Weekly Notes #7

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Reminder: this site is an iterative experiment, so let's put on the janitor hat:

unfortunately the original image took too long to load. Longboi can smell that.

This week's summary

A wise person said to me this week: experience is not about figuring out what you want to do, but deciding what you don't want to do.

This was a very timely piece of advice. I'm still juggling research, building, writing here and dealing with the little pesky detail of having to pay rent. (btw, Mango's fine, he lives rent-free as Ensō handles his upkeep, and I still feel richer than with a 6-figure salary and a 150m2 office surrounded by suits.)

My progress on Night Reader has been steady, but slower than I expected, and that's OK! I didn't have time to get it out on the AppStore, but I've added better loading error UX, ability to report bugs, and improved page loading performance. I think we're ready to go!

(Related: Heart of Dorkness)

The app will be paid, but if you want to give it a go you can use TestFlight or just message me and I'll try to give you a free version, no questions asked.

Publishing smaller articles worked quite well. My approach is to start with a bigger topic, work on its branches and then by Thursday come back to the main article. This way you–the reader can control how you want to navigate the subject.

I want to write a bit more about mental health, so will try to wrap up a few drafts in the next two weeks.

Also, I've received a lot of feedback from my new batch of Ensō users. I won't add any big new features, but I'll make it possible for users to switch off some stuff, following the MISS – Make It Stupid, Simple philosophy.

Finally, I was so happy to see that more and more people have a Say Hi page now! Perhaps we should create a catalog of all Say Hi sites? (project todo)

Next week

Favourite project

(t,i,x,y) => "creative code golfing" — Interactive code golf! OK, I know that there's a 3D version of this project hidden somewhere in the depths of the web. If I find it, I'll post it in the next one.


Windows 98 - Virtual x86 — Run Windows 98 in the browser.

Favourite site(s)


Toiletpaper Magazine – I just discovered that one of my favourite print magazines has a site, and that site really speaks to its physical counterpart. ToiletPaper magazine is an avant-garde publication co-created by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. It's a mixture of commercial photography, and surreal, bizarre imagery. It's beautifully and unashamedly trashy, and that speaks to me at a deep and personal level. Keep scrolling, feed your eyes, and take a shower afterwards (then buy a physical copy).


unim.press – Reddit Front Page reader in the style of New York Times. Initially The (Medieval) Times was supposed to be an NYT-styled news reader, but the idea evolved quickly once I learned about this project. I don't use Reddit any more, and I built a catalog of alternative communities: Lemonade, so might give the project another shot.


Welcome to the Sixties – A catalog of 60s related memories I found via the marginalia site explorer.

Favourite piece of tech

Cursorless: Voice coding at the speed of thought — Cursorless is a composable, spoken programming language designed for keyboard-free programming. To learn more about its design and see a quick demo, check out this Strangeloop talk by Pokey Rule.

Interesting articles

An Attempted Taxonomy of Web Components—zachleat.com — Zach is one of my main sources of wisdom when it comes to Web Components and JAMStack. My main issue with Web Components was scalability and composability, but after seeing more work using this tech, I'm starting to notice more value in it from the perspective of my own personal practice.

Side note: if you're interested in JAMStack, be sure to fill in the The Future of Jamstack survey (it's short.)

5 Animals Whose Blood Isn't Red | HowStuffWorks - Sharing this for very selfish and idiosyncratic reasons: I caught myself reading it in Night Reader and had a pretty good experience despite my app using only three colours: black, red, dark red.

No feature — an opinion piece discussing how brittle and myopic the mainstream approach towards building AI apps is at the moment, plus some (vague) directions on how to move forward. I think they overestimate the usefulness of chatbots/conversational UX when it comes to interacting with LLMs. To learn more about that I recommend Maggie Appleton's Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots. I think that in the age of rapid enshittification, removing features rather than piling them up can be an advantage (MISS – Make It Stupid, Simple).

Early-life stress changes more genes in the brain than a head injury — one of the reasons that the tools I build for my own well-being (examples and wishlist) seem to work for folks with ADHD, despite me not being on the ADHD spectrum is early-life stress. So, naturally I find this subject interesting. If you're interested in mental health, esp. the impact of trauma from a child development and epigenetic point of view — let me know. I've been collecting research on the subject for some time and I'd love to share it (either links or a compiled article).

Things I wrote last week that people liked

Make
It
Stupid
Simple,
To
Experience
Revenue

=  M.I.S.S.T.E.R.

Thanks for reading! See you on Monday!

See you next week!

You still here?

Here's a treat: BUTTERFLY LAUNCHES FROM SPAR POLE. I found this site by sheer accident. I'm attaching it here, because when I read it I see a real person on the other side of the screen.

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a giant foot-shaped snail with a house on its back. the house is still in construction, with a big crane towering above it The image is a stylized black-and-white illustration. In the lower left corner, there is a small, cozy-looking house with smoke rising from its chimney. The smoke, however, does not dissipate into the air but instead forms a dark, looming cloud. Within the cloud, the silhouette of a large, menacing face is visible, with its eyes and nose peeking through the darkness. The creature, perhaps a cat, appears to be watching over the house ominously, creating a sense of foreboding or unease.