My approach to running a link blog by Simon Willison: After thinking about doing the whole blog thing for awhile, this is what finally inspired me to start.
I like his thought:
The value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time—worthwhile even if you don’t attract much of an audience (or any audience at all).
Particularly because no audience at all is exactly where I will likely be for the foreseeable future, but it feels nice to have a public record of your committment to something like this over time.
The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class by Alex Danco This sparked a large discussion on HN, although that may be because it essentially attacks hobbyism as a whole…what HN is all about.
One interesting thought was:
Generally speaking, the farther you go up this ladder, the more detached from reality you get.
This is in regards to the “middle manager” ladder mentioned in the article. I think many people in relatively dead end jobs look for advancement in their careers in strange places. Think people who do endless MOOCs, or someone who starts a link blog. They assign importance to something relatively meaningless or unserious because they cannot see the reality of the situation they find themselves in.
Breadbun Labs Following this project to see where it goes.
Steve Jobs Commencement Speech, Stanford Somehow I had never seen this before. Some quotes to save (copied from a poor audio transcription):
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.Don’t be trapped by dogma which is livingwith the results of other people’s thinking.Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own innervoice. And most important,have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.They somehow already know what you truly want to become.Everything else is secondary.
And while we’re on Steve Jobs, another insight about what AI may evolve into from ‘83:
The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.
I feel the first step on the road toward what he’s describing is happening as part of the Surfer open source project.
(Dieter) Rams Documentary by Gary Hustwit I found this from the Steve Jobs biography that mentions Dieter often. I doubt many think about Braun as a company designing beautiful products today, interesting to see where they came from.