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Bill Maher visited Donald Trump at the White House, where he not only got Trump to sign sixty of the insults he’d hurled at Maher but also encountered a president who was surprisingly self-aware and willing to listen.
Maher concludes:
The most surreal part of the whole night was when I got home. I flew back right after the dinner and I’m in bed watching 60 Minutes from the night before, and there’s Trump in one of their stories, standing at a podium in a room that looked to me like one of the rooms and podium places we’d just been in. And he’s ranting: “Disgusting.” “You’re a terrible person.” And I’m like: Who’s that guy? What happened to Glenda the Good Witch, and why can’t we get the guy I met to be the public guy? And I’m not saying it’s our responsibility to do that. It’s not.
I’m just reporting exactly what I saw over two and a half hours. I went into the mine, and that’s what’s down there. A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there — which I know is fucked up. It’s just not as fucked up as I thought it was.
I really enjoyed listening to Tim Cook on Table Manners. What a personal and friendly conversation.
Herman Martinus wants his products to be like a garden:
That’s what I want from my products. I want to putter about, feel connected to the process, and have fun doing so. I want to make things that don’t scale. To see people tuck into them and enjoy them as people, not as stats. I’ve done this fairly successfully with JustSketchMe. We have a small, diverse, and amazing community of artists and illustrators making awesome things. I’m trying to build a similar product with Bear Blog. Something niche but valuable. Something I can spend time on because I want to.
Being able to talk to, and interact with the people using my tools is fulfilling. Spending time meticulously improving subtle aspects of the product is enjoyable.
The authors of The Pragmatic Programmer about users not knowing what they need:
Dave Thomas: Tying in to what Andy said earlier about software having a Heisenberg effect, where delivering the software changes the user’s perception of the requirements, almost by definition, your target is moving. The sheer act of delivering the first release is going to make the user realize, “Oh, that’s not quite what I wanted.”
Andy Hunt: Or even worse yet, “Oh, that’s exactly what I wanted. But now having seen that, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve learned. I’d now like to do this instead, or this in addition.” Just by introducing the software, you’ve changed the rules of the game. Now the user can see more possibilities that they weren’t aware of before. The user will say, “Oh, if you can do that. What I’d really like is if you could do this.” And there is no way to predict that up front.
Cal Newport:
Between this newsletter, my podcast, my books, and my New Yorker journalism, I offer a lot of advice and propose a lot of ideas about how the modern digital environment impacts our lives, both professionally and personally, and how we should respond.
This techno-pontification covers everything from the nitty gritty details of producing good work in an office saturated with emails and Zoom, to heady decisions about shaping a meaningful life amid the nihilistic abstraction of an increasingly networked existence.
With the end of year rapidly approaching, and people finding themselves with some spare thinking time as work winds down for the holidays, I thought it might be fun to try to summarize essentially every major idea I discuss in one short primer.
He then shares his thoughts about knowledge work, personal technology use, deep life, and the internet and future technology.
Masks by Shel Silverstein:
She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by—
And never knew.
The first time it happened, I was writing a paper. The paragraphs I had just typed vanished into thin air, faster than Time Machine or Backblaze could save them. Gone. The next occurrence was during app development; Xcode suddenly flagged numerous errors in previously error-free code. My recent changes to several files were erased.
Months later, the mystery is solved: iCloud Drive detected a file conflict. It assumed different versions of the same file existed on my Mac and iPhone and couldn’t merge them automatically. This was impossible; the affected files were never opened on the iPhone. But they were in iCloud, as I had moved my Mac’s Documents folder there.
Dropbox manages version conflicts by storing all conflicting files side by side, labeled as “(John Doe’s conflicted copy)“. iCloud Drive, however, doesn’t show these conflicts in the file system. If you open the file in an editor that supports conflict handling, a popup appears asking which version to keep. Editors like Textifier, Xcode, or Obsidian, lacking conflict handling, leave iCloud to decide which version to store on your disk and in your backup.
Over time, newer backups overwrite older ones containing the correct version; your content is gone for good. The only way to get it back is to open the file with an editor that supports conflict resolution.1 Once moved out of iCloud Drive, even that won’t help. The content is lost.2
Masking version conflicts might appear user-friendly, but it has catastrophic consequences. You might not discover the data loss until years later, when reopening significant but infrequently used documents.
Until iCloud Drive exposes version conflicts in the file system or a central, easily accessible location, my strong recommendation is to move all crucial data out of it. Meanwhile, set up a Git repository to monitor your critical files; you might uncover surprising changes.
Update: For files that need to stay in iCloud Drive I’m building Cloud Cub, a simple way to detect and resolve hidden sync conflicts before they cause data loss.
Within a few days of prototyping a game mechanic, Valve’s designers start watching users play. And they conduct playtests once a week until their games are fun and it is “no longer excruciatingly painful” to watch.
On a side note: At least in 2012, when its Handbook for New Employees was published, Valve was completely self-organized.
Morgan Eua does a great job introducing Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method for personal knowledge management.
In follow-up videos with easy to understand examples she details how she implements a Zettelkasten in Obsidian.
For a more comprehensive overview, check Sönke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes.
Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running inspired Cal Newport’s theory of deep work. Newport explains:
Against the advice of nearly everybody, he sold his bar, and moved to Narashino, a small town in the largely rural Chiba Prefecture. He began going to bed when it got dark and waking up with the first light. His only job was to sit at a desk each morning and write. His books became longer, more complex, more story driven. He discovered what became his signature style.
You might have heard of Parkinson’s Law. It states, that a project will always fill the available time. If you have two weeks, it will take you two weeks. If you have two years, it will take two years.
Cal Newport dug up the original article in which C. Northcote Parkinson describes how the naval bureaucracy grew after World War I was won.
Tyler Wetherall writes in the New York Times about how she helped her ex-boyfriend recover from memory loss:
To break up with someone is to lose the imagined future you would create together, but you would always share the landscape of your collective past. If Sam could not remember, I would be alone in that landscape.
YouTubers MrWhoseTheBoss and MKBHD explain the techniques tech companies use to get a more positive coverage of their products.
Christopher Balding retraces Xi Jinpings rise in the 1980s and the conclusions Xi must have drawn from the collapse of the USSR:
Everything the USSR did in the 1980s and 1990 was wrong. Do the complete opposite. To put it another way: whatever Gorbachev would do, do and do the complete opposite.
In Balding’s view this explains current policies:
If we take avoiding a system of governance collapse as the driving motivation for what Xi is going rather than seeking to address continually rising debt levels or differences in public and private productivity, his behavior makes sense. Foreign analysts talking about the importance of private enterprise to the Chinese market are not incorrect in their presentation of facts, they are wrong in understanding what problem Chinese leadership believes it is solving and how to solve it.
Interesting piece.