Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

Category: Weeknotes

  • What’s the next move?

    Parenting a toddler is getting up at 1AM for your toddler with an ear infection and at 3AM to help them find a squishy ball they lost in their bed but it all being worth it for the endless joy it produces.

    Short week, Thanksgiving. We’ll see if I can get some inertia.

    Reading

    I finished The Bullet Journal method for the second time. I got a lot out of it again, even though this time was more of a skim. One thing I’m focusing on is logging more than just simple tasks and events. This stood out (emphasis mine)

    You can view your Bullet Journal as a living autobiography. It allows you to clearly see what the rush of life tends to obscure. You can track the decisions you’ve made, and the actions you’ve taken that led you to where you are. It encourages you to learn from your experiences. What worked, what did not, how did it make you feel, what’s the next move

    If I could sum that up, it’s probably: slow down and think about it. That’s a lesson we can all learn, but one that I’m particularly thinking about for how I log in my journal.

    That used to be something came so naturally, especially in my college years, when I considered a future in academia. And I’m not sure if its the natural distractions of life or the interruptive modern era that makes that so hard these days.

    Some hope for the future of the web? A good point made in in Today in Tabs about a decade or so ago, when publications like The Awl began to break through with a new form of independent media:

    The Verge seems to be doing fine, some of the others kind of still exist, pretty much everyone is laying off staff and making ominous noises about replacing the rest with AI soon. But if I know one fact (and I do) it’s that there will always be people with no other interests or life skills except finding out what’s happening and writing it down. You can give them big paychecks, but it won’t make them work any faster. You can fire them, but it won’t make them work any less. The moneyfolk come and go from media for reasons I will never understand, but when they’re gone—when things look the most bleak—that’s when your true reporter goblins come out to play.

    Who knows what the future of the web holds, and who knows what journalists and creators will do? The only thing that’s certain is that once a generation, they are counted out, and once a generation, they find a new path no one had thought of.

    Drive is a bit repetitive, but it certainly… drives… home its point. Intrinsic motivation is a very really think and it can be encouraged and it is a bit counter-intuitive. But once you wrap your head around it, it starts to make a lot of sense.

    Writing

    Maya Angelou, echoing the kind of thing you hear all the time from writers:

    Writing is a part of my life; cooking is a part of my life. Making love is a part of my life; walking down the street is a part of it. Writing demands more time, but it takes from all of these other activities. They all feed into the writing. I think it’s dangerous to concern oneself too damned much with “being an artist.” It’s more important to get the work done. You don’t have to concern yourself with it, just get it done. The pondering pose — the back of the hand glued against the forehead — is baloney. People spend more time posing than getting the work done. The work is all there is. And when it’s done, then you can laugh, have a pot of beans, stroke some child’s head, or skip down the street.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • Inspiring, really.

    I’m returning to the kinds of things you return to at the end of the year: focus and progression. I do feel as if I have had a handle on focus for quite some time, even more so since I’ve been able to process the lessons of Four Thousand Weeks. But that focus has been directed on minutia for the most part. Makes sense. Having two small kids has you swimming in a lot of minutia. But I do feel as if I’m in a good place to try and progress forward my focus. And that’s what I’ll be trying to do.

    Reading

    I read a post once with some incredible and straightforward advice about reading:

    Read fiction in as few sittings as possible, but take my time reading nonfiction. Immersive storytelling benefits from few interruptions. Nonfiction benefits from reading only short amounts at once and reading multiple books at once. Always have at least two nonfiction books going.

    So I’ve picked up two nonfiction books: The Bullet Journal Method and Drive.

    I first read The Bullet Journal Method back a little bit after it was published in like 2018. Of course, by then, the bullet journal was a pretty popular concept and there were lots of people doing that. Since then, I’ve pretty much always had a notebook around, but I’ve definitely tried out different digital approaches and apps. But I’m back to a notebook (and a single notes app)(it’s Obsidian)! And I’m reading the book as a refresher.

