Updated April 28, 2024

This is a (very much) incomplete list of ideas that have been roaming around in my head, roughly sorted by stage. It is up to date as of April 28th, 2024. The way I see it in my mind is that projects start off in the _ideation_ 💡 stage, move on the _prototyping_ 🌱 stage, and then eventually moves on to the _build_ 🏗️ stage — unless it gets put _on hold_ 🥀. See also: About Ideas Now Software projects ----------------- Software, whether open-source or not. ### Build a budgeting app **Stage**: On hold 🥀 See Budgeting app prototype. It is something I’ve been working on on-and-off for a long time. ### Build a personal database app **Stage**: Ideation 💡 Such an app would allow writing down data in a structured format with all the benefits that come from it: custom queries, custom views. It would also allow exporting to different formats, including HTML for inclusion on web sites. Similar to FileMaker, Bento, TapForms, Steward, AirTable, Notion databases. The app would ideally be local-first, with cloud sync available, and the data format would need to be open (or good export options would need to be available, but that’s less interesting). Use cases: * **Personal library**: What books do I have? What have I borrowed from people? What have I lent to people?) * **Job search**: What jobs have I applied to? What is the status? Is there anything I need to do to progress particular applications? * **Reading list**: What books do I want to read? What have people recommended me? What am I reading right now? What have I read and what did I think about it? * **Recipe list**: What are the recipes that I like to make and want to share with others? ### Build presentation software **Stage**: Ideation 💡 I like Keynote, but it sometimes feels limiting and awkward, especially in the way it supports builds and animation. I’d like something more advanced. I don’t know what technology I’d use for that. ### Build a color palette designer **Stage**: Ideation 💡 I have my own hacked-together set of color palette designers that I use on denisdefreyne.com, but polishing that into an app could be really nice. Does not have to be an _app_ necessarily; could be an online tool too. ### Build a feature flag service **Stage**: Ideation 💡 There are few open-source feature flag services out there, and the ones that exist are just not good. I could definitely whip up something better, but it’s unlikely to happen because I’d only really feature flag systems in a work context… ### Build a production change tracker **Stage**: Ideation 💡 Keeping track of changes to production is useful for debugging, auditing and postmortem construction. What is deployed and when? What changes to feature flags have been made, by whom and when? See also: Project idea: Captain’s log. ### Build a development environment setup tool **Stage**: Ideation 💡 The tooling at Shopify is remarkable, and especially the `dev up` command is magic, as it sets up an entirely development environment. I have since reimplemented the `dev` tool at a later company,111 I wrote about this `dev` tool reimplementation in Week­notes 2022 W34: Insomnia and then later in Week­notes 2022 W45: Burn II.  but it is intellectual property of that company and since leaving222 I wrote about leaving this company in Week­notes 2024 W04: End of work.  I no longer have access to it. I miss it! I need to reimplement it again and share it with the world! This tool would not use Docker. On macOS, Docker is far too slow to provide a reasonable feedback loop. ### Create a programming language **Stage**: Ideation 💡 I have started on this so many times, because it is just plain old fun — at least at the beginning, and then it gets remarkably tedious. Heh. But still, there is potential in creating a programming language that is different from anything else out there. Maybe a programming language with no globals? Non-fiction writing ------------------- Articles, books, talks, and the like. ### Write a “how to memoize” article **Stage**: Ideation 💡 This would be an article reflecting on the learnings I had writing a memoization library (ddmemoize — now abandoned). I already gave a talk in a similar vein, How to memoize, though this article would reflect more on the weird/unusual bits of Ruby knowledge that I gained in the process. Topics that this would cover: metaprogramming, `#freeze`, thread safety, weak references and soft references, metrics. ### Write a “how to code review” article **Stage**: Ideation 💡 It is an established practice to do code reviews, but there is a lack of clarity on how to do it, and why to do it. Some practices are counterintuitive (e.g. the purpose of code review is not to find defects). This might be part of a larger collection of writing on software engineering principles. ### Write software engineering principles **Stage**: Ideation 💡 This is an extension of the previous idea on writing down my practices on doing code reviews. See also: software engineering principles. ### Create a “build a programming language” talk **Stage**: Ideation 💡 In about 30 minutes, this talk would run through creating a programming language and writing a (tree-walking) interpreter for it. It wouldn’t be a _great_ programming language at the end of those 30 minutes, but the talk would touch on most of the core concepts (tokenizer, parser, symbol resolver, evaluator). Miscellaneous ------------- Stuff that doesn’t fit elsewhere. ### Build a new about page **Stage**: Prototyping 🌱 My personal web site has a homepage which has a _little_ bit about myself, but really not very much. I’d like something that contains just a lot more. Who am I? What am I interested in? What have I done in the past? What drives me? What do I want to do next? See About (brainstorming). ### Convert my CV to be skill-based **Stage**: Prototyping 🌱 My current CV lists my experience, and “core skills” to the side. It does not properly highlight the skills I have (and want to use); it uses work experience as a mediocre proxy. A skill-based CV could be much more interesting. This could tie into Skills I have. The work experience would still be there, but perhaps secondary. (Hopefully it does not bring my CV to three pages, but it in all likelihood will.) ### Publish my library **Stage**: Ideation 💡 Publish a list of books that I own and have read. Maybe also books that I want to read. Perhaps also add reviews of books I have read. This would be nice because people could then ask “can I borrow this book” and then I could lend them the book. I could even mark books as “to give away.” This could include not just books, but also movies, TV shows, and games, though that might push the scope a little. It could be neat to publish this in a computer-readable format too: see Library JSON - A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads (Tom Critchlow). ### Create a new default Nanoc site template **Stage**: Ideation 💡 When you run Nanoc’s `create-site` command, you get a web site that looks like it’s straight from the early 2010s — probably because it is. The HTML is not great, the CSS is quite dated, and the design is not mobile-friendly.333 In my defense, maybe that is because Nanoc is older than the iPhone. Nanoc is old. Ancient, even. But still relevant in 2024!  A new default template could be useful. Or even a set of default templates that you could choose from: a minimal site (sort of what it generates now), or something more advanced like a personal web site with blog posts written in Markdown. Note last edited April 2024.

