prior to his departure, Matta left with poet Jean Schuster, executor of André Breton's will, a collection of notes titled Infra-réalisme . For Matta, infrarealism is a defense against alienation. Alienation is of course at the root of the problems we see today in our digital lives. The discourse surrounding platform decay and the state of the web is a reaction to a new reality: we have built a digital infrastructure hostile to meaningful human development. We find ourselves at a strange crossroads, where conventional wisdom tells us that the internet is a tool and not an end in itself, but after 2020 something changed. To keep the world running in the wake of the pandemic, the digital sphere took on new responsibilities. Forced to stay away from each other physically, we moved part of our lives online. Today the consequences of that move continue to be felt, and alienation becomes almost inevitable. In the words of Paul B. Preciado, the individual "is not a physical agent, but a digital consumer, a code, a pixel, a bank account, an address". In technology circles we see appeals to a vintage web, rejection of AI tools and praise for projects that highlight the human aspect of social interactions. We see the defense of free speech and privacy rights and conversations about where we go from here. With an understanding that alienation comes from the type of work we produce and the form in which we consume it, in Matta's speech we find a reminder to do the kind of work inherent to all of us. The following is my translation of Roberto Matta's speech The Internal Guerrilla . A Spanish reproduction appeared in print in Prometeo magazine in 1987. I found a transcription at Mecánica Celeste . In my opinion, one of the most important topics proposed by this Congress is the one referring to the Integral Development of Humankind. Allow me to expose my views regarding this point, especially in relation to one of its essential aspects: the development of the creative imagination, of an intelligence that builds from poetic imagination, of a subversive imagination, of an erotic imagination also. I understand that just as Revolution is a collective endeavor on the social plane, it is also a process which must be verified in each individual. For intellectuals and artists, for all people, I consider this personal revolution wholly necessary. Especially so if the intellectual, if the artist, if that person is conscious of belonging to a world which finds itself in the complex stage of building a new social organization, in which the Integral Development has an importance of the first order. It is not about only being with the revolution, but about being revolutionary. And being revolutionary implies, of course, being free, or consequently fighting for liberty. Just like people free themselves through the fight against political and economic oppression, individuals can only free themselves through the fight against internal tyrannies: hypocrisy and fear. Prejudices, false pretenses, self-criticism, conventional and schematic ideals constitute the invisible (often mercenary) army against which the internal guerrillas set out to defend creative liberty. As with more consciousness there is more light, so too there is more light with more consciousness. To achieve a cultural revolution there must be a cultural revelation , humankind's possibilities must be seen. A high sense of responsibility does not mean practicing self-censorship systematically. In the field of imagination, one must be brave as in the field of battle. The builders of a new world, in the social sphere as in the cultural, intellectual, and artistic spheres are characterized by generosity, for commitment to their work, but also by defiance, by the capacity to assume, with necessary courage, the risks undertaken by all creators and innovators, by all true revolution. This problem does not concern the poet exclusively. I think a true person is a poet, an integral person ought to be a poet, because poetry means clinging to more reality, all reality. In the end, an intellectual, an artist, only differentiates themselves from others by their capacity to experience the world more intensely, dealing not only in facts but with imagination also. Stimulating the creative imagination of people, creating conditions for which all have access to true culture (that is, more than accumulating knowledge, but the profound interpretation and appreciation of that knowledge) is the goal of a revolutionary process prolific in its cultural field. A person forged this way will be an integral person, that is to say, a poet, even if their job is not explicitly to write poems. Art is not a luxury but a necessity, and just like in the social landscape, Revolution confronts new problems and finds new ways to solve them, in the landscape of artistic creation and intellectual labor a truly creative imagination will propose solution to a renewed set of problems, and will find the means of investigation and expression to resolve them. Art is the desire for what does not exist, and it is also the tool for achieving that desire. I hope this Congress will not only meet the undeniable need to harbor information and exchange of ideas dear for artists and intellectuals. I hope for more: a discussion on how far we will let our victory over internal guerrillas depend on fruitful development and that an integral person, a poet, a new person, can become reality. Havana. Congreso de la Cultura. 1968. La guerrilla interna ( PDF ) The Internal Guerrilla ( PDF )
Culture
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pabloecortez
1 months ago
