Ideas We're Grappling With March 30, 2023

Will

It's Thursday, and here we go again. I'm telling you what I'm working on to inspire you to share what you are working on. The best way to grow and learn is to step outside your comfort zone and participate. Your unique perspective and contributions are valuable and can help spark new ideas.

Although I've spent less time zettelkasting this week, I've still captured a few notes and started to build an economics structure hub. My morning practice has shifted, and it is more free writing focused than it has been. This currently feels like progress, but time will tell. Tonight my creative energy is low, and rather than resist, I will be okay with it and rest.

Currently Reading

• Faulkner, Grant. The art of brevity: crafting the very short story, Prometheus Books. 2023. Scribd
• Jauhar, Sandeep. Heart: a history, Simon & Schuster. 2018. Scribed
• Elbow, Peter. Writing without teachers, GREYSTONE BOOKS. 1998. Apple Books
• Ruthnum, Naben. Curry: eating, reading and race, Riverhead Books. 2018. Scribd

This past week, we made and shared a few burgers over here. Could you consider adding yours to the collection? It's lots of fun, and the more, the merrier. @ZettelDistraction moved the bar higher with his culinary delight, the "Nothing Burger."

What's happening in your ZK?

My seven day zettel production

ZettelDistraction

@Will said:
@ZettelDistraction moved the bar higher with his culinary delight, the "Nothing Burger."

Thank you for your kind words. That graphic was done quickly, with no references-- unprofessional!

What's happening in your ZK?

A few things.

Here's what my ZK looks like in Zettlr:

The IDs have the format Keyword[.Folgezettel].0.timestamp. The square brackets indicate that the Folgezettel is optional. Zettel H1 headers have an ID followed by a brief title. The ID regular expression in Zettlr is ((\w{1,4}\.){2,}\d\w{3}), and the pattern to generate new IDs is %Y.%M%D.%h%m. This ID scheme works for me with two constraints: the regular expression should match only IDs across all the notes and be simple enough for Zettlr to handle. This choice has the consequence that notes must be renamed to match the IDs, which has another result: it forces me to revisit notes. I wrote a script to identify mismatched nodes. More on my ZK organization is addressed in my GitHub Zettel Wiki.

I am still renumbering notes--Obsidian helps with automatic relinking. I prefer editing in Zettlr, though. The number of Zettels is over 400--almost enough for the Zettelkasten to transition from an inert file cabinet to a conversation partner with an independent personality and history.

Habits

1. A disgraceful admission: I subscribed to Grammarly, despite the advertisements for the service featuring scrubbed Millenials and Generation Y and Z members who gush that thanks to Grammarly, they "... can literally write literal Standard English!" Improved writing helped to clarify my thinking overall. One downside: I am editing as I write. Another upside: I am writing as I edit.

I am more concerned with quantity than quality. It does not bother me that Grammarly is geared toward business writing since I'm attempting to cultivate an "extremely businesslike attitude by wholly identifying with particular projects in the world"--while I labitulate as a part-time hikikomori.

2. Aside from habitual reliance on Grammarly, there are three habits that I haven't wholly internalized:

• reading with pen and paper in hand.
• to learn as much as I can.
• one way to improve is to start over, start over, start over.

Some positive developments

1. The following enshittified^† social media platforms have become boring
   • Facebook
   • Twitter
   • Instagram
   • LinkedIn
2. I have less patience for Mastodon.
3. I have no patience for TikTok

It's about time.

From Reddit, I learned about the Signal Identification Guide and the Amateur Radio Booklet. Occasionally there are helpful links. It's too easy to waste time viewing r/IdiotsInCars and r/PublicFreakout videos on Reddit. Doom scrolling is a guilty pleasure.

† Enshittification refers to the devolution of social media and Internet platforms from helpful, open resources to rent-seeking, self-destructing chokepoints.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
– Excerpted from https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys CC BY-SA 4.0 Cory Doctorow.

Duty to Self

I am reading Schofield, Paul. 2021. Duty to Self: Moral, Political, and Legal Self-Relation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Will

@ZettelDistraction said:
1. A disgraceful admission: I subscribed to Grammarly, despite the advertisements for the service featuring scrubbed Millenials and Generation Y and Z members who gush that thanks to Grammarly, they "... can literally write literal Standard English!" Improved writing helped to clarify my thinking overall. One downside: I am editing as I write. Another upside: I am writing as I edit.

I am more concerned with quantity than quality. It does not bother me that Grammarly is geared toward business writing since I'm attempting to cultivate an "extremely businesslike attitude by wholly identifying with particular projects in the world"--while I labitulate as a part-time hikikomori.

I subscribe to Grammarly and struggle with the same downsides and upsides you describe. I'm experimenting with turning off Grammarly for initial drafts and then activating it for an editing session. The one thing that might drive me away from Grammarly is its dependence on the mouse with zero support for the keyboard.

