I’m still using Instapaper for reading online things, although in 2020, my aim is to read articles (even) less, in favor of books.

• Try to install a radar system with one job: Searching for chances to give a compliment. Compliments: How to Get Happy and Make a Better World
• Warren Buffett’s metric of success is “Do the people you care about love you back?” What I learned at work this year
• As Edelman points out, if YouTube really cared about our intentions and values, when we logged on to learn ukulele it would try to serve that need — and then send us off to practice! The Internet Can Make Us Feel Awful. It Doesn't Have to Be That Way
• Wisdom as the ultimate virtue. Really solid framing in favor of centrism. How to be good: A theory about Virtues & Values

• From 1200 to 1745, 21-year-olds would reach an average age of anywhere between 62 and 70 years. Do we really live longer than our ancestors?
• Nick Cave isn’t just an awesome musician, but is also quite eloquent. “What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it.” Music, Feeling, and Transcendence: Nick Cave on AI, Awe, and the Splendor of Our Human Limitations
• Seismic air guns are widely used to map the sea floor. They are incredibly loud and disruptive to ocean fauna. Oceans Are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life
• Unlike traditional two-by-four lumber, cross-laminated timber (CLT) consists of layers of wood glued together to form solid, thick panels that can be made in custom dimensions for anything from walls and floors to beams and roofs. CLT is being used to build mid-rise buildings, including big swaths of Google Sidewalk in Toronto. Skyscrapers made of wood make a return, nudged by google
• Peter Turchin: “the way forward to sustaining and increasing the well-being of large segments of population is not to abolish government, but to evolve institutions that keep bureaucrats working for the benefit of the population, rather than themselves.” An Anarchist View of Human Social Evolution
• The scary thing about GPT-2-generated text is that it flows very naturally if you’re just skimming. Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences
• I disagree with Stratechery that the web is better today than it was when we were punching monkeys, but he writes terrifyingly about Spotify’s role in today’s podcast marketplace. Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play
• A stark look at the rising costs of digital goods and their implications for working poor. Video games are teaching users how to enjoy perpetually renting consumer goods rather than owning them
• I thought the Albedo effect only applied to melting ice caps, but as it turns out, it also applies to clouds! A World Without Clouds
• What came first, the moralizing God or the complex society? Evidence points to the latter, followed by Gods-as-divine-policemen. Humans Built Complex Societies Before They Invented Moral Gods
• The American public is broadly pessimistic about its country’s future, and this pessimism correlates with education level. Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts
• As wealthy kids are growing up with less screen time, poor kids are growing up with more. Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good
• Stop building to ship until you’ve first built to learn. https://uxdesign.cc/building-to-learn-977a8cd88ced?
• A charitable look at Post-modernism holds that there is no privileged lens with which to view the world; that even empiricism is suspect, because it too has a tendency to reproduce and reify the power structures in which in exists. https://socratic-form-microscopy.com/2019/04/03/post-modernism-and-political-diversity/
• Texas produces more wind power than every other state in the country, four times as much as the runner-up, California. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/11/magazine/climate-change-exxon-renewable-energy.html?mtrref=www.instapaper.com&gwh=A83B2941A03E83BDCAE36DF6FD0D3189&gwt=pay&assetType=REGIWALL
• While I disagree that there may be a difference between personal and professional values, I found this brief article to be a useful exercise. https://blog.alexmaccaw.com/a-value-driven-life
• Formidable pays employees $20/hr for contributions (outside of normal work time) to OSS and tech communities or even a personal hack project purely for fun and learning, as long as it’s released under an OSI license. https://formidable.com/blog/2019/sauce-program/
• Look at how everyone else is doing it (the likely local maxima) and then find a better way. https://www.nateliason.com/blog/local-maxima
• A look into some of Duolingo’s limitations. Learning a language with an app should be a starting point, not the end.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/smarter-living/500-days-of-duolingo-what-you-can-and-cant-learn-from-a-language-app.html
• A Facebook co-founder wants the US government to fix Facebook. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html
• How might we design mediums in which “reading” is the same as “understanding”? https://andymatuschak.org/books/