The Year 2025 for powRSS
One of the fun side projects I've taken on this year has been powRSS , the public RSS feed aggregator for the Indieweb. As 2025 comes to a close, I want to put together a summary of the things that went on. I'm a strong believer of building in public, and that includes talking about the goals, successes and failures. Here is how powRSS did this year, from May 21st when it launched to today, December 14th. Thank you so much to all of you who helped support this project! It's so rewarding to see the response it has gotten in the eight months it has been running. I'm excited about what the next year has in store for us! On Friday May 21, Fred Rocha wrote a blog post titled Small (web) is beautiful in which he talked about digital gardens, the indieweb, and the challenge of discovering new sites and independent voices to follow. I replied to him with a blog post where I put together some of the resources I knew about like Andreas Gohr's Indieplog.page and Viktor Lofgren's Marginalia Search . During this time I had been wanting to get back into the Gemini Protocol, as that project was what introduced me to the small and personal web about five years ago. I loved the ethos and the community aspect of it all. When documentation wasn't available to achieve something, I knew I could ask for help and many kind folks would be glad to offer advice. That evening I put together a quick proof of concept written in Ruby and launched the following morning. I find that the desire to help and build together remains true today with Indieweb communities, and I'm grateful for the comments, advice, and feedback I've received about powRSS since it launched. This version was a static page, set to rebuild every 12 hours with new posts from its list of known feeds. It's actually very similar to the way lettrss works to send out each book chapter :-) During this time all blog submissions were handled via e-mail. I added my e-mail address to my blog and when people came across the project they'd send me links to their RSS feeds. About a week later, as more people began submitting their blogs to be added to the feed, I decided to add categories and a dedicated submissions form. On the afternoon of my birthday, May 31, I came across a post from Joan Westenberg: Independent sites who don’t have the resources to compete with major platforms in visibility and search rankings, lose traffic and, consequently, viability. As a result, entire categories of information and smaller communities become less accessible, hidden behind the algorithms of the dominant, bloated tech giants. I took this quote and shared a link to powRSS on Mastodon, and this is where things got even more exciting! Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon Westenberg, who has 30k followers, made powRSS visible to a lot more people, and that meant receiving way more submissions and responding to new kinds of feedback. One of the first great suggestions came from Alex White who sent me a message suggesting the addition of a "Random site" feature like StumbleUpon. That seemed really fun to implement, so I wrote another blog post announcing the new feature. With more blogs being added to powRSS, I began spending more time going through submissions. It's important to me that powRSS remains a space for human creativity, independent voices, and the serendipity of coming across people who, like you, understand that the web is indeed beautiful. The things we read and interact with inform our decisions and strengthen our convictions, so cultivating a space that enables this type of discovery matters. Today I continue to manually review all submissions. I like knowing that every link on powRSS takes me to the website of another person who took the time and care to build out a space for themselves on the internet. My absolute favorite part of this project has been discovering blogs I would have never come across otherwise and having conversations with those authors. Around November I wanted to give powRSS a more retro feel to better reflect its mission. In this design the two-column layout on desktop was important because I wanted those recently-added blogs to also have some discoverability. As you can imagine, some authors write more frequently than others. Some of you write every few months, and if you were to add your blog to powRSS without a recent blog post, it could take a while before others knew about your blog. The "new to powRSS" column made it easy to find blogs which maybe didn't have recent posts but you also knew were being actively maintained, since each addition to powRSS requires the manual submission from its author. Indeed, some of you told me you felt more excited about blogging again knowing that your posts were definitely going to be seen by others! As you can see, powRSS no longer had categories like before. I thought a while before getting rid of them, and I think in retrospect it was a mistake, so I brought them back with a twist. I do want to explain my reasoning though. By giving blogs a strict category, we end up pigeonholing authors, especially those who have personal sites. I love seeing personal stories along with pictures of a trip or the last book you read even if your blog is mainly about programming or photography or sports. The whole point of the personal blog is to have that freedom. "Can I still share pictures of my dog if I'm in the Technology category?" was a question I received, so I realized site-wide categories weren't the way to go. However, there is of course a benefit to knowing about the blog you're about to visit, so I chose a happy middle ground by adding brief category labels below each blog. This was added in time for the Winter redesign I launched at the beginning of December. Here is what powRSS looks like today: powRSS today Thank you all for making the web more exciting, more vibrant, and more human. Have an excellent rest of the year! Grateful, Pablo Enoc
