Not all bricks are nourishing. Be aware of what is being practiced.
Not all bricks are nourishing. Be aware of what is being practiced.
Time-based notes with Alexander Griekspoor
[Despite having training materials and support, people generally learn the tool socially.]
[Build community forum posting into the app.]
[Ask people to describe their workflows.]
['Identity theft' is favourable because it absolves institutions of their responsibility to secure their authentication systems.]
Nature is abundant. Nature does not imagine.
[End-user programming languages are more motivating to learn when they are task-oriented: instead of making available only smaller primitives, provide higher-level abstractions that actually do the complete job.]
[Spreadsheet arithmetic is approachable not because most people know how to add and subtract, but because that's what accountants and business people do]
[Go beyond 'easy to use' and prioritize early success within a few hours of use to increase motivation.]
[Avoid 'having to know everything to do anything']
[Spreadsheets obviate the need for control structures or variable names.]
[Happiness is a choice.]
How can we appropriate the mind's repetition and 'latching onto things' to reinforce healthy practices?
[Start out by not letting anyone touch it without being there to show how it works. First give a demo to let them see what they can do with the product, then guide them while they try it for themselves.]
[Help provide context and help them understand why they should care.]
10 Years of Open-Source Visualization
[Maximize your impact by making teaching central to your strategy, ideally material that can be consumed without you being present.]
[Have lots of examples.]
[Answering questions is more than altruism, it's a chance to learn.]
[If you're complaining on the Internet, think of the practical impact of your words.]
[Focus on laying a perfect brick everyday and eventually you'll look up and there will be a wall.]
[Conversational language is a poor medium of HCI because computers lack the context that we constantly refer to, as well as the ability to interpret context to derive meaning.]
[Deterministic outcomes from a computer and so prefer formal languages because conversation is naturally open-ended and not specific.]
Don't End The Week With Nothing
[If you are not allowed side projects or to make your work open source, ask for more money.]
[Bitcoin is an investment bubble built around the narrative of people's rage at economic inequality and a broken economy.]
[Cache and cash sound similar because our concept of storing value comes from nature, squirrels keeping a stock of acorns in such a way to avoid it being eaten by someone else.]
[People die because we give numbers in machines more resources, attention, and care than living beings.]
[The Kwakiutl call their money objects 'bad things', like dead bodies or intestines, and in potlatch money-destruction ceremonies they 'wipe the shame off their body'.]
[A groove is a cell that repeats. A song is a collection of cells that are organized linearly to have a beginning, middle, and end.]
[Making a groove longer is trivial, a song not so.]
[Songs lend themselves to be covered and arranged. Grooves lend themselves to be remixed and sampled.]
What can I say or offer as a pleasant surprise to the other person?
[End users are not 'casual' or 'naive', they are scientists, librarians, teachers, architects, people that want to make serious use of computers without becoming professional programmers.]
Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie on Getting Your First Consulting Client
[When starting out: instead of doing free work, offer a limited free or discounted sample and propose that if the results are excellent that we discuss paying the full rate.]
[Public/private distinctions are a natural fit for offering things for free.]
[Understand the words that people use to describe their problems, then repeat their words back to them.]
[If you can empathize with the client, you will be more likely to be chosen than someone who has more technical skill.]
[If his life's work is men's clothes, you can bet he likes to talk about men's clothes.]
[If your first question is how much does it cost…]
[When you enter an area with birds, insects korbanimals, they are listening to you completely as it may mean the difference between survival and death. You are received.]
[Context, like location and the people present, is what defines how a story is told: the same story can vary based on the audience. Social media like twitter collapses context to the point where the more successful actors are generic.]
[As opposed to friends and family that see a person growing and changing over time, the social media crowd sees a monolithic and timeless figure who is expected to never change their mind.]
[Contrast Mark Zuckerberg's 'two identities is a lack of integrity' with Audrey Lorde's 'multiple selves']
[Online censorship exists without governmental intervention through flooding the stream with banalities that distracts from serious issues.]
[Online discourse creates weak ties: physical dimensions of time and space enable stronger connections and dialogues.]
Anger will get you started but it won't keep you going.
[Various questions that you pose while knowing your environment are all trying to answer: where and when am I, and how do I know that?]