• Safe playgrounds lead to boredom, which tends toward rash stunts like turning somersaults on top of climbing frames and standing on the shoulders of others on the swings. So let’s make playgrounds a little more dangerous! https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/well/family/adventure-playgrounds-junk-playgrounds.html
• What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and NIMBYism. Ouch. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-housing-nimby.html
• We were certain that more communication would make everything better. Arrogantly, we ignored history and learned a lesson that has been in the curriculum since the Tower of Babel. https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-love-tech-defense-difficult-industry/
• What are signs that a player is alive? One strong sign is a player doing things outside of their domain. For example, Putin is a live player. The Russian state is doing things they haven’t done in a long time, like annexing Crimea… https://medium.com/@samo.burja/live-versus-dead-players-2b24f6e9eae2
• San Francisco is a stunningly beautiful and continuously innovative city, cursed to always be considered one or two generations past its peak, like a rowboat chasing the horizon. https://www.sfchronicle.com/oursf/article/San-Francisco-isn-t-what-it-used-to-be-13901994.php
• The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character. GoT used to be like that, but then turned into a story about heroes. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-real-reason-fans-hate-the-last-season-of-game-of-thrones/
• An attempt to integrate cybernetics, counterculture, computing, and design. http://www.dubberly.com/articles/cybernetics-and-counterculture.html
• If AI were a great storyteller, it would be an alien bard who has studied our planet from orbit and still doesn’t get it; but the tales it tells embarrass us with their insights all the same. https://emshort.blog/2019/04/04/can-ai-tell-a-good-story/
• Quadratic Voting is too complicated for the average person, but the idea of having a finite number of tokens to distribute amongst a set of important issues is a good one. https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/publication/qv-or-not-qv-question-some-skepticism-about-radical-egalitarian-voting-markets
• A whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/garden/05tree.html
• Where do ideas come from? https://nadiaeghbal.com/ideas
• Cliff Mass correctly predicted that we’d have fewer wildfires in the PNW, great example of regression towards the mean. https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/05/will-puget-sound-experience-another.html
• Bungalows in places like Wallingford and Ballard that many now find charming were widely criticized as cheap when they began popping up in the early part of the 20th century. Who knows how Seattle’s modern builds will age? https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/a-teardown-a-day-bulldozing-the-way-for-bigger-homes-in-seattle-suburbs/
• That skyscraper in Vancouver prominently seen from Granville bridge (northbound) is also designed by big.dk. https://www.dezeen.com/2018/11/30/movie-big-heatherwick-google-hq-progress/
• Half of parents are fathers, yet 99% of the research on parenting focuses on mothers. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190606-how-to-be-a-good-father-to-a-newborn-son-or-daughter
• Massive migration of G+ accounts from Google accounts gave people the impression G+ was a “ghost town.” https://onezero.medium.com/why-google-failed-4b9db05b973b
• Identify and avoid cargo cults in design thinking. https://medium.com/designing-atlassian/when-design-becomes-a-cargo-cult-2bb9a50aad53
• 80% of the aviation industry's emissions come from passenger flights longer than 1,500km - a distance no electric airliner could yet fly. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48630656
• ‘Sleeping beauties’ are papers which didn’t have much influence early but come to be appreciated and important later. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/new-model-reveals-forgotten-influencers-and-sleeping-beauties-science
• Our superpower is not raw intelligence but our ability to learn through imitation. Aggregated over generations, this becomes culture.https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/
• Banned about 70 years ago in Seattle, parent-in-law apartments were again allowed across the city starting in 1994 and backyard cottages since 2010. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-city-council-oks-more-and-larger-backyard-cottages-restricts-mcmansions/
• The Baumol effect: “A violinist can always choose to stop playing violin, retrain for a while, and work in a factory instead. Maybe in 1826, when factory owners were earning $1.14/hour and violinists were earning $5/hour, so no violinists would quit and retrain. But by 2010, factory workers were earning $26.44/hour, so if violinists were still only earning $5 they might all quit and retrain.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/10/book-review-the-prices-are-too-dmn-high/
• Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
• It’s hard to separate the threat that technology poses from the threat that capitalism poses. https://www.gq.com/story/ted-chiang-exhalation-interview