Open Source
Web Development
Ruby
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pabloecortez
1 months ago
Release schedule for lettrss books
lettrss now has a release schedule so you can see book progress! Today Chapter 3 of A Christmas Carol was sent out via RSS. Next chapter is out on Monday. There's still time to follow along :-)
Books
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pabloecortez
1 months ago
Lost Media: Konpeito Tapes
Konpeito Media Winter 2021 Cover In the winter of 2021 I discovered a Gemini capsule called Konpeito Media. KONPEITO was quarterly Lo-fi hip hop & chill bootleg mixtapes, distributed exclusively through the Gemini protocol. Each tape was a half-hour mix, clean on side A and repeated on side B with an added ambient background noise layer for atmosphere. Tapes were generally released in the first week of each meteorological season. KONPEITO ended in the Winter of 2022. The project no longer exists, but I found a mirror capsule here: gemini://gem.chiajlingvoj.ynh.fr/konpeito/konpeito_media_mirror.gmi > I saved a few of these mixtapes to my computer back then, and I always find myself coming back to the Winter 2021 tape. It's great to set as background music on blue winter evenings when I find myself writing for long periods of time. Konpeito Media had a deliberate end when its author felt it ran its course. Often we see blogs or projects abandoned, that's normal, but rarely do we see a two-year project where the author acknowledges that it's time to wrap things up and move on to other things. Konpeito on Mastodon - January 20, 2022: After some soul-searching, I've decided to call the KONPEITO project done. I know y'all were fiending for the new tape but it seems like there's always something else diverting my attention and that's usually a really good sign my heart isn't in it. The capsule will stay up indefinitely and I'll make sure you have notice before I take it down. I'll have one more tape up before I do, to say thank you to everyone who's listened and everyone who's shone light on the Gemini project. This project is one of my favorite pieces of internet history.
Music
Media
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pabloecortez
1 months ago
Next on lettrss: A Christmas Carol
Last week we finished reading The Wizard of Oz on lettrss . Thank you to everyone who read along! For December, I thought it would be fun to read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. This one is also a short book with ~29,000 words and an estimated reading time of 1 hour and 45 minutes. I'd love to know what books you'd like to see next! Some of you have e-mailed me with ideas for doing poetry or short fiction books so it feels less overwhelming in case you miss a post here and there. That sounds great! Suggestions are open until December 21st . Note that your suggestion must be in the public domain. For this I have been browsing Standard Ebooks . Once we have chosen the next book, I'll announce it here and via lettrss. If you would like to help out with preparing the next book, you can also find the lettrss project on GitHub .
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pabloecortez
1 months ago
Re: the overstated importance of connectivity
This post is mirrored from my website at ENOCC.com Ava published a great piece on the way social media platforms exploit our desire for human connection. Which is why the need for connectivity in the way these companies mean it and push it is a big lie just to further their financial interests and has nothing to do with how humans actually pursue, facilitate and experience true connection, and we need to question it. Below are some scattered thoughts on this topic and the relationship between us and cyberspace. In the fall of 2021 I had the pleasure of taking Amy Reed-Sandoval 's seminar on the Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance. Philosopher Cécile Fabre even gave a guest lecture on the ethics of espionage , clarifying for us that what governments and platforms were doing with our data was exactly that. This was after things began picking up in the US following the pandemic, and as most of us had gotten used to spending a considerable part of our days online, it seemed particularly relevant to understand what privacy and surveillance meant in the context of working, studying, socializing, and being online. During this time I conceived of the digital world as an extension of the environments with which we interact. I didn't believe digital personas to be an alter ego, I saw them as one more form of self-expression. There are of course different attitudes regarding the relationship between the physical world and cyberspace. For example, Ava goes on to write: I can only speak for myself, but the reason why I would be able to be completely alone, unread and ignored online is because I already get all the connection I need offline. Online is a bonus, or a fallback. Not to mention that it could overlap and only my offline relationships could read my blog. Would that not be enough? Yes, that is exactly what we should be doing! Identifying how each of us inhabits cyberspace is the key to setting boundaries, managing expectations, and maintaining a good balance between the physical world and cyberspace. And these can