Things I Think About Often
I originally planned to call this page "Things I Care About", but soon realised that the things that crossed my mind frequently were not necessarily things I intended to think about, let alone care for. Egregores are rarely considerate enough to request permission.
Friends
Most other things come second.
Mediums and constraints
There are mediums that shape the very forms of our thoughts and ideas everyday, but are simply taken for granted. Things like sentences, subtitles, tweets, and literacy itself. I find this shit fascinating.
I get unreasonably excited every time I come across a new one, or when I get to experiment with particularly fun constraints.
Local-first software
How do we design softare that depends less on the cloud and gives ownership + control back to users? As a further benefit, apps also get more robust to network failures and collaboration glitches.
The folks at Ink & Switch seem to be working at the forefront of this niche. I'd like to know who else is interested in similar ideas.
Related resources:
- Local-first Software — You own your data, in spite of the cloud.
- Building a BFT JSON CRDT
- Offline First
This depressing graph
You could doubt the trustworthiness of the data, or even the effectiveness of survey methodologies, but that feels a little like burying one's head in the sand.
Suffering
I'm not a big fan of pain-free hedonic utopias, but I do think we should do what we can to make chronic, debilitating pain a thing of the past. Some kinds of suffering are much, much worse than others.