Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game (Ben Thompson)
Here is the important thing to understand about the Libra Association: while its members — who again, are the validators — do control the Libra protocol, Facebook does not control the validators. Which, by extension, means that Facebook will not control Libra.
It’s always good to control ones biases, but it doesn’t come easy for me when dealing with Facebook. Ben makes the case that since Libra is not a “Facebook Coin”, but rather a Facebook initiative, the tradeoffs between trust and efficiency just may enable it to succeed.
Certainly Facebook’s audacity and ambition should not be underestimated, and the company’s network is the biggest reason to believe Libra will work; Facebook’s brand is the biggest reason to believe it will not.
But there’s that.
Meta: No longer automatically cross-posting
I’ve disabled cross-posting from baty.blog to Micro.blog/Twitter/Mastodon. I like not worrying about force-feeding every single thing I publish to other feeds. If I post something I want to share more widely, I’ll post links directly.
This feeling started with my wiki. I just write stuff there without worrying about where it’s going to “go”.
For those few who truly want to read everything, there’s RSS
Please don’t cancel Keanu (The Outline)
Please do not cancel Keanu Reeves. Please. Keanu Reeves is the closet thing we have to Mr. Rogers and we already don’t deserve him as it is.
I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I’ve always rooted for Keanu and it’s nice seeing him getting so much good press lately.
Also…
explain this one atheists pic.twitter.com/ghHUTCAZwf
— liv (@keanuthot) May 20, 2019
The Dropbox updates are fine
I keep a shit-ton of stuff in Dropbox. I’ve been using it with nary a hitch for many years. Dropbox was the first syncing option that didn’t completely suck, and it’s still better than the rest (I also use iCloud and Syncthing).
Sure, sometimes the Dropbox app uses too much CPU. On the other hand, sometimes iCloud loses data. And no one enjoys configuring Syncthing. Point is, Dropbox is the closest thing I’ve ever found to hassle-free sync across everything. The recently added Smart Sync is awesome. Add to that, Paper, which is quite nice, and darn good sharing options and I still feel like Dropbox is a winner.
The new Dropbox adds a bunch of stuff that, at first glance, made me think, “Ah, hooey, what’s this Evernote-level bullshit, now?!”
Then, I used the new desktop app all day today and am already finding the changes useful. It’s too early to be sure, or to review, but I think we all knew that Dropbox had to do something, and I think they may just be figuring out what that something is. If you don’t care about the new stuff, just keep using it the way you always have.
For a different take, Michael Tsai is collecting some of the more snarky knee-jerk reactions.
Ben Thompson (Stratechery):
I find this tremendously exciting, and sorely needed. For years I have been wondering which company will build the “operating system of the cloud”, and this seems like a very credible attempt to do just that. The new Dropbox app is basically a new version of the Finder or Explorer, with communication and collaboration built-in.
Also…
To that end, Dropbox will never achieve the same level of integration, given it has to partner with other companies, but it doesn’t need to: the idea is to have good-enough integration so that all of the apps it is integrating with can win on their own merits. In other words, I would go further than Houston: the new Dropbox isn’t simply complementary to a product like Slack in particular, it promises to make Slack a much better product in its own right, particularly when viewed from that higher, more wholistic level that Microsoft has focused on.
It remains to be seen how this plays out. It’s easy to succumb to the usual knee-jerk cynicism, but I’m not ready to dismiss it quite yet.
Bug Fixes (Paul Ford)
But in the end, the software works or it doesn’t. Politics, our personal health, our careers or lives in general — these do not provide a narrative of unalloyed progress. But software, dammit, can and does. It’s a pleasure to watch the code change and improve, and it’s also fascinating to see big companies, paid programmers and volunteers learning to work together (the Defense Department is way into open source) to make those changes and improvements. I read the change logs, and I think: Humans can do things.
Daily software stack as of June 06, 2019
Because things change, I’ve jotted down the list of apps I use to manage my “stuff” daily as of today. Below each is a quick list of the types of things for which it’s used. At some point I’d like to go into more detail, but by the time I do that everything changes again.
The list is longer than I would like, but I can’t seem to narrow it down further. The highlight here is that I’m unable to get rid of Emacs, so it remains an important part of my process. I fear that it always will, and that I’ll have to get good at it, eventually.
Emacs
- Task management via org-mode
- Long-form journaling via org-journal
- Time tracking
- Document production
- Too much of my spare time
TheBrain
- The Control Center: Connects everything to everything
- Project management
- CRM
- Personal and work event timelines
- Links to interesting things and to their concepts
Tinderbox
- Project notes
- Logs
- Visual/Concept mapping
Day One
- Photo/event journaling
Drafts
- My note-taking “inbox”
- Blog posts, tech notes, and ideas percolate here until ready to be moved somewhere more permanent
Apple Notes
- For finished notes that I may want to share or access quickly on the go
DEVONthink
- Document archive
BBEdit
- All sorts of wierd text processing
- Occasionally as a writing environment
Typora
- Markdown writing. Mostly blog posts. I just really like writing here.
I tried again with Twitter
I got back into Twitter about a month ago. I thought I missed it, but it turns out I only missed small portions of it, and those portions have been drowned out by pessimism, hyperbole, hate, and self-interest.
Here’s how I tried making Twitter into a pleasant experience again:
- Unfollowed everyone and started over.
- Disabled retweets
- Muted lots and lots of keywords.
- Tried having a good attitude
And still, my feed was awash with the usual awful, depressing, tedious noise of people determining that “Something is BAD!!!” and yelling incessantly about it without a single rational suggestion about how to make it less bad.
There just isn’t enough signal to go with the noise. I’ve had to stop visiting Twitter again.
Dark Mode Isn’t ‘Easier on the Eyes’ for Everybody (Vice)
In the end, more display options are better, and people should use whichever lighting theme they want. It’s great that dark mode is coming to iOS for people who it helps, but there’s simply not evidence to make the blanket claim that dark mode is “easier on your eyes.”
Vice adds to the recent spate of articles confirming my biases against some of the widely-touted benefits of Dark Mode.
How did journalists file before Google Docs? (CJR)
By the summer of 1863, competition was fierce. A New York Tribune reporter was about 10 miles from Gettysburg, trying to cover a cavalry raid, when the battle opened. The town’s telegraph operator told him the wires had been cut. “The Trib’s man gathered up a work crew, rented a handcar from the president of the railroad, and took off to find the break and repair it,” Tucher says. “In return, he demanded that the telegraph operator not let anyone else but him use the wire, and sent off a scoop.”