Notes From the Field

After looking into linting prose in Emacs, I found a way to roll your own prose linter setup using vale (an extensible prose linter), efm-langserver (a generic language server), and eglot (a language server mode for Emacs).

When there is no formal structure in a group of people that interact over any significant amount of time, informal structures appear.

Emacs can be customized to create a beautiful, focused writing environment akin to Ulysses, iA Writer, Bear, or other minimalist markdown editors.

Some of the downsides of informal structures in an unstructured group are:

When rules are implicit, only those who know how decisions are made can participate.

An elite individual is an oxymoron. The nature of an elite is membership to a group that exhibits informal influence or control over a larger group.

A commonly cited reason for Web3 is that centralized systems (government, banking) are broken and decentralized systems are the way forward (blockchains, cryptocurrencies).

The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. Links to this note Elite Are Groups Not Individuals

A problem with Twitter’s advertising business is that it’s product is used for text-based information (tied to the physical world like work or current events).

A commonly cited success story of NFTs is CryptoPunks. They were 10,000 uniquely generated pixel art avatars released on the blockchain for free.

Zettelkasten notes become more useful the better links you make between them.

I came across the idea of a hyperfine village from Lisa Hardy.

Blockchains are transparent ledgers in that anyone with a copy of the blockchain can see every transaction.

Smart contracts are not recognized as legal contracts and don’t offer the same protections.

Smart contracts that run on a distributed ledger effectively need to work forever to be useful.

Distributed autonomous organzations (DAOs) have more in common with limited liability corporations (LLCs) than C Corporations.

This note does not have a description yet. Links to this note Cooperative Cryptonetwork

NFTs lack the legal and regulatory protection of other forms of property.

The World Health Organization (WHO) classified B.1.1.529 (omicron), first detected in South Africa, as a COVID-19 variant of concern.

Read An Engineer’s Hype-Free Observations on Web3 (and its Possibilities) from PSL.

List of places that will pay you to move and work remotely:

Using a fingerprint as authentication is trivial to break using a picture of fingerprint, some acetate, and wood glue.

The Millenium Tower in downtown SF is sinking. Before it’s completing, the concrete skyscraper had already sunk 16 inches—building code allows for 6 inches of sinkage.

Values of a community or organization are embedded in every UI decision.

Emacs is not a great text editor in and of itself—it’s a building material for the best text editor you can make for yourself.

Baboons are really good at finding water. Baboons also really love salt.

Some people argue that there is no such thing as “good taste” in art.

Good taste is a closeness between what you perceive as power vs what is power, independent of who is observing it.

A sales narrative is a cohesive story that explains why customers need your product.

There was a meme in on Twitter that you should unfollow VCs and follow artists.

When things are going poorly it feels like you are pushing your users.

The term “creator economy” and the lexicon around it has broad appeal—who doesn’t want to be a “creator” or a “builder”?

A good analogy might be graduating from university and getting your first job.

GitHub powered (Commentor needs to oauth GitHub to comment) Utterances uses GitHub issues Gitalk uses GitHub issues Giscus uses GitHub discussions

I’m an optimist with anxiety—constantly fretting about the future, but optimistic that it will work out fine.