Dear kids.

One thing I recently picked up (but forgot where) goes roughly like this: Pareto posed the 80/20 rule as we know it, because it is stunning enough when you encounter it. But reality is much, much worse.

Actually, it is more like “20% of 20%” — wich is comes down to 4%.

Actually, it should be called the 96/4 rule. But Pareto anticipated that this would be just too much for people to swallow.

So, once you observed the Pareto principle in the wild for a bit… once you accepted it and started using it… start looking for 96/4.

Dear kids.

It is fun to write again, „in public“, like muttering to myself in the woods at night. There is something different about talking out loud, about writing into a website instead of just a notebook. „How am I supposed to know what I think before I hear what I say?“, said by Dieter Hildebrand in some random episode of Scheibenwischer I used to watch with my parents as a kid.

Important though: never write (or talk) about what you‘re going to do. It takes away the magic. It‘s like letting the hot air out of the ballon before you took a flight with it.

Why is that? I don‘t really know. I‘ve just found it to be true over and over and over again.

One part is definitely that it builds up expectations. And as soon as that happens the journey becomes about arriving — which is so boring I would need to sit down right now if I wasn‘t already lying on a couch.

I started reading the friendly orange glow and after just one page of the introduction I had to put it down.

My mind wandered back to HyperCard on the Mac Plus and to Netscape Navigator on ISDN. Where has the excitement gone? The wonder, the exploration, the adventure? When did computing become a hygiene factor, a task, an information firehose I have to deal with? And more importantly: how do I get back to Wonderland?

In 2011 I started carrying a sketchbook again. Inspired by an illustrated life I got a watercolor sketchbook and a starter kit of watercolors and never looked back.

So many endless hours just exploring and experimenting. The real breakthrough was allowing myself to draw shitty things. I stopped being even interested how the result turned out. The only important thing was: did I have a good time while soing the drawing?

Maybe that is where I need to take computing to again. Randomly explore the utmost different things, from Urbit to terminal-based email. To just wander around, get lost, get on another track. Look back on a life of experience and love and wonder.

Fuck achievements.

LOLBLOG

A „blog“ in 2020 feels like recording on dat tapes. People have flocked from their blogs to Medium and now flock back to Email. Well, no, to Substack, which then asks people to read via Email. It’s complicated.

As an infrastructure system, email is amazing. Email is the cockroach of internet standards. The sad thing is that very little evolution is happening. Except for delta chat or spike, email is still the same: a pile of ugh. If you‘re lucky, your client threads the messages. Inspirational it is not. And don‘t dare to throw encryption into the mix or even user-friendly for non-technical users — it‘s all a nightmare.

All in all, delta chat is so far the best solution in my opinion. It combines the people-based interface we got used to from messaging apps with the fully automatic encryption we got used to from — well, yeah, it‘s basically whatsapp on email minus facebook minus realtime.

Personally I love getting away from realtime, from notifications, from all the bling bling that screams into our faces all day. As I write this, my device is offline and the screen filtered to greyscale and I‘m just sad that there are very few e-ink phones so far.

Oh, there is the other thing: operating systems. I‘m tired of all the big tech. As much as I enjoyed Macs for 35 years, and as convenient as Apple‘s walled garden is — I want back my autonomy! It might take a year or two, but unless unforseeable, terrible things happen, I will slowly and quietly switch over to Linux. A Raspberry Pi 400 is on the way and Elementary has just this week started experimental Arm builds (the same week btw that Brave started experimental IPFS support).

I fear the switch and I am also really excited. Sometimes I wonder I really need more than a terminal and a browser, given I find enough open-source or at least open-API webapps. I will miss Keynote. I will miss iA Writer. But that‘s mostly it. Who knows, it might even be time learn vim. (a sudden coldness hath befallen my soul after typing that… too far… too far…)

Dear diary. the TLDR Newsletter brought the Command Line Interface Guidelines in today, which then go on to say Use a command-line argument parsing library where you can and links to TTY • The Ruby terminal apps toolkit. I am happy already — stuff keeps appearing where I happen to look. At some point I need to tell you more about the intuitive-creative paradigm and how unbelievably well it works…

Dear diary. Today I installed rbenv and actually read the whole readme to understand how it works. Looked up gem-install to get default config to where stuff is installed (this is not npm). Found rbenv-default-gems which might help not to run into “bundler is not installed” after upgrading ruby. Started at TryRuby but switched to go through all the Ruby String Methods.

It all feels incredibly right to do it this way idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