Updated April 28, 2024

2024-04-28 * Thinking of buying some clear resin to see if my u/w magnifying math is accurate: I can 3D print the biconvex lenses, smooth the printing with spray lacquer, and get a _sense_. It won't be usable quality, I wouldn't think, but the curves aren't insane, even for a material with a lower refractive index. 2024-04-14 * My latest stupid idea is an underwater magnifying glass. Normal magnifying glasses don't work well underwater because seawater has a refractive index of 1.33 and common optical acrylics and glass are only ~1.50. There used to be a company in Belgium that sold an u/w magnifier for around $150 and you had to wait in line to get one, but they seem to have gone out of business. The math is pretty straightforward and so I've put an RFP out on Alibaba.

Updated April 24, 2024

Apr 24 2024 A New Lack of Information ------------------------- I was sitting at my computer this evening googling about a half-formed question, something like “how much of the current U.S. and world economy is made up of goods versus services, how is a ‘good’ defined, and is there any sign that the U.S. service economy is losing ground in the post-Covid era?”–when it occurred to me (or rather, occured to me _all over again_) that all of the sources I found online were not very good. Now, if I brought a little prior knowledge and intentional effort the question, if I searched for respectable public institutions–like the Fed–that put their data online, I would surely find a start to these questions. But these are things that one would have to know. For the average person, you want to know the answer to something non-commercial, you just start typing questions as they occur to you, and you will probably give up clueless because online search these days is remarkably bad. It’s not that all of my questions had been targeted by low-quality content farm sites, but rather that a lot of the more mainstream sites that came up first–like a link to a LinkedIn post, or a Forbes article, or a Harvard Business Review blurb– were all generalist filler. And on down for several pages, with the occasional news article from a few years ago or a general Wikipedia topic (”Service economy”) thrown in. Search is not very good in large part because the sites that count as “average” are mediocre at best. And don’t get me started on bots like ChatGPT. Yes, you ask a question like this of a bot and you get a coherent answer back, but whence this answer from the void? Maybe some services like Bing will give you a few citations attached to the answer, but guess what? Those citations are just sourced from the same search services I was complaining about above. If the two services that currently define the information landscape are search (Google _et al_) and chat (ChatGPT etc), then we are choosing between a graveyard of irrelevant “content” and a polished but low-context book report. Even as more life is spent online, the online world gets thinner and thinner. More often, when I want to know something, I find myself confronting a situation that had nearly slipped from my memory: how would I figure this out if I _wasn’t_ online? Who would I ask, and how would I go about asking it? What identifiable _source_ would I need to read? To me, the idea that a little more space might be opening up behind the screen is an exciting thought. But I do worry that if the internet completely falls apart as an information ecosystem, there will be nothing left to backstop it anymore. What would a revitalized world of information look like, without that now-old idea of the “world wide web?” Tags information internet Permalink Feb 21 2024 Dayswork -------- I’ve been reading Jennifer Habel’s and Chris Bachelder’s book _Dayswork_. Actually, dipping into it, then falling away; losing interest for a while. then coming back. The episodic approach to reading works quite well for a book, written during the Covid pandemic, in an aphoristic format. Many of its passages could be tweets. The book has the feel of something written in a makeshift desk–maybe from a closet–when the writer is supposed to be doing something else (I don’t know, exactly, what the writing process was for _Dayswork_). But it also reads like a product of the distracted modern condition of reading. Judging by how active even many serious writers have been on X/Twitter over the past decade, I suspect that distraction is also the predominant condition of writing today.1 The waves of “Melville revival” that brought him into the American canon have always had an obsessive devotion to the historical Melville; the quotidian, _real_ person: adventurous, flawed, idiosyncratic. _Dayswork_ contributes to the cult of the author. While the book does use Melville’s literary work as an anchor, it spends just as much time pecking at the minutia of the author’s life. The book spends a lot of time introspecting about other figures connected to Melville, some of them people he knew (his wife Lizze Shaw, daughters Elizabeth and Frances) and others later interpreters or admirers, like Elizabeth Hardiwick. One of the most frequently mentioned figures, “The Biographer,” is still commenting on Melville as of early 2024. The Biographer remains unnamed until the book’s end. He is Herschel Parker, a retired English professor and Melville scholar from the University of Delaware. Author of not just a Melville biography, but of a Melville meta-biography. And, most relevant to _Dayswork_, he also maintains an active blog in which–guess who?–Melville comes up a lot. As a character, Parker does not come off well in the book. After it was published he responded with obvious annoyance. _Dayswork_ is above all a book of personalities, and I have a few thoughts about its relationship to personas like Parker. Are its antagonisms really any different than authors in the pre-internet era, inserting gossip about contemporaries into their books? Writers have included one another in fictionalized form, walking all the way up to libel and beyond, since before mass printing began. But there is a sense of detachment in how the authors speak about Parker, as if what they say about him is not so much directed at him–as with a debate or conversation–as it is whispered about him. Take this episode in Chapter 6 > On the morning of the wedding Melville took a walk on the Common. > > Or, Herman sallied out early in the forenoon for his last vagabondizing as an unmarried man,” in the words of the Biographer. > > Whose blog entry for today, I see, reports a frustrating transaction with Netflix: > > He ordered the BBC’s Cymbeline starring Helen Mirren, but instead received a “hyper-violent” version from 2015 featuring dirty cops and a biker gang. > > “Sealed it up and sent it back.” > > Which must mean, my husband pointed out, that the Biographer still has a DVD subscription to Netflix. > > Not wanting to pay to access the movie through Amazon Prime, he ordered a copy on eBay, asking the seller to make sure it wasn’t the violent biker version. > > For