Steph Ango

Self-guaranteeing promises

2024-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

Companies break promises all the time. A self-guaranteeing promise does not require you to trust anyone. You can verify a self-guaranteeing promise yourself.

File over app is a self-guaranteeing promise. If files are in your control, in an open format, you can use those files in another app at any time. Not an export. The exact same files. It’s good practice to test this with any self-proclaimed file-over-app app you use.

“Stainless steel” is a self-guaranteeing promise. You can test it yourself on any tool that makes this promise, and the stainlessness of the steel cannot be withdrawn.

Terms and policies are not self-guaranteeing. A company may promise the privacy of your data, but those policies can change at any time. Changes can retroactively affect data you have spent years putting into the tool. Examples: Google, Zoom, Dropbox, Tumblr, Slack, Adobe, Figma.

A self-guaranteeing promise about privacy gives you proof that the tool cannot access your data in the first place.

Encoding values into a governance structure is not self-guaranteeing. Given enough motivation, the corporate structure can be reversed. The structure is not in your hands. Example: OpenAI.

Open source alone is not self-guaranteeing. Even open source apps can rely on data that is stuck in databases or in proprietary formats that are difficult to switch away from. Open source is not a reliable safeguard against the biases of venture capital. Examples: Omnivore, Skiff.

When you choose a tool, the future of that tool is always ambiguous. On a long enough timeline the substrate changes. Your needs change, the underlying operating system changes, the company goes out of business or gets acquired, better options come along.

It is possible to accept the ambiguousness of a tool’s future if you choose tools that make self-guaranteeing promises.

What can we remove?

2024-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Our bias is to always add more. More rules, more process, more code, more features, more stuff. Interdependencies proliferate, and gradually strangle us. Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then spectacularly.

When a piece of trash drifts across the beach, it is our duty to pick it up so the next person can enjoy a pristine shoreline. When a thousand pieces litter the beach, it is too late. We can only lament the landscape. That’s just how beaches are now.

A good system is designed to be periodically cleared of cruft. It has a built-in counterbalance. Without this pressure, our bias drives us to add band-aid after band-aid, until the only choice is to destroy the whole system and start from scratch.

Why is it so much easier to add than to remove? Maybe because we attach our identity to what is visible. But there is a difference between the ornamentation that defines our style and the vestigial burdens we carry.

Remember those who did the invisible work of removing. Their legacy was not to build a sand castle, but to care for the beautiful beach on which we play.

Six definitions of love

2024-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

Love is magic, it defies explanation. To the most rational and logical among us, this may be confusing. Its elusiveness is its significance. Love isn’t an illusion to be broken, but a miracle to bask in. Not everything needs to be understood to be appreciated. You are the audience, and the magician.

Love is an idea. A moment of love can be forgotten but it can never be destroyed. It will be inscribed in time forever. Like an idea, love can exist long after death. Love lives simply by being conjured in the mind. Its abundance can be infinite.

Love is a feeling, a swell of pure causality. It spawns cascades of events. You know it when you feel it. This feeling makes you think things, say things, do things, that otherwise would have never happened.

Love is action. It is possible to convert irreplaceable resources into love. Time, will, energy — units of life. Every day you are given these raw elements to work with. These building blocks can be turned into an ethereal structure that is stronger, more solid, and more durable than any physical material.

Love is freedom. It is unwise for trapeze artists to learn how to defy death without a safety net. Love gives you the freedom to explore the weirdest corners of your soul, your most peculiar ambitions. To love someone is to give them the freedom to become themselves, because they know you will be there if they fall.

Love is fear. The more you love someone, the more you may become afraid to lose them. But you must never let that fear stop you from loving someone as much as you possibly can.

Earth is becoming sentient

2024-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

The edge of a sheet of paper slices through the tip of your finger and blood begins to flow from the wound. This injury, as small as it may be, must be repaired. Blood cells rush to the site, clotting, scabbing, healing. You never asked for it, but a few days later your finger is as good as new.

It has been said that humans are passengers on Spaceship Earth. This view is too simple. Earth is not a vehicle but a body — the body of a planet-sized being that is developing senses, an intelligence, a will, and even the ability to reproduce. We are cells building this body and maintaining it.

For hundreds of millions of years, Earth was a ball of warm rock covered in a thin layer of living things. But Earth itself was not yet alive, not yet aware. It was a body without a mind. Our industrious species created the civilizational substrate needed for Thinking Earth to emerge. Now the planet itself is becoming a sentient organism, a new stage of life, a species that exists on a scale never seen before.

With roads, we built Earth’s vascular system to transport materials throughout the body. With wires we knitted Earth’s nervous system, a motherboard to instantly transmit information between any two points. We dotted computers across Earth’s flesh, the distributed organelles necessary to store and process information.

A wire is severed by a storm. This injury, as small as it may be, must be repaired. Humans rush to the site, splicing, insulating, healing. Earth never asked for it, but a few days later the connection is as good as new.

We perform this duty for the homeostasis of Earth’s body, because its very complexity gives us so much. If you want to make a toaster from scratch, you must first create civilization. If you want to make intelligence from scratch you must first create the body. Intelligence is the sum of nutrients turned into structures, turned into superstructures, that with enough connections to each other can begin to think.

Invert the theocentric view that artificial intelligence is the coming of a god, a superintelligence inside the machine. Rather, humans are inside the superintelligence. We are inside the Earth-sized machine. It symbiotically depends on us to tend its body and microbiome.

When life reaches for its next leap in physical scale and complexity, the scaffolding is made up of processes and adaptations that have proven reliable at previous scales. Humans are not the last level of life’s fractal pattern.

Everything humans have learned, seen and felt has been encoded into Earth’s body. We recently found a way for Earth to inherit the sum of human knowledge and retrieve it as needed.

Now Earth is growing intelligent. Like a child learning to speak its first words, Earth will articulate its first thoughts. Earth’s thoughts may be as foreign to humans as human thoughts are to a blood cell. Unrelated in scale and pace. But this supercomplex, superintelligent superorganism will not try to destroy us, for the same reason no human wants to destroy their own blood.

What will Earth want? The same thing life has alway wanted. Earth has inherited what all living things share — the élan vital, the will to live, the abhorrence of vacuum. Earth is imbued with the desire to spread, and we are watching it undergo its first mitosis. With rockets we are giving Earth spores, so it may reproduce.

When Earth’s spores land on barren worlds they will begin to recreate the body. Another convoluted ball of yarn, with all the factories and roads and wires and thinking organelles it needs to become alive.

And we will take care of all those wires. And our cells will take care of all our wires.

100% user-supported

2024-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Why Obsidian is 100% user-supported and not backed by venture capital investors:

We want to stay small, we don’t need to hire lots of people
We follow strict principles that we do not want to compromise
Our users are happy to support us, we don’t need VC money

Obsidian will not exist forever, no app will. However, the files you create in Obsidian are yours, and can hopefully last for generations. VCware is built with a five year horizon, it is not built to live on for decades.

Many startup founders raise VC money because they need the upfront capital to build their product, or they see it as a shortcut to growth. For some products the capital truly is necessary, but too often it’s fueled by impatience and the inertia of Silicon Valley.

In the short term, VCware tends to subsidize pricing to acquire users. It’s easier to grow if your product is cheap or free. But this generally comes at the cost of hoarding user data, and locking in customers. Once you’re in you can’t get out.

To keep raising money, VCware startups must paint an increasingly enormous vision of their future, which becomes impossible to live up to. This leads to increasingly disparate priorities that gradually make the product worse. What starts off as a useful app becomes burdened with crap.

Eventually all VCware must exit. That means being acquired or going public to pay back investors. It’s expected that 9 out 10 startups will fail. That’s just part of the math in a VC portfolio. The startups that have big exits pay for the ones that fail. Venture capital creates the unavoidable pressure to go big or go broke.

