Daily Journal 📓

Avoidance Machines, Part 1, by Kevin Baker:

“Writing is a task which forces one to confront ambiguity, uncertainty, and one’s own limits directly, so it’s not surprising that a coterie of avoidance entrepreneurs sprung up around it.”

The Disappearing World Wide Web covers the loss of web pages found in Common Crawl (38% of the 2013 pages are no longer accessible), as well as the general trend of info to exist in cozy web spaces.

Good write up on Farcaster’s new decentralized channel system and the approach to moderation + algorithms, including comparisons with hashtags and Reddit.

Tren Griffin @trengriffin with a short thread on Software isn’t Ending

“There are zero significantly profitable software businesses with pricing power based on the expense of creating the software. Instead:”

“1 Supply-Side Economies of Scale and Scope; 2 Network Effects); 3 Brand; 4 Regulation; and 5 Intellectual Property.”

In response to @cpaik.

Chris Paik @cpaik wrote a short piece predicting The End of Software. The premise is that software will go the way of journalism, because of LLMs making it.

Here are three quotes:

“Software is expensive because developers are expensive.”

“Vogue wasn’t replaced by another fashion media company, it was replaced by 10,000 influencers.”

“Majoring in computer science today will be like majoring in journalism in the late 90’s.”

I’m someone who would like to see more user malleable software, but we’re not quite there yet.

At Z-Space for an afternoon of tinkering. I should be doing some more LOCALHOST setup and writing, but ended up working with the MiniPC PL63 here.

The Razor Core X Chroma stopped connecting, so I’m troubleshooting.

Along the way, I installed Obsidian so I could type these notes, and Github Desktop so I could sync the notes.

So, the Razor eGPU really should be plug and play (and was before). There are some drivers for MacOS (which is what I originally used it with, but it only supports Intel Macs), but really nothing for Windows.

I am going to attempt to install ASUS updated drivers. There is a Management Engine Interface (MEI) and Chipset update that could work.

Hmmm. Updated Thunderbolt drivers? All support for the Intel NUC devices are now with ASUS. This appears to be a 2023 thunderbolt driver.

The event logs say Thunderbolt isn’t loading because of the Intel graphics driver. Ok, let’s load an updated graphics driver from the MiniPC drivers.

“Something went wrong” when installing the Intel drivers. Hmm. Maybe I’m going to do a fun Windows re-install here?

I think I will Windows re-install. I don’t think I’m going to use this to run Linux on, so may as well remove the drive partition too.

OK, and we’re back! Did Windows update after first install. Seemingly the Razer is now recognized and even installed it’s glowing light thing. I did blow away the Linux partition.

The reset also seems to have updated the BIOS as well.

May as well log my setup.

• Setup Outlook — I haven’t really used this, but one way to shuttle stuff back and forth
• Uninstall McAfee
• Github Desktop
• Obsidian — so that I can type into here
• AMD drivers — they did detect the graphics card in the eGPU
• Steam

Now to learn about restore points now that I have all this stuff installed!

We registered Z-Space as a BC society today:

Z-Space Arts and Technology Society provides affordable, sustainable, community oriented office and creative space dedicated to supporting creative technologists, startups and innovative small businesses. We host a series of events and meetups supporting the community. We connect with similar art, science, and technology spaces globally.

Just bought my DWeb Camp tickets. I’m excited, it’s my first time! It’s Aug 7th - 11th, and I’ll probably spend some of the next week in SF to catch up with some people, maybe do a meetup or two.

I’ve used Wave for payroll in Canada forever (both SMB and small startup teams). Giving it another look for SMB basic accounting. Anything else I should be looking at in Canada?

siftrss is a tool for filtering RSS feeds and outputting a new, filtered feed. I used it on my Github account feed to generate a feed of just starred items, which I’m now using EchoFeed to cross post.

@levelsio points out that many are missing Telegram as a giant platform:

Telegram has 1 billion users

It’s the #1 or #2 chat app in most countries around the world

Complete blindspot for most Americans

And NOBODY uses it for its encryption (or lack of it), we use it because it has the best UX of any chat app!

Also best API to develop bots with

I think I finally found a good label for what my approach is, by @hermittoday:

a deep generalist is someone who discovers new niches by following their curiosity with extreme faith, and once the newly found niche is understood and its complexity exhausted, in a meta-systematic fashion, it’s time for them to move on

Spending more time with Ownr. Seems like a good choice for sole proprietorship. Not sure if I can do a “test” startup setup.

Mattias Ljungman writes that seed stage investing is broken for investors and founders, and suggests a framework for redefining the pre-seed to A investment stages.

I had an amazing catch up with Ami last week. He’s the founder of Creative Pulse, a community running in Vancouver for 10 years.

The next event is about type designer Alanna Munro’s approach to Build in Public .

EchoFeed is a service to send RSS posts to Mastodon, MicroBlog, Bluesky, GitHub, Discord, or LinkAce, as well as Webmentions and Webhooks. Free to start or $25/year.

Jortage is a communal cloud whose first project uses Backblaze + Fastly to deduplicate media attachments, designed for fediverse instances.

Seen via @[email protected]

I put together a page gathering info on DAUs for the Open Social Protocols I’m interested in.

I love the Minimum Viable Demos website. If all you see is the boring vertical mobile version on your phone…turn it sideways! (and/or visit the glorious desktop version)

MLS aka Messaging Layer Security is all of: the right choice, early, and needed today.

Battle-tested common libraries that work across web, mobile, and desktop would be a great common good.