https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/19/facebook-moves-15bn-users-out-of-reach-of-new-european-privacy-law
As you can tell I’ve been de-prioritizing Facebook and moving to my blog, and this is one of the big reasons why. Instead of actually fixing their problems with privacy, they just moved users out of reach of valid privacy laws. Great job FB… If it wasn’t that you represent 80% of my traffic I’d get rid of you. Something I think most people who do sites of any kind would also do.
A TED talked I watched a long time ago by Dan Gilbert made one point that I really enjoyed and has helped me keep perspective on things. And that is “if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.”.
That means that whatever happens today. Probably won’t matter in the long run. The only thing that matters is my perception of it. How I choose to react, how I choose to be.
“The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another — Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice.” – Adam Smith
When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look into the reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change. – Thich Nhat Hanh
Some ridiculous percentage of the views I get (all 10-30 a day of them!) come from Facebook or Twitter. They are in a sense the only real method of distribution I have. It’s interesting because while I advocate for most folks to take control over the distribution channel by using email (RSS and most other means are for all intent and purpose irrelevant now) I haven’t done it for myself. I’m not sure if I will spend the time trying to convince people to subscribe.
And if I do, is it just because I like seeing views on the site?
Is that the goal of why I write? To feed my ego when I see 40 views instead of 0?
Maybe that’s it, but I feel like if that was the case I’d polish these pieces out a bit more.
I could for example, with this post, start by explaining how historically the methods of distributions were in a few large media companies (that’s if I start with the last century) and you had to go thru them to get your message out.
Then the Internet was supposed to revolutionize this. Everyone would be on an even playing ground. And for a while things actually were better.
There were many different aggregation sites. Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Yahoo, AOL, MSN and still other ways to follow sites (RSS, ATOM) and tools to do that (Insert complaint about Google Reader being discontinued here) and then finish with how it’s right back where we started with Google and Facebook controlling most of the traffic.
I guess I don’t see the point in doing that. It’s like most books. It’s a 10 page idea wrapped with 300 pages of explanations, evidences, anecdotes, the same idea repeated in different ways etc. I don’t think I’m going to sway many opinions. You already know if you agree or not or you’ll form an opinion quickly if you don’t well more facts won’t change your mind.
All that to say, would you sign up for an email subscription? What if I make a popup that blocks your screen while reading? Would that be even more enticing?
Some people seem to hate quotations, I can understand, I mean a good example is:
Quotations, the Karaoke of ideas – John Oliver (#)
But I think there’s a reason we do Karaoke, it’s because that song is much better then anything we could come up with and it usually describes pretty well what we had in mind. How we feel, and it expresses better then we could in the moment.
Some men’s words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better – Waldo Emerson
I’ve personally always loved quotations. It’s how I used to convey my ideas during my early 20s. I still have my word document of quotes, I’m not sure what version I have now, parts of it lost and found over the countless hard drives and windows installs. And while it might be cheesy and easy to ridicule, I really do believe they are a way to easily remind ourselves of the values and truths we strive to achieve.
Quotations help us remember the simple yet profound truths that give life perspective and meaning. When it comes to life’s most important lessons, we can all use gentle reminders. – Chriswell Freeman
I often get people telling me things like:
“What? You’re working on the weekend?”, or
“What? it’s 9pm and you’re working?”
The implications being that I’m working all the time.
On the other hand, I often get weird looks from my landlord and neighbors when it’s 2pm and I’m out in the yard gardening. I’m pretty sure the landlord thinks I’m some sort of internet scammer that doesn’t do any real work or something.
Both of those show the strange relation we have with work. That it’s all the same and that he best way to do work is to get up at 8, get into work at 9 and then get home at 5. And you shouldn’t do work outside those hours because that’s over working and you shouldn’t not work in those hours because then you’re lazy.
And to be fair, that system works for many people. I have many colleagues who like the 9 to 5 and that’s it. They are always there at 9 and always leave at 5. One of the great things about working remotely and my job ( you should think of joining us ) in general is that you can set your own hours. If I don’t feel like getting up for 10 am today. I don’t need to! If I feel unproductive at 2pm (which I often do) I can just go outside and spend 30 minutes to an hour gardening or doing groceries or playing a video game.
Now that’s not to say it’s all just fun and games. We all have responsibilities and things that need to get done by a certain day or time and we have some on call shifts (usually during hours that you’d work anyway) and we take turns being on call on the weekends (for which you take time off for). I’m a big fan of a Matt Mullenweg quote:
[…]We think someone’s working if they show up in the morning and they’re not drunk, they don’t sleep at their desks, they leave at the right time[…]
-Matt Mullenweg
And that quote was actually a contributing factor to why I applied to Automattic in the first place.
I personally greatly enjoy the flexibility, the autonomy and the trust we have in eachother in my team. If you’re interested, maybe you should check us out.