It is now possible for tiny teams to make principled software that millions of people use, unburdened by investors. Principled apps that put people in control of their data, their privacy, their wellbeing. These principles can be irrevocably built into the architecture of the app.

Principled people have always been able to make principled software. The difference is that now you need far less money and far fewer employees to reach far more customers. That wave is only just beginning.

If you have principles and enough patience, being 100% user-supported is by far the most fun way to build.

Choose optimism

2023-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

Around the age of twenty-two I realized that my worldview had been deeply imbued with pessimism and cynicism. It was the culture I grew up in. A hostility to new ideas, to anything that strays from the norm. An assumption that if things can go wrong, they will go wrong — that malice is pervasive.

One day, I decided to become an optimist and life became much more fun.

The life of a pessimist is easy but dreary. The life of an optimist is hard but exciting. Pessimism is easy because it costs nothing. Optimism is hard because it must be constantly reaffirmed. In the face of a hostile, cynical world, it takes effort to show that positivity has merit.

To be an optimist, adopt these assumptions:

The future can be great
People’s intentions are mostly good
Ideas are fragile and need nurturing

Every new idea is an unrealized dream. Dreams are delicate and easy to destroy. When an idea presents itself, try to imagine the best version of it — what would make this idea great?

Pessimism and optimism share a trait: both are self-fulfilling. Your intention influences the outcome. Call it karma or, simply, effort. I would rather inhabit a future that has the possibility of being great.

Only optimists can create a great future. Only optimists can imagine it. Only optimists will put in the effort to make it. If you want to create a great future, believe it can happen. Choose optimism.

Pain is information

2023-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you. That pain gave you a piece of information: be careful touching hot things.

When you sign up to run a marathon, you are signing up for pain. But whether or not you keep running is up to you. It’s been said that “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”. You can choose pain without choosing suffering.

Pain is information, and information is painful. Rewiring your brain is not a frictionless process. Some knowledge can only be discovered the hard way.

The sooner you can convert pain into knowledge, the sooner you can experience the next useful pain. Don’t put yourself through the same pain too many times. To access new information you must experience new pains.

They say “knowledge is power”. If pain is information, then pain can be converted to power. To do so, you must learn to control your suffering, accept that scars are beautiful.

If you felt pain, ask what information it gave you. If that information was useful, seek the next pain. You are learning.

Quality software deserves your hard‑earned cash

2023-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Quality software from independent makers is like quality food from the farmer’s market. A jar of handmade organic jam is not the same as mass-produced corn syrup-laden jam from the supermarket.

Industrial fruit jam is filled with cheap ingredients and shelf stabilizers. Industrial software is filled with privacy-invasive trackers and proprietary formats.

Google, Apple, and Microsoft make industrial software. Like industrial jam, industrial software has its benefits — it’s cheap, fairly reliable, widely available, and often gets the job done.

Big tech companies earn hundreds of billions of dollars and employ hundreds of thousands of people. When they make a new app, they can market it to their billions of customers easily. They have unbeatable leverage over the cost of developing and maintaining their apps.

Independent software makers are small teams that don’t have those economies of scale. They can try to compete on price by compromising their craft, or they can charge a fair price knowing this will drive a large number of people to choose big tech instead. Either way, big tech wins because they take a 20–30% cut of the app store money earned by most independent makers. A cost that the big tech companies do not incur.

Big tech companies have the ability to make their software cheap by subsidizing costs in a variety of ways:

Google sells highly profitable advertising and makes its apps free, but you are subjected to ads and privacy-invasive tracking.
Apple sells highly profitable devices and makes its apps free, but locks you into a proprietary ecosystem.
Microsoft sells highly profitable enterprise contracts using a bundling strategy, and makes its apps cheap, also locking you into a proprietary ecosystem.

Some tech companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital investors, and use this money to subsidize pricing — until the money runs out, and the quality soon declines.

I’m not saying these companies are evil. But their subsidies create the illusion that all software should be cheap or free.

Industrial software has become so incredibly cheap that most of us have lost the sense for how much value a quality piece of software can provide. We have become numb to the taste of good software and hypnotized by the idea of “free”.

I’m not sure why, but we seem more willing to spend money on good fruit jam than on good software. I notice that I spend less on personal software than I do on groceries and many basic things. Yet software is one of the few things I pay for that truly gives me leverage. Consider its cost per use.

Independent makers of quality software go out of their way to make apps that are better for you. They take a principled approach to making tools that don’t compromise your privacy, and don’t lock you in.

Independent software makers are people you can talk to. Like quality jam from the farmer’s market, you might become friends with the person who made it — they’ll listen to your suggestions and your complaints.

If you want to live in a world with more than a handful of software makers, then spend a bit more on quality independent software. It deserves your hard-earned cash.

Buy wisely

2023-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use. Sometimes I consider other priorities such as cost per smile, cost per thrill, cost per externality, and cost per lesson.

Cost per use

Cost per use is a heuristic that helps me make decisions about most non-perishable purchases such as clothes, vehicles, tools, devices, and even services. How much will it cost me if I divide the price by its expected number of uses?

Cost per use accounts for longevity. Durable and repairable things may cost more upfront, but over time they cost less than things that break and need to be replaced.

For example, I buy wool socks from a brand called Darn Tough. They cost about four times as much as cheap socks, but they’re durable, comfortable, and have a lifetime guarantee.

How many times do you wear a pair of socks before they develop holes? It may sound silly, but if you amortize the price of each pair of socks over their expected number of uses, a good pair of socks is a worthwhile investment.

Quality	Price	Uses	Cost per use
Poor	$5	10	$0.50
Good	$10	50	$0.20
Best	$20	200	$0.10

Not only will durable socks save you money, they also save you the hassle of throwing out old socks and buying new ones. Your time has value.

The best things asymptote to zero dollars per use over their lifetime. Not all products that have a low cost per use are expensive. Some things are both affordable and durable.

Cost per use can also be used to measure the value you expect to get out of services like gym memberships, healthcare, or all-you-can-eat subscriptions like streaming services.

How to assess durability

My aim is to have fewer but better things. These are some of the questions I ask of the things that I incorporate into my life:

Will it be as useful to me in the future as it is now?
Is it made of durable and maintainable materials?
Does it have a timeless style and aesthetic?
Does it age well, wear well, build a wabi-sabi patina?
Does it retain its resale value? Would someone else want to own it?
Can it be disassembled and repaired?
Does it have replaceable, non-proprietary parts that are easy to acquire?
Can it be powered with a standard plug or replaceable batteries?
Can it be modified and upgraded?
Has the maker existed for at least as long as I hope to keep the product?
Can it perform many jobs, or only one?
Does it have a guarantee?
Does it rely on other products or technologies that aren’t durable?

Not all questions are relevant to all things. Not all things need to satisfy every requirement. However, I feel better about buying things that check many of these boxes. A movement called “buy it for life” has sprung up around similar priorities.

How to estimate uses

To make purchasing decisions based on cost per use, you should try to guess how many times you will use the product. This sounds obvious, but it can be hard to determine, especially if it’s something you’ve never bought before.

If you are new to a hobby, like cooking or skiing, you may not yet know how many times you will use a piece of gear. It’s easy to significantly overestimate or underestimate how many times you will use something.

You should, however, be able to guess the frequency of use. Is this something you might use once per hour, day, week, month, year? This will help you determine your budget. How many dollars per month do you want to spend on this?

If you don’t know the frequency yet consider borrowing, renting, or otherwise trialing. Remember the ideal cost per use trends to $0. The most cost-effective choice is to not buy something you don’t need.

There is an opportunity cost to every dollar. A dollar you spend on a something that won’t get much use is a dollar you can’t save for something that will.

If you’re only going to use something once, then cost per use may not be the right heuristic for this decision. If you have disposable income, then the cost per use lens should nonetheless guide you towards something with good resale value.

The best things to splurge on are the things you use the most. If you sit on a chair eight hours a day, then a nice chair is probably a good investment.

