branweb

Came here to post this. Love James Burke's work! Connections is my all-time favorite documentary. It changed how I think about technological progress (or really, historical progress generally).

Frankly this article should have credited Burke since it reads like a summary of the Connections episode you mentioned. But I guess everybody steals from everybody.

Always good to pause and reflect on the ephemeral nature of knowledge on the www. I've always admired the Internet Archive's Sisyphean mission to preserve some piece of it.

ps those statues of internet saints occupying the old benches of the former church/current IA hq are neat and kinda disturbing.

Completely agree about fastmail. Been a happy customer for a few years now. Easy to migrate from gmail too. Enjoying it all the more since the "upgrade" of gmail's web-ui.

Fastmail isn't free, but I think the old adage "if you're given a really cool product for free, then the product us you" applies here. If you're ok with that, that's cool. But if you're not, there are some great options out there.

Seeing other people's hand-annotations in books is fascinating--regular folks even, not just eminent authors. Sort of a voyeuristic thrill maybe.

I stopped marking up my books for a while because it made me loathe to loan them out. But now I've just stopped loaning them out.

True, but your original assertion (without the "in at least a few places" edit) was misleading.

Not true. The article specifically mentions Seattle having non-functional pedestrian buttons, and I've encountered many myself around the city. In fact, I think the Seattle Times ran a story on it a while back.

edit: found it - https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/do-...

I'm quite ignorant of our (US) legal system, but the article seemed to say that it was dropped because the Supreme Court confirmed Ulbricht's life-sentence for the drug charges. US Attorney figured he wasn't going anywhere anyway, I'm guessing.

Yeah I think this part is what I was remembering: http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page41.htm

Where he says:

* I spent all this time making this spreadsheet to record all my moral failings

* The plan was to focus on 1 virtue a week, over and over, til I had no marks on my spreadsheet

* But I basically just did it once the first year, then once over the next few years then said screw it.

Then he concludes that the whole scheme might've been "moral foppery" (lol) and "that a perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance". Just thought it was funny. And also counter to all these "be your best self/be more productive/get blood transfusions" self-helpy blogposts.

I know my comment was ambiguous, but I didn't mean it as a slam on Ben Franklin. It makes me like him more. Most relatable founding father ever.

Pretty sure Franklin's effort to cultivate these virtues in himself lasted like a couple weeks. These articles never mention that.

Definitely agree with the synthesize, select, focus approach, though I find software can make this process cleaner / more enjoyable. You just have to guard against it (the software) becoming an end in itself. For suggestions, check out this HN discussion from a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759 . Pay particular attention to Ixiaus' emacs org mode comment. That's pretty close to my ideal solution.

The founder of DuckDuckGo published a similar list of mental models a little before this one. His list is longer, but there is some overlap between it and this one:

https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-use...