As I said in my last post, my reading workflow consists of GTD-like phases: collect, process and write. While I wrote about collecting before, this post is about the three phases of processing notes. In the last section you’ll find a few example Zettels I wrote.
Reads
The Process forces us to think critically, categorize ideas, relate them to similar ideas, come up with metaphors/analogies/stories to better convey those ideas. The Process improves Thinking.
Using a Zettelkasten is about optimizing a workflow of learning and producing knowledge. The products are texts, mostly. The categories we find fit the process well at the moment are the following:
Knowledge Management: general information about what it means to work and learn efficiently.
Writing: posts on the production of lasting knowledge, and about sharing it with others through your own texts.
Reading: posts about the process of acquisition of new things and the organization of sources.
Social distancing imposes hardships, but it can save many millions of lives
Bad economic times could lead to deaths of people with low income who are most vulnerable to an economic downturn. ❧
This is the most likely place that governments and the richer ruling elites are likely to fail their societies. Even the United States is like to do this and one need look no further than their response to the hurricane aftermath in Puerto Rico to see this.
Annotated on March 23, 2020 at 03:55PM
The overwhelming majority of funds donated to a super PAC supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) presidential bid came from a sole donor, according to new Federal Election Commission filings.
Karla Jurvetson, a wealthy doctor in California, donated an eye-popping $14.6 million to Persist PAC, a group that sought to revive Warren’s faltering campaign in February.
The funds from Jurvetson made up the lion’s share of the roughly $15.1 million the super PAC raised last month in its efforts to boost Warren, who, prior to the group’s formation, had stumbled after third- and fourth-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.
What does the future hold for large Tiddlywikis? What can I do right now to start optimizing my TW to be usable while still huge. I am grateful to the TW contributors and those who made one of my browser engines. This has to be one of the best FOSS communities I've ever had the privilege of participating in. I need the advice of experts.
When did America become polarized? For leading historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, it all starts in 1974 with the Watergate crisis, the OPEC oil embargo, desegregation busing riots in Boston, and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
This last section covered the turmoil of the Supreme Court during the late 80’s Reagan era.
Four day livestream after a cancelled Australian tour - just a sample of the best of making-the-best-of out there.
tl;dr Now that so many are forced to use online media to communicate, let's use this opportunity to create many smaller virtual communities and social networks outside the enclosed world of Facebook.
Node has been updated and I was able to install the latest version of Ghost (3.0.2).
While I wrap up Fraidycat 1.1.3 — which solves the conflict with Firefox’s ‘Strict’ Tracking — here are some kind words from someone who inspired the organizational aspects of Fraidycat, Ton Zijlstra.
While I’ve been trying to work through a few rejections of the last version from the Chrome Web Store, a number of hot discussions have sprung up around the Cat.
So I built this - and its initial purpose was just to help me keep up on public TiddlyWikis (like philosopher.life) that I had discovered. But I couldn't get myself to rip off other news readers - I've not been satisfied with RSS and I disliked Google Reader. I didn't like that it basically created a second read-only email inbox - where I'm supposed to look through every message. And I didn't like that I lost the formatting and styling of the original hypertext. I much preferred just surfing my favorite sites periodically. As I began to add blogs, Twitter, YouTube support - it felt like I was connecting the whole Web, as if it was all one network, almost as if I viewed it like the government does. (Equipped with my own personal XKeyscore Lite.) I had felt isolated before - unable to see past whatever was being recommended to me on Twitter - but now I had a tool that forced me to rouse my dormant research skills. The task of reading, writing, publishing and hunting on the Web is a formidable one - and we're far from mastering it. It's no wonder that we abdicated to social networks that attempt to do it all for us. So yeah - Fraidycat is a very small attempt to move toward tools that give us some power. It really only adds the ability to assign "importance" to someone you are following - allowing you to track them without needing to be aware of them every second. But hey - it's four months old - I think it's a good start and hopefully others here can be encouraged by it to work on tools for the World-Wide Web again.
One does not simply read the Internet…
“What do I miss” is the wrong question, because the feeling isn’t an absence, but a presence.
If running your own website is like operating a nuclear reactor, then, yes: let’s give up on that. But what if it’s more like cooking dinner at home? That’s an activity that many people find challenging and/or intimidating, one with all sorts of social and economic ~encumbrances~, but even so, who would argue that it’s inappropriate to hope more people might learn to cook for themselves?
Maybe, after everything, we’ve actually ended up in a healthy place. Maybe the great gluey Katamari ball of technology has served us well. In 2020, you can, using nothing but the free app provided by Instagram, publish something very close to a multimedia magazine. Or, sitting at your laptop, you can produce a lightning-fast website all by yourself, every line of code calibrated just so, and host its files at a domain of your choosing. Or! You can do something in between, using a service like WordPress or Squarespace. This is not a bad range of options! ❧
There’s something between the lines here that feels like it’s closer to what the idea of IndieWeb Generations should really become. Perhaps it’s the case that when even a small handful of larger competitors like micro.blog exist it will force the larger corporate silos to come into line (they’ll lose out on market share and need to offer better service) and be more IndieWeb-like over time?
Annotated on March 21, 2020 at 11:34PM
Whether their scenario is a historical reenactment (albeit with higher-res images) or a seductive counterfactual, I don’t know. Whether it “matters,” I don’t know. I do know that I am enjoying my fraidy-follows, their slow pulse—people really are blogging, doing the dang thing—and the feeling of an old instinct waking up. ❧
Annotated on March 21, 2020 at 11:36PM