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Annotated Cookbooks may make good timeful texts by Andy Matuschak (Andyʼs working notes)
I don’t think the right answer is to use something like the Mnemonic medium to memorize a cookbook’s contents. I think a likelier model is: each time you see a recipe, there’s some chance it’ll trigger an actionable “ooh, I want to make this!”, dependent on seasonality, weather, what else you’ve been cooking recently, etc. A more effective cookbook might simply resurface recipes intermittently over time, creating more opportunities for a good match: e.g. a weekly email with 5-10 cooking ideas, perhaps with some accompanying narrative. Ideally, the cookbook would surface seasonally-appropriate recipes. Seasonality would make the experience of “reading” a cookbook extend over the course of a year—a Timeful text. ❧
Indigenous peoples not only used holidays and other time-based traditions as a means of spaced repetition, but they also did them for just this purpose of time-based need. Winter’s here and the harvest changes? Your inter-tribal rituals went over your memory palace for just those changes. Songs and dances recalled older dishes and recipes that hadn’t been made in months and brought them into a new rotation.

Anthropologists have collected examples of this specific to hunting seasons and preparations of the hunt in which people would prepare for the types of game they would encounter. Certainly they did this for feast times and seasonal diets as well. Indians in the Americas are documenting having done things like this for planting corn and keeping their corn varieties pure over hundreds of years.

Read This website is killing the planet (Steve Messer)
For a while I’ve been intending to make my website more sustainable, but I succumbed, as I often do, to the human trait of sloth. But this morning after reading Gerry McGovern’s post on webwaste, I thought I’d procrastinated long enough. So I ran a web page performance test and got some grim r...
Interesting piece about what one can do. It’s nice to advertise this sort of thing to bring awareness not only to this aspect, but to the larger problem. Be aware though that there are many more effective things one can do to help fix the problem than this particular approach.
Read Pluralistic: 12 Aug 2020 by Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)

Today's links

I didn’t know Cory had a separate linkblog like this, but should have suspected that he would have.
Read Introducing aboutfeeds.com, a Getting Started guide for web feeds and RSS by Matt Webb (interconnected.org)

There’s a better way to read websites and it’s called web feeds a.k.a RSS. But web feeds are hard to get into for new users, so I decided to do something about it.

I posted about suggested improvements to RSS the other day and top of my list was onboarding: If you don’t know what RSS is, it’s really hard to start using it. This is because, unlike a social media platform, it doesn’t have a homepage. Nobody owns it. It’s nobody’s job to explain it. I’d like to see a website … which explains RSS, feeds, and readers for a general audience.

So because it’s no-one’s job, and in the spirit of do-ocracy:

I built that website.

Or to slightly abuse a phrase, Be the change that you wish to see in the world wide web.

Read JavaScript, WebASM, Freedom and More by Nathan DeGruchyNathan DeGruchy (degruchy.org)
The web is perilously close to complete vendor lock-in. Mozilla, having recently laid off another 250 workers after having (in the same year) laid off 70 workers, is teetering on the brink of death, with only Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome being the remaining contenders. One wonders where th...
Read Employees vs. Independent Contractors (www.nolo.com)
As far as the IRS is concerned, there are only two types of workers in the world: employees and independent contractors ("ICs"). Independent contractors are people who are in business for themselves. Employees work for someone else’s business. Being classified as an independent contractor instead of an employee has enormous consequences. Because they are supposed to be in business for themselves, ICs don't get the same legal protections that employees do--for example, they don't qualify for unemployment insurance and are not protected under most labor laws. Moreover, hiring firms need not provide ICs with benefits ordinarily provided to employees such as health insurance or vacations.
Read Open Letter to the Gatsby Open Source Community by Kyle MathewsKyle Mathews (Gatsby)
Gatsby is a React-based open source framework with performance, scalability and security built-in. Collaborate, build and deploy 1000x faster with Gatsby Cloud.
Given the accusations and specifics that prompted this letter, it definitely comes off as disingenuous and fake corporate speak. I don’t want to touch the platform with a 10 foot pole… He addresses some of the controversy, but doesn’t actually indicate any actual plan for change.
Read ‘Christianity Will Have Power’ (nytimes.com)
Donald Trump made a promise to white evangelical Christians, whose support can seem mystifying to the outside observer.
I still don’t get the persecution complex part at all. Has Fox News and others really been pushing the “culture wars” bit this far? How do they not understand how these viewpoints clash so heavily with the message of The Bible? Love your neighbor as yourself? 
Read Passphrases That You Can Memorize — But That Even the NSA Can’t Guess by Micah LeeMicah Lee (The Intercept)

IT’S GETTING EASIER to secure your digital privacy. iPhones now encrypt a great deal of personal information; hard drives on Mac and Windows 8.1 computers are now automatically locked down; even Facebook, which made a fortune on open sharing, is providing end-to-end encryption in the chat tool WhatsApp. But none of this technology offers as much protection as you may think if you don’t know how to come up with a good passphrase.