I've been using Next.js for years to deploy static sites deployed to Github pages as well as experiments. It is quite simple and keeps my code organized.
202 karma · joined December 9, 2020
Here's Chapter one from the book on their website: https://drgabormate.com/book/hold-on-to-your-kids/hold-on-to...
There is a window of time from ages 0 to 5 in which critical aspects of a child, their relationship to their parents and family, and the broader world are developed. Our western industrial culture does not support parents and families in their attempts to parent well during that window of time. In order to parent well then, you will most likely need to develop a counter-cultural lifestyle. This book can help you understand why that is important, and how you might do it yourself.
Parenting is a massive undertaking and an unparalleled joy. Congratulations!
1) Cultivate an attitude of optimism and gratitude despite the challenges, perhaps through a study of Stoicism and a cultivation of patience via a study of Buddhism. Gain more pain tolerance. Learn to not care so much about the outcomes, and care more about your own presence and the excellence of your contribution. Learn to care more about other people, rather than just getting the job done. Learn to have more fun, while also "digging the digital ditch". Being calm and steady despite feeling uncomfortable is an invaluable life skill essential to growth and doing big things.
2) Learn to politic. Recommended reading (and there is a lot) would be How to Win Friends and Influence People, as well as Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power. Navigating people and political systems is also an invaluable life skill and essential to growth and going big things.
3) Develop your life outside of work more fully. Consider getting more involved in helping your family, your friends, and your community. Volunteer opportunities abound. Perhaps they need a speedy hacker like you to help them with some part of their tech?
4) Study the challenges of BigCo for startup opportunities. Lots of startups are created by people who ran into a big challenge at a big co, then broke out on their own to solve the problem, then were able to grow by selling back to their previous employers to solve the problems with tech.
Here's his website: https://jonathanstark.com/
Here are some interviews where he covers the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT32G9wmONg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1b7QlQILRo
Also, the School Sucks Project [2] is a great source of knowledge about the history of schooling, as well as education solutions and alternatives to schooling. They have just launched a re-broadcast of the essential 50 episodes (of their over a decade of 800 episodes) that covers the full spectrum of the relevant topics.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE%3Fref=... [2] https://schoolsucksproject.com
Here's a video of Simon Wardley introducing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW9L1uNMCs
And for all the details here's a book: https://www.amazon.com/Wardley-Mapping-Knowledge-Topographic...
And book free online: https://medium.com/wardleymaps
Barry Oshry is one author that has investigated and detailed organizational behavior and developed simplified models that can provide insight and guidance for daily practice and planning. He has multiple books available, I recommend "Seeing Systems". Here's a video recording of a talk covering some of the content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYpO-pK7IFA
https://dorian.substack.com/p/at-any-given-moment-in-a-proce...
One way of understanding Alexander's life and work is that he asked a few important and simple questions, and went through many investigations through research and practice to develop different perspectives and frames to provide answers. He was continuously evolving his approach and experimenting to learn and develop a deeper understanding.
Read Alexander if you're interested in questions like:
- Why are old buildings better (more beautiful, more life affirming)?
Which led him to the question of:
- What is real? What is reality?
His own answers to these questions run counter to materialistic modern ideas, and so this puts his work at odds with his contemporaries. Myself, I believe he was a great among mortals, and that his work will prove immortal.
Here's a great example: https://www.johnlocke.org/good-for-thee-not-for-me-robert-re...
"Robert Reich, a left-wing professor at the University of California Berkeley who served as labor secretary during the Clinton administration, is very concerned about income inequality. He urged Wall Street executives to “invest” in cities by funding low-income housing projects. He also praised a “promising initiative” to promote the construction of affordable housing units in San Francisco.
Reich is not so keen, however, on a proposal to tear down a dilapidated building in his Berkeley neighborhood and replace it with a 10-unit development that would include low-income housing.
Reich and some of his wealthy neighbors are imploring the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate the dilapidated structure, known as the Payson House, as a Berkeley landmark in order to stop the proposed development. In a letter to the commission, Reich said the proposed housing units would destroy the “charm of an older era of Berkeley” and likened the developers’ actions to “the illegal practices and corrupt politics of the late nineteenth century.”