I just finished reading Geek Heresy (that’s now a lie as this blog post is based on a draft from 2015!! But it was true at the time), and I really recommend it to techno-optimists such as myself.
It was a very well written account of a point of view I had partially embraced previously. I’ve always thought that the only thing we should (and can because everything else fails) ‘export’ as a means of charity is training. The book expands on why technology itself will never solve any social problems.
Social problems being things such as the state of public schools in the US (One laptop per child will not even things out, it will just amplify good schools and make mediocre schools even worse). Same with health care e-records. They are not what we need to become healthier (they are not by themselves a good or a bad thing, they just amplify social tendencies). The same goes for foreign aid. There are some people who talk about ‘capacity building’ and that is relatively close to what the book advocates for, but still most of the resources in foreign aid are ‘things’ that we give to other poorer countries. It goes on to explain why even really simple things like vaccines will not cure a disease without other social aspects (A good example of how to eradicate a disease without a vaccine can be found here ).
It goes on to talk about how one should help train and finished by saying that mentor-ship, real mentor-ship not coaching or just plain teaching is what can help change the world. While some parts feel pessimistic I felt overall that it gave me hope that I can help make even a small dent in the world by helping mentor and ‘teach’.
That was where this post ended in 2015. The book and a post by a friend on Facebook is what got me to start being a big brother and to take part and help grow an internship program where I work. Since then I’ve taken part in hour of code and spoken to a few different classes about careers in technology. If you’re looking to make the world a better place, it’s often easy to focus on the really big things. But if you help mentor even just one person it might have a snowball effect.
I re-read a post from Wait But Why called “Religion for the Nonreligious”. I find it somewhat poorly named as I don’t feel it has much to do with religion. It’s a great post about Wisdom, consciousness and it’s title would probably have the word mindfulness in it if it was published today. What struck me is how similar the post is to discussions about life / the meaning of life from the Dalai Lama, the Leadership and self deception book, Ken Wilber, and a whole range of modern pseudo philosophical / spiritual books.
For most of these, we’ll read it, agree, and then a few days later it’ll be out of sight out of mind. What’s interesting about this post is he mentions that. How it’s a struggle to stay “aware” of our consciousness and that we keep making good decisions and not get dragged down into negative impulses.
It’s a very similar thought to my post on setting the conditions for things to come naturally and I guess it’s been on my mind a lot as I try to be more compassionate and to stick to it and not have knee-jerk reactions to things. It’s interesting because one thing I worry about is that people reading this will be like, “Wow Steph talks a lot about wisdom and compassion and all that, but he sucks at it, he always has oversized reactions and throws out blunt opinions when he’s frustrated”. This came to mind recently because a friend of mine had a boss who kept writing Facebook posts about management and leadership and all that. And she was like: “he’s a horrible boss”. I want to believe the reason he posted about it was because he was aware of that. Or at least, had a nagging suspicion that he could improve his management abilities and not that he thought he already knew the answers or rather that he “knew” the answers, but the implementation wasn’t there yet.
The interesting part is just a few days ago I wrote about self sabotage and the answer was to make small steps each day. Isn’t it the same answer as the question here? That yes we might forget things, but we should keep striving one day at a time? I guess that’s if we keep remembering things. Kinda like remembering Sammy Jankis….
Today is Saturday (or more accurately this post is scheduled for Saturday). And that means cheat day for me where I eat a bunch of junk food I don’t eat during the rest of the week. The science behind it is questionable but it works for me. There are 2 reasons that might be the cause of the cheat day, the first one is the whole it’s way easier to not eat any junk food (basically anything processed or anything with medium to large amounts of sugar) if you can just delay gratification. It’s not that I won’t ever eat ice cream again. It’s just that I will eat it in X days. The other theory is that one of the reasons some people who do calorie restriction long term start to metabolize slower (that’s pretty sure at this point) is that there body is responding to the fact it doesn’t have as much leptin. Anyway, the cheat day combined with cutting out almost all sugar and carbs (which also has a side effect of removing almost all processed food) has had a dramatic impact for me. It’s now been over 4 years now that I’m on it and it’s working for me. If you’re looking for something, give it a try :).
I decided I was going to try to write a blog post a day. So you’re probably going to end up with random thoughts.
Today I was in the car and I noticed (And this is not the first time this has happened) that Google Assistant’s voice changed half way thru a “conversation” on sending a text message. While both are similar one definitely seems to have a more fluid tone. I also feel like one has a more British vs US accent but it’s not super pronounced and it doesn’t jive with my current theory that it’s the “networked” voice (like the voice samples from the cloud) vs the “local” voice (just from the phone without internet access). I’m still not sure yet and truthfully perhaps if I spent a bit more time googling it I could find it, but up to now local vs networked is my bet.