    Drive was recommended to me. I don’t know a ton about it, but I am very interested in setting direction and focus (there it is again) among teams. At this point, the introduction was worth the price of admission.

    And the always insightful Ryan Broderick on the current cycle of viral clips which are staged as podcasts and crafted on TikTok specifically to spark an outrage cycle on Twitter in a ruse that is so obvious it doesn’t even belong in a Bond film. Anyway, Broderick sums it up nicely.

    There are a few big takeaways here for me. The first, and funniest, is that X users have become so right-wing and reactionary that they’re spending their time raging over literal ads for porn. The second takeaway is how savvy new porn operations have become. They’ve built these labyrinthian networks of SFW viral content on major platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that guide users to their OnlyFans pages. And the final takeaway for me is that at our current late stage of Web 2.0 everyone is having such a Bad Time Online at such a consistent level that you can build an entire media company off of short videos of young women saying random stuff that makes weird men angry. Inspiring, really.

    Watching

    Lupin Season 3. Constructed evenly and methodically as always, even as it raises the stakes. The threat of violence has been an incredible foil in every iteration of Lupin, because it is such a clumsy and vicious instrument. And Assane’s ability to weave around and manipulate violence, even when confronted with dire circumstances, makes him that much more of a hero. Always a blast to watch. The music is incredible.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus

    Week Focus:

    • EOS: Set everybodys rocks
    • Site Architect: Get demo up
    • History of the Web: send out nenwsletter
    • Keep setting up new bullet journal
    • Quality rock: kick off document where I’m trying to corral all this stuff

  • Thinking is an active pursuit

    Thinking about how to keep things small this week. Everything these days feels so big, and we’ve invented these big and complicated systems and procedures for trying to manage just how big it all feels.

    So this week I’m trying to think small. How can I give myself time and space to simply think? How can I simplify? How can I manage the breadth of news in the world without being overwhelmed?

    Doing

    I just finished a slide deck on web history. Specifically, the history of layout and grids and all the things we tried until we got to 3 line CSS solutions that start with display: grid. Hoping to turn that into a talk some day, but I’ll just drop this picture of Bill Nye’s first website for now:

    ALSO PUBLISHED:

    Reading

    On his blog, Ploum describes how the users of the web have split the two. One the one side, the ad-infested, barely usable experience of browsing mainstream sites and social media. Across the divide, the small web. The considered web. The thoughtful web that deals in ideas and clean layouts. Ploum concludes fairly decisively.

    It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.

    Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.

    One great word of caution. If you think your team has a culture problem, it may be time to look inward.

    This one’s from a little while ago, but I finally dug into Casey Newton’s slight departure with Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter. Here’s the thing that’s been sticking with me:

    The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

    It’s kind of one of those obvious things. I spend too much of my time distracted. I’ve been trying to take some time to stare at a while for a little bit and see what happens. See what comes into my head. Then I write that down. So fucking obviousl

    Plus, a quick read on writing culture challenges. Something that is always super interesting to me. I’m in awe and strive to be part of a team that emphasizes communicating through writing.

    Watching

    As an American Jew with skepticism about the Zionist project that increasingly feels like it can’t exist without the subjugation of another people, I have complicated feelings about the current conflict in Israel. But this video is making the rounds now, and it is eye opening.

    And Patrick Willems embarks on a murder mystery to try and answer the question, who killed cinema. The culprit may not be who you think… (it’s not Marvel. Or maybe. Kind of).

    Notes

    Tasks:

    • Write Purdue Case Study
    • Sort out Sportsengine tasks about DNS

    For this upcoming week:

    • Presentation to Geoffs class
    • AI Blog Post
    • Prep for EOS

  • Man, distinctive in the universe.

    Fall begins. My kids are sick. But several years in, I may actually know how to handle it. We’ll see next week if I’m right.

    Reading

    Continuing with Grapes of Wrath, which I completely understand most people read in High School. I did not. And I do love it. It has some of the most keen and insightful reflections on the nature of people in the faith of unspeakable adversity.

