Transcript: Update on Savannah and I's apartment layout considerations. So the original thinking was, how do we host people? We have a bed in the living room and it's annoying to disassemble it and put away the box spring and shove the mattress in the room every time people are coming over. It just sounds unsustainable. But we did have people over, we had 17 people come over from our apartment building and it was a blast, first of all. Great turnout, people were stoked to organize a WhatsApp and people started suggesting different events to do. It was great. But we realized, when we rearranged the place after the party, we just left the mattress, carried the mattress back into the living room, we just put it on the floor and basically just called it done for now. Where to host people, all we need to do is move the mattress off the ground, put it in one of our rooms or even our closet later when it gets a little more freed up and we could have people over pretty easily. And if it's an apartment event, especially for this one, we just said, bring your own chair. So everybody sat on something that they brought. We had a few extra pillows and stuff. If it's people from out the apartment building or biking over, then I think it's going to be rare that we have that many people over and I think we can just have folding chairs and a folding table. Funny enough, the practical definitely won out over the theoretical where we realized the simplest solution is really just to pick up the mattress and put it down. There's still thoughts of a long-term plan here, but it's the cheapest, easiest way to getting a bunch of people in our apartment and having a good time, so that's what we're at with.
Savannah and I are rethinking our two-bedroom apartment layout that currently uses each room as our private studios and has our bed in the common living room. We're considering new arrangements to accommodate more hosting and spontaneous visits from friends, as our current setup proves challenging with the bed in a shared space. We're exploring several options: I could rent a local co-working space for work, we could lease a commercial office next door for my studio, or we could transform our bed into a more conventional living room. Each option presents its own advantages and drawbacks, including considerations of cost, convenience, and the ability to maintain separate work and leisure areas. Considering options for accommodating guests and community events, a Murphy bed couch conversion was deemed expensive and impractical. A DIY solution to space constraints is on the table, but also poses challenges due to the difficulty of moving and assembling large items in the apartment. An alternative idea involves renting an adjacent one-bedroom unit to create a communal space for friends and events, despite its higher cost and effort required to maintain coziness. The desire to host more casual, spontaneous gatherings is driving these considerations, with the aim to create an open-door atmosphere for social interactions.
The concept of the "light switch effect" was first acknowledged during