look different for each of us, and we don't have to agree, because the relationship between the individual and the digital world is cultivated by each person. I would call these "real life" and "the internet" or something along those lines, but I think that falls short. We have to acknowledge that for some folks, whether it be by choice or circumstance, cyberspace is a real, habitable environment. This is why people defend freedom of speech online, along with privacy, encryption, and the infrastructure which makes it all possible. All of these are fundamental so you can even begin establishing a relationship with cyberspace on your own terms. If we are to reconcile the differences between the physical and digital worlds, we must start by recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of each one as they pertain to the individual . We will disagree on what these are, however, which is one of the reasons why we constantly see new articles and posts in which people analyze their own relationship to technology and proceed to make sweeping, normative declarations on what we ought to do because of the way things are . No one is exempt from this, and in fact these are helpful to read because the experiences of others broaden our options and inform our opinions. I'm thinking for example of posts where we may talk about how we use e-mail, or how we use RSS, or why we quit Instagram, so on and so forth. In the spirit of learning more about these topics, I want to share with you some of the readings from that seminar. They're grouped by topic, and this list is certainly not exhaustive, but it's a good way to learn about what work is being done to identify and engage with issues pertaining to the relationship between people and cyberspace. These readings had a big influence on how I began to think about technology and the role I let it play in my life. And it's only going to get more interesting as the future comes closer to us. Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Secrecy and Revelation [Book] Cécile Fabre, The Morality of Gossip [PDF] Matt Lister, That's None of Your Business! On the Limits of Employer Control of Non-Workplace Behavior [PDF] Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk About It) [Book] Anita Allen, Unpopular Privacies: What Must We Hide? [Book] Katie Engelhart, What Robots Can—and Can’t—Do for the Old and Lonely [Article] Dana Boyd and Eszter Hargittai, Facebook Privacy Settings: Who Cares? [Author Blog] Andrew Marantz, Why Facebook Can't Fix Itself [Article] Anita Allen, Gender and Privacy in Cyberspace [PDF] Carissa Véliz, Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data [Book] Marisa Elena Duarte, Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country [Book] Cécile Fabre, Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence [Book] Michelle Goldwin, Policing the Womb, Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood [Book] Amy Reed-Sandoval, Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice [Book] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, The New Mestiza [Book] José Jorge Mendoza, The Contradiction of Crimmigration [PDF]
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pabloecortez
1 months ago
I made an 88x31 button for powRSS
I think 88x31 buttons are cute so I made one for powRSS. You can grab it from https://powrss.com/powrss-88-31.png Here it is on my blog's footer!
Design
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pabloecortez
1 months ago
Black Friday for You and Me
Yesterday it was Thanksgiving and I had the privilege of spending the holiday with my family. We have a tradition of doing a toast going around the table and sharing at least one thing for which we are grateful. I want to share with you a story that started last year, in January of 2024, when a family friend named Germán reached out to me for help with a website for his business. Germán is in his 50s, he went to school for mechanical engineering in Mexico and about twenty years ago he moved to the United States. Today he owns a restaurant in Las Vegas with his wife and also runs a logistics company for distributing produce. We met the last week of January, he told me that he was looking to build a website for his restaurant and eventually build up his infrastructure so most of his business could be automated. His current workflow required his two sons to run the business along with him. They managed everything manually on expensive proprietary software. There were lots of things that could be optimized, so I agreed to jump on board and we have been collaborating ever since. What I assumed would be a developer type of position instead became more of a peer-mentorship relationship. Germán is curious, intelligent, and hard working. It didn't take long for me to notice that he didn't just want to have software or services running "in the background" while he occupied himself with other tasks. He wanted to have a thorough understanding of all the software he adopted. "I want to learn but I simply don't have the patience," he told me during one of our first meetings. At first I admit I thought this was a bit of a red flag (sorry Germán haha) but it all began to make sense when he showed me his books. He had paid thousands of dollars for a Wordpress website that only listed his services and contact information. The company he had hired offered an expensive SEO package for a monthly fee. My time in open source and the indieweb had blinded me to how abusive the "web development" industry had become. I'm referring to those local agencies that take advantage of unsuspecting clients and charge