A bit of this, a bit of that
Reading
Ted Gioia is always inspirational, and he recently shared how he came to love reading, and what that might imply for encouraging reading. The factors that influenced him:
I was exposed to the joy of storytelling at a very early age.
I soon learned how to read for fun, and discovered that reading was enjoyable.
I had people in my life who were role models, and embodied reading as a leisure time pursuit.
I had easy access to books, even in my working class neighborhood.
I gradually gained confidence that even tough books were worth reading.
These were all true for me as well. At a very young age, I was regularly taken to the Carnegie Public Library for storytime and the opportunity to check out some books. That experience felt magical, even holy.
And in my elementary school days, I became hooked on comic books, and my parents encouraged that, as any reading was better than none.
As young parents, we also learned how effective reading to our children could be. When they were bored, or overactive, or whatever, a book session on the couch was a great way to settle everyone down and have some shared time. And it probably helped our kids to become lifelong readers.
Markdown
Anil Dash has a good history of Markdown here — HOW MARKDOWN TOOK OVER THE WORLD. There are so many good lessons to be drawn from this story:
- build the simplest possible solution.
- build a solution that humans can easily understand.
- work on a problem that is near and dear to your heart.
- bear down and focus on the problem, even if it seems small.
- share your work freely with well-intentioned people.
Great stuff and thanks to John Gruber.
AI Productivity
I haven’t opened a Microsoft Office app in some time. Word, I have certainly abandoned (in part replaced with markdown notes), PowerPoint as well. Excel still gets light use. I’ve never used Copilot beyond some light dabbling. Meanwhile, I use Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT a lot. And I suspect I will be using Claude even more as Cowork rolls out.
Is this making me more productive? This observation resonates with me:
But maybe in the past I abandoned projects at the idea stage, whereas now I am abandoning them later in the process? That seems like a good thing?
… if you focus in on the computer industry it appears that there has been an incredibly rapid pace of change over the past 50 years. …
Yet, all this time, productivity growth has not been high.
And I think one key reason for that is that one of the most common things people do at work with modern information technology is fuck around.
Claude: "We help you fuck around at a deeper and more meaningful level."
A note on our country
With all the ill-considered and heartless federal government activity going on, it is hard to stay optimistic. Like many of you, I abhor much of what I see in the news and in the streets these days.
But I am also feeling that my caterwauling is absolutely pointless and ineffective. I’ve voted against Trump as much as I can, I live in communities and states that have voted against Trump. There isn't much more signal I can send.
It is up to the Republican Senators, Representatives, party members, and voters to decide when they have had enough of Trump. I would have thought that ill-equipped goons shooting people in the face in the street would have been enough. But apparently not. I do believe the country will reach a breaking point, and I am saddened by how much pain it will cause people, but all I can do is wait.