cmod

https://craigmod.com

In Japan I’ve seen at Starbucks: a guy bring in a giant power supply and plop it down on top of the table to power his tower and monitor like it wasn’t the most sociopathic thing in the world. And another guy used to set up six or seven screens at his table to “daytrade” — turns out he wasn’t day trading at all, they were all running videos of fake daytrading / stock tickers. (I had a friend at that Starbucks who would give me all the details; they had to ban him eventually for disrupting / getting surly with other customers).

Hacker News is the url I use to test most fussy connections because it's so light, and will load under even the slightest trickle of data. When I was doing research in Ghana, it was the only site I could get to reliably load for news in the field, and thus spent a month reading only HN (good luck getting the _New York Times_ to load without a gigabit connection). Appreciate how it stays — and has stayed — svelte and fast throughout the years.

Thank you for building this; over the years the bus animation has gone a bit wonky, but otherwise the page holds up really well. It’s a great library you built.

I've been using this thing daily for about five months and really adore it. I use it as a Kindle replacement and with Readwise Reader as a longform article dump. I've read more longform pieces in the last few months than last few years combined. The device is incredibly light, and maintains battery even if you leave it idle all day (unlike my kindles which often drained themselves). Anyway, it's been a nice surprise, the palma.[0]

[0] https://craigmod.com/roden/091/#digital-reading-in-2024

Is Micro[0] not a better, more purpose-fit solution to these issues? (Syntax highlighting quality, etc)

Prev discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37171294

[0] https://micro-editor.github.io/

YouTube Premium has to be the best pay-for deal of any service. I'm frankly surprised by how much adblocking talk there is when YouTube comes up on HN. YouTube is doing what I want all services to do: total elimination of ads as part of Premium. The result is it's one of my favorite spaces online, and feels miraculous in the quality and quantity of content (docs, interviews, how-tos, history, music, archival footage).

Grateful for YouTube and enthusiastic to pay for premium.

This old site: https://cannedcoffee.org/

KLIM in New Zealand does outstanding work: https://klim.co.nz/

until you have to type your password to unlock it

Thank you. Yes, 100% funded through memberships (https://craigmod.com/membership/) and book + print sales (https://shop.specialprojects.jp/products/kissa-by-kissa-4th-...) since basically 2019.

https://craigmod.com

Wow, just realized it passed its 21st anniversary last month. A few iterations throughout the years, but the current form is basically 13-ish years old, regularly updated.

Also, the date in the email application seems to indicate 1984.

https://archive.is/Z218W

I'd add to this: Take screenshots, and consider compiling them into a book. [0]

[0] https://craigmod.com/journal/digital_physical/#book

The worst is airdrop which will shift and shimmy drop targets as they're discovered …

Substack does suffer from the same potential terminal illness as Medium: An extremely high valuation relative to addressable market. I think both businesses were good low hundred-million-dollar businesses. Medium never found a way to justify their ~$1B cap. Substack's current valuation is currently $650M based on recent funding.

Substack seems to have fostered a pretty good commenting environment for the little I've seen. Especially from authors like George Saunders writing non-political / education-focused "newsletters" (i.e., blogs). In part, this seems to be because of forced login, and the fact that you have a single, shared identity for all publications on the platform (thereby increasing the value of … civility?). But also, of course, the commenters are often limited to paying subscribers, so they are all on the "same team" as it were in a way public, completely open blogs / articles aren't.

Fwiw - paying for YouTube premium removes all ads from all devices and I see it as a strong vote in favor of subscriptions that do so. But, yes, it’s nearly unwatchable in its free state.

Figma is also Thiel Fellowship born …

I would recommend poking around with 11ty,[0] which I find to be significantly simpler than Hugo.

The Go templating of Hugo is extremely confusing for most non-Go people. After using it for years I still constantly look up how to do simple conditionals.

11ty is a very competent, "good enough" generator. We used it to build this site[1] for CERN back in 2019 from scratch over the course of a few days.

[0] https://www.11ty.dev/

[1] https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/

Job "hygiene" and "motivation." The motivation just ain't there for lots of folks.

On "hygiene" — quoting from Clayton Chirstensen's "How Will You Measure Your Life?":

“Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices,” he writes. Critically, it turns out that compensation is also a hygiene factor (as opposed to a motivational factor): “You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation.”

“If you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. *The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.*”

On motivation:

"Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth … The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance."

Many are perhaps realizing they may have decent "hygiene" in their work life, but "motivation" adjacent factors have been dragging, and continue to drag.

What's wild to me is how IRC was the wormhole that essentially got me out of my small hometown, and established everything I've been able to do over the last thirty years. It's scary to think about how much impact something like a chat server could have.

My gateway drug was ANSi art, and that whole scene. I made connections when I was 13 to folks who ran the groups, folks 6-10 years old that me, and was offered my first internship in the Bay Area through IRC. I drove across America in a beat up Honda Civic where the muffler fell off halfway there. But that was it: Through a bit of weird gumption and blocks of colored ascii, I was working at a design agency in Silicon Valley. Everything kinda barreled forward from there.

I think about this quite a bit: Unevenly distributed opportunity. There are a lot of smart, creative, emotionally intelligent folks stuck for lack of opportunity, and it seems like if you value GDP growth or general societal forward momentum on a whole, then maximizing access to those opportunity footholds should be a first-order priority of society.

Anyway, thanks IRC, and the folks who maintained / maintain it.

Most likely; the thrust of the trip was Baikonur bookended by Almaty and Nur-Sultan.

Typographically I found it interesting that the country was attempting to shift away from Cyrillic to a more romanized (??) written form; i.e., "Qazaqstan."

My own experience in Kazakhstan a few years ago was amazing — kind, generous people. I had the most surreal (but standard) Russian Bath experience: sitting with a bunch of naked folks as they self-flog with branches in rooms so hot you needed wool caps to keep the top of your head from singeing. When I was getting dressed a huge guy next to me said something in Russian, I was certain I had committed some bath faux pas, but then he repeated in heavily accented English: "Those boots, suitable in winter?"

Almaty was surprisingly cosmopolitan, walkable, felt eminently livable.

Took the train to Baikonur. Walked on the launch pad, visited the old control rooms. [0]

The whole way: Kindness and gentleness were the two words that kept bouncing around my head. In the middle of nowhere folks were driving sensibly (as opposed to, say, in Morocco where I felt like every car ride was a dice roll). I saw two cars have an accident in Almaty — the drivers calmly stepped out, shook hands, and discussed the situation.

Nur-Sultan was, however, miserable — built for cars, human antagonistic, artificial layout, depressing architecture.

I'd love to get back to Almaty.

Hoping for swift and peaceful resolution on all this.

[0] https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/036/

Because folks in their 20s are usually in a process of self-discovery / growth / change, try to develop the habit of making sure you are investing in friendships that matter and are aligned with your goals. This sounds cold and calculating, but learning to step away from toxic/misaligned friendships and double down on friendships / connections / mentorships that dovetail with and proactively (and symbiotically) support your goals is one of the most difficult-to-measure super powers. It doesn't pay immediate dividends, but if you look at most successful / accomplished people, you realize they're skilled at doing this (implicitly or not).

Also, yes, therapy, although this can be expensive. The difficulty in explaining therapy is that until you've committed to it, the benefits / aspect of it as a tool aren't super grokable. You may need to try out many therapists. They're essentially a pair-programming decompiler. You and this technician work to make sense of the machine code of your mind. Incidentally, therapy also helps realign friendships since you can use therapy to deconstruct personal / social / work issues, and use time with friends to build / elevate one another. Many folks misconstrue a friend who "listens" as a form of therapy; it's very much not. A good therapist will be a master pattern matcher, and will help you build habits to extract yourself from negative loops.

Speaking of negative loops: personally, I found removing alcohol from my diet to be one of the simplest and most profound overall quality-of-life upgrades. I wish I had done it sooner. (I did it around ~29.)

And don't worry too much about investing. Open a Schwab / Etrade account and put $100 in it. Just break the "investing seal." Treat it like a little savings account to start with. And then slowly add to your portfolio. The critical step is making the account. This will allow future decisions to flow more easily.

somewhat related: to be happy, hide from the spotlight [0]

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/10/fame-pres...

Steve May have been a categorical jerk in many ways, but his opinions often had moral grounding and backbone. Just before I joined Flipboard way back in 2010, Jobs had apparently visited the office after their epic launch. He spoke for a few moments about apps and then launched into a lengthy diatribe about the death of fish in the ocean and how a company like Flipboard needed to amplify those kinds of messages. Use its power to save the planet. A strange monologue given the context, but also kind of amazing.

Japan postal service stopped shipping to most of the world last year and are still (I believe) not fully back to world-wide shipping. Supposedly because of JAL contracts and a lack of commercial flights on which they'd usually piggyback.

it's probably worth splitting the hair between spiritual and "literal" time travel