    And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

    But at the center, it’s all heart. It’s just about a family trying to get along, alone, but together

    They were afraid, now that the time had come—afraid in the same way Grampa was afraid. They saw the shed take shape against the light, and they saw the lanterns pale until they no longer cast their circles of yellow light. The stars went out, few by few, toward the west. And still the family stood about like dream walkers, their eyes focused panoramically, seeing no detail, but the whole dawn, the whole land, the whole texture of the country at once.

    Watching

    Finished the final season of Sex Education, which was a really well done show, but one that kind of falls short in its final season. For good reason, there is a lot of length given to the auxiliary characters, and they all shine (Eric especially, who finds his purpose in brightness), but Otis and Maeve fail to ever really connect with the heart of the show. Still, it was a good send off, and one that gave some time to properly explore its edges, where it was always most interesting anyway.

    Kevin Kelley on listening:

    Listening well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?” until there is no more.

  • Being in Time

    It’s one of those chaotic weeks. Overscheduled. A lot going on. One thing goes wrong and it all goes down like dominoes.

    And yet it’s actually kind of fun. There is a lot of joy in activity and a quickened pace. It makes me wonder that my brain’s default setting always seems to try and seize on balance and routine. It’s easy to think of David Foster Wallace’s “this is water” parable in moments like these. But also, the way Oliver . Burkeman extended that story in Four Thousand Weeks (emphasis mine):

    Soon, your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time. it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed….

    Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.”

    I’ll be thinking about that this week as I try to stay present. As I try to live my life and let it unfold.

    Reading

    A few articles I had some time to read.

    One was the original review of Infinite Jest in The Atlantic which offers a really fascinating perspective on the book that’s much fresher than what we have these days.

    Also, two articles that work well as a pair. Building an innovative agency (and why you might not need one) and what to do with your agency team about this whole AI thing people seem excited about. The key, it would seem, is one of those things that are painfully obvious once you see someone articulate it so clearly, as Nicholas does. You need to set up the preconditions for innovation to emerge so that when an opportunity presents itself, you are ready. Put another way, the worst time to innovate is at the exact time you want to be innovative. You should have already started.

    And I was really saddened by what Allie Nimmons had to say in her revealing and incredibly honest post about why she is leaving the WordPress community behind. It is a huge loss. Lots hit home, but especially this:

    There is a huge disconnect between the people making the “real” money with this software and the people who are trying to earn a fair living.

    Ursula K. Le Guin on what it means to write history:

    History is one way of telling stories, just like myth, fiction, or oral storytelling. But over the last hundred years, history has preempted the other forms of storytelling because of its claim to absolute, objective truth. Trying to be scientists, historians stood outside of history and told the story of how it was. All that has changed radically over the last twenty years. Historians now laugh at the pretense of objective truth. They agree that every age has its own history, and if there is any objective truth, we can’t reach it with words. History is not a science, it’s an art.

    Notes

  • Men made it, but they can’t control it

    Thinking about HTML tables this week. Not only because I’m going to be talking to a class about that very topic soon, but because it seems that we are in the HTML tables phase of technology’s next big Internet-driven cycle (it would seem): AI and language learning models.

    Anyway, what do I mean by that? We’re forcing it, basically. We are using the technology of AI in a clunky way. It is unrefined and depends on hacks, rather than going with the grain of the technology. When the technology recedes into the background, becomes more minimal, and less intrusive, than we may truly be on to something. Until then, I can’t help but feel like we’re using tables for layout.

    Reading

    Read through The End of the Googleverse. The web has been reported dead before. The Post-Google world is more interesting to me than not.

    Speaking of Google, I could take a look at their NotebookLM, which I was surprised (and kind of pleased) to find had at its helm Steven Johnson, the co-founder of Feed and writer of many books including Interface Culture.

    Notably, much like the web, what’s absent from the next wave of AI tools are any sort of concept of transclusion. Ted Nelson never quite cracked that technological nut, and we are so well past it that nobody even thinks about it anymore.