days, according to his blog, the Biographer has been yearning to listen to the Act V recognition scene in the BBC version of Cymbeline. > > Earlier this year he wrote that while doing exercises in the middle of the night he’d been listening to film adaptations of Shakespeare, including some other version of Cymbeline— > > “Nothing more consoling than Act 5 over and over.” Let this be an example to anyone who posts the trivial ups-and-downs of everyday life to the internet–or a blog :). Parker is someone who has elected to put himself on display. One difference between an old-school blog like Parker’s and modern social media is that the following on a blog is harder to see. From the inside of a blog, there is always a little bit of a sense of talking to oneself. From the outside–when you comb through the archives of someone’s thoughts, especially the old ones–there is always a little bit of a voyeuristic quality, like looking at someone’s private papers or files. But voyeurism has not gone away with modern social media, which has–if nothing else–lowered the bar for two-way participation on the internet. Still, to be online is to be hit with far more “content” than one’s capacity to produce it. This makes “lurking,” a term that refers to passive reading of old-school internet message boards, into the default online condition. When reading _Dayswork_, it is hard to get past the sense that the authors are very online, lurking around their subject(s). I don’t even know if they would dispute this claim. Maybe it is because of the pandemic, which made both acquaintances and strangers feel far away for a while, that the book feels like it is gossiping about all of its subjects–even Melville. In _Dayswork_, like the pandemic, being online is a condition that is endured. The short-form writing–the distracted writing–that thrives on the contemporary web is well-suited to this gossip. Even if they are writing about a master of American long prose, one of _Dayswork_’s accomplishments is to bring a tweet-sized version of Melville into view–a Melville that is both viable to and relevant within the distraction economy. Tags herman\_melville literature contemporary aphorism Permalink Feb 7 2024 The Internet of Information: Ends and Beginnings ------------------------------------------------ A useful but somewhat unsatisfying definition of “information” is that it is anything that reduces uncertainty. For some time I have found myself thinking about the conditions under which the internet–I”ll define it here as a worldwide information-sharing network–might wither away substantially, or even disappear from recognition. Those thoughts have only accelerated for me as it appears that the internet, in its contemporary form, is becoming an ever-more parasitic on itself. ChatGPT, which was likely produced through large-scale bulk collection of as much of the internet as possible, is only the latest version of this trend. There is more incentive than ever to capture information on both the intake side–through super-dominant platforms that host the great majority of the world’s new information that enters the internet each day–and on the archival and retrieval side–where ever-more information is “read” by bots and metadata collection agencies. On the 2024 internet, web activity by bots and automated tools is almost evenly split with the traffic generated by actual humans. Yes, this network of interconnected smaller networks known as the internet is likely to be kept around as long as possible, since it is has a lot of uses (many of them lucrative) to so many. This is the _infrastructure_ internet, the network that connects things for its own sake, because it is always potentially useful to be able to send a message to a faraway place. By objective measures the internet is still growing at a considerable year-over-year pace. But is the amount of _information_ on the internet still growing? The internet took on a new life when it became a series of interconnected documents. When I write “document” here, I don’t just mean text in any specific format (although a lot of early internet documents were in fact plain text). Instead I mean document in the most abstract sense: a unit of information. Information rarely stands alone; it is always based on prior efforts to know or establish something, if only implicitly. Therefore any document owes its existence to others which came before it. The internet can be thought of as an attempt to make as many documents–information–visible and “on the map,” to make the relationship between information units explicit–and to foster the creation of new connections that would not have been otherwise created. The typical internet growth chart begins in 1990, near the time when Tim Berners-Lee’s research group implemented a version of hypertext for linking documents into a single network. In a 1999 reflection on the fast-maturing internet, Berners-Lee recounts the type of general relationship that he wanted to create with hypertext: > So long as I didn’t introduce some central link database everything would scale nicely. There would be no special nodes, no special links. Any node would be able to link to any other node. This would give the system the flexibility that was needed, and be key to a universal system. The abstract document space it implied could contain every single item of information accessible over networks–and all the structure and linkages between them. > > Hypertext would be most powerful if it could conceivably point to absolutely anything. Every node, document–whatever it was called–would be fundamentally equivalent in some way. Each would have an address by which it could be referenced. They would all exist together in the same space–the information space.1 Berners-Lee strove for a decentralized document network: everything could be linked to everything else only because there was no priority between the units. The intention to decentralize the network points to a curious feature of this model: it is a network with infinite extent (links can always be added) and no depth (documents cannot establish priority over one another, only connection). By making it easy to establish links between documents, the modern public internet became widespread at the expense of establishing its authority. To give an example, if you want to know something obscure about the city of Cleveland, Ohio, then the internet is usually the the first and primary (most common) method, and the most expedient one (because it is fast and never closed)–but only rarely does it have the final answer on any issue.2 And yes, this goes for Wikipedia , too. The informational internet started to come under strain at soon as it began to replace the authorities upon which it implicitly relied. Electronic communication has replaced authoritative knowledge with knowledge that is merely “the fastest” and the “most expedient,” and this in turn has replaced information with “information about information” (metadata). What are the signals on