There is a bit of evidence that people are building heavily used web apps with Next.js that connect to databases, backend APIs, and expose APIs of their own, for example: https://nextjs.org/showcase
Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism in 2020: A Short Guide to Mass Movements and Ideology - Daniel Grasso
https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Origins-Totalitarianism-2020-...
From an Amazon review, which I agree with: "Grasso has clearly and effectively translated the twentieth-century’s totalitarian crisis into the modern day.
As someone who struggles to grasp Arendt’s philosophy, I appreciate Grasso’s synthesis of her thoughts and how he relates them to our modern political climate. He does this in a very objective/unbiased way—exposing growth areas in both conservative and liberal thought. Overall, this is a fair, helpful, thoughtful, and necessary work."
Neil is a blow-hard. Due to his own lack of humility and skepticism, he is precisely the worst public figure to represent science. His prescription is a recipe for dark ages totalitarianism.
> "Scientizing public controversies often prevents the recognition that people without science degrees often have important contributions to make."
Yeah. Because politics is about many people coming together, sorting out their needs and desires, and taking action. Not only the high priests.
> "Decision makers expect certainty, whereas science is best at producing new questions."
Decision makers don't expect certainty (they are good at dealing with uncertainty). Rather, decision makers (all of us) produce certainty when we make a decision, by coming up with the current best story about how the world works, what we need and desire, and how we might attain it together. Science adds important information to our current best story of how the world works.
> "Scientizing policy privileges the dimensions of life that are easily quantifiable and renders less visible the ones that are not."
Are we tracking case numbers? What about the fact that 4th graders are now at a 2nd grade level of education? Divorce rate? Depression? Suicide? Social cohesion? Incomes? Crime? Nope, just case numbers. Carry on!
> "Political scientism starkly divides societies into friends and enemies, the enlightened and the ignorant."
The vxd and the unvxd. Ask yourself a simple question how far away are we from recommending sending people away to training camps so they can learn the proper gospel of science? Or simply letting them waste away in a ghetto or gulag? Alternatively, how far are we from inviting those we disagree with over for dinner? How far from a warm embrace of someone wearing a red hat are you? Which are you closer to?
> "In a culture dominated by political scientism, citizens and policymakers forget how to listen, debate, and explore possibilities for compromise or concession with one another."
I recommend we read Hannah Arendt for an understanding of what politics must be for us. This essay points to a fundamental misunderstanding, in my opinion, that politics is about making "the best decisions" but really it's about making "the best decisions we can make together*".
From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
This capacity to act in concert for a public-political purpose is what Arendt calls power. Power needs to be distinguished from strength, force, and violence (CR, 143–55). Unlike strength, it is not the property of an individual, but of a plurality of actors joining together for some common political purpose. Unlike force, it is not a natural phenomenon but a human creation, the outcome of collective engagement. And unlike violence, it is based not on coercion but on consent and rational persuasion.
Arendt maintains that the legitimacy of power is derived from the initial getting together of people, that is, from the original pact of association that establishes a political community, and is reaffirmed whenever individuals act in concert through the medium of speech and persuasion. For her “power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy ... Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow”
I recommend reading all of her books, but for a brief summarization of The Origins of Totalitarianism and why it is important today, this book is well written and poignant: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Origins-Totalitarianism-2020-...
One heuristic for this is the 40-70 rule - a heuristic for decision making. In order to make a decision you should have no less than 40 percent of the information you would prefer to have, and you shouldn't wait to make the decision once you have 70 percent of the information you would prefer have.
For anyone interested in up-leveling their own understanding of design I recommend the articles, videos, courses and other materials available from the Nielsen Norman Group https://www.nngroup.com/
What is the shape of evolution? Many believe the shape of evolution to be a line of deterministic "progress" with a forward and a backward movement that may be accelerated.
Maybe evolution is a process which we are unconsciously subject to and consciously participate in forming. It seems directors, managers, and other employees working for Facebook may be more conscious of the role the Facebook systems play in social, psychological, and evolutionary processes, and the outcomes the systems grow.