them for every little thing. I began making Germán's website and we went back and forth on assets, copy, menus, we began putting together a project and everything went smoothly. He was happy that he got to see how I built things. During this time I would journal through my work on his project and e-mail my notes to him. He loved it. Next came a new proposition. While the static site was nice to have an online presence, what he was after was getting into e-commerce. His wife, Sarah, makes artisanal beauty products and custom clothes. Her friends would message her on Facebook to ask what new stuff she was working on and she would send pictures to them from her phone. She would have benefitted from having a website, but after the bad experience they had had with the agency, they weren't too enthused about the prospect of hiring them for another project. I met with both of them again for this new project and we talked for hours, more like coworkers this time around. We eventually came to the conclusion that it would be more rewarding for them to really learn how to put their own shop together. I acted more as a coach or mentor than a developer. We'd sit together and activate accounts, fill out pages, choose themes. I was providing a safe space for them to be curious about technology, make mistakes, learn from them, and immediately get feedback on technical details so they could stay on a safe path. I'm so grateful for that opportunity afforded to me by Germán and his family. I've thought about how that approach would look if applied to the indieweb. It's always so exciting for me to see what the friends I've made here are working on. I know the open web becomes stronger when more independent projects are released, as we have more options to free ourselves from the corporate web that has stifled so much of the creativity and passion that I love and miss from the internet. I want to keep doing this. If you are building something on your own, have been out of the programming world for a while but want to start again, or maybe you are almost done and need a little boost in confidence (or accountability!) to reach the finish line and ship, I'm here to help. Check out my coaching page to find out more. I'm excited about the prospect of a community of builders who care about self-reliance and releasing software that puts people first. Perhaps this Black Friday you could choose to invest in yourself :-)
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pabloecortez
2 months ago
You can read the web seasonally
What if you read things around the web the way you watch movies or listen to music? A couple of days ago I made a post on Mastodon introducing lettrss.com, a project I made that takes a book in the public domain and sends one chapter a day to your RSS reader. Xinit replied with a great point about RSS feed management: This is fascinating, but I know how it would go based on the thousands of unread RSS feeds I've had, and the thousands of unheard podcasts I subscribed to. I'd end up with an RSS of unread chapters, representing a whole book in short order. Regardless of my inability to deal, it remains a great idea, and I will absolutely recommend while hiding my shame of a non-zero inbox. When I first started using RSS, I thought I'd found this great tool for keeping tabs on news, current events, and stuff I should and do care about. After adding newspapers, blogs, magazines, publications, YouTube channels and release notes from software I use, I felt a false sense of accomplishment, like I'd finally been able to wrangle the craziness of the internet into a single app, like I had rebelled against the algorithm™️. But it didn't take long to accumulate hundreds of posts, most of which I had no true desire to read, and soon after I abandoned my RSS reader. I came back to check on it from time to time, but its dreadful little indicator of unread posts felt like a personal failure, so eventually I deleted it entirely. Will Hopkins wrote a great post on this exact feeling. I don't actually like to read later : I used Instapaper back in the day, quite heavily. I built up a massive backlog of items that I'd read occasionally on my OG iPod Touch. At some point, I fell off the wagon, and Instapaper fell by the wayside. [...] The same thing has happened with todo apps over the years, and feed readers. They become graveyards of good intentions and self-imposed obligations. Each item is a snapshot in time of my aspirations for myself, but they don't comport to the reality of who I am. I couldn't have said it better myself. This only happens with long-form writing, whenever I come across an essay or blog post that I know will either require my full attention or a bit more time than I'm willing to give it in the moment. I've never had that issue with music. Music is more discrete. It's got a timestamp. I listen to music through moods and seasons, so much so that I make a playlist for every month of the year like a musical scrapbook. What if we took this approach to RSS feeds? Here's what I replied to Xinit: This is something I find myself struggling with too. I think I'm okay knowing some RSS feeds are seasonal, same as music genres throughout the year. Some days I want rock, others I want jazz. Similarly with RSS feeds, I've become comfortable archiving and resurfacing feeds. For reference, I follow around 10 feeds at any given time, and the feeds I follow on my phone are different from the ones on my desktop. You shouldn't feel guilty about removing feeds from your RSS readers. It's not a personal failure, it's an allocation of resources like time and attention.