a social media platform–the “like,” the “view,” engagement, etc–other than a way to turn metadata into a public, gamified social signal? Information itself becomes “content,” which is really just a way of valuing the container over the thing itself. There is no guarantee over the long run that a worldwide public network continues to draw any trust or interest. It is quite possible that there continues to be a network through which Bank A can send a request for funds transfer from Bank B, but that there is nothing of use on that network to the public at large. Most or all of the indicators of activity on the internet today–number of links, visits or reactions–have no connection to its status or value as information. What I wonder is if and how long this continues. It is possible that the internet settles into a status of quasi-stable dystopia, washed over by regular waves of distracting and entertaining sideshow–maybe this can just continue forever. But it is also possible that the whole thing falls apart over time. This would be the more hopeful outcome, but it would require a painful breaking point: paranoia grows and trust wanes so badly that it becomes clear the only sane choice is abandonment, as deflated and boring as a reality without worldwide connection might look, at first. And what comes after? Who can say, but I doubt it would be a return to paperbook books and snail mail. Maybe a set of more manageable, deliberately regional networks take the place of the worldwide web; maybe what is now called information becomes so rare that a new value attaches to it, and it begins to grow back. Tags collective action web commons communication Permalink Jan 24 2024 Dilemmas to Start With in the Humanities Today ---------------------------------------------- I have come across a few different sources lately that debate the importance of the humanities. Among them: 1. Agnes Callard: “I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is” 2. The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education The institutional situation is that a lot of these subjects still draw interest from undergraduate students, especially in their first year(s), before they have to pick a major. But fewer students choose to stick with the humanities: the most recent long-term report I could find said 25 percent fewer from 2012 to 2020, although there may have been a slight swerve upward since then. The overall trends are extremely worrying for the survival of many humanistic disciplines across the entire American university system. The theories about the cause of the decline are everywhere, so prominent and repetitive that most are not even interesting to summarize. Everyone working on the inside of these departments has to decide for him or herself why the humanities are declining. A few thoughts: 1. When the argument is about the societal importance of the humanities, there may just be a mismatch between what humanistic culture contributes to collective life (a lot, I think), and what is in the short-term advantage of any single student to study and pursue. That is, there may not be enough good cases for “risking” one’s own future to study humanities, even if everyone–including those who don’t study the humanities–are better off if there is a critical mass of people who do. 2. It could also be that the humanities are as much effect as they are a cause of a healthy society. That is, the humanities don’t make people or societies good, they follow when these things _already are_ healthy and “good.” When people enjoy some stability, confidence in themselves, and sense of future continuity–it is at this point that many people choose to engage with ultimate, open-ended questions in literature, philosophy, art, etc. Or, when a culture becomes troubled, these subjects are still practiced, but they move out of institutions. This could be because the institutions contribute to the underlying problem, or because institutions like the university no longer understand open-ended inquiry as worth pursuing. Both seem to be occuring in our own time. 3. In places where the humanities are doing well and at the center of what a college does, the setting is often religious, or otherwise not invested in the critical humanities. This means places like Hillsdale College, where “Western values” and the “Western tradition” make up a fixed curriculum attached to a confident moral and political project. And usually, it’s a project with a built-in constituency. For the forseeable future, there will be a huge cultural gulf between the faculty at these schools and secular American humanities departments–to the point that people on either side will not recognize one another as a legitimate version of the humanities. I am not religious, and yet I wish there was more exploration of how the humanities didn’t have to be the critical humanities. Humanistic study appears indefinitely stuck in cul-de-sac of critical detachment: many mainstream academics recognize the problem. But it seems to me that there is a different-in-kind problem that presents itself here: if you’re doing critical work and you want to stop, it’s very hard to do that without abandoning academia entirely. To my knowledge, there are a few senior people with tenure who, say, write novels instead of criticism, but there is no way to even propose that within the formative stage of one’s career. I would love to hear counterexamples. Maybe the way out of the critical trap is to trade in some humanities departments for more art schools. 4. Finally, I worry that the humanities looks too much like a closed book today, that the humanities are still too focused on “the tradition,” antiquarianism, and old things in general. This is obviously not true of all humanistic work, including the humanistic knowledge that is most implicated in the American culture wars today. But for the humanities in their present endangered state, the real struggle is to get students to take the classes and read the books at all. In other words, it’s hard to persuade students even to be consumers of humanistic knowledge. And so it would be beyond the pale, almost unthinkable, to propose that more students _produce_ humanistic work. But as much as we need more people who have a deep sense of history, of the strangeness of other historical moments, I worry that the humanities start at a disadvantage when they are presented mostly in terms of the past. There needs to be a more expansive vision of what it means to produce humanistic work today, such that more students can see themselves in that work–regardless of their major or what they go on to do for work–and the humanities looks more like a living, ongoing, future-oriented project. Tags criticism detachment art culture Permalink Jan 5 2024 Human Switches -------------- I don’t use rideshare apps that often these days. Over the break I used the Uber app for the first time in a while. Little things had changed here and there in the UI–as they usually do with web tech–but I was surprised