2. Aside from habitual reliance on Grammarly, there are three habits that I haven't wholly internalized:

• reading with pen and paper in hand.
• to learn as much as I can.
• one way to improve is to start over, start over, start over.

You are not alone; these are hard habits to internalize. We are all a work in progress.

Some positive developments

1. The following enshittified^† social media platforms have become boring
   • Facebook
   • Twitter
   • Instagram
   • LinkedIn
2. I have less patience for Mastodon.
3. I have no patience for TikTok

It's about time.
† Enshittification refers to the devolution of social media and Internet platforms from helpful, open resources to rent-seeking, self-destructing chokepoints.

Love this idea of Enshittification.

Thank for sharing.

GeoEng51

@ZettelDistraction Thanks for the links to ham radio articles. I'm a lapsed ham trying to build up momentum and get back into the hobby. This is a start

ZettelDistraction

@GeoEng51 said:
@ZettelDistraction Thanks for the links to ham radio articles. I'm a lapsed ham trying to build up momentum and get back into the hobby. This is a start

If you have the time and interest, the YouTube product reviews of outdoor gear by OH8STN are excellent. He calls the Xiegu x6100 a "shack in a box" and is very impressed with the Lab599 Discovery TX500.

ctietze

@Will said:

@ZettelDistraction said:
1. A disgraceful admission: I subscribed to Grammarly, despite the advertisements for the service featuring scrubbed Millenials and Generation Y and Z members who gush that thanks to Grammarly, they "... can literally write literal Standard English!" Improved writing helped to clarify my thinking overall. One downside: I am editing as I write. Another upside: I am writing as I edit.

I am more concerned with quantity than quality. It does not bother me that Grammarly is geared toward business writing since I'm attempting to cultivate an "extremely businesslike attitude by wholly identifying with particular projects in the world"--while I labitulate as a part-time hikikomori.

I subscribe to Grammarly and struggle with the same downsides and upsides you describe. I'm experimenting with turning off Grammarly for initial drafts and then activating it for an editing session. The one thing that might drive me away from Grammarly is its dependence on the mouse with zero support for the keyboard.

There are plugins for a lot of editors: VSCode, for example, has a Grammarly plugin that works really well.

Except it, uh, annotated "really", instead of "goodly". Hm.

Anyway, it works with keyboard shortcuts

Similar fun can be had with the open-source "LanguageTool" alternative. (Also from Emacs.)

ZettelDistraction

I use VSCode on occasion. I'll try the plugin--it sounds goodly.

GeoEng51

@ZettelDistraction said:

If you have the time and interest, the YouTube product reviews of outdoor gear by OH8STN are excellent. He calls the Xiegu x6100 a "shack in a box" and is very impressed with the Lab599 Discovery TX500.

Yes, I will pursue that.

I searched through my ZK and realized I have no zettels discussing anything in ham radio; just one mention of it as a hobby. Hmm...that needs some rectification - not to distract me from actually getting on the air again, but to help with the "building momentum"

Will

I've been exploring VSCode as a markdown editor. Sadly The Archive can't be used outside my ZK. Even in VSCode with the Grammarly plugin, I haven't been comfortable with the, in my opinion, poor keyboard support. Either you have to stop immediately for the ⌘. keyboard shortcut to work while the cursor is still on the word or phrase that Grammarly flags or you have to navigate around so the cursor is on the target word or phrase. I'm not aware of a "jump to next Grammarly flag" other than in their own online editor. I am getting lots of practice moving the cursor with the keyboard, but it is a pain.

I may try doing what I do when using The Archive, turn off Grammarly for the first draft.

@ctietze said:
Anyway, it works with keyboard shortcuts

Nori

I love the term enshittification 😄 Very fitting. I have all but quit social media sometime late last year and I feel like I got a lot of mental bandwidth back. Thinking about it, it’s a very strange concept to spend so much time looking at content one didn’t choose 😅

In the last week I have mostly been taking notes from The Proof is in the Plants by Simon Hill, which we have been reading in my book club. Now, it’s a vegan book and I am rather the opposite, so we disagreed on most points. That prompted a lot of digging into the references. I think I will need way more time to process this book into my Zettelkasten. But I think it’s very important to hear the other side of the argument in order to minimise cognitive bias.

And I can see now that I have a burger to draw!

ZettelDistraction

@Nori said:
I love the term enshittification 😄 Very fitting. I have all but quit social media sometime late last year and I feel like I got a lot of mental bandwidth back. Thinking about it, it’s a bizarre concept to spend so much time looking at content one didn’t choose 😅

The term enshittification is due to Cory Doctorow. I want to take credit for losing patience with Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Twitter. But the credit belongs to those platforms for enshittifying themselves with desperate advertising for dubious products and services and spewing digital effluvium everywhere.