Data Analysis
Tutorial
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pabloecortez
2 months ago
Read a book via RSS with lettrss.com
If you picked a book and sent one chapter a day to my RSS reader, I'm sure I'd read it all. I'll be putting this to the test with lettrss.com , a project I built to syndicate books in the public domain via RSS. lettrss - read public domain books via RSS Since the second part of the Wicked movie is coming out on November 21 in the United States, I thought it’d be fun to start this RSS project with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
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pabloecortez
2 months ago
The Devil Needs No Advocate
Unless you're wealthy enough to bribe a small country or have personally received an invitation to Epstein's island, you have no business advocating for billionaires. Surely there must be a thrill in an ethics of contrarianism, something to make docile subservience an exciting prospect. "Ohh look at me, I'm so naughty because I'm not like everyone else", thinks the contrarian while shooting a sideways glance towards the working class, hoping to one day share a meal with wealthy industrialists, completely oblivious to the fact that among the working class is where he will always be kept. Did anyone ever find a friend in the kid who played "devil's advocate" in school? I want to share with you an unbelievable paragraph I read today. It was written by an American professor of philosophy, in an essay arguing that there is no moral objection to AI art. I call it unbelievable because it's hard to believe how badly it mischaracterizes the artist's rejection of generative AI. Imagine an artist in a patriarchal society complaining when women are allowed into the art museum for the first time: “I never gave permission for women to view my art!” This artist has no legitimate moral complaint, I’d say, because he has no moral right to make his work accessible only to men. Likewise, artists have no moral right to make their work accessible only to humans. They have no legitimate complaint if an AI trains on the work they post online, any more than they can complain about a young human artist “training on” (or learning from) their work. Take a minute to read that one again. "Babe, I thought of a great way to advance an instrumentalist view of agency that attributes mental states and intentionality to generative AI systems. First you pretend women and computer software are equivalent and then..." To philosophers it must be exciting to think of Artificial Intelligence as its own ontological class, a sui generis marvel of modern engineering. The truth is that no such thing exists yet, and marketing in Silicon Valley is powerful. Women have agency. AI has no agency. That's why this is a silly comparison and not even at all what the rejection of generative AI is about. When an artist pushes back against the use of generative AI tools, what they are saying is something like this: I do not approve of technology corporations amassing wealth by exploiting my work as an artist without consent . There's no artist saying they don't want the literal software processing their data because it's software. It's about who owns the software and what they do with it. The rejection of generative AI is not about programming languages, package managers, libraries, large language models and application programming interfaces. It's about technocrats building programs, using marketing terms like "learning" to make you think they have agency, and then the working class pretending they do because the marketing got so good. The devil needs no advocate.
AI
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pabloecortez
2 months ago
How I discover new (and old) blogs and websites
One of the great things about having a blog is that you get a space that is entirely yours, where you share whatever you want and you make it look exactly how you want it to look. It's a labor of creativity and self-expression. An encouraging aspect of having a blog is also being read by others. I love receiving emails from people who liked a post. It's just nice to know I'm not shouting into the void! But take for instance posts I wrote last year or many years ago. How do those get discovered? Perhaps you wrote an awesome essay on your favorite topic back in 2022. How can I or anyone else stumble upon your work? Making it easy to discover hidden gems from the indie web was my motivation for making powRSS . powRSS is a public RSS feed aggregator to help you find the side of the internet that seldom appears on corporate search engines. It surfaces posts and blogs going all the way back to 1995. You never know what you're going to find and I think it's really fun. Today I made a video showing how it works.