to see that they now offer a setting for “conversational level.” That is, you can set in advance how much your driver is supposed to talk to you. But conversation is not actually a function of the app that can be dialed up and down. It’s a thing your driver does, a service (or disservice) that for the moment, can still only be performed by the driver. You are not actually setting anything, just registering a preference that will be communicated to the driver along with your other ride information. I don’t know why this bothered me, or even made me think. Maybe I don’t use enough person-to-person apps. Let’s be honest, for any app in the gig economy, the entirety of the software platform is really a way of turning a person (“gig worker”) into a set of menus and toggle switches (“grab \[X\] food at \[X\] and bring it to \[X\] by \[X\]“). The NYTimes columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote something a few years ago about that US college admissions bribery scandal that stuck with me and seems apt here: people with enough money to be the buyers in the gig economy have become “socialized to easing every hurdle through an app.” He was talking about money (Manjoo: “who should I Venmo to fix this thing?”) but another consequence of an endless landscape of software-mediated transactions is that both parties are now obligated to relate to one another like software. As I reflect on it, I think what actually bothered me about the Uber app was just how small and incremental this “setting” is. How many more of these options will there be to tap, pulse, interrupt, and shake every imaginable extension of a person’s agency? And because the setting is basically a fake lever- there’s a real person on the other side of this software lever who still gets to choose whether to comply or not–you can program up an infinite number of them. They probably won’t have the effect you want, but it will have an effect, if only in aggregate. Tags transaction manipulation Permalink Jan 5 2024 Into the Distance ----------------- I took this photo from Interstate 77, near Fancy Gap, Virginia, looking back southeast to where I’d come from. The mountains on the horizon are Pilot Mountain to the right, with its distinctive round knob, and Hanging Rock to the left. I love the way the camera captures focus on the mountains while allowing foreground objects like the tree and the guardrail to blur. Here, like the human eye, the camera renders sharply what it cares about; detail reveals itself according to attention given, other objects become a sketch. The ridge on the left, in the photo’s middle ground, offers suspense by cutting in at a diagonal, revealing the height of the observer and threatening to close out the view. The sky, given substance by the cloud ceiling, makes a counterpoint to the textures of the ground, breaking only at the horizon to let in the colors that outline the mountains. I also love the sense of space in this image, the way perspective and distance allows objects of dissimilar size to appear to be on the same scale. It is a lightly settled landscape. A town near the lower right can be made out, contained by the trees. The mountains are large, but still bounded, by the view. The landscape reveals the layout what would otherwise be too close, too “on top of me,” to see. A sense of recognitiion: “I was _there_, I am _part of that_–that only triggers when the observer is separated from the scene, and the scene tucks into the borders of a wider earth. Tags landscapes Permalink Dec 7 2023 Seeing ------ Three pictures that I wanted to post this fall, that I never got around to: I don’t know why–I knew I liked them, and wanted to see them archived. Maybe I would find them the following season. But I also know that I liked these photos because they reminded me of an act of seeing, that the artifact stood in for how I related to something with my own eyes. The photos exist to point: to a moment of observational capacity, openness and fulfillment that is far less communicable. I’ve been thinking again about what it means to be a naturalist; one answer I’ve arrived at is that a naturalist is someone who observes uncontrolled situations for their own sake. The qualifier _uncontrolled_ does the work, for me, of a more traditional definition of nature: nature is not just that which is opposed to the human. I believe so strongly in this observational component, I am willing to bend quite a bit on my definition of nature. Streets are a fine place, as long as you look. The point is to look with such unrelenting commitment that your vision starts to get strange, to be OK with taking away (only, only!) the impression and go no further. To rest in what cannot be communicated. Tags vision looking nature naturalist Permalink Dec 5 2023 Matter and Beauty ----------------- This news in astronomy got a bit of attention in a few newspapers last week. The discovery was that a distant star system has six planets orbiting at different resonances, or rates of orbit, that are related to one another in precise ratios. Imagine one planet orbits its star at twice the rate of another planet in the same system, a third planet that orbits four times as fast (these ratios are made up), and so on. This arrangement is both beautiful to behold and mathematically harmonious. Current thinking suggests that these neat arrangments probably arose during the formation of the star system, while fusion gets underway, and dust and gas accumulate into planets. If these initial relationships still hold, it means we are looking at a system whose planetary bodies have not been disturbed over billions of years. The perfection of the system can be seen as a mechanical time capsule, a glimpse at the original creative force that first pushes stars into motion. On a related note, I’ve been returning to Spinoza’s work recently because I’m going through this book. I thought of him when I read about this concordance of ideal motion and intellectual beauty. In it, I see a phenomenon that Spinoza would find particularly pleasing. In his _Short Treatise_, Spinoza writes about the two types of _Natura naturata_, or “those modes or creatures which immediately depend on, or have been created by God:” “motion in matter, and “intellect in the thinking thing.” On matter: > With regard particularly to motion, it belongs more properly to a treatise on natural science than here, \[to show\] that it has been from all eternity, and will remain to all eternity immutable, that it is infinite in its kind… And the intellect: > As for intellect in the thinking thing, this too is a Son, product, or immediate creature of God, also created by him from all eternity, and remaining immutable to all eternity. Its sole property is to understand everything clearly and distinctly at all times. Spinoza was writing at a greater level of generality here than that of particular planetary bodies in motion or the constructs of an embodied human mind, but I still think that he would, at least aesthetically, be