If you’re thinking, “Figure out the kinds of sequences that generate good responses,” you’re still looking for essences. You’re seeking a list of words that can make someone excited.

Instead, the process of making something that people want is the process of learning, through experiment and error, to be the kind of person who can generate needs, wants, and jobs in other people. 

This kind of person is one who notices that a new restaurant in their neighborhood has a line out the door. Instead of walking by, they walk in. 

They stop to notice the soft, earthy color palette of its interior decoration, one that evokes a coastal Mediterranean village. They see the way its menu layers in unexpected ingredients like za’atar, cinnamon, and chile as subtle references to other cultures and traditions. They notice the feelings that this sequence of experience evokes in them, the way it feels familiar and also pleasantly surprising. They know that if they linger on these feelings, they’ll be able to evoke them later—for themselves and for others—in a logo design or an article.

I’ve been trying to be more aware of things happening to me lately.

I know I can be in my head, a million miles away from reality unfolding before me. I feel more comfortable there, if I’m honest. Reality can be uncomfortable, not quite right for me.

As it turns out, when you retreat from reality too often, you start to forget that while it can be uncomfortable sometimes, its contents can be incredible.

I’m finding that the moments I am aware of what’s happening around me are when I am the happiest.

And it turns out, paying attention to reality with your own unique perspective can really make a difference for others.

I was afraid I had become too cynical to find excitement in technology again. It wasn’t true.

While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.

One thing that excites me about the web is our ability to communicate effortlessly with other people across the world.

It still feels like magic every time I get an instant message from my friend in Uruguay.

Hell, I spent several hours on video chat with my coworker from Brazil today. How insanely cool is that?

I think I just want to find interesting problems to solve using that tech, which feels a bit like “I have a hammer and I’m looking for nails.”

I’m just grateful that people want to pay me to play with computers all day.

Productivity is a topic you have probably searched for on Google. There are thousands of gurus trying to sell you the idea of the ultimate system when, in reality, it is simpler than that.

Don’t be fooled; productivity is not about complex systems or automating everything. Productivity is about knowing when to push and when to stop, understanding what to do and what not to do. Above all, it’s about thinking long-term and pursuing things that genuinely interest you.

What follows is a solid list of simple tips which help keep you focused and productive.

We don’t relax when we can trust the people around us. Maybe we can relax when we prove ourselves worthy of trust. At least in the small things.

We can do the small things. We can live in small moments. We can find hope and love in the people around us. We can stand watch for them, and in turn, they will stand watch for us.

This past year continues to be one where I am peppered by realizations that are only obvious by taking the time to, um, realize them.

One of them is that I take for granted all of the various chores that my wife does around the house.

I’m a lazy person, I’ll admit it. I’d rather spend 100 energy units thinking up a way out of doing a chore than the 3 energy units it actually takes to just do the chore.

And it’s awful to have realizations like this one because, unless you’re an unempathetic jabroni, you feel instantly guilty for being such an untrustworthy person.

I’ve been trying extra hard to build up better habits around my chores. But I think this quote from Mike Monteiro hits me hard because I feel such strong anxiety when I’m procrastinating.

Maybe I need this in my quote rotation as a reminder that beating that particular form of anxiety is the easiest one to defeat. All you gotta do is do something.

I was listening to a podcast episode the other day while I was driving and in there there was a thought that stuck with me: the idea that the web is moving from a creator economy to a curator economy. With a web flooded with AI generated slop and the platforms themselves encouraging it, the role of curators is gonna become more and more important. Who knows, maybe with a digital world filled with low-quality garbage we’ll find refuge in old-school printed magazines.

I would love that!

I recently watched the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary, and one point they made clear was that so much of early skateboarding culture was shaped by misfits around the country reading the same skateboarding magazines and being inspired by the same people.

Shared culture is something I find myself missing these days. Unless you and your friends are watching the same stuff, you quickly run out of things to talk about.

It’s great I have a place to talk with people about the indie web or large language models or The Simpsons, but I miss the larger, more generic topics that we can all bond over more easily together.

I’d share screenshots of these things, but one of the primary reasons I’ve been enjoying myself so much while making them is because they are literally only for me to see or use. I’ve gone through creative periods where I’m coding outside of work but in the end it has always been shared to some kind of audience - whether that be the designing and coding of this site or my CodePens. This is different.