• Convenience is a value, and one we hold personally. Maybe it’s worth reconsidering this. https://onezero.medium.com/the-tyranny-of-convenience-2e7fa145ab4
• We don’t want hectoring morality tales, as evidenced by The Odyssey’s exceeding popularity compared to Plato’s Republic. We want stories that let us be other characters: strong and cunning, defiant or afraid, good or bad or somewhere in between. https://putanumonit.com/2019/06/25/playstation-odysseys/
• A scene with active technological evolution has what musician Brian Eno called scenius. https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/following-the-scenius
• The Antidisciplinarathon is a compelling format to quickly broaden one’s purview, ramp up on new fields, and meet new interesting people. http://hypotext.co/antidisciplinarathon
• The vast resources of Silicon Valley have too often been applied to the problem of “what is my mother no longer doing for me?” https://slate.com/culture/2019/06/life-hacking-productivity-tech-silicon-valley-hacking-life-book-review.html
• AFAICT, Deinstitutionalisation => Homelessness. https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/736612514/seattle-faces-backlash-after-easing-up-on-punishing-crimes-involving-mental-illn
• We would like to think there is some quick hack, or that we can learn something with it feeling like a simple game, but the true is that real learning is hard work and frustrating. https://medium.com/@gjdickens/distraction-disguised-as-learning-duolingo-codeacademy-and-why-you-should-get-back-to-basics-99a22a9e2c33
• China seems unlikely to do personalized learning well, but appear to be far ahead in many aspects of optimizing education. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614057/china-squirrel-has-started-a-grand-experiment-in-ai-education-it-could-reshape-how-the/
• Some studies seem to indicate that not only do students retain less when reading digitally, they’re more likely to overestimate how well they comprehended the material. https://www.wired.com/story/digital-textbooks-radical-transformation/
• Because the 737 has kept the same name for 50 years, the FAA certification of the fourth-generation 737 in 2017 involved only light-touch approval. The only really rigorous test-result underpinnings were those of the 1967 machine. https://www.edge.org/conversation/timothy_taylor-polythetics-and-the-boeing-737-max
• Criticize the existence of billionaires in general, their spending on yachts or mansions. But if you only criticize billionaires when they’re trying to save lives, you risk collateral damage to everything we care about. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy/
• A resurrected Franklin wouldn’t have a news job inside The Washington Post; he’d have an anonymous Twitter account with a huge following that he’d use to routinely troll political opponents. https://www.wired.com/story/journalism-isnt-dying-its-returning-its-roots/
• Tech workers might not realize that their opposition to the work their companies do on military technology does not change the decision-making of the American leaders who choose to go to war. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/opinion/military-war-tech-us.html
• AI-writer centaurs are super interesting. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/30/20840194/ai-art-fiction-writing-language-gpt-2
• “Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” he asked us one day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-the-culture-war-comes-for-the-kids/596668/
• Study after study has shown open offices to foster seclusion more than innovation. People in an open office put on headphones, talk less, and feel terrible. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/opinion/wework-adam-neumann.html
• Great summary of arguments in favor of and also against Sortition - the system whereby members of representative bodies are picked at random, like jurors.http://edmundgriffiths.com/sortition.html
• Rather than maintaining my own lawn, much better to have a smaller garden and live right beside a great park? https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-disaster-1826070720
• We’re not merely lighting a match to the Amazon and imperiling everything that lives in it with extinction, but also summoning creatures long dead to return to Earth’s surface and give up the ancient energy they took to the grave. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/amazon-fire-earth-has-plenty-oxygen/596923/
• In the last 20 years, some Inuit communities who had never seen robins before have had to invent a name for them: “Koyapigaktoruk.” https://earthsky.org/earth/decoding-climate-change-signals-arctic-treeline-tundra-alaska
• Yedoma consists of thick layers of soil packed around gigantic lodes of embedded ice. Because Yedoma contains so much ice, it can melt quickly — reshaping the landscape as sudden lakes form and hillsides collapse. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-siberia/
• Wikis are just editable web pages; Twitter is just a way of sharing very short form writing; and Facebook is just a way of sharing writing and pictures with friends. Indeed, writing itself is just a clever way of ordering a small number of symbols on a page. While a medium may be simple, that doesn’t mean it’s not profound. https://numinous.productions/ttft/