Writing
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pabloecortez
2 months ago
What I read this week #1
Some interesting stuff I read this week. Mirrored from ENOCC.com The Imperfectionist: Seventy per cent by Oliver Burkeman This one I discovered in Sal's blog . The 70% rule: If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it. If you’re 70% satisfied with a product you’ve created, launch it. If you’re 70% sure a decision is the right one, implement it. And if you’re 70% confident you’ve got what it takes to do something that might make a positive difference to the increasingly alarming era we seem to inhabit? Go ahead and do that thing. (Please!) Investing in RSS by Tim Kadlec Opening up my RSS reader, a cup of coffee in hand, still feels calm and peaceful in a way that trying to keep up with happenings in other ways just never has. There’s more room for nuance and thoughtfulness, and I feel more in control of what I choose to read, and what I don’t. The act of spending that time in those feeds still feels like a very deliberate, intentional act. Curating a set of feeds I find interesting and making the time to read them feels like an investment in myself. long time no blog; thinking about collective action in view from the present Yet I find myself wondering if social media - precisely the thing we need to collectively push to meaningfully change - isn't purpose-built to prevent us from banding together collectively for meaningful change. I don't just mean its attention-fragmenting, privacy-obliterating features; I also mean its tendency to convince us that slacktivism is all we need. You don't need to go out and organize! Just share this video and like that post, see, you did the thing, you are a Good Person who is Fighting the Good Fight. Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence by Jarrett Fuller, Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University The paradox of designing for the web is that the simplicity of building a website with basic tools means it can adapt to the changing technology around it. “For those of us who’ve had our websites for years, each version tells a story about us from a different era,” Schwulst says. “With my new site, the goal was to build a structure that could last for years.” This is not a nostalgia for a web long gone or a resistance to change, but a reminder for those of us working in digital spaces: Legacy is not a bad word. Process World, Object-Oriented Mind by Marco Giancotti Marco Giancotti writes an exploration of the rise and fall of Object Oriented Programming for Aether Mug and makes references to the models of cognition which in turn influence software engineering paradigms. I'm surprised there was no mention of Platonism, which was a clear influence on one of the first Object Oriented programming languages, Smalltalk. Here is Alan Kay talking about this in his paper The Early History of Smalltalk : Philosophically, Smalltalk's objects have much in common with the monads of Leibniz and the notions of 20th century physics and biology. Its way of making objects is quite Platonic in that some of them act as idealizations of concepts— Ideas —from which manifestations can be created. That the Ideas are themselves manifestations (of the Idea-Idea) and that the Idea-Idea is a-kind-of Manifestation-Idea—which is a-kind-of itself, so that the system is completely self-describing— would have been appreciated by Plato as an extremely practical joke. You Can Make A Website by Coyote If you have any doubts, then you're the target audience of this guide. Many people hesitate or even write off the possibility of making a website due to common misconceptions, poorly-written instructions, or simply feeling unsure where to start. So to help you over those hurdles, this guide is designed to address some of those misconceptions, walk you through resolving certain mental blocks, and present you with some tutorials to help get you on your way. Pro-craft by Jared White I would like to propose we start using the term "pro-craft" to describe our movement, rather than anti-AI. craft as a verb: to make or manufacture (an object or product) with skill and careful attention to detail craft as a descriptive noun: an art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill, especially manual skill I am not "anti-AI"…I am pro-craft. I've dedicated my life to being a good craftsperson, in a variety of disciplines, and I'll be damned if I let craft be devalued or dismissed.
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pabloecortez
2 months ago
It's insulting to read your AI-generated blog post
It seems so rude and careless to make me, a person with thoughts, ideas, humor, contradictions and life experience to read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo machine because you were too lazy to write it yourself. Do you not enjoy the pride that comes with attaching your name to something you made on your own? It's great! No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human! Everyone wants to help each other. And people are far kinder than you may think. By adding a sterile robo-liaison between yourself and your readers, you don't give us a chance to engage with you. Here is a secret: most people want to help you succeed. The problem is that you, yes, you are too afraid to ask for help. You think smart, capable people don't ask for help because they should know it all. Wrooooooooong. On the contrary, smart people know when to ask for help and when to give it too. They create mutually beneficial relationships with the people surrounding them. I ask you, human to human, both as beings capable of love and fear and humor and all the other great feelings we have cultivated for thousands of years: leave the AI to your quantitative tasks if you have to use it at all. Face the world with your thoughts and enrich them through real-world experience. The best thoughts are the ones that have been felt , anyway.
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pabloecortez
2 months ago
Here is a blogging challenge for you
These past few days I've been writing e-mails to some of my favorite bloggers, simply sending them a message letting them know that they have a reader in me. I've been spending a lot of time reading people's blogs this year while working on powRSS , to the point where I'm talking about what goes on in their life with my own friends! "Hey did you catch Herman's post last week about smartphones?" Simple stuff like that. A lot of the posts you write here do make an impact on my real life, whether it's an anecdote, a reflection, or simply reading a slice of life chapter of whatever is happening in your world. So, I think it'd be a great blogging challenge to send an e-mail / guestbook entry to those blogs that we read frequently. It's always nice to know our words are being read by others.
