Listening to Moxie Marlinspike on JRE, around 1h39m:

"In a sense, I'm glad those things [social media] exist, because they're sort of what we wanted, but I think we underestimated how important the medium is, like the medium is the message kinda thing. What we were doing at the time, of writing zines and sharing information, I don't think we understood how much that was predicated on actually building community, and actually building relationships with

There is a type of humility, an admission of limitations, that is as rare as it's ever been on the internet. But for some reason, I'm finding it standing out to me more and more. It sounds something like, "Here's what I think I know, and here's how I know it, but if that turns out to be wrong, I stand corrected."

Here's a real world example: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place

Imagine two people meeting for dinner at 6 at a restaurant neither of them has been to before.

Harry is a busy man with a calendar full of meetings. Google Maps says it's a 27 minute drive to the restaurant. At 5:31 he gets in his car, starts up the navigation, and gets directions straight to the restaurant. On the way, he listens to his podcasts at 150% speed because he has so many

Eric Hoffer insisted that everyone needed time to think while your body was otherwise occupied. He famously wrote The True Believer, published in 1951, while working his job as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco.

Unloading ships, mowing the lawn, or walking, whatever you do, you need quiet to hear yourself think. Time to digest whatever you've ingested in your intellectual diet, combine it with news from the day, and distill new knowledge

A moment of contempt is like a cigarette.

Each one is a buzz.

But it's the accumulation of them that kills you.

The only way to an empty mind is not to push everything else out and decree silence. It is only by being open to every thought and allowing them to arise until they slow to a trickle. This may take a while, but it is quicker than the other option which is unending.

There is a strange irony of difficult times like the current moment, when everyone expects everyone else to be tense and short-tempered. The podcasts, newsletters, and smartphone notifications say the world is coming apart at the seams. People expect bad things to happen.

The result is that the slightest moment of friendliness has a magnified effect. A smiling nod, holding the door for someone, a kind word of thanks to a stranger. It's so unexpected

I'm not sure what you were planning to do with the next 24 minutes (16 if you watch at 1.5 speed like I do with most talking-heavy videos) of your life, but I have a good suggestion: Smarter Every Day's video about building a supersonic baseball cannon. This episode is actually fairly light on explaining the underlying science that is often a part of his other videos. There's more of than in the one-hour

When I set out to build this blog, it was deliberately a place to tinker. I already have one blog running on WordPress and there wasn't a "cool factor" to starting up another one.

Why? Because WordPress is so old-fashioned. It's built in PHP, a programming language that is a few generations out of date and quirky. People who have other options would never choose to start a new project in PHP these days. There

I've come to the decision that there is nothing of intellectual substance that can be done in under two minutes, which is the amount of time I am most often looking to fill on my smartphone.

At best, I can review things and eliminate the ones that don't need attention: emails I don't need to read, RSS reader posts I'm not interested in, notifications that don't require a response.

But even those tasks only take