struck by the harmony between astronomical motion and the constructs of the intellect. The situation offers a natural opening to the idea that matter and the intellect are in rational coordination with one another: that motion achieves its perfected realization in contemplative understanding, and the special status of the intellect is confirmed in the material embodiment of what it knows. Tags philosopy physics Permalink Nov 28 2023 Innovation, Nonprofits and Cultural Priming ------------------------------------------- Given that I am not someone who specializes in this stuff, I am especially tired of thinking and writing about AI chatbots. But there are at least two thoughts in this area I’d like to see get more attention: * How the OpenAI’s _nonprofit_ status contributed to the breakthroughs it made. Over the last few weeks, since the shake-up on the board, the company’s unusual legal structure– a nonprofit controlling a for-profit corporation–has mostly been the subject of ridicule. This is a reflection of how badly the current moment has been captured by a certain type of profit-motive narrative about creative breakthroughs–at least the capture of those who are in a position to do most of the reporting on OpenAI. The consensus I read is that OpenAI’s non-profit structure has been holding it back for a while, that it was an accidental property of its naive founders. I hope, with time, that the stories move past this prejudice, and some journalist or ethnographer gets enough access to study if and how the company’s unusual corporate structure contributed to what it did. Innovation–especially profitable innovation–will always be unpredictable, but shouldn’t a non-profit environment for technical _innovation_ be taken more seriously? Was there a relaxed field here–maybe a different relationship to work, goals, and play–that nurtured the achievements that the for-profit partisans now want to take credit for? * All the ways in which ChatGPT reflects a a larger civilizational readiness, a cultural priming, to accept automated text generation. If bots like this really do maintain their status as breakthroughs once the hype has settled down, one of the more curious aspects of its origin story will be how long the basic technology was out in the open without any real mainstream reaction. This is true since at least 2020 from OpenAI, and Google reportedly had in-house chatbots with significant capabilities before that. Why did it take it so long to land, and why did it explode when it did? Is there a story here about post-pandemic mental exhaustion? Certainly there’s a story here about large numbers of people _wanting to do_–doing more of–the things that chatbots do well: sit for long periods of time in front of screens, sending chat bubbles back and forth, and write the things (e.g., code) that chatbots are trained to do well. I wonder, without the conditions that lead large numbers of educated people to sit inside in front of computers all day, if chatbots would seem so impressive. There’s also a backstory here about an algorithmic way of life, of which chatbots are just the latest, strangest chapter. Chatbots may be philosophical zombies that usurp human qualities in the body of a computer, but computers had to draw humans a little closer before that became possible. Tags computing ai Permalink Oct 25 2023 Parts of the Intellect ---------------------- Over the past year, as OpenAI’s ChatGPT has gone from a specialist tool to a worldwide cultural phenomenon, there has been one anxious question controlling the discussion: is this time different–are computers now _really_ intelligent–and what does this change about the human self-understanding? If human beings are exceptional, then it is in large part because of intelligence. It didn’t help that a computer was now considerably more likely to pass one of the most clearly defined, functional tests for artificial intelligence, the so-called “Turing test:” give a human being the chance to pass messages back and forth with a partner behind a veil; if the human cannot tell that he or she is conversing with a machine, it passes the test. It is intelligent, practically speaking. There are a lot of problems with this test. Still, the bar was raised. Furthermore, if the standard for “real” artificial intelligence is a moving target, always a few steps ahead of whatever computers are currently capable doing, then maybe the questions about artificial intelligence are hopelessly philosophical, likely to generate new pathways for analysis but impossible to answer with any closure. When I wrote above that human intelligence is an _essential_ quality of the human–of human exceptionalism–I meant it in two senses of that word: that intelligence is (1) a distinguishing quality of the human, and that (2) as a quality, it has the special status of an _essence_. The essential quality and its object are hard to separate. What is intelligence? Look to human beings, see it in action. What are human beings? _Homo sapiens_, thinking things, subjects with intelligence. What we may be seeing right now is a shift of intuitions, a breakdown of confidence that intelligence is an essentially human quality. This does not mean that artificial intelligence is like human intelligence, or that computers are (will someday be) _more_ intelligent than humans. But it does suggest that intelligence is increasingly detached from how it was previously defined: _through_ human beings.1 A new situation emerges; imagine pieces, bits, scraps of (general) intelligence circulating throughout the environment. More people may have to make constant judgments about the scope of the intelligence of various things. I cannot see into these scraps of intelligence, know what they are. Their capabilities and intentions (if they exist) are opaque to me–like those of other human beings. Maybe there is a new standard for artificial intelligence: is it _necessarily_ unknowable? Then it is intelligent. I am reminded of the debate about viruses and life: are they alive? If so, how? Are viruses alive in the same way that living things (people?) are? Here is another philosophical question that is difficult to operationalize. Viruses interface with life, need life, latch onto life and push it in new directions. One cannot help but ask the question about viruses because they are so strange; maybe what is being sought is another, comparable essence that applies to the virus. The virus, by suggesting a comparison with life, makes life seem less like an essential thing and more a definable set of processes which can be recombined in ways so strange that categorization falls apart. I wonder if something similar is happening with intelligence right now. What was once a unitary essence that attached to the human is now being decomposed into X number of parts, parts that we can see, uncover, build into new entities that display some of the qualities of intelligence, without the human. Tags intelligence ability computers defamiliarization Permalink