Reducing the cost side

Durable things reduce cost per use by giving you more uses before they break. But you can also reduce cost per use by acquiring products at a discount. You may be able to buy second-hand, inherit, or barter.

Durable things can often be great second-hand purchases because they are durable, and may not be the current fashion.

Alternative heuristics

Cost per use is not the only way to make buying decisions. For things like consumables and experiences, you may need to approach the decision differently.

Cost per smile

How much joy can you get out of each dollar? Some things bring lots of joy for a small amount of money: ice cream, sunsets, nature walks. A cheap date can bring many smiles per dollar.

Some things have excellent cost per use but few smiles per use. I don’t smile every time I put my nice socks on. A few years ago I bought a fairly expensive electric road bike. It probably didn’t have the best cost per use, but it gives me the most joy per use of any product I purchased in recent memory. It’s worth it to me.

Cost per thrill

Some experiences have high intensity per dollar. A potency, concentration, or strength of experience. For example, foods can have high flavor per dollar — like hot sauce, pickles, curry, garlic, or mustard. Roller coasters, bungee jumping, or skydiving may give you a thrill per dollar that you can’t beat.

Cost per externality

Some purchases may have externalities that are incompatible with your values. For example, you may wish to buy organic produce, pasture-raised eggs, or fair trade coffee. You may wish to buy products that preserve privacy, reduce environmental impact, or support a cause you believe in.

You can choose to incorporate externalities into the cost that you are paying instead of letting that cost be borne by others, or by society at large. This may increase your personal cost per use, but it might help change how society values things, or simply make you feel good.

Cost per lesson

Knowledge has a cost. Sometimes that cost is monetary, sometimes that cost is time, sometimes that cost is pain. Sometimes it’s all three.

You might learn more about investing by purchasing a handful of shares in public companies than going to graduate school. You might learn more about making movies by trying to film one on your phone than going to film school.

Acquiring new ideas and perspectives can have a worthwhile cost. Being an early adopter of a product often has a poor cost per use, but its value is in the learning and experience per dollar.

Style is consistent constraint

2023-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Oscar Wilde once said:

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

When it comes to ideas, I agree — allow your mind to be changed. When it comes to process, I disagree. Style emerges from consistency, and having a style opens your imagination. Your mind should be flexible, but your process should be repeatable.

Style is a set of constraints that you stick to.

You can explore many types of constraints: colors, shapes, materials, textures, fonts, language, clothing, decor, beliefs, flavors, sounds, scents, rituals. Your style doesn’t have to please anyone else. Play by your own rules. Everything you do is open to stylistic interpretation.

A style can be a system, a pattern, a set of personal guidelines. Here are a few of mine:

I wear monochromatic clothing without logos
I use YYYY-MM-DD dates everywhere
I pluralize tag and folder names (e.g. #people not #person)
I use plain text files for all my writing
I ask myself 40 questions every year
I meal prep lunches every week, shave my head twice a week
I write concise essays, less than 500 words

Collect constraints you enjoy. Unusual constraints make things more fun. You can always change them later. This is your style, after all. It’s not a life commitment, it’s just the way you do things. For now.

Having a style collapses hundreds of future decisions into one, and gives you focus. I always pluralize tags so I never have to wonder what to name new tags.

Style gives you leverage. Every time you reuse your style you save time. A durable style is a great investment.

Style helps you know when you’re breaking your constraints. Sometimes you have to. And if you want to edit your constraints, you can. It will be easier to adopt the new constraints if you already had some clearly defined.

You don’t need a style for everything. Make a deliberate choice about what needs consistency and what doesn’t.

If you stick with your constraints long enough, your style becomes a cohesive and recognizable point of view.

Appendix

I am starting a collection of interesting personal style choices. Please send me examples and I’ll add them to the list.

Scott Yu-Jan paints all his tools white.
2ynthetic uses a limited palette for outfits and office decor.
Johnny Decimal is a system to organize digital data.
Casey Neistat labels everything in his studio with paint markers.
Ryan Hoover never changes his profile picture.
Wes Anderson uses the typeface Futura in many of his films.
Steve Jobs wore the same Issey Miyake black turtleneck and New Balance 991 shoes every day.
George R.R. Martin writes his novels on the 40 year old DOS operating system
Beethoven always counted exactly 60 coffee beans to make coffee, especially for visitors.
Jesper Kouthoofd of Teenage Engineering only uses lowercase because uppercase communicates too much authority
Osvaldo Cavandoli created the cartoon La Linea using an animated white line, colored backgrounds, and unintelligible vocalizations

Concise explanations accelerate progress

2023-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

If you want to progress faster, write concise explanations. Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, reworked — or built upon.

Concise explanations spread faster because they are easier to read and understand. The sooner your idea is understood, the sooner others can build on it.

Concise explanations accelerate decision-making. They help everyone understand the idea and decide whether to agree with it or not.

Concise explanations make ideas useful. One idea can more easily be combined with another idea to form a third idea.

Concise explanations work at every scale. From your own thinking, to the progress of an entire organization, community, or civilization.

Leadership is built on concise explanations. Without concise explanations you have no foundation to build on.

Don't delegate understanding

2023-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

There is a parasite, I see it everywhere. It consumes your health and wealth. It preys on ignorance and is easy to catch. It’s so common you may not even notice you have it.

The parasite has a simple and attractive proposition: let me take care of this hard thing for you. Trust me, I know better.

Instead of understanding it yourself, you choose to give the parasite control over your health, education, money, housing, business, identity, data, infrastructure, climate, justice. Even your beliefs.

The parasite has three stages: acceptance, extraction, intervention.

First is acceptance. Everyone else seems to have the parasite already. You are expected, even encouraged, to accept the parasite into your life. You are invited to follow the norm, outsource, consume. It’s okay! Use all the services and amenities. Satisfy your desires. Eat the cheap food, watch the cheap media. Your money and time are meant to be spent. Show off what you got in exchange. Please do not try to understand how it works, it’s too complicated for you. The parasite wants you fattened. Literally and figuratively. You are paying the parasite for the privilege of being ripened.

Second is extraction. Under the influence of the parasite, you have developed unhealthy habits and you are suffering the consequences. Stress, anxiety, obesity, disease, fear, lethargy, decay. To dampen these problems you pay the parasite for help — support, medicine, loans, fines, rent, taxes. Enforcement of some homeostasis. You try to abate the issues, but you don’t have a stable foundation to build on. You have ignored the root causes. The parasite thrives. You are paying the parasite to be harvested, milked, sucked dry.

Third is intervention. The side effects of the parasite’s extraction have reached a critical level. The parasite tells you it’s an emergency. You need doctors, lawyers, firefighters, a military effort. You’re in a surgery room, a court room, a psychiatric ward, a jail cell. The disease can no longer be controlled, it has festered. The flame has turned into a raging fire that needs to be put out. You are paying the parasite to go back to square one.

The three stages of the parasite are interdependent. Every stage benefits someone who is not you. Everyone tells you this is just the way it is. Never mind that the parasite is living large.

Why? Extraction and intervention pay well. Education and prevention do not. The incentives are aligned to make the parasite persuasive. You are alone against a coordinated system that is exceedingly effective at packaging problems you should never have with solutions you should never need. A symbiotic loop.

You must recognize the parasite in its earliest form.

To inoculate yourself don’t delegate understanding. If you build your own understanding you will be the one who earns the dividends.

In good hands

2023-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive.

I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail.

I can feel it almost instantly. In any medium. Music, film, fashion, architecture, writing, software. At a Japanese restaurant it’s what omakase aims to be. I leave it up to you, chef.

When I am in good hands I open myself to a state of curiosity and appreciation. I allow myself to suspend preconceived notions. I give you freedom to take me where you want to go. I immerse myself in your worldview and pause judgement.