    Bleak House continues, Chapters 31 through 37. Much is revealed and we are quite expeditiously arriving at the point at which it will all collapse. Lady Deadlock has made herself known to Esther. Richard has fallen to the Jardynce sickness. Tachyhorn is onto Deadlock. And the world continues to simply turn, in a way only Dickens can describe:

    Now there is a sound of putting up shop-shutters in the court and a smell as of the smoking of pipes; and shooting stars are seen in upper windows, further indicating retirement to rest. Now, too, the policeman begins to push at doors; to try fastenings; to be suspicious of bundles; and to administer his beat, on the hypothesis that every one is either robbing or being robbed.

    On to The Grapes of Wrath. If I could write like any author, oh man would I want it to be Steinbeck. There is so much pathos in every passage of the book. Every word choice is perfect.

    Yes, but the bank is only made of men. No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

    Harrowing, and true, and poignant. But also, the rhythm of that excerpt is right on point.

    Watching

    Fully caught up to Only Murders in the Building

    Octavia Butler on writing:

    The first, of course, is to read. It’s surprising how many people think they want to be writers but they don’t really like to read books… The second is to write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration….

    Forget about inspiration, because it’s more likely to be a reason not to write, as in, “I can’t write today because I’m not inspired.” I tell them I used to live next to my landlady and I told everybody she inspired me. And the most valuable characteristic any would-be writer can possibly have is persistence. Just keep at it, keep learning your craft and keep trying.

    Notes

    Maybe there’s someothing to a public and shared Aboard board that can be used to collect History of the Web type resouroces innto different categories, or mabe collect it there everytime a footnote is made

    For today:

    • Move Notion finances into Google Drive
    • History of the web ideas
    • Mow the lawmn
    • Do all the laundry

  • Consuming films like Coca-Cola

    Reading

    The conclusion of two books: Sculpting in Time and Just Keep Investing.

    On Sculpting in Time I will say that it is an incredibly unique perspective and view of cinema—recognized by Tarkovsky as a wholly artistic pursuit and a unique medium focused on the compression and rhythm of time. And these are accurate, and well thought out, though perhaps a bit dated these days, as the cinema has receded into the narrative over form in greater and greater strides over the last few decades. This has caused more than one person to lament lately about the state of content, but thankfully Tarkovsky precedes that view and entirely rejects it.

    He concludes the book with a look at the responsibility of the artist. The responsibility is, of course, to represent one’s own personal vision faithfully. But, there is also a responsibility to create true art, even when it is challenging, rather than popcorn movies for pure consumption:

    People cease to feel any need for the beautiful or the spiritual, and consume films like bottles of Coca-Cola. The contact between film director and audience is unique to cinema in that it conveys experience imprinted on film in uncompromisingly affective, and therefore compelling, forms. Th e viewer feels a need for such vicarious experience in order to make up in part for what he himself has lost or missed; he pursues it in a kind of ‘search for lost time’. And how human this newly gained experience will be depends only on the author. A grave responsibility!

    I found it interesting, when talking about Stalker, how bothered he was when people asked him what the mysterious “Zone” at the center of the film was:

    People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films

    I wonder what he would think about Star Wars and Marvel movies, where every offhand storyline requires a huge backstory and every plot thread needs resolving.

    Just Keep Investing more or less reiterates the title over the course of many chapters. It’s good advice though.

    Watching

    I saw an interview with Karim Lakhani about the future of AI. I think in many ways it represents well the popular view, and presents a nuanced vision for what’s to come. One thing that gave me pause was when Lakhani pointed to AI as a place to substitute whenever one is doing tasks that require thinking. This is a useful starting point, but I think that it hides the technology and makes AI feel too much like magic.

    Final Note

    I was reminded of this excellent quote by Oliver Burkerman (in Four Thousand Weeks) from this week’s Marginalian:

    Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.