Updated April 24, 2024

This is a public list of my ideas for future projects. Additional features and improvements for my existing projects and websites are also listed here. You’re always welcome to email me with feedback, or if you feel like we could work together and make any of these happen. **Last updated:** Apr. 24th 2024 * A minimal bookmark manager * A browser game that works on a Q/A basis; user submitted question/answer combinations, 1 question per calendar day * An offline version / desktop app for recept0r; should use a local DB * A “bring your own API keys” desktop / mobile version for watch3r; should use a local DB * A web graveyard for abandoned, unfinished or otherwise interrupted side projects * An Eleventy plugin that creates a `robots.txt` file based on the Dark Visitors API Done ---- * A reboot reminder bot for ActivityPub/Mastodon * An Eleventy plugin to show the git activity in the respective site’s repository * It exists already: see section “Custom Data” at postgraph.rknight.me * Refined idea: build such a custom data object from a repository’s git history * Add a sitemap to this website to make it more user-friendly for humans * Added 03/24, see /sitemap * An interface for Eleventy to retrieve reading list data from Omnivore * Added 03/24, see /reading

Updated April 23, 2024

Somewhere to publicly write the ideas I get. If you have any feedback, if you feel we can work together to make any of these happen, or if you have an idea you think we can build together, let’s talk! 🧑‍🎓 ISA Student Loans for Disadvantaged Youth ----------------------------------------------- ##### Idea started Oct 2022. Added to site April 23rd, 2024 This was the company I was going to build right after selling Finco, but the macro environment just wasn’t favorable due to extremely high interest rates. In Latin America and developing countries in general, many promising young people from disadvantaged backgrounds never achieve their true potential due to factors external to them. Compared to their more affluent peers, their mothers had worse nutrition during pregnancy, they had a worse diet themselves, they have less stimulation growing up, and have a higher chance of dropping out of school for many different factors.. More importantly, many young people who do reach the end of high school still don’t go to the next step in their educational path because of economic, societal or other problems. What if you could find the students who managed to beat the odds, and who not only finished high school but excelled above their peers? What if you could give them a chance to study a high-earning-potential career and find them a corresponding high-paying job? you would be changing not only their lives but that of their families and future offspring as well. True social mobility would be achieved, their potential not lost to inequality but rather realized thanks to grit and perseverance. Something like Makers with a more social focus. I think you could offer these students an opportunity to study these careers through an Income-Share-Agreement loan. You would have every incentive to help them get the best possible career and job offer to maximize gains on the loan, while they would have every incentive to keep excelling to change their lives. It would be important to also aid in adjusting to an alien academic setting, mental health, living costs and other important factors that may determine their chances of realizing their dream. Also, programs wouldn’t necessarily need to be 4 year long programs. Why not 1 or 2-year-long courses on current demanded skills in the tech economy? This would lower costs, lower time to graduation, lower time to revenue, and lower drop-out rates. This has been my dream company for a couple of years now. Maybe soon I’ll get it done. 🔃 Repitis.com -------------- #### Added April 23rd, 2024 Together with my wife, we bought the domain www.repitis.com a couple of years ago. We totally suffer from domain-name shopping addiction. Another one of our other great acquisitions was www.bigassants.com (to sell this Colombian delicacy). ”Repitis” means “to repeat something soon or immediately” in Colombian parlance. Typically used when doing something fun like a board game or pleasurable like sweet food, or more commonly, sex. Our initial idea since we just had the babies was to put up a circular economy website for baby clothing and items that get discarded as the kids grow out of them. We quickly realized that was kind of a logistical nightmare (baby items get dangerously close to biohazard waste status ☣️), but the domain name is so fucking good we just need to use it on something. We thought about a board game import company, but the margins were too low to make it lucrative and we would compete vs. Amazon delivery. Now, we just don’t know what to use it for! My latest ideas hover towards a dedicated place to sell old videogames and consoles. Do you have some idea of what we might use repitis.com for? Let me know! 📚 No-bullshit Book Publisher ----------------------------- #### Added April 23rd, 2024 In a recent chat with a colleague at R5, he opened my eyes to an undeniable truth: Most instructional books could tell you all you need to know and be over in 50 pages or less. The rest of the content is just fluff. Now, I’ve been reading a lot lately and I couldn’t agree more. I loved Atomic Habits but James Clear really goes overboard with the examples. He even has a 1-page summary of the book which could replace the whole thing easily. Maybe you could build a publisher that admonishes and embraces this fact, and instead of going for length, values conciseness. You could even sell “compilations” of several books, which together make up the typical length of a more typical, bullshit-fluff-literary piece. ⏩ Express Video Interviews -------------------------- ##### Added March 5th, 2024 In my experience, the most bothersome part of recruiting someone new into your team is the first round of disqualifications. You go, make a nice post on LinkedIn, and suddenly you have 20+ applicants you want to interview. Now, talking to all of them will take at least 30 mins each or 20 hours total, so in practice, you end up shortlisting only 5 or so and hope for the best. What if you could lower that initial time from 30 minutes to only 5? The idea is to make a small service that lets you input a set of screening questions to be answered in less than 1 minute each. Candidates would record themselves answering them on the website and whatever came out, came out. No second takes! Bonus function: have Whisper make a transcript of the answers and then automatically use GPT-4’s API to rate candidates based on your expected answers. 👗🕶️ Boutique Brand Marketplace -------------------------------- ##### Added March 5th, 2024 Colombia and Latin America have a ton of cool boutique consumer-goods brands that could sell for a good margin in the US and Europe while maintaining a decent margin due to the lowish cost of manufacturing in LatAm. Because of how the economics work out, these brands sell for what would be considered a premium price in their local market, limiting their market reach. Many of these are also bootstrapped businesses with low financing available, with founding teams that are not knowledgeable on how to scale up a good product or how to reach international markets. You could group a bunch of these businesses under the same website/storefront, advertising them to US and EU customers as zany, Latino-owned, up-and-coming brands. This already happens physically in Colombia to some success as there are a ton of “multi-brand local entrepreneur stores” all around. The idea would be to take that concept, amp it up to 11 and bring it to a larger, more affluent market. 👷‍♂️ Mid-sized Mall Renovation ------------------------------- ##### Added March 5th, 2024 There are 2 malls very near to my place in Bogotá, which is located in a reasonably affluent part of the city. One has the most expensive square-meter-rent-price in the country. The other is just ~2 blocks away but has 1/10th the rent price because of how run down it is. The second one is also extremely well located. It’s at the intersection of 2 main roads, the sunday Ciclovia passes right in front of it and has several restaurants and bars nearby. It simply wasn’t maintained over time and now is an eyesore in an otherwise great zone. The idea would be to buy this place, renovate it and rent the commercial space out for somewhere around 5 to 8 times the current price, leveling it to the zone average. I LOVE this idea. The only bad part is that mortgage interest rates have skyrocketed in Colombia (currently around ~13% yearly) so the lease would probably be too expensive at the moment. Maybe there is some other way to finance the project that is less vulnerable to interest rates…

Updated April 14, 2024

Menu The crazy things I always wanted to make, concepts I’m mulling over, or planned projects Last updated: 2024-04-14 A simple key/value store for static apps ---------------------------------------- This idea has been bouncing around for a while. Is there some way I can enhance my simple static web apps with a simple, secure key-value store with a REST API? Lots of ideas for how to do this have been put forward, but it’s probably a simple Laravel app that I need to build and deploy.