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pabloecortez
7 months ago
A first update on powRSS
There are still a few days left until my birthday (May 31, baby!) but the warm welcome powRSS has received is a great present already. Thank you to everyone who has checked out the project! A special thank you goes to those who have submitted their blogs and sites too, I'm humbled at the amount of talented writers putting their words out there and trusting independent readers to find them. I can't wait to come across your writing soon! Throughout this weekend it became evident that discovering new sites and blogs is both the most difficult yet rewarding aspect of the independent web. Most of us are subject to algorithms in the platforms we frequent, and this means missing out on a lot of good stuff that matters. I have now found even more software tools that work towards alleviating this, but the funny thing is that my discovery of them came from first-hand recommendations via e-mail. People are still using e-mail! Do I sound surprised? That's because I am. This morning alone I had 53 unread e-mails— 51 of those from actual humans —where someone took the time to type out a response to something I had written or to share their website. I love it when people are proud of their work, and I didn't realize that this weekend project would give me the chance to provide an outlet for people to share that with others. I think most of us feel the same way towards yet another technology, yet another algorithm, yet another platform and filter to figure out. I mention this because one of the e-mails I received asked me how the sorting algorithm worked on powRSS and when was the best time to post. There is no special algorithm because the feed is in chronological order . "Is it instant?" Nope . It updates at least once (up to four times a day) but only when someone visits the site . Processing only takes place when actual humans need info, not when a machine decides it's time to consume processing resources :-) So, what's new? If you got questions, suggestions, or simply want to say hi, my inbox is always open. Working on an RSS feed New blogs being added daily Categories (you can pick your own or I'll pick one for you!) Click on the "Random" button to visit a random site from the IndieWeb
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pabloecortez
7 months ago
I made a public feed aggregator. Share your blog!
I'm excited to introduce powRSS to the Bear community. It's a small public RSS feed aggregator. A big appeal of Bear for me has always been its Discover page, and I decided to build something like it for the web. It's a public feed aggregator for all indie sites and blogs. powRSS updates daily. The feed is generated automatically by picking new sites each month, giving every site a fair chance to be featured. I'm inviting all of you to check out the feed and submit your own sites if you'd like to be discovered and read by a few more people! Grad school has made me dread e-mails, so to get over this I'm accepting website submissions via e-mail either at [email protected] or directly to me at [email protected] I can't wait to see your blogs over there too :-) I'm updating the post to say thank you for the number of submissions. I'm making my way through each of your blogs and replying one by one. You'll be notified as soon as your blog is included! Please send your site, we have a fantastic community going and we'd love for you to join us.
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pabloecortez
1 years ago
Leaving Instagram
Hi cybercitizens, I'm currently in the process of helping my father leave Facebook and Instagram in favor of the Indieweb. He loves sharing things online, from family photos to personal projects that he works on, such as illustrations and "blog posts" (which are really very long captions beneath Instagram posts). Today, he has over 1700 posts. We've talked about why it would be a good idea for him to have his own domain so he can own his content. At this point, I'm not sure what blogging platform would be best for him. For him, convenience is most important, but he has shown a lot of interest in having his own website. For an older and busier man, what would be a good blogging platform? His requirements are pretty simple: I am happy to help him through the entire process, but I also know he would like to feel independent and do it all on his own. He likes learning new stuff, but he's no web developer. What would you recommend? I'm looking forward to reading about any similar experiences you may have had yourself or with parents. To reply to this post, please feel free to email me at [email protected] Alternatively, if you'd like to reply publically so others may benefit in the future, I am happy to add a link to your reply here. Easy to upload photos Good mobile UI
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pabloecortez
1 years ago
Is it worth it?
I keep seeing this question online, in various forms and communities, from internet forums to TikTok videos. A person will ask, "is it worth it to do X?" But what exactly are they asking, and how is anyone but themselves qualified to answer that? This question is usually raised when someone wants to know if the time spent on a given activity or project will produce what they consider a desirable outcome. Why would any stranger be able to answer that? I particularly dislike this question when it comes to learning something, because it's always about capital , whether it be social capital or financial gain. "Is it worth it to learn Ruby on Rails?" "Is it worth it to learn Spanish?" "Is it worth it to read Hemingway?" "Is it worth it to listen to The Beatles?" You don't need to ask permission! Knowledge is intrinsically valuable, learn things for their own sake! I'm aware that some people are asking these questions because it's comforting to ask others what their experience is regarding various activities. But why not ask instead about that? "What has been your experience using Ruby on Rails?" "How has learning Spanish changed your life?" "How did reading Hemingway make you feel?" "Why do you like The Beatles?"
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