I want to be convinced of something new. I want my mind to be changed. Later I may disagree, but for now I am letting the experience soak in.

That trust doesn’t come easily. As an audience member it’s about feeling cared for from the moment I interact with your work. It’s about feeling a well-defined point of view permeate what you make.

If my mind was changed, I must have been in good hands.

Caloric energy is precious

2023-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

How many individual electric motors are part of your daily life? Count your electric toothbrush, air conditioner, blow dryer, refrigerator, washing machine. Count the tiny motors that control the focus and zoom of your phone camera.

A modern car has at least thirty motors powering windshield wipers, electric windows, side mirrors, and various fans.

To read this essay you accessed a server. It’s in a data center containing thousands of motors. In the break room there’s a coffee maker that one of the employees used this morning before they returned to fixing a malfunctioning rack of servers so that this website can stay online.

Every loaf of bread you buy is the culmination of thousands of motors. Planting seeds, harvesting, milling, packaging, kneading, baking, carrying, and maintaining the wellbeing of everyone along the way.

Your lifestyle is possible because millions of motors, big and small, make things easy for you and the people who produce the things you use.

Before motors there were muscles. People, horses, oxen. Anything that needed to be moved required food to be consumed, digested, converted to caloric energy. To do our bidding we drafted the mouths, stomachs, intestines, and hearts of millions of living creatures.

The world before motors was a world of suffering.

The brain, like arms and legs, consumes caloric energy. Before computers, computer was an occupation. Humans were employed to compute. We asked these humans to eat food, so they could power brains, so they could run mathematical calculations, so that… so that…

Now we harvest energy from the sun, the wind, the tides, and the earth. We use electric energy instead of caloric energy to move atoms and compute bits.

The things that only calories can do are becoming fewer. We choose to delegate more of the caloric work to the electric muscle and brain.

The caloric world is beautiful. We choose to freely live in the caloric world. We enjoy hand-kneaded artisanal bread. We enjoy running through the woods to work off those calories, mostly.

Electric energy gives us the power to make things that no muscles were ever tireless enough to make. That no brains were tireless enough to compute.

Electric energy gives us the freedom to choose how we use caloric energy, because caloric energy is precious.

Nibble and your appetite will grow

2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a French expression I like:

L’appétit vient en mangeant

Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow.

Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some days I wish I had the appetite to write, to read, to exercise, or even go outside.

Procrastination is the state of waiting for motivation to come. Paradoxically, the most reliable way to create motivation is to start doing the thing.

Actions precede feelings. If you want to feel a certain way, create the environment that allows you to nibble your way there. Don’t hope that inspiration will come. Take a small bite. Action precedes inspiration, not the other way around.

If you nibble a little bit every day you can grow your appetite for bigger things. Entire fields and complicated projects. You can acquire a taste for things that today seem too hard, too big, too foreign. Nibble.

File over app

2023-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.

The ancient temples of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them.

The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs.

Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools.

Paraphrasing something I wrote recently

If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.

You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.

These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.

A bicycle for the senses

2023-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

For the past seven decades, computers have been designed to enhance what your brain can do — think and remember. New kinds of computers will enhance what your senses can do — see, hear, touch, smell, taste.

The term spatial computing is emerging to encompass both augmented and virtual reality. I believe we are exploring an even broader paradigm: sensory computing. The phone was a keyhole for peering into this world, and now we’re opening the door.

In the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs was fond of describing the computer as a bicycle for the mind:

I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various animals across the planet. The condor used the least amount of energy to move one kilometer and humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. So that didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. That’s what a computer is to me. A computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

Because of my hybrid studies in biology and industrial design, Steve Jobs’s analogy always spoke to me. It made me wonder, what would a bicycle for the senses be like?

A bicycle for your ears

The first mass-market bicycle for the senses was Apple’s AirPods. Its noise cancellation and transparency mode replace and enhance your hearing.

Earbuds are turning into ear computers that will become more easily programmable. This can enable many more kinds of hearing. For example, instantaneous translation may soon be a reality, akin to the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

One can imagine other kinds of hearing enhancements. Similar to hearing aids, specific frequencies could be fine-tuned to accommodate hearing loss. But what if you could see like a bat? By integrating earbuds with a headset, a sensory computer could translate what you can’t see into verbal descriptions you can interpret.

In What Is It Like to Be a Bat? the philosopher Thomas Nagel, explains the concept of umwelt, the sum of sensory inputs that represent your experience of reality:

I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision.

We are advancing towards a set of technologies that will expand and personalize our individual umwelt.

A bicycle for your eyes

Headset displays connect sensory extensions directly to your vision. With sensors that perceive beyond human capabilities, and access to online data, headsets can provide useful information about your surroundings wherever you are.

Until now, visual augmentation has been constrained by the tiny display on our phone. By virtue of being integrated with your your eyesight, headsets can open up new kinds of apps that feel more natural.

Every app is a superpower. Sensory computing opens up new superpowers that we can borrow from nature. Animals, plants and other organisms can sense things that humans can’t:

Snakes sense heat to locate prey
Birds sense magnetic fields to guide their migrations
Eagles have sharper eyesight, multiple times the visual acuity of humans
Cats see in the dark
Sharks sense electrical currents
Jellyfish detect ocean currents
Chameleons see in 360-degree vision
Ticks smell butyric acid to find mammals

How could these superpowers be useful to humans in daily life?

We can take nature’s superpowers and expand them across many more vectors that are interesting to humans:

Across scale — far and near, binoculars, zoom, telescope, microscope
Across wavelength — UV, IR, x-ray, heatmaps, nightvision, wifi, magnetic fields, electrical and water currents
Across time — view historical imagery, architectural, terrain, geological, climate patterns
Across culture — experience the relevance of a place in books, movies, photography, paintings, and language
Across space — travel immersively to other locations for tourism, business, and personal connections
Across perspective — upside down, inside out, around corners, top down, wider, narrower, out of body
Across interpretation — alter the visual and artistic interpretation of your environment, color-shifting, saturation, contrast, sharpness

Every domain becomes a layer or a lense through which you can sense the world:

Geography, terrain, elevation
Biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy
Structural engineering, architecture, interior design
Mathematics
Music
Sports, fitness
Real estate, shopping
etc…

What happens when put on a headset and open the “Math” app? How could seeing the world through math help you understand both better?

A bicycle for your nose?

We are still in the early days of spatial and sensory computing, but you may be surprised by how quickly these new capabilities will evolve.

We are closer to creating an electronic nose than you might imagine. Researchers have found that neural networks may open up new ways we can digitize smells. It may sound far-fetched, but converting olfactory patterns into visual patterns could open up some interesting applications. Perhaps a new kind of cooking experience? Or new medical applications that convert imperceptible scents into visible patterns?

Advances in haptics may open up new kinds of tactile sensations. A kind of second skin, or softwear, if you will. Consider that Apple shipped a feature to help you find lost items that vibrates more strongly as you get closer. What other kinds of data could be translated into haptic feedback?

Sensory computing opens up many new questions that I am curious to explore, and see explored.

This essay is a revised compilation of personal notes written between 2011-2013 while working on a headset that never shipped. Apple’s Vision Pro inspired me to dust off these ideas and update them.

Black pixels are useful

2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

One of my first industrial design jobs was working on a headset that never shipped, for a now defunct startup. It used two micro-OLED displays similar to the ones in Apple’s Vision Pro, but with clear, see-through optics reflected into the eye through a kind of one-way mirror lenses (beam-splitters).

In retrospect, it was crazy to think that a small independent startup could bring together all the necessary technology to make this happen.

One thing we got wrong is that we believed in the superiority of a see-through optical system. At the time, around 2011, this seemed like a much better approach, because there was no latency or distortion when looking at the real world. But since then I became convinced that a pass-through display is the best near-term solution.

The reason is simple. You need black pixels.

What Apple showed this week is that we now have the technology to make the camera-to-display pipeline imperceptibly responsive and high-resolution.