Updated April 14, 2024

_Last updated: 2024-04-14_ I have just begun this page and will improve in time. I’m hoping it leads to conversations and collaborations. ###### Marketplace and Instant Free Money Transfer I used to live in China and for three years experienced the absolute magic that is WeChat. One of the most magical aspects is the way money transfer or payments work. You can send money to any of your contacts as easily as you could them an image. On their side they have to accept the transfer for it to be completed. This can happen at any time of day any day of the year all for free. If you want to pay a business you scan their QR Code and authorise payment. Instant. This not possible in South Africa. EFT money transfers take time. Not just the transfer itself but also the action of adding details. Many numbers are involved with many errors likely. You have no idea if the money you sent has been successfully recieved and you have no idea beforehand if you’ve entered the correct banking details. There is a lot of trust and takes place and a lot of errors occur. The problem with copying WeChat is essentially WhatsApp. South Africans have their app. People will not easily move to new a messaging app. Not impossible but it would have to offer something special. What South Africa doesn’t necessarily have, at least not in a market dominant form, is a marketplace app. Especically one where trust is enforced. People are regularly scammed online and in person so there is inherent distrust. The incetive to download a new application would be powerful and the added service benefit of instant money transfer would be massively beneficial. I think these two gaps present a possible opportunity. A marketplace where all goods first and second hand are sold. And the accounts that exist within having the ability to transfer between each other. Of course the ideal way for peer to peer payment would be in a messaging app. The next best thing is the ability to send using a smartphone keyboard. Confirmations can come through push notifications and only be received by verified accounts. The verification itself is potentially tricky and here I think the answer is ID cards. Associating a trust score with particular person or persona that is linked to an ID would make for effective transfer protocol. If multiple connections to a node find that node untrustworthy then further evaluation can occur. ###### South African Digital Services Simply South Africans need to carry around too many cards. Driver’s licences and ID cards in particular could and should be one card. They should be a digital card. In the event of interacting with law enforcement it should be a simple matter of sharing an identity number and relevant information should appear. I would take this a step further and link this personal identification to health and education records. A single point of clear validation that doesn’t require the user to carry anything.

Updated April 5, 2024

Things I’d like to work on. **Last updated:** 5 April 2024 @ 02:45 SGT Posts Permalink ¶ ----------------- * Review drafts CSS Permalink ¶ --------------- * review and refactor CSS and make tasty usage of layers, revert-layer, :where, :is, :has, etc. * use utopia-core-scss to generate fluid spaces, type, etc. * figure out how to resize code elements with \`font-size-adjust: from-font;" * figure out how to de-dupe `navigation__list` for the popover * why do shelf items on /explore /posts /feeds etc. not show any of the content in the print stylesheet? dev tools print mode shows them correctly… is it an OS thing? * review showing the URL after anchors in print stylesheet JS Permalink ¶ -------------- * refactor getPlace() * functional tests for functions, filters, etc. Eleventy Build Permalink ¶ -------------------------- * figure out logic for pinned posts * figure out how to manage "RSS-only" posts (that become visible on the site after site.limits.recentDays) * use new eleventy-img transform instead of image shortcode * keep an eye on performance here * pull data out of fathom analytics for page popularity Admin Permalink ¶ ----------------- * testimonials for /about and /cv * finish transcript for "Middle Out in CSS" on YouTube

Updated March 29, 2024

justing.net ----------- _Updated: 24MAR29FRI_ ### Future Possibilities * Write some fiction. * Write some non-fiction essays. * Learn how to draw. * Hike around Mont Blanc. ### Upgraded to “In Work” (will fill in as things above migrate down) ### Done and Did (will fill in as things above migrate down) Past updates ------------ Feed of all updates. What is this? ------------- This is an ideas page. For more info see About Ideas Now. Email me about this page. © Justin Garofoli 2005-2024

Updated March 24, 2024

⃪ HomeLast updated: 3/24/2024 (These notes are inspired by Andy Matuschak's notes) I've been toying around with the Zettelkasten method and trying to build a habit of deep thinking first thing in the morning. Everything here is a work in progress — consider it thinking out loud. The goal is to capture one, complete thought per note with lots of links to other thoughts. One problem with this is it's not a blog so there is no index. I'll try to link to a few chains of thought here and you can follow the links. Generative UI ------------- I'm currently thinking a lot about Generative UI which is the moment when Every user gets their own UI generated by AI. Generative UI will come in phases. I feel confident that this is the future of frontend development because the economic incentives are huge and the technology is already here. AI will compress time on UI improvements to zero. Already the Immediate impacts of GPT-4 are huge for developer productivity and are pushing us through this loop faster. Developer Talent Management --------------------------- I've spent the last four years working on a talent management platform for elite military units. This likely evokes images of sweaty meatheads wearing fatigues and doing pullups, and there is a lot of that. But what I've learned is the organizations that we work with have processes that put to shame anything I've seen in the private sector. What would it look like if we took these same ideas and applied them to a software company? I've started to lay a lot of conceptual groundwork to build on. We need to know if we're a Laundromat or a Startup. We need to define Developer Velocity and have a heuristic for Deciding what to work on. When we hire we need to think of Build vs Buy.

Updated March 20, 2024

Ideas ----- Projects: * A wiki for Pulp patterns * A game about picking up stones from the seashore * Try to get uxn on the playdate running Vague topics: * Humility and humanity in technology Looking for: * Funding for tracking technology carbon footprint data * Finding for developing an online archive for community digital assets _Last modified: 2024-03-20 15:01:25_

Updated March 19, 2024

I always have about a million ideas and a firm realization that most will not come to fruition – but you never know… with the right collaborators and the right timing. I created this page after being inspired by the AboutIdeasNow.com website. Things I would like to work on: * **A fediverse podcast discussion app** – like BookWyrm for podcasts – recommend, review, discuss, share. I don’t want to create this one I want someone to make it – but happy to be a “critical friend” on what I envisage. * **A community wifi network** for my neighbourhood to provide cheap reliable internet (think NYCMesh or Freifunk but small). #CommunityNetworks #Wifi #CommunityWifi * **A progressive politics talking shop/think tank** to talk about ideas of a progressive nature and enthuse people to be involved in things when elections or other campaigns and issues come around. This could be hyper local or more regional. It would be nice to have an engaged and well trained activist base who could use their efforts. Perhaps more online than in person or mix of the two to make it easy to participate casually. #Progressive #ProgressivePolitics #Activism #CommunityOrganizing #CapacityBuilding * **Helping set up a community organization** (like these) for the neighbourhood to help improve where I live (I do not want to start and run something but happy to help someone else). #Neighbourhood #NeighbourhoodAssociation #Community #CommunityAssosociation * And one million more around politics, technology and often their intersection Last updated: 19 March 2024