efields

Sounds productive. Don't forget to take breaks, drink water, and sleep.

I thought this was true for a lot of plants…

This, this, this (plus zoning laws based off this).

I drive through a neighborhood in Baltimore County, Maryland where a number of the houses have these black and white signs, "Save the suburbs!" "No new light rail!"

The USA has a lot of unaddressed trauma around "others" and urban living. Plus a car infrastructure it heavily relies on to the detriment of all other modes of transportation. And stores that take up an enormous amount of square footage with cheap goods… and… and…

(edited for coherence)

To do what? People want to post, share pictures, share video. The gardens arose to do this more easily than setting it up yourself. There's no driving force to work outside these gardens.

Let's take LiveJournal or MySpace… those services arose out of an interesting time when the metaphor of daily posting on the web was novel to a lot of people. Sharing photos on the web was novel so Flickr was created. During these times, folks are figuring out the design patterns of the web that get crafted in HTML/CSS/JS and now they've all but been standardized and commodified by Meta et al.

I'm pessimistic about the likelihood of any new "wild" internet ecologies thriving the way they did in the past.

If you think of hypertext as a medium, it's been pushed to its most logical extreme already. There's not a lot of boundaries to explore.

There are weird places online already, sure. And curiosities still abound. But idk… I wonder if a generation lost in cyberspace is exactly the reason why we are actually so unhappy with the internet writ large.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

But that industry is soooo massive, and such a huge economic force, and is kind of built on the idea of Constructing Fantasy, so it _makes sense_ that the Hollywood neighborhood is like this.

I have no numbers to back this up, so feel how you will about this comment, but I’m sure the STR economy does not create much more than income for the single homeowner, and makes it _harder_ for these sudden AirBnB boom towns to build an economy beyond more than renting rooms.

This is great. It's so simple it hurts.

I like my job security large, ornate and full of stained glass.

How web bloat impacts users: negatively. Better do your best to fix it.

This stuff is simpler than we let it be sometimes, folks.

SVGs don't scale the way you want them to. You can't make a (for example) 256px square image, even a vector, look good at 24px just by vector transforms.

Marketers be marketing.

I appreciate the insight. I think coffee people are on a higher level than wine people, FWIW. It is a _far_ more nuanced beverage.

Network. Figure out what your network wants. I’ll still consult on dev stuff but there’s a lot of aging SMBs and retired execs who need a smart person on retainer to help them figure out… everything.

Squarespace costs $300/year. Sell it for $3000/year with 4 seasonal updates or something.

Adapt.

Baltimore resident. I went to that staples for the first time a week ago and thought the parking lot was strangely huge. I don’t think an urban forest makes sense there tho.

Baltimore actually has a decent amount of forest and park per capita. The Roland park country club is becoming a public/private thing.

Getting around town without a car sucks though. There’s no growth to incentivize bigger transit projects. More busses would be nice.

I don’t think Baltimore and other hollowed out blue collar cities need trees as much as they need to enable entirely different industries. And I don’t know what those industries are! But there’s a lot of talented craftspeople here, and not enough capital to pay them.

Or we go anarcho-collectivism.

They won’t, but certain fungi will break them down.

Yep. Consulting is where you want to be rn.

Maybe that's because they employ so many people, law of large numbers etc.

It’s good to have this conversation. I don’t think anyone here wants the bill enacted as-is (did anyone actually read it? I didn’t, and I don’t live in FL).

Of course this is technically unenforceable. There will always fbe workarounds. You could smoke as an 11 year old if you were determined enough.

But we need more pushback and dialogue on social media’s role in the common discourse. For a while, nobody talked about smoking being bad and it became normalized while killing a lot of people. Seatbelts. Dumping waste in the river… most people go with the flow of common consensus until that consensus is scrutinized.

I read this to the bottom and I don't have a clear explanation of what the lesson is.

> By re-reading archival documents, the researchers were also able to clarify the role of British hospital specialist Henry Saxon Snell, who mysteriously backed away from the project after developing its original designs. The board of governors pushed Snell to step down after local consultants argued his ventilation scheme wasn't fit for the cold winter.

Implies the design doesn't work??

Flower farmer here. Without reading: terroir. All coffee is grown in soil and the soil around the world is different. All plants will grow if they get the right inputs (water/light/air/macros/micros), but how they grow and the makeup of their harvestable material is going to vary by the _amounts_ and _timing_ of those inputs. I'd expect the same harvesting and roasting techniques applied to beans sourced from opposite ends of the earth would perform differently.

I’d just like restaurants, cafes, etc to have an easier time operating here in the states. There is so much overhead to just serve people food, the most foundational service to offer a person. Do I have specific examples? No, but industry friends, anecdotal stories, etc…

I agree that some of this was kinda weird or just meant for those "in the know," but it was mostly a good piece. I especially appreciate the ABZ idea, because it comports with one of the best pieces of advice I got in college, "Work from the end, to the beginning." What does the finish product look like and how did it get there? It frames your (my) thinking better when I don't have an answer. If I take the learned experience of what I've done (A) what I'm working on already (B), and I know I want to make (Z), that's end-to-beginning thinking.

And if you are happy with the deal, what’s the problem? Enough people seem to be that it keeps going…

The demo is kind of incredible. It’s the admin ux of an app we built internally over 2ish years.

It’s just… right there :)

It's been happening for a couple years. Part of it is we really did pare designed spaces down to the bone in terms of style and functionality, so there's nowhere left to go but the opposite direction, and the pendulum had a lot of potential energy built up. Maximalism with modern sensibility is in.

I know, I know.

I used to have a copy of this book. I hope I still do. Thanks for posting.

Amazing how these cultures developed such intricate and beautiful ornament systems — which is functionally a design system — and the best we get now is all white and plywood.

I know, I know.

It’s more interesting to me how these entities that operate the models start making money from them. They are a money pit and there’s not enough $20/month subscribers on earth to support them.

Enterprises that make content with this also don’t want to infringe on copyright. The AI companies don’t have a good story here. The value has not become evident after years.

Not sure if they’re ahead but I think it was smart to not ship anything LLMlike until the regulations get made first movers test the waters.

Casey Newton has been saying all year that these things will be awesome once we can unleash them on our own corpus of data safely. “Siri” already does a great job digging through my photos and picking the good memories. I can let my camera roll become a visual junk drawer now.

Do the same for my email. Make “Find” the tool we always wanted to be. I don’t care if I’m conflating LLMs/AI with other smart tech.

Thanks for this. I didn’t know there was a name for it. We’ve probably accelerated the effects that lead to the equilibrium in many product categories. It takes a big mover like an Apple to take the risk to move the needle now, but so many consumer products lack an Apple in that space.

Yep. As someone who just tried social media again this summer, mostly as a promotional tool, there’s been a downward usage trend. I think the events of October 7 didn’t help.

Too soon to call this good or bad for any singular reason, but what sucks as a result is how hard it is to build an audience now. The network effects are shattered. It’s a shame because I think the Instagram creation tools are kind of neat. If that service was just a digital community bulletin board where every post expired after 30 days or something… idk, could be cool.

Or a massive pendulum swing back to more analog, offline groups.