Author: obsidian_ns

I’ve slowly restarted keeping track of the links and articles I’ve been reading lately. The reading/writing/sharing workflow hasn’t really kept up with the changes in my life lately. I’ve had to remind myself that it’s okay.

Anyhoo. A bunch of delectables from this last week.

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Music:

• 2 Hours of John Prine’s Greatest Hits
• Beth Hart: Your heart is as black as night 💙
• A-ha Take On Me acoustic has a different vibe
• Graham Nash NPR Tiny Desk concert
• Taylor Bloom and Benjamin Cooley cover The Boxer

Need this for my coursework: How to draw perspecive

Ed Zitron: The Generative AI Con We are in the midst of a group delusion — a consequence of an economy ruled by people that do not participate in labor of any kind outside of sending and receiving emails and going to lunches that last several hours — where the people with the money do not understand or care about human beings.

HT: Jeremy Keith 1 dataset. 100 visualisations

This NYTimes article on couple’s therapy was a hard read.

This quote that Jeremy Keith linked to:

design is deciding. The best designers are the best deciders_

From Tom Nolle’s in an article about the AI hype

perhaps more time because focusing on the wrong thing invariably leads to delays in recognizing the right one.

Baldur’s mum used to be a professional tv anchor, and he asked her for advice.

There’s a pro YouTube look. There’s a pro podcast sound. None of these represent actual professionalism. They aren’t what makes a podcast professional. They aren’t what makes a video professional. They are the trappings of professionalism – the acoustics and aesthetics of professionalism.

Chandoo’s article on converting JSON to Excel includes both the Power Query & the Python options.

Gall’s Law: 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.

In Jim Nielsen’s blog post linking to Heydon Pickering’s blog, this story:

There’s a story that illustrates how you can reject binaries and invert the assumption that only two choices exist. It goes like this: A King told a condemned prisoner: “You may make one final statement. If it is true, you will be shot. If it is false, you will be hanged.” The prisoner answered, “I will be hanged.” This results in the King not being able to carry out any sentence. The prisoner manipulates the King’s logic to make both options impossible and reveal a third possible outcome.

The Story Spine spawned a multi-billion dollar empire?

Are you telling the real story? How many heroes still wait to be unearthed?

Stowe Boyd’s notes on turning notes into knowledge and how he uses Obsidian’s Web Clipper features to make this happen.

Annie Muller is earning her way into my reading with her words: When You Love Something Made By a Terrible Person: Most people don’t change, though, after a certain point. Changing requires thinking new thoughts, different thoughts. Changing requires adjusting your beliefs. Changing requires letting go of who you used to be and the first step to doing that is to recognize yourself.

Tom Noelle: How do we organise AI applications and processes starts with a simple truth in contemporary organisations: What organizes …. processes today is really large an organizational/human activity. IT is largely directed at facilitating human activity. However, we do have (even today), workflows at the IT level that cross process boundaries.

Steve Blank: The Path of Our Lives _ there is a small set of humans who don’t act like their lives are predestined. For better or worse, regardless of circumstances, country or culture they struggle their entire lives wanting to change the outcome. And a small percentage of these translate the “wanting to change” into acting on it. This small group is dissatisfied with waiting for life to hand them their path. They act, they do, they move, they change things.

Tom Johnson: Failing. Reading a piece of text while playing a piece of music. Hilarious!

Gaping Void: The Myth of Maslow Curiosity rules. We’re only as good as who we are.

Annie Mueller’s question Do You Dabble/Meander/Peruse/Putter resonates strongly. I’m good at getting lost and good at turning around. This can be seen as a lack of skill, I know. I see it more as the development of skills, crucial skills, key capabilities, refined and honed over years, allowing me even more freedom to wander, dabble, peruse, stroll, and meander, wherever I happen to have ended up.

Kaiser Fung: How hard can counting be?

Uplifting news of the day: Hiker found after 13 days in the Australian bush

This note from Nikhil Suresh. My life has changed massively over the past two years, largely as a result of deciding to start writing. In this matter of writing, we have a difference: he writes publicly, I write privately. He has gained internet fame among a group of his peers. He’s young, and has been getting offers of work that are liberating him from the tedium of a corporate job. Suffice it to say that I hadn’t realized how much my growth had been stunted by the culture of the typical company and from working with people who were checked out.

His friend Adolfo Ochagavia also writes about why he writes publicly – broadcasts.

Finished listening to this Hidden Brain podcast with Erica Bailey titled Be Yourself. What authenticity is, and what it really means to be yourself. Fabulous listen.

“I want AI to be a hammer in my hand, not a replacement for my mind.”
— Vlad Prelovac, CEO of Kagi

John Durrant: The Psychology Behind The Sneer. a form of defence mechanism referred to as ‘reaction formation’ where we express our opposition to something in an exaggerated way when it is actually something we want for ourselves. By putting another person down with slurs and derogatory remarks we feel less uncomfortable about our own inadequacies.

Manuel Moreale is encouraging when it comes to blogging: If you’re doing it, you’re doing it right.

Tracy Durnell is apparently reading my mind: Disrupting my reading habits to read more of what I want. She does a far better job of explaining how she’s tackling the problem of information hoarding. I don’t know if I can even try this, let alone succeed at it.

One of the songs in our band’s playlist is Yesterday. One day this year, I’m going to sing it to these lyrics instead:

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There’s not half the files there used to be,
And there’s a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.

I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data’s gone
and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

Yesterday,
The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
I knew my data was all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.

Quotes

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
— Isaac Asimov

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Word of the Day

Lower Slobbovia: A place regarded as isolated, underdeveloped, or unimportant. Coined by Al Capp in a comic strip Li’l Abner.

Links

Prompt from James Clear: What good things have you done quietly today?

Simon Willison gets a nod from John Gruber on his post from yesterday.

Scott Eblin: Let Your Words Be Your Guide This Year. I like the idea of a single word north star for the year. Eblin takes this further with his Life GPS framework. A small number of words describe him at his best, and he turns them each into a question to ask himself every day.

Rands in Repose has a Slack Leadership Community that will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year with nearly 35000 members. How the hell did he manage to do this? Just Hard Work

The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.
—John Vance Cheney, poet (29 Dec 1848-1922)

Ben Werdmuller has OKRs for 2025 while Sahil Bloom has intentions. Both appear to have done the work to make this their own, not copied from someone randomly.

Stewart Brand’s Pace Layering is a framework to think about how each stack within a system operates, the time scale etc..

Hunter Walk: If you don’t like sales, don’t start a company.

Allen Pike: An Unreasonable amount of time

Artisans are those who weave what doesn’t change into what does. They host the spaces between our imaginations and the changing practices of daily life. They produce the artefacts and services that symbolise who we see ourselves as, grounding us in our identity and society, whether at a local level or connecting a diaspora. Artisans are the innovators who turn new ideas and technology into the first clunky prototypes that catalyse revolutions, and they are the mycelium that helps ideas spread.
— Richard Merrick

Beannacht (Gaelic word for Blessing), a poem by John O’Donohue

Simon Willison: My Approach to Link Blog.

Seth Godin: Winging it. If we’re here to make a difference, we often get there with better, not with more.