Things I Think About Often

I originally planned to call this page “Things I Care About”, but soon realised that the things that crossed my mind frequently were not necessarily things I intended to think about, let alone care for. Egregores are rarely considerate enough to request permission.

If you see a common thread running through all of these things, please let me know, because I sure don’t.

Friends

Most other things come second.

Information Architecture

Ways of creating information, and how they influence the content itself.

Incremental Moonshots

There was a praticular type of idea I’ve been trying to point at for a while, but couldn’t find the right name for. The closest I’d got was “marginal revolution”, but that wasn’t quite it.

Then I found Aaron’s post on incremental moonshots and was gifted the perfect term.

Markets & Distribution

I’ve written before on the many limits of markets , as seen in the real world.

Market-making

And it goes by many names:

• Ben Thompson calls it aggregation theory,

Job markets

Work is too big a part of life for anyone to not give up a bunch of brainspace to it. These are some of the questions I keep coming back to:

• Why are job markets so damn inefficient ?

Mediums & Constraints

There are mediums that shape the very forms of our thoughts and ideas everyday, but are simply taken for granted. Things like sentences, subtitles, tweets, and literacy itself. I find this shit fascinating.

I get unreasonably excited every time I come across a new one, or when I get to experiment with particularly fun constraints.

Sad Teenagers

You could doubt the trustworthiness of the data, or even the effectiveness of survey methodologies, but that feels a little like burying one’s head in the sand.

My current hypothesis is a combination of “people don’t do enough things together anymore” and the death of stories.

Software That Is Good

We can do better. Here are some concrete ways.

Local-first software

How do we design software that depends less on the cloud and gives ownership + control back to users? As a further benefit, apps also get more robust to network failures and collaboration glitches.

The folks at Ink & Switch seem to be working at the forefront of this niche. I’d like to know who else is interested in similar ideas.

Related resources:

• Local-first Software — You own your data, in spite of the cloud.
• Building a BFT JSON CRDT
• Offline First

Magic Ink

Related reading:

• Magic Ink – Information Software and the Graphical Interface.

Sharing data across apps

Modern data silos are artifacts of the SaaS approach of creating and selling products.

Suffering

I’m not a big fan of pain-free hedonic utopias, but I do think we should do what we can to make chronic, debilitating pain a thing of the past. Some kinds of suffering are much, much worse than others.