    Notes

    Meal Plan: Meatloaf + Breaded Chicken using new breading

    Focus

  • Did we tell you how the marmoset saved us from Hitler?

    Reading

    It was a big Tarkovsky week. From Sculpting in Time, I finished Chapter 5: The Film Image and Chapter 6: The author in search of an audience. The way that this book builds, he often returns to the same point over and over again, each time layering something new on top of it. So first, we talk about the filmic image as an objective and personal vision of truth, then we talk about the mechanics of how it creates that truth, then we move to a discussion of how the film auteur can use the camera to tell their own truth and the responsibilities of an artist.

    The image is indivisible and elusive, dependent upon our consciousness and on the real world which it seeks to embody. If the world is inscrutable, then the image will be so too. It is a kind of equation, signifying the correlation between truth and the human consciousness, bound as the latter is by Euclidean space. We cannot comprehend the totality of the universe, but the poetic image is able to express that totality.

    Watching

    Starting out on Welcome to Wrexham.

    Solaris is a poetic film, as much as I’m sure Tarkovsky would want to deny this. And I don’t mean that it is lyrical, but simply that it’s aim is to use filmic language to communicate emotional experiences, rather than to advance a narrative. And in this case, it actually does a good job of doing both. It is an intriguing enough scenario to motivate a suspension of disbelief, but it is pointed and disjointed enough to feel viscerally. It is a story of love and loss and there is much to find welcoming for all of its distncing.
    Quick synopsis: A psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a mysterious, living ocean to determine if it is worth continuing explorations, but finds instead a station mostly empty and haunted by hallucinations from his past.

    The story from Marginalian this week is about Virigina Woolf and her experience with the Nazis

    Did we tell you how the marmoset saved us from Hitler?

    Todos

    • Review the digital organization guide for talks
    • Remove your name from electro freeze contacts
    • Upload recent trainings videos
    • Review AI notes, add my own
    • Follow up on codeowners PR in Salesforce

    Focus Next Week

    • Write my blog post
    • Virtual Retreat
    • Sort out next steps on the AI project

  • Weeknotes #1

    Reading

    Articles

    I saw an interesting parable in a recent entry in Cory Doctrow’s Pluralistic blog. There’s a story that goes around that in the midst of his progressive reforms, a labor activist was pushing on new federal discrimination laws. According to some accounts, he responded with “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” It‘s also possible the story isn’t entirely true. Either way it’s pretty cool.

    Finally got through Ronan Farrow’s huge profile / takedown of Elon Musk in the New Yorker. It’s scary and unnerving in all the usual ways and is such an indictment of America’s major political failings it reads like satire sometimes. This about sums it up:

    In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded

    Simon Willison put up a written post of a talk I saw at WordCamp US. It’s brutally practical, which is kind of good.

    Books

    Bleak House chapters 22 through 31, where the threads are beginning to come together. In a much longer aside from the narrator, Mr Guppy starts to put the whole thing together and Lady Deadlock realizes that Esther is indeed her daughter. Richard casts off after an argument with Mr Jarndyce and Esther become ill.

    Dickens appears to excel at weaving together a compelling story and social commentary so that one never lives without the other, and so that each is made better for it. And it keeps you in.

    On to Chapter 4 of Sculpting in Time,Cinema’s destined role where Tarkovsky begins to pick apart the trajectory of cinema by viewing it through the prism of his own experience in the industry. He talks about his transition from film school to the wider world of filmmaking, and the way in which mass appeal has shaped the way in which people respond to film. But he comes back to the universal truth of cinema, that it was a tool invented to record facts, actuality, and time:

    Cinema came into being as a means of recording the very movement of reality: factual, specific, within time and unique; of reproducing again and again the moment, instant by instant, in its fluid mutability-that instant over which we find ourselves able to gain mastery by imprinting it on film.

    Watching

    Started Solaris to keep up with Tarvovsky.

    Notes

    Meal Plan this week
    Monday –
    Tuesday –
    Wednesday
    Thursday

    New todos: