Request for Comment: Works in Progress Retreat

Learned: if you’re working remotely, but you want to bring back the daily experience of going to an office with some friendly people, maybe don’t start a coworking space. It probably won’t work. You can recruit a half-dozen friends who like you, and they’ll show up occasionally, but not daily. You can offer Aeron chairs and tasty snacks. You can...

A friend showed me Simple, Non-Commercial, Open Source Notes. (Warning, this video will berate you for 30 minutes.) My values are different from the author’s, but I appreciate their methodical(??) approach to articulate their needs and explore the solution space of digital note-taking systems. Here, I do some of the same. Composing and Editing I...

Warnings: This topic, personal eating habits, is tired. Anything I could say, a different nerd has said better. I currently eat meat but try to avoid eating mammals, which I learned today is called mafism. I’m a mid-30s knowledge worker who lives with a partner. We share some meals spontaneously but don’t plan around it, each keeping our own...

It seems that you want my help making a personnel decision? Sadly, I have little to say about the agent who answered my phone, email, or chat inquiry. They appeared to be a competent human. If I was unknowingly interacting with an LLM, you did a great job fine-tuning it. While I’d have preferred someone with forensic troubleshooting skill and...

I sponsor development of technologies that answer to their users’ own interests, rather than the interests of megacorps (who harvest users’ data and attention, extract rents, impose lock-in, and so on). I particularly support indie developers who are heading upstream of their own economic incentives. I also support some creative work like music...