That’s the realistic gray area in between the extremes of the argument. I enjoy the analog experience of my 20 year old Nikon the way you like your Casio, but they’re also both luxury items precisely because neither one is inherently important to daily life. They’re fun toys, not real tools.

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

It's not exactly a fair test for stylesheets since so many styles look similar but aren't actually boilerplate setup, but it does capture the Groundhog's Day feeling of frontend work.

I don’t know about the rest of big social media switching away, so I’m personally just focused on appreciating the community that’s been built up already instead of evangelizing. Maybe I’m wrong and something open will go viral, like the new Loops video app.

Follow-up comments and engaging with others after posting is big too. People that “syndicate” without actually engaging on each platform are like some weird proselytizers that show up to a house party and hand out flyers to their own weird shindig without talking to anyone there.

The truth is that we’re social creatures and for social products, that means hanging out where other friends are already hanging out. It’s my personal thesis that no matter how matter how much we lower the bar to participate in the indieweb, fediverse, or other non-corporate platforms, it’s going to be inherently niche.

Which is fine. Small is beautiful.

My big project for sometime this year is to switch to Eleventy.

Electric planes will definitely graduate to short hop commutes eventually though and not just be niche training vehicles, especially when you consider how much safer they are than jet engines: they have way less moving parts, require less maintenance, and most importantly, they don’t stress the airframe nearly as much.

And that’s just with current airplane designs retrofitted for electric (which is essentially what these training planes are) instead of the upcoming designs that are built with many small electric motors and not the giant jet engines.

Lilium is an example of the new style of electric plane, with motors distributed through the wing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohig71bwRUE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CS3isCH4bk

I'm still more of a prepper lurker that's reading up on this stuff while friends are starting to take it more seriously. I personally don't know if prepping is a fad like cold war-era nuclear bunkers, a potential lifesaver like a beefed up version of the red cross emergency kits, or somewhere in between as a useful hobby like hiking and camping, but my inner research nerd is having a great time learning more.

It helps that my YC team was a product review website and there's a lot of gear junkies in the survivalist crowd, so that's been my entry point into it, not so much the angle on being freaked out about the news.

A good starter book on the Stoics that also reinterprets the ancient lessons for the modern age:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0040JHNQG/

We’ve built an exclusive private network of startups and brands that connect for business partnerships. It’s a hard problem to solve and we’ve shrunk the process down from months to minutes.

If you want to work someplace that’s just starting to take off but small enough to have a huge impact on its outcome, then we’re at the perfect Goldilocks size for you. The timing is great too: activity on our network is starting to spike and we’re getting great customer feedback on where to take it next.

Our development process is best described as “relaxed yet driven”. We have just enough process to keep momentum - big quarterly goals, weekly kickoff and wrapup meetings, team dinners on Wednesday nights, everything’s tracked in Trello - but it’s loose enough to give people the space to get shit done. So it’s more of a trust-based system than some childish flavor of agile. I.e. we don’t do daily standups, enforce pair programming, or have hourly work estimates. Yuck.

We’re looking for a senior dev, someone at least backend but ideally fullstack and as comfortable with server admin as they are with writing code. We’re a python/django/angular shop but honestly we care less about your specific skills than finding someone great, because you’d be more than good enough to pick up new languages anyway.

Interested? Great, then email me directly: al@partnered.com

If you keep going down the audiophile rabbit hole like I did, next up is a DAC or a tube amp. A good starter cheap one (sub $100) is the Qinpu:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001TGDB9Q/

http://blog.circleci.com/silence-is-for-the-weak/

It reminds me of Joel Spolsky's articles on their approach to workspaces.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper...

It's so rare to find a workplace in SF that's not an open office plan that some of the most productive people retreat to remote work just to get shit done in their home office, like Rands did with his Nerd Cave:

http://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-nerd-in-a-cave/

Talking about the productivity of private offices could be a major attractor, the way Microsoft way back in the day had a big poster for college recruiting that was a photo of a door and the words "you'll get one of these" on it.