My world on the web
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)I think talent is probably overrated.
Talent exists, sure. Some people are naturals. But we overestimate its impact. I think much of what we see as talent is actually motivation.
@schnarfed https://snarfed.org/2024-07-31_53442
It reminded me of a post from Dave Cormier from a few years ago about ‘care’ being learning’s first principle. He makes the case that,
Student separate into two categories… those that care and those that don’t care.
Learning’s first principle – the most important thing i learned this year
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)Blockchain and smart contracts are truly groundbreaking advances. They fascinate me. I hope they mature and succeed. However, we had to trust people before blockchain, in all sorts of ways, and we still do now. It’s the basis of modern civilization. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. Let’s remember that.
Next time you hear someone say they’ve taken a real world problem and solved it by putting it on the blockchain, ask them how. How do they authenticate the data? How do they vet the systems that do that authentication? How does the data get onto the blockchain? The more guarantees they make, the more they’ll depend on off-chain tools, procedures, organizations, and people. Always people. Verisart punted on many of these problems, as did most of its cousins, but that didn’t make them go away.
For me, this touches on the association between technology and magic.
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)This decrease is “just a tiny blip on the long term graph.” To keep global warming under 2°C, we’d need sustained emissions reductions in this range every year for the next 20-30 years. The pandemic has been hugely disruptive, but it’s still temporary, and all signs point to a strong recovery. The drop in emissions was largely caused by lockdown, not persistent structural changes that will persist for decades to come.
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)One key phrase seems to be deep practice, popularized by Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code as an expansion of Anders Ericsson‘s research on deliberate practice. It’s a bit underwhelming, both the underlying science and the practical techniques. The main physiological mechanism that shows up is building myelin, the insulating sheaths around axons. That makes sense broadly, but is mylenation really so fine grained and specialized that I grow a Clair de lune myelin pattern when I practice that piece? Or is it like exercise or eating right, growing evenly and aiding overall cognitive function?
Similarly, the science-inspired practice techniques are believable, but leave me wanting. Chunking and repetitionwere table stakes when I played piano in high school. Same with playing slowly and forcefully. The two new ideas I came across were interval training and distraction, eg turning the TV on (with volume low or off) while you practice.
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)A big collection of engineering quotes I like, collected over many years. Also see engineering lessons.
After exploring the Activity Pub plugin, I am currently exploring Bridgy Fed to work out the difference between the two.
This method seems to involve a few other steps, including adding a feed to the header and Safe Redirect Manager plugin. It also seems to be a bit more technical. However, I am assuming that the Bridgy Fed and Mastodon options recently added to Syndication Links mean that it can be controlled per most, as opposed to every post with the Activity Pub post.
I have followed the steps, but still trying to get posts to follow through. Maybe I need to have my new instance added to Bridgy? Not sure.
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)Shh, don’t tell, I’m afraid some low level product manager at Twitter will discover this and “fix” lists like they “fixed” the home timeline a while back.
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)Mastodon is now on Bridgy! Both backfeed and publish (aka POSSE) are fully supported. Feel free to try them out! And let me know if you hit any bugs, problems, or missing features.
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)Here’s a hand wavy design sketch:
– Create a new task that’s triggered by a new reply to one of your posts.
– Configureit to send a POST webhook to Telegraph’s API (https://telegraph.p3k.io/webmention) with these query parameters:
token: your API key
source: the reply’s URL
target_domain: your web site’s domain
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)Facebook, surprisingly, wasn’t much harder. I’d gradually become dissatisfied with the company over time, so I was already using the product less and less. I only posted six times in 2018. Regardless, it’s still the one social network that has all the people I care about in real life. I’ll miss posting pictures of my daughter and knowing my extended family, high school friends, and other parents at school will all see them.
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)https://snarfed.org/electric_toothbrush.png https://snarfed.org/electric_toothbrush.png
My electric toothbrush is good technology.
It has one button. The button turns it on. It vibrates for 30 seconds, buzzes, then repeats three more times. It has no other controls.
It works one way: the standard, A…
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)Google has offered custom search engines for individual sites for a long time, so I threw together one that searches all of the sites in Indie Map, plus lots more that have joined the IndieWeb since then. It seems to work ok so far. Try it out and let me know what you think!
https://snarfed.org/magnifying_glass.jpg https://snarfed.org/magnifying_glass.jpg
A search engine for the whole IndieWeb has been a hot conversation topic, on and off, for many years now. Many of us offer search on our own individual sites, and more ambiti…
twitter-atom – A webapp that generates and serves an Atom feed of your Twitter, ie tweets from people you follow.
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)Baffle lets you use Microsub reader apps like Together, Indigenous, and Monocle with traditional feed readers like NewsBlur and maybe eventually Feedly and more.