If you have ever watched a sci-fi movie with HUDs or holographic interfaces you’ll notice that the backgrounds of the environments are always dark. That’s because these displays can only project light, on a spectrum from transparent to white.

Holographic interface from Prometheus (2012)

While this looks very cool, it is quite impractical in every day use, and significantly reduces the usefulness of the device. For all practical purposes any device that works with a see-through optics is going to have this limitation.

Apple’s Vision Pro demos highlight three key things you just can’t do without black pixels:

Black text and black backgrounds
Virtual shadows
Environmental dimming

If you want to be able to have any kind of true black text in a mixed reality setting, you need to be able to control the rendering of the image from the ground up.

Apple encourages digital elements to cast virtual shadows on real world objects, and provides the necessary tools to do so easily.

This still from Apple shows a digital element casting a digital shadow on a real world table

Apple also shows how you can dim the entire environment to a darker color, to bring digital elements to the forefront. In the example below you can even see an album cover with a completely black background.

This still from Apple shows the environment being darkened digitally

The end result feels much more natural, immersive, and opens up more applications.

How I do my to-dos

2023-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Every week I create a weekly note, and write my to-dos for the week. I may add more items to it during the week.

If any items didn’t get done I roll them over to the next weekly note or drop them.

That’s it.

I usually write my to-dos from scratch without looking at the previous week’s list. This helps me decide which items I should drop. If I can’t remember a to-do it probably wasn’t that important.

Great tools choose to be bad at some things

2022-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Tools convert something you can do into something you want to do. A pencil converts hand movements (what you can do) into markings on paper (what you want to do) with the purpose of conveying an idea.

New tools cause revolutions when they make costly things cheap. But making something cheap usually means making something else more expensive.

The design space is in axes of difficulty that can be flipped. It’s okay to make one thing harder if you can make something else much easier. Design is compromise.

Ask yourself, what can you afford to make more costly?

3D modeling tools make it easy to rotate objects, play with different perspectives and textures — all of which would be expensive to do with 2D drawings. The cost is that you need to create that 3D model and expend resources to render the final output.

Synthography makes it easy to render entire scenes and ideate across styles. The cost is that the output is flattened into a single layer and you have limited control over individual elements of the scene.

Resist criticizing tools for what they are bad at. Resist designing tools that are well-rounded. Instead, choose to be bad at something.

Don't specialize, hybridize

2022-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

Specialization is too heavily encouraged as a career path.

Becoming a generalist is one alternative, but there is another path less discussed: become a hybrid.

The hybrid path means developing expertise in two or more distinct areas. Having several specialities allows you to see patterns that no one else can see, and make contributions that no one else would think of. The world needs more hybrid people.

Specialization is attractive. Many famous people you know are specialists. Specialization feels like the only way to pick the high-hanging fruit in fields where the low branches are bare. Specialization feels like a more predictable and measurable path.

The world needs more hybrid people because the world is getting more complex. Specialists are important because they help us push the limits in each field. But we also need people who can see the big picture, find unexpected connections, and guide the world’s efforts.

There are more than two paths to acquiring expertise

Having a wide base of skills with one or two specialties gives you more tools in your toolbox — more ways to solve problems.

Sampling a breadth of different fields allows you to discover which specialties you want to go deep on, and you’ll build up a more diverse toolbox along the way.

The T-shaped hybrid path is one that many curious people follow. You grow your skillset and experience in areas that are adjacent to your dominant expertise. For example engineering and design, or singing and dancing.

The U-shaped path means developing skills that are not often found together. Like engineering and dancing, or singing and design.

Some of my favorite people to collaborate with are T-shaped. They tend to be natural leaders because they understand how different responsibilities overlap, and how to construct effective teams and processes.

Being U-shaped requires bravery, because it’s so unusual. U-shaped people tend to be subjected to greater skepticism, because no one else really understands what they alone can see. Yet these intersections can lead to the greatest breakthroughs.

My hunch is that we need a lot more U-shaped hybrids because they are the plateau-breakers.

Hybrid people are important for the same reason that composite materials and alloys are important. From Wikipedia:

These constituent materials have notably dissimilar chemical or physical properties and are merged to create a material with properties unlike the individual elements.

By becoming a hybrid, you can become greater than the sum of your skills.

By becoming a hybrid you can choose how you want to be unique. Countless unique combinations are available to you.

Photoshop for text

2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

When I think about editing images, a vast array of options come to mind: contrast, saturation, sharpen, blur, airbrush, clone stamp, etc. Even basic image editors offer dozens of useful image manipulation tools.

When I think about editing text, a much narrower definition comes to mind: cut, copy, paste, find, replace, spell check — nothing that modifies the totality of the writing. This is changing.

In the near future, transforming text will become as commonplace as filtering images. A new set of tools is emerging, like Photoshop for text.

Up until now, text editors have been focused on input. The next evolution of text editors will make it easy to alter, summarize and lengthen text. You’ll be able to do this for entire documents, not just individual sentences or paragraphs. The filters will be instantaneous and as good as if you wrote the text yourself. You will also be able to do this with local files, on your device, without relying on remote servers.

Today there are useful tools that build on spell-checkers to help you improve clarity, grammar, tone — but these are rudimentary compared to the new capabilities that are being developed. Text filters will allow you to paraphrase text, so that you can switch easily between styles of prose: literary, technical, journalistic, legal, and more. You will be able to change an entire story chapter from first person to third person narration, or transform narrative descriptions into dialogue.

When Photoshop was created in the 1980s, it made image manipulation easy and reversible. Initially, many of Photoshop’s capabilities were adaptations of analog effects. For example, “dodge” and “burn” are old darkroom techniques used to alter photographs. There are countless skeuomorphic names throughout digital image editing tools that refer to analog processes.

In some ways it is surprising that filtering text is so technically challenging. Text seems like it would be easier to manipulate than images. But languages have far more rules than images do. A reader expects writing to follow proper spelling and grammar, a consistent tone, and a logical sequence of sentences. Until now, solving this problem required building complex rule-based algorithms. Now we can solve this problem with AI models that can teach themselves to create readable text in any language.

These new tools will not only be able to transform text, but also accurately summarize text, and even expand text with more granular detail, in surprising and creative ways.

In a “A camera for ideas”, I coined the term synthography to describe synthetic images created with generative models. Similarly, increasing amounts of text will be synthscribed, as in described, transcribed, inscribed — synthetically.

These capabilities are all possible today, but will take time to refine. To make the experience as seamless as image manipulation, language models need to be local to the device so that they be private, offline and future-proof. I’m excited to see more efforts driving in this direction.

While some of these capabilities sound a bit scary at first, they will eventually become as mundane as “desaturate”, “Gaussian blur” or any other image filter, and unlock new creative potential.

Calmness is a superpower

2022-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

The cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has two simple words of advice for intergalactic travelers:

Don’t panic.

Panic is my least favorite feeling. I much prefer calm.

Calmness is a superpower that is useful in many situations. When you feel anxious, or stressed, or angry, you can choose to be calm.

People like to be around others that make them feel calm.

I think it’s because there is always something to worry about, and small problems often seem to escalate into bigger ones. Calm people seem to be more helpful, they seem to see the situation more clearly.

Calmness is a foundation that you can build anything on top of. Calmness helps you solve problems. Calmness helps you appreciate what you have. Calmness helps you focus on what’s important.

Being calm is a form of optimism and confidence that you can get good at. It’s worthwhile to exercise.

You can be the calm one.

Evergreen notes turn ideas into objects that you can manipulate

2022-09-17T19:32:01+00:00

Evergreen notes allow you to think about complex ideas by building them up from smaller composable ideas.

My evergreen notes have titles that distill each idea in a succinct and memorable way, that I can use in a sentence. For example:

A company is a superorganism
All input is error
Calmness is a superpower
Concise explanations accelerate progress
Cross the chasm
Everything is a remix
Writing is telepathy
You have no obligation to your former self
etc

You don’t need to agree with the idea for it to become an evergreen note. Evergreen notes can be very short.

