Read IndieWeb Meetup by John Chidgey (techdistortion.com)
Once I knew the conference dates in the States I realised that the IndieWeb meetup in Austin would be happening on the first Wednesday of the month, which was an evening when I would be in Houston. Noting it was a mere 2.5 hour drive (far closer than a 28 hour door to door flight) I decided to drop by.

👓 Have y’all been following what’s happening with Instacart this week?

Read a thread by Sasha PerigoSasha Perigo (Twitter)

Have y’all been following what’s happening with Instacart this week? The company is retaliating against workers, and it’s really, really bad. I’m going to share what I know in a thread.  Instacart is a grocery delivery service. “Shoppers” are the workers who pick up items at the store and deliver them to customers.

Instacart keeps wages really, really low. A Shopper in Menlo Park says she makes a few hundred a week.

Shoppers went on strike this week with two demands:
- The app increase the default tip option from 5% to 10%.
- Instacart stop charging “service fees” and pocketing them. Instacart not only didn’t honor the workers strike demands, but they retaliated and cut pay further!

They cut bonuses which can be up to 40% of the workers’ income.

The workers are contractors so they aren’t as protected from this retaliation.

Instacart Shoppers wrote a Medium post explaining what’s happening to them and asking for software engineers and other employees to speak out against their bosses. @GoogleWalkout shared it today.

Instacart flagged it to Medium, and it’s been TAKEN DOWN!
link.medium.com/VW7Oy3D9r1

What can you do?
- Share this story widely and generate bad press for @Instacart.
- DON’T use Instacart right now.
- Organize with the gig workers at your company. Their struggle is your own!
- Follow @GigWorkersRise for updates and donate to support them.

mentions 

Calling Instacart to give them negative customer feedback could help turn this around too.

If you're a customer who's boycotting, let them know!

👓 In Seeking to Join Suit Over Subpoena Power, Mulvaney Goes Up Against the President | New York Times

Read In Seeking to Join Suit Over Subpoena Power, Mulvaney Goes Up Against the President (New York Times)
In effect, the acting chief of staff hopes the court will tell him whether to listen to his own boss, who wants him to remain silent, or to comply with a subpoena from the House, which wants his testimony.

👓 A Simpler, Account Free, SPLOT | Alan Levine

Read A Simpler, Account Free, SPLOT (CogDogBlog)
This is kind of a big deal for SPLOTs… but then again I thought the plugin version was, and that made nary a ripple. Maybe I need to write an open textbook (SNAP!). A brand new version of the…
Read The daily creativity prompts that help me spend time on myself by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
Last month, I drew a new picture every day as part of Inktober, responding to daily word prompts. In response to the word Ash, I drew a response to Brexit: In response to the word Mindless, I drew a self-portait of sorts: And in response to Frozen, I drew a heart. I'm not an artist by any means, ...
Read Oh, It’s November? by gRegor MorrillgRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)
I had not even registered that it was November until I read Jamie’s post about participating in National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). Something about it hit me just right with inspiration and I decided I should try it again. My last attempt was 2013 and 2011 was the last time I met the goal of ...
Read A fictitious, somewhat farcical conversation between me and the JavaScript programming language (littleyellowdifferent.substack.com)
Ernie: Hey, JavaScript. JavaScript: Oh. It’s you. E: Yeah. So it’s been a while. JS: Oh. It has. E: I’m sorry I’ve been away so long. You know how it goes; it’s just been super busy the past couple of years. Being a manager at all of that. JS: Mm-hmm.
This is pretty hilarious and oh so true.
Read Airplane Wifi Location Tracking to Tasker to Compass by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)
On my recent trip, I took Southwest Airlines for the first time in many years. At Indiewebcamp New Haven, I set up Aaron Parecki’s compass project to send my location data to. I have 59MB of location data since March 3oth, 2019. The problem is transforming the input from Southwest into the format ...

👓 Blogging Futures Prompt 2 | Write.as

Read Blogging Futures Prompt 2 (Write.as)

Infrastructure

For the second prompt of the Blogging Futures course, we want to explore the question of infrastructure of blogs.

The discussion has shifted to thinking about how we assess the infrastructure of blogs. This entails not only the infrastructural framework of writing on the web but the mental framework behind it too.

👓 Blogging Futures Prompt 1 | Write.as

Read Blogging Futures Prompt 1 (Write.as)

Paradigms

For the first prompt of the Blogging Futures course, we want to explore the question of paradigms.

At the heart of this course is a simple question: where do we want blogging to go? Embedded in that question is another equally important one: Where do we not want blogging to go?

So where do we want/not want blogging to go? Are there paradigms you find useful in exploring these questions? Does writing on the web even exist on such a spectrum for you or is it something more complicated?

Along with these questions, there are some paradigms below that could serve as prompts for your own reflection.

Happy writing!

Read Memo palaces without any preparation? (Art of Memory Forum)
Yes, I found it works for long term recall too. There are a lot more tricks to imaginary locations that make them work better. They aren’t as simple as normal locations because you can make them better or worse than normal locations. Some of these tricks dive into how memory works too, the most common issue I see people having with imaginary memory palaces is interference and linking. These issues appear because normal memory palaces do not really deal with interference because they have been ...