Thursday, 12/03/2020

20:19 xx

ode to open data

everyone wants their product, their framework, their idea to last forever -- to continue to sustain all use cases and empower all users in perpetuity.

This is never the case. Practices go out of style, code ages and deprecates. Companies rise, switch priorities and give up. Maintainers have families and run out of time. We can't count on the products we use or make to last forever, or even more than a couple of months longer.

The principal issue with this approach is the data silo. Proprietary code running a software-as-a-service product often allows users to input, format and manipulate their data -- take services like are.na, Roam Research, or notion.so for example. These tools serve as repositories for our data. Even services like Spotify and Facebook, though initially not meant for this purpose, become siloes for our memories -- they store our posts, text messages, and interactions with one another over a long period of time, free to revisit at any moment.

When these products go under, this data disappears. There's no way to back it up, extract it or reuse it. The last employee to leave flips the switch and shuts down all of the servers on the way out... goodbye data, regardless of how much time you've invested in the platform. This happened to me on Google Keep, on various startup notetaking services and social media products that fluttered out of existence as quickly as they began, taking some priceless data with them. It's just like losing my notebook the first semester of college: all of my journal entries, accurate knowledge of my emotions at the time, gone into the wind.

i feel so small

why? i'm 21. i'm skilled. i have merit i think. what's holding me back?

etc

the deindustrialization of america has hurt the middle class everything is broken but how to we fix this life is all about temptation - buying and selling ideas! ava: inconspicuous consumption. what makes youacceptable is the accrual of a thousand different pieces of knowledge

elliott erwit: photographer

take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby i want pictures that are emotional through china with a camera: john thomson

23:48 distribute fact checking

https://abe-winter.github.io/only/fans/2020/11/29/everything-in-moderation.html this is exactly my idea lmao @ url but