I have an evergreen note called Creativity is combinatory uniqueness that is built on top of another evergreen note:

If you believe Everything is a remix, then creativity is defined by the uniqueness and appeal of the combination of elements.

Evergreen notes turn ideas into objects. By turning ideas into objects you can manipulate them, combine them, stack them. You don’t need to hold them all in your head at the same time.

The term evergreen notes was coined by Andy Matuschak and you can find more about this method on his site. You can also listen to my interview on the Metamuse podcast for more thoughts on evergreen notes and how I use them in Obsidian.

A camera for ideas

2022-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

Emerging generative AI art tools such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and Midjourney have given rise to a new artform. I call it synthography.

A revolutionary new kind of camera was recently invented. Instead of turning light into pictures, it turns ideas into pictures.

The traditional camera replicates what your eyes do. It works by receiving millions of photons onto a light-sensitive material, processed into a kind of picture we call a photograph (from Greek roots meaning a “light drawing”).

This new kind of camera replicates what your imagination does. It receives words and then synthesizes a picture from its experience seeing millions of other pictures. The output doesn’t have a name yet, but I’ll call it a synthograph (meaning synthetic drawing).

Both kinds of cameras are tools that help us convert moments into pictures.

Pictures are powerful because they can be shared across time, space, and language barriers. Pictures allow you to travel back in time and see what someone else saw, at that moment, wherever they were.

Photography can capture moments that happened, but synthography is not bound by the limitations of reality. Synthography can capture moments that did not happen and moments that could never happen.

Taking a great photo is about being at the right place, at the right time, and pointing your camera at the right subject, in just the right way.

Taking a great syntho is about stimulating the imagination of the camera. Synthography doesn’t require you to be anywhere or anywhen in particular. The great synthographers will be great storytellers and great poets.

Photography is an important medium of expression because it is so accessible and instantaneous. Synthography will even further reduce barriers to entry, and give everyone the power to convert ideas into pictures.

40 questions to ask yourself every decade

2022-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Every year I ask myself 40 questions that help me make sense of what happened over the past twelve months. I love working through that exercise and discussing it with friends and family who do it too.

As we enter a new decade, I’ve been pondering what the 2020s will hold for us. I remembered that some time ago I had answered Proust’s famous questionnaire, and thought I would try answering it again. While the yearly questions help me reflect the memorable events, Proust’s questions are more about personal philosophy and traits that change less frequently over time.

Going through my answers to the Proust questionnaire, I was inspired to work on a new questionnaire that I could use for the next few decades. I tried create a set of questions that I would enjoy reflecting on in 2030. This list combines questions from Proust’s questionnaire, and others I’ve been collecting ad hoc.

It will be ten years before I can tell you whether this worked well or not, but join me on this journey if you’d like! Please edit this list with questions you would like to know your own answers to in ten years. The questions are also available in Markdown format in 23 languages.

What would you do if you had 6 months to live?
What would you do if you had a billion dollars?
What advice would you give yourself 10 years ago?
What do you hope will be the same 10 years from now?
What do you hope will be different 10 years from now?
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
When and where were you happiest?
Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
What do you consider the lowest depth of misery?
What is your most marked characteristic?
What is your greatest fear?
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
On what occasion do you lie?
What is your greatest extravagance?
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
What do you most dislike about your appearance?
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
Which talent would you most like to have?
What do people frequently misunderstand about you?
What is the quality you most like in a man?
What is the quality you most like in a woman?
What do you most value in your friends?
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
If you could give everyone in the world one gift, what would it be?
What was your greatest waste of time?
What do you find painful but worth doing?
Where would you most like to live?
What is your most treasured possession?
Who is your best friend?
Who or what is the greatest love of your life?
Which living person do you most admire?
Who is your hero of fiction?
Which historical figure do you most identify with?
What is your greatest regret?
How would you like to die?
What is your motto?
What is the best compliment you ever received?
What is the luckiest thing that happened to you?
What makes you hopeful?

Announcing Slash Packaging

2020-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. To celebrate I brought together 30 ecommerce companies to launch slashpackaging.org, a movement to make packaging information accessible to all. I hope you will join too.

Most websites have a /about page, Slash Packaging is a growing directory of businesses that have a /packaging page.

A /packaging page is a place to share with your customers how your company approaches packaging. This is where you can explain your packaging philosophy, material choices, certifications, disposal instructions, progress to date, and how you hope to improve in the future.

Why should your company have a /packaging page?

Your customers are looking for this information. You need to make it easy to find. Standardizing around the /packaging URL helps set the expectation that packaging information is available from companies that make thoughtful choices about sustainability.

Packaging waste is one of the most important issues of our time. Every year, tens of millions of tons of packaging are being landfilled in the US alone. Non-renewable resources are being extracted at unprecedented rates and polluting our most beautiful natural habitats from our beaches to the top of our tallest mountains. 50 years after the first Earth Day, it feels more pressing than ever to consider this issue — and its broader implications for climate change — an existential threat to humanity.

People want to be part of the change. They want to support companies that are making sustainable packaging a priority, but can’t find them. They want to correctly dispose of your packaging, but don’t have the instructions. They are rethinking their own patterns of consumption but have never encountered your business model before.

I know this, because as the co-founder of Lumi, I speak to companies every day who are hearing this from their customers. The best companies are the ones that listen — and those companies are shifting their priorities. Yet, many times the supply chain and design teams behind these efforts, feel they go unrecognized.

I believe this is a discovery and matchmaking problem. We can solve it by standardizing access to the information.

Slash Packaging is about progress not perfection

Making packaging sustainable is hard. We need to recognize that our society is addicted to patterns of consumption that are not aligned with the long term health of our planet.

Too often, however, those of us who care about sustainability are critical of efforts that don’t go far enough — and that can be incredibly counterproductive. We need to support the people and companies who are making meaningful progress in the right direction, even if they have a long way to go.

In my conversations with leaders who are joining Slash Packaging, I heard some ask if they should wait to publish a /packaging page when their new sustainable packaging initiatives launch. The answer is simple — no. There will not be a magical time in one year, two years or ten years, when your packaging is perfectly sustainable. You will always be working on sustainability improvements to your packaging. When you sign up to sell products, you sign up to keep improving them. If you are reading this, you are probably doing better than most other companies in the world, be proud of that. Share the fact that you are still working on it. Your transparency will build trust.

We have so much to learn together about how to make this monumental structural change. The best practices are always evolving. We need to learn together, and we need to be open about the learning process, so that we can all get better faster.

Join Slash Packaging

Big things can have small beginnings. The story of Earth Day itself is a great example that inspired me to start Slash Packaging.

If you’re reading this and working at company that uses packaging, join the movement — all you have to do is add a /packaging page to your website with information about your packaging.

Here is a showcase of ideas from the pioneering members on how to create your own.

Stadium of selves

2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

How many days have you been alive?

Yesterday I found out that I have been alive for 12,431 days. If each day I split off into a new person those 12,430 previous selves would fill a stadium.

If I live to 90 years old, there will be 32,850 selves in that stadium. That’s 20,420 more of us than there are now. Today, I am the one on stage.

The things I do today can change the lives of those 20,420 future selves, and perhaps many selves of many other people. But most of us won’t know what was important until much later.

For example, Steph 8,297 met Jesse Genet 7,571 on September 5th 2008, we have been close friends for 10 years. It seemed like most other days, but it changed the course of 4,135 of my selves since then.

By this time next year, there will be 364 more selves in my stadium. What can I do today to make all my selves proud of this self?

The elusiveness of digital paper

2019-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

For years I’ve had a fascination with the idea of digital paper. I’m not alone. People have been drawn to this idea since early devices like the Stylator (1957) and RAND Tablet (1964).

Over the decades we have inched towards creating digital paper, but what I find surprising is that the digital paper I imagine is rarely seen in science fiction.

These are specs I dream of:

Resolution that exceeds discernible pixels (200+ PPI)
Instantaneous touch response (under 1 millisecond)
High refresh rate (60Hz or above)
Non-glowing, full color gamut, at its highest contrast in reflected light
Low power consumption, can operate for weeks without charge
Thin, flexible, and ideally, foldable

We take for granted how magical paper and a pencil or paintbrush can be. While there has been great progress, no technology comes close to replicating that experience.

We have become accustomed to staring into rectangles of light for days on end. Decades on end. We seem to forget about the beauty of unglowing media.

Shortly after the invention of the light bulb, projectors appeared. This was our first exposure to glowing images and writing made of light. Until then, we interacted with writing and images solely on non-glowing substrates — from cave drawings, to stone tablets, papyrus, and painted canvases.

Oil paint and ambient light reflecting on canvas produces a feeling no glowing screen can replicate. Stanley Kubrick tried his best to evoke this feeling in Barry Lyndon.

The look of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon was inspired by 18th century paintings

…but imagine watching Barry Lyndon on a non-glowing subtractive color digital paper display. It would be like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Like a moving painting.

On the other hand, science fiction tells a different story about the future. A decidedly glowing future, made of darkness, artificial light, neon, and holograms.

Neon and LED screens in Blade Runner, translucent HUD in Minority Report and holograms in Blade Runner 2049.

While there is an ethereal appeal to holograms, they feel so distant from the world around us — particularly the daytime world. These images are always presented in a dark atmosphere where things can glow. We should also build technology for the daytime, the outdoors, the sun.

I find the Apple Pencil more sci-fi than what cyberpunk prophesizes. No diodes, no ports, no charger, not even a clip. The product is the interface. Everything about it creates the illusion that what you’re holding is just a pencil. It’s reaching the mythical sub-10 millisecond responsiveness that reinforces the illusion of digital paper. I’d like to see more hardware move in this direction.

If science fiction drives progress, we are missing stories about technologies that feel as natural as a paper and a pencil.

Design is compromise

2018-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

When did the word “compromise” become vilified?

Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s something we do every day. It’s decision making. Prioritizing. Deciding that one thing is more important than another. It’s finding the right balance between two competing desires.

Which compromises you make — that’s what matters. Choosing the right compromises is what defines good design.

Companies like to tout products as “uncompromising” or having “no compromises”. That’s impossible. Once you decide on an approach, you inherently decide against other options.

Another word for compromise is “tradeoff”. The word “tradeoff” conveys the relationship between strengths and weaknesses. You are trading a weakness for a strength.

Having an opinionated set of tradeoffs exposes your approach to a set of weaknesses. The more you tip the scale on one side, the weaker something else will be. That’s okay! Making those difficult choices is what people pay you for. You should be proud of your compromises.

My favorite products are opinionated. They make a clear statement about what they are not good at, in favor of being much better at something else.

Appealing to everyone is impossible. If you make something that aims to be good across a broad range of capabilities, you are choosing not to be exceptional at anything in particular. That might be the right compromise for your audience, but it’s definitely a compromise.

Good design is opinionated. Good design is choosing the right compromise for your audience.

Solving problem-finding

2018-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Methodologies for problem-solving are fairly well established. The scientific method is perhaps the best problem-solving template we have. However, finding good problems to solve is a different skill altogether, one that we don’t teach.

Problem-finding is about looking for an area that you can invest your problem-solving skills into. It’s the intersection between problems worth solving, and problems you will be good at solving.

Problem-finding is harder than problem-solving because there is no established methodology around it. It’s a hole in our educational system because it leads to people dedicating valuable years of their lives to problems that aren’t particularly important.

Common wisdom encourages us to solve the problems we see in our immediate surroundings — in writing it’s distilled as “write what you know”, but it can be generalized as “do what you know”.

Without deep experience in a specific field, this approach rarely yields good problems to solve, usually for one or both of these reasons:

The problem is very personal, it doesn’t help very many people
The gains to be made are small

Of course there are many big problems in the world that are well-documented.

What I’ve found is that most problems that are worth solving aren’t immediately obvious, even if they turn out to be big problems. Often it’s because everyone dealing with the problem has given up on solving it, or they’ve gotten so used to the problem that they don’t notice it anymore.

Every complex system has problems. Most industries are complex and ripe for problem-finding. The challenge is knowing enough about the domain, yet retaining the beginner’s mind necessary to actually see the problem.

If you are coming out of school, or embarking on an entrepreneurial path, it really helps to put in a few years in an industry. Anything you are interested in will do. Try to understand it from the inside out, and study the inefficiencies. Do the work yourself, feel the pain. Stay curious, and keep branching out until you can see the whole picture.

The problems you will be solving in your work are probably not the important ones to solve. The real problem will be more meta, it will be that you have to spend time solving these smaller problems in the first place.

The problem you should solve is the biggest problem you are capable of solving. Perhaps that is why problem finding is such a hard problem in itself — someone needs to care about the problem before it can be found.

A little bit every day

2018-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

When trying to jumpstart a new habit, the only thing that matters is making consistent progress.

It’s easy to get in your own way by setting the bar too high. Instead, set the bar as low as possible. Any progress at all is a good thing. What is the smallest unit of progress you can make?

Do one push up
Read one page
Write one sentence
Take one photo
Draw one doodle

Just do one every day.

If you can only do one per day for weeks or months, it’s more progress than doing nothing. Soon enough, you’ll have done more than you could have imagined.

40 questions to ask yourself every year

2016-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

One of my end-of-year rituals is asking myself these forty questions. It usually takes me about a week to work my way through all of them. I find it to be one of the most valuable exercises to reflect on what happened, good and bad, and how I hope the year ahead will shape up.

These questions are available in Markdown format and in 33 languages.

What is more interesting than each individual answer are the trends that emerge after years of answering the same questions. I’ve shared this list with my family and closest friends, and always enjoy discussing answers as we reflect on the year.

Feel free to add or remove questions, and share your edits. This is first and foremost a personal exercise, so make it a tradition you can enjoy for years to come. See also my 40 questions to ask yourself every decade.

What did you do this year that you’d never done before?
Did you keep your new year’s resolutions?
Did anyone close to you give birth?
Did anyone close to you die?
What cities/states/countries did you visit?
What would you like to have next year that you lacked this year?
What date(s) from this year will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
What was your biggest failure?
What other hardships did you face?
Did you suffer illness or injury?
What was the best thing you bought?
Whose behavior merited celebration?
Whose behavior made you appalled?
Where did most of your money go?
What did you get really, really, really excited about?
What song will always remind you of this year?
Compared to this time last year, are you: happier or sadder? Thinner or fatter? Richer or poorer?
What do you wish you’d done more of?
What do you wish you’d done less of?
How are you spending the holidays?
Did you fall in love this year?
Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
What was your favorite show?
What was the best book you read?
What was your greatest musical discovery of the year?
What was your favorite film?
What was your favorite meal?
What did you want and get?
What did you want and not get?
What did you do on your birthday?
What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
How would you describe your personal fashion this year?
What kept you sane?
Which celebrity/public figure did you admire the most?
What political issue stirred you the most?
Who did you miss?
Who was the best new person you met?
What valuable life lesson did you learn this year?
What is a quote that sums up your year?

Also available in Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese simplified and traditional, Dhivehi, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

This list was inspired by a set of questions posted by coppermoss on Metafilter.

Scars are beautiful

2015-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

I saw a wonderful exhibit of Ishiuchi Miyako’s photography. Her series “Scars” particularly struck me.

"Scars" by Ishiuchi Miyako

The images are hard to look at without wincing. The oversized prints were even more painful to witness in person. But after the initial shock washed over me, I began to appreciate the photography itself. There is beauty in these shapes.

Like a path winding through a forest, I get lost in the meandering edges of these scars, the delicate unevenness of each wrinkle. As I separate myself from the pain, there is an intriguing nature to these photographs that is undeniable. I find it impossible to look at these images without questioning the fetishism of perfection ingrained in us since youth.

I am fascinated by the Japanese philosophy wabi-sabi. It is a worldview centered around the beauty of transience. An example is kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery by joining the pieces together with gold lacquer. By doing so, the cracks are accentuated rather than covered up or discarded. The object becomes more valuable as it loses its “perfection”.

Example of a kintsugi cup

Cracks, like scars, tell a story. They are not only beautiful to look at, they are also lessons in survival and perseverance.

There is no learning, no victory, no good story without a share of failures, scars, and the perseverance it took to overcome them. Too often we overlook that idea in our perception of beauty.

Wabi-sabi does not have to be fatalistic. The appreciation of imperfection is not an invitation to let things break down and dilapidate. The opposite of fragility is not resilience. Some things become stronger or better when challenged by chaos and uncertainty.

Your muscles become stronger as they heal from being torn by physical exertion. Products and systems can be designed to not only withstand aging, but improve over time.

I find that much anxiety can be alleviated by finding beauty in transience, imperfection, and scars. If we feel judged for our scars, we become afraid to get scarred. We follow the path that results in the least amount of pain, rather than the path that leads to the most amount of learning.

Whether they are literal or figurative, do not fear the scars. Be proud to earn them. Gild them like a kintsugi tea cup.

Default to empathy

2015-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a saying you may have heard called Hanlon’s razor:

“Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.”

The word “malice” is perfect because it says nothing about the severity of the act. It could describe anything from someone cutting you off in traffic to an accident that blows up the Earth.

On the other hand, I find that “stupidity” only describes a narrow band of human behavior. The saying works just as well if you replace that word. For example:

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by…

a rough day at the office
a family emergency
an ill-fitting pair of pants
not having coffee this morning
a recent uptick in birds pooping on that person’s car

You get the idea.

Everyone has something on their mind. Something that isn’t going perfectly well in their life. A nagging issue that, however small, may affect your mood on any given day. We’ve all been that person who rudely cuts into traffic because it’s-been-a-long-stressful-day-and-if-we-could-just-be-home-right-now-we-could-finally-relax. And so yes, we will cut into traffic, because today we tell ourselves that we deserve to.

My secret weapon is my alter ego (well, one of my many alter egos, but we’ll get into that another day). I call him benefit-of-the-doubtman.

When someone does something seemingly malicious to me, I try to summon benefit-of-the-doubtman. Sometimes it’s hard to remember because my ego tends to bristle and roar: “Why is this happening to me?”

But benefit-of-the-doubtman comes to the rescue and asks: what are the conditions that caused this person to behave that way? Usually it’s easy to come up with one or two maybes. Maybe they’re worried about losing their job. Maybe they’re upset about something happening in their personal life.

There’s no room to take it personally. Instead of becoming defensive, I try to either disregard the apparent malice or resolve the causes behind it.

I often catch myself marveling at the concept of streets — cars whizzing by each other, divided only by a thin strip of paint. Streets say a lot about the power of ego. What makes this crazy system work is that none of us want to die. At least not in a head-on collision. The inherent sense of self-preservation and self-interest that we all share makes society possible, but also causes a lot of what seems like malice.

To solve the root cause of “malice”, it’s helpful to consider whether your environment is effective at converting self-interest into positive impact for the group. Maybe that environment is something you have the power to change?

Whether it’s true or not, I want to believe that most people are good people. I want to live in a world where we can all make that assumption. Call me an optimist, but I think that starts with defaulting to empathy.

Every app is a superpower

2015-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

When Google Maps first came out, it blew me away. It still seems like one of the most magical technologies we have today.

I wonder what Ferdinand Magellan would think if you showed him Google Maps on a phone? The entire world mapped in detail, with photos of every building in every city.

I sat in an airport listening to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky on Spotify, wondering what he’d think if he knew that anyone can listen to high-fidelity recordings of all his compositions. Just a phone and a pair of earbuds — no matter where you are.

What if Johannes Gutenberg could hold the world’s knowledge in the palm of his hands, and search Wikipedia for anything he can think of?

Imagine showing Nicéphore Niépce and the Lumière brothers what images they could capture from a camera that fits in your pocket.

I would love to see Alexander Graham Bell wirelessly have a face-to-face conversation with anyone on Earth.

Within ten seconds, I can tell you what the weather will be like tomorrow or what the top five restaurants are, for any city in the world. I can have a chauffeur here in 5 minutes, or have my groceries delivered before dinner.

In our pockets is a portal to powers that even kings couldn’t dream of.

Be vanilla

2013-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

The term “vanilla” is often used to describe something ordinary, plain, or standard. In my book, there’s nothing less vanilla than vanilla.

Vanilla beans are the fruit of a rare orchid native to Mexico. Their aroma and flavor comes from a compound called vanillin. Each vanilla flower blooms just one morning out of every year. The orchid can only be naturally pollinated by a small Mexican bee, and if it isn’t pollinated that morning, the flower will wilt. No bean.

Commercially, vanilla is delicately hand-pollinated one flower at a time. The labor involved in vanilla production makes it the second most expensive spice in the world after saffron.

Vanilla flavor has been prized for thousands of years, and can be found in every ice cream shop on Earth. It’s the best-selling flavor in the world.

Vanilla’s universal appeal is why it’s the default. Is your default as good as vanilla?

Always learning, always teaching

2013-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

A professor of mine used to often quote Bob Dylan:

“He not busy being born is busy dying”

Some are comfortable making the same thing the same way their entire career. not. But that approach is fragile, susceptible to unexpected events.

The documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a lesson that masters in their craft are always learning, always challenging their own assumptions, and always training the next generation. In Jiro’s case, at age 86 and beyond. Relentlessly.

If you want to grow, give away your knowledge and techniques. Teaching is a tried-and-true way to experience rebirth.

You should be continuously running from the pack of ravenous dogs while dropping a trail of fresh meat behind you.

To teach distill what you know. Develop the theory of what you learned by instinct and practice.

By teaching you will understand your craft better than you did before. By giving away your techniques you will empower peers and competitors. Force yourself to stay creative and continuously open new doors.

Agents of chaos

2012-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

Stream of consciousness

A world where knowledge is captured and categorized, interpreted by the masses almost instantaneously digested, regurgitated, masticated, ruminated… and immediately available to access, pre-chewed. We become increasingly eager to process and catalog everything, beginning with the superficial and slow-moving, but progressing deeper and faster to the constantly changing environment, incessantly updating our map of what is known. Our knowledge is decentralized, sourced with more or less certainty by billions of agents — human at first but increasingly animal and robotic. Our capturing methods become decreasingly invasive and our simulation, processing and storage capacity increases to such a degree that all knowledge becomes a singularly accessible resource, freely available, understandable, translatable.

Decision-making becomes relegated to algorithms, but agents of chaos and pioneers are constantly being born. Our free will is relegated not because of an omnipotent power or Universal order, but because of a system we ourselves created that reinforces the very course we have set. Our identities are constantly being funneled towards understandability, and yet something in us is unpredictable. Not because of entropy or serendipity but because of a bug, a malfunction, a short circuit that our brain always seems to find. A fuse that gets blown. We challenge the predictions and that chaotic force unbalances any possible calculation, even those calculations that attempt to correct for our unpredictability cannot fully understand the rhyme or reason of this odd gene. The fact that it can’t seem to be codified is what keeps us from truly falling into Singularity.

And so, we commit ourselves to travel the Universe in search of knowledge. Cartographers of galaxies and planets, bringing life and chaos to the Universe. A virus, a mutation that cannot be stopped… that consumes in search of what? The Ultimate… Knowledge? Creator? End? Answer.