Kottke.org

Because there must be somebody who isn't aware of it, Jason Kottke's blog is wonderful: https://kottke.org/ Another oldie-but-greaty is Metafilter: https://www.metafilter.com/ Finally, I'll recommended a blog/webcomic that often seems to be written for HN fans, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/

I usually go with the followings: Sidebar[0], Kottke.org[1], Waxy[2]. Obviously, Twitter and Hacker News get interesting links first, so typically these 3 websites repost after something becomes famous. [0] https://sidebar.io/ [1] https://kottke.org/ [2] https://waxy.org/

Here are some of mine: - https://kottke.org/ - https://lobste.rs/ - https://haxplore.com/ (I love this version of HN news to whip through with keyboard shortcuts)

I follow a lot of tech blogs, but two non-tech blogs I end up starring/bookmarking posts from most often are: https://kottke.org/ https://seths.blog/

Daily - Mostly Tech / Science. I love hacker news as it covers basic science as well. From discovery of planets, to Gene editing. Hacker News :) http://techmeme.com/ https://slashdot.org/ Weekly - World http://kottke.org/ https://www.edge.org/ Youtube App on Ipad, Subscription to Joe Rogen, Tim Ferris, and many others Podcasters like these mostly point out to any random topic under the sun, and the discussion is Deep. Example - check out these podcasts and their discussion on Ethics, AI, Health, Finance and Trump :) Random Facebook - mostly from friends and of personal nature, but I do visit resources they point out

http://marginalrevolution.com and http://kottke.org are both longtime favorites of mine, featuring interesting content ranging from economics to food to philosophy to art...

My traffic history: started in August 2004, up to 15,000 pageviews/10,000 visits/day at the 2013 peak, when blogs were at their zenith. I'd get 10 or 20 comments/post, often. Then a slow decline until January 2015 when I became clinically depressed and barely functional such that it took everything I had to post one sentence/day just to show proof of life. I recovered completely in October 2016 and resumed multiple posts daily as is the case today. Traffic when I started back in in late 2016 on a regular multiple posts/day basis was around 100 pageviews/day. Current traffic is about 600 pageviews/day, with 5-10 comments/week. Still, a couple times a year some popular blog/website picks up something I've posted and links to my post which results in a sudden spike to 3,000-8,000 pageviews that day, with a regression to the norm over the next week or two. One thing I find interesting is that things I post today I would've posted back in 2004, and vice versa. It's amusing to discover a couple times/year that something I'm about to feature or just featured appeared 10-15 years ago. Occasionally a reader from back in the day will point this out, to my delight. As best I can tell, the only popular one-person blogs that still update regularly and go back as far as I do are https://www.swiss-miss.com/ [March 2005] and https://kottke.org/ [1998]. I take pride in publishing daily including weekends and holidays, unlike pretty much every other blog/website. Always something…

http://kottke.org is my favorite website.

Jason Kottke occasionally uses the term The Great Span over at his blog on similar musings: https://kottke.org/tag/The%20Great%20Span I think his post that really got me was the 2021 headline, The Last Documented Widow of a Civil War Veteran Has Died: https://kottke.org/21/01/the-last-documented-widow-of-a-civil-war-vete…

Best advice on this topic: How to Age Gracefully | CBC Radio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sycgL3Qg_Ak [Spoiler] "Dear 91-year old, don't listen to other people's advice. Nobody knows what the hell they're doing. Signed, a 93-year old." [Edit] This was originally passed down to me through RSS from: https://kottke.org/15/08/how-to-age-gracefully

> The irony of doing this while covering their own faces It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied. It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination. It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect. It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point. For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue—the greatest. * https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/109551955251655267 * Via: https://kottke.org/25/03/for-fascists-hypocrisy-is-a-virtue

> It's the party of rules for thee, not for me. Hypocrisy is a virtue: > It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied. > It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination. > It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect. > It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point. > For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest. * https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/109551955251655267 * Via: https://kottke.org/25/03/for-fascists-hypocrisy-is-a-virtue

There are a small number of people/sites who I have given money/subscribed to on the internet. Substack has never been something I wanted to help with. Anything with dark patterns to get you to subscribe completely turns me off. I respond to individuals or small groups saying "hey this stuff you like to read takes time to write, and for me to do this for a living and continue to create stuff, it would be really nice if you contributed a small amount of money" For example: https://kottke.org/members/ https://www.patreon.com/acegikmo/membership

Ted Chiang put it best - "most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism." https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-fears-of-c… So long as the dominant theology in this country is extractive capitalism, nothing that tilts the cost balance towards capital and away from labor will be good for the middle class or the average person.

I want more people to have link blogs. I have one in the sidebar of https://simonwillison.net/ which I've been running since November 2003. You can search through all 6,836 links here: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark I can post things to it with a bookmarklet. It has an Atom feed. It's such a low-friction way of publishing. A lot of https://daringfireball.net works like this too. I also like https://waxy.org/ and https://kottke.org/ for this. I'd love to see more of these.

Love this! Remember a thread from years ago on 1/999999999999999999999998999999999999999999999999 giving the Fibonacci numbers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9815839 — was even linked from https://kottke.org/15/07/fibonacci-sequence-hidden-in-ordinary-divisio… — but that trick (using a fixed "base", in the terminology of this post) eventually runs into "overflow" issues (of the mathematical kind, not actual computer arithmetic overflow), so the idea here of using a base that varies with n is a really cool one. I think the post says b=3^n and b=2^ {n+1} were "experimentally found" to be enough, which raises the question: can we say what's the smallest base that would work, for a given n?

The much loved Shopsin's was one of a kind not just for the food but also its gruff but lovable chef Kenny Shopsin. Documentary: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0390109/ Profiled by Calvin Trillin in the New Yorker: https://web.archive.org/web/20230313065345/https://www.newyorker.com/m… Unique Menu rules: https://www.kottke.org/04/08/shopsins-menu

The blog https://kottke.org/ is alive and kicking since 25 years.

We changed the URL from https://kottke.org/23/09/the-plot-of-all-objects-in-the-universe. (Kottke is great but usually these are best changed to the original source. That URL is still a good place to start.)

>> Whatever "meritocracy" we supposedly have, as far as I can tell, is a total fiction. Worth noting that the term "meritocracy" was invented as satire: https://kottke.org/17/03/the-satirical-origins-of-the-meritocracy

This is probably the best quote about conservatism: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. See: https://kottke.org/22/12/the-boring-conservatism-of-elon-musk

> Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Mashable’s Matt Binder, and journalist Aaron Rupar Once we get past this dust up about the scope of free speech, I hope we have the energy left to give the defintion of journalist the long overdue fix it needs. Being an editorialist is lower standard than journalist - or used to be. https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1 There's more to journalism than publishing. Not that MSNBC, Mashable or CNN would know that. Even the NYT is questionable but the debate isn't worth the distraction. Let's clean up the obvious messes first.

Can you imagine You log into your Tumblr dashboard All your friends on Mastodon making posts, your favorite bloggers on Write.as/WriteFreely instances, your favorite artists and photographers on Pixelfed Mingling with the people you follow on Tumblr. And it's all neatly tied together through ActivityPub. This was the original promise of the tumbleblogs Tumblr was inspired by. https://kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs I see people worry that it'll be quickly blocked the moment it steps on to the Fediverse. The matt in Automattic lived through the same decades of web and internet we all did. I hope he has the good sense to slow walk it and make sure Tumblr is a good citizen of the Fediverse rather than flipping a switch one day to open the floodgates.

> Post the demise of RSS it's one of the few places I check in on directly every few days. What do you mean by this? I saw the announcement in my RSS reader before seeing it here. > What are your other favorites that might help me fill the gap? I actually just purged a lot of my media consumption for "burnout" related reasons of my own, but can second some of the recommendations Jason included at the end of the post like Colossal and Open Culture. He also posted this a couple years back: https://kottke.org/18/04/blogging-is-most-certainly-not-dead

That blog has one of my favorite posts: https://kottke.org/17/05/the-struggle-with-the-self

If you want to see what the Disney multi-plane camera could achieve in 1940, watch this tracking shot from the beginning of Pinocchio: https://kottke.org/19/12/cool-multiplane-animation-in-this-pinocchio-c… It is technically amazing, and the scene reportedly cost as much to produce as a regular Disney short. I'm sure Orson Wells was inspired by this scene when he made Touch of Evil.

From the man himself: > Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.” https://kottke.org/17/06/if-you-cant-explain-something-in-simple-terms…

I still read some of the classics (surprised nobody mentioned them so far) and also a few newer ones: https://kottke.org/ https://daringfireball.net https://seths.blog https://www.freedomain.com/blog/ https://www.cringely.com https://www.zeldman.com https://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com http://quirksmode.org/blog/ http://hypercritical.co

Sony TC-50 is a cassette recorder that could be considered as a predecessor to the Walkman; it even went to the moon with the Apollo 11 crew [1]. [1]: https://kottke.org/19/07/sonys-proto-walkman-that-went-to-the-moon Off-topic question: Since this is a thread on Walkman I'd like to ask you on any dedicated music player that you'd recommend?

https://kottke.org/ - love Jason's blog, https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ - great news aggregator, https://pluralistic.net/ - another good one, https://www.drudgereport.com/ - as someone that leans left I sometimes check drudge out to see what my dad is reading, https://www.matthewball.vc/ - recently found this guy, been enjoying some of his essays