Robin Sloan coined these type of apps as home-cooked. Following his analogy, technically I am a professional chef but at home I’m creating dishes that no one else has to like. All the stuff I have to care about at work - UX best practices, what our Community wants, or even the preferences of my bosses and colleagues re: code style and organisation can be left behind. I’m free to make my own messed-up version of an apricot chicken toasted sandwich, and it’s delicious.

I’ve been doing the same lately, largely driven by how easy it is to get these home-cooked apps off the ground using LLMs.

My favorite one so far is a tool for helping me manage my sound and public address duties for our local high school’s soccer games. I whipped up a form which lets me set some variables (opposing team name, referees, etc.) and it spits out the script I need to read.

It also contains a mini sound board to easily play stuff like the school’s fight song when they score.

I hope nobody else ever needs to use this thing because it’s certainly janky as all hell, but it works exceedingly well for me.

I’m sure most people are aware of how expensive it is to go out and see shows, but I’m not sure if most people are aware of why.

This video does a great job of explaining how the Ticketmaster + Livenation monopoly works.

We’re quickly approaching election season here in the US. Growing up, the importance of an informed electorate was driven into my brain.

This is the kind of stuff more voters need to be aware of. How do monopolies form? What market conditions lead to consolidation of power, and how do we hold those in power accountable?

Glen Weldon, who hosts NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, said Dropout isn't trying to create shows to please everyone – its content is niche, and that's ok. The show's cast makes the content feel casual and personal to him.

"The reason you show up every week is to see them in this kind of unguarded mode trying to figure things out on the fly," Weldon says. "You are in the room with them, and they're inviting you into their world for just a hang."

This nails what is so exciting about the Dropout experiment. You are rooting for the simultaneous success of the show and the concept. It’s fun to feel like you’re a small part of the creative process.

We’ve gotta be getting close to a new season of Game Changer!

That’s because what really sucks about the web these days, what has us feeling despair and anger, has everything to do with the industry that has formed around the web, but not the web itself. The web is still just a substrate on which anything can be built. Most importantly, the web is the people who use it, not the companies that have established themselves around it.

And the widespread disillusionment that we’re seeing may actually be a good thing. More people than ever have realized that the utopian dreams of a web that could only bring about positive and wonderful things might have been misguided. That tech companies maybe don’t always have our best interests in mind. And that slogans like "don’t be evil" might be more about marketing than about truth.

Once again, Molly White explains how to make the internet fun again in an admirably eloquent way.

Related: I bought a domain with the intention of creating a list of artists who Donald Trump can’t use in his campaign functions. I lost motivation after finding basically what I wanted to assemble on Wikipedia, but reading this article makes me want to give it a go.

Fifteen or 20 years ago, this would not have even been a conversation,” said Ms. Lorre, who has often discussed the benefits of silent walks, most recently on her podcast and on TikTok. But silent walking feels relevant right now because many of us have become tethered to our devices, she added.

The question then becomes: “How do we counteract that?” Ms. Lorre said.

Walking is a well-established balm for the mind and body. Research has shown that walking for as little as 10 extra minutes a day may lead to a longer life. And a 2020 study in The Journal of Environmental Psychology found that a 30-minute walk in an urban park reduced the amount of time that people dwelled on negative thoughts. Walking has also been shown to improve creativity and help fend off depression.

A few months ago, I started turning my walking habit into a silent walking habit.

Sure, some days I’ll throw on an album or podcast, but more often than not, I’m finding myself putting my headphones in, reaching the end of my street, and then pocketing them.

It takes some practice to know what to do with your thoughts, which is a surprising effect of living a digital life. Most thoughts are ephemeral, dismissed as effortlessly as it entered.

Some thoughts are journalible. That’s easy to quickly pull out your phone, wrote them down, and reflect on it later.

Some are scary. Negative. Nasty. Those ones are tough to let go of, but if you acknowledge the thought and permit out to exist, the endorphins will eventually help you move on from it.

I could not encourage you more to get out for a 15 minute silent walk today. Make space for it. You’ll be glad you did.