• For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html
• The idea of the Anthropocene inflates our own importance by promising eternal geological life to our creations. It is of a thread with our species’ peculiar, self-styled exceptionalism. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arrogance-anthropocene/595795/
• To Western ears, the combination of C and F# is grating, but Tsimane listeners rated this chord just as likeable as other chords that Westerners would interpret as more pleasant, such as C and G. https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/perception-of-musical-pitch-varies-across-cultures
• It doesn’t seem too soon to ask: Is the vision of the VR or AR headset as a widespread consumer device just a dead branch hanging off technology’s evolutionary tree? https://www.fastcompany.com/90418190/the-one-thing-google-didnt-talk-about-at-its-keynote
• Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together. https://patrickcollison.com/fast
• On-device AI could be clutch for detecting illegal logging. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/climate/indonesia-logging-deforestation.html
• Technology that’s Actually Yours could be the next great counter-trend. https://alexdanco.com/2019/10/26/everything-is-amazing-but-nothing-is-ours/
• Utrecht has a bike garage with sensors on the racks, making finding a free spot during rush hour much easier. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/world/europe/bicycling-utrecht-dutch-love-bikes-worlds-largest-bike-parking-garages.html
• By pushing a highly political agenda the Anxious, Social-Justice, Partisan (ASP) movement is undermining bipartisan efforts--and nothing important will be done unless both sides of the aisle are involved. https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-real-climate-debate.html
• The party launched the app, called Study the Great Nation, containing articles and videos about Xi’s activities or his ideology, “Xi Jinping Thought.” There is even a sense of competition, with users earning points for reading articles and commenting on them, and a leader board showing how users are faring in quizzes. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-app-on-xis-ideology-allows-data-access-to-100-million-users-phones-report-says/2019/10/11/2d53bbae-eb4d-11e9-bafb-da248f8d5734_story.html
• Younger Palestinians were interested (in improving relations with Israel), but that there were none well-established enough in their careers yet to withstand the blowback. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/israel-arab-dialog.html
• Clustering meetings and scheduling them near breaks is ideal. One of the best times is near the end of the day, or right before lunch. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
• Terrifying: ISPs would recognize the obsolescence of the internet and support the Trinet only, driven by market demand for optimal user experience from GOOG-FB-AMZN. https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html
• Saildrones are autonomous sailboats that act as mobile weather stations. Could we take advantage of this capability to improve observations of important storms? https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/11/can-autonomous-weather-observation.html
• Prediction is overrated. What we really should be striving for, with our social science, is ability to bring about desirable outcomes and to avoid unwanted outcomes. http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/psychohistory-and-cliodynamics/
• If until now you were used to moving along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls! http://www.bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/
• What would it take to create an effective developmental learning environment for humanity? https://glazkov.com/2019/08/11/a-classroom-for-humanity/
• Great mathematicians each had their own strategies for generating ideas. Erdős sought hyper-focussed vigilance, Poincaré described lying in bed in a half-dream state as the ideal condition, Descartes famously loved to lounge in bed in the morning and think. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-myth-and-magic-of-generating-new-ideas?verso=true
• On the Estonian border, another anekdot goes, a border guard is filling out Putin’s entry form. “Occupation?” the officer asks. “Not today,” Putin replies. “Just tourism.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/russian-jokes-tell-deeper-truths-about-putin-and-trump/602713/
• The Reigns mechanic requires making pragmatic choices to stay alive, not always being ideologically consistent, and working to find a way out over course of generations, slowly discovering one’s true nature and power. https://emshort.blog/2018/01/24/reigns-her-majesty/
• In exploration games, to spend time in a place is to deplete it, to make it less and less interesting until there’s no longer any reason to stay. In gardening games, to spend time in a place is to enrich it.
• The intersection of Science Fiction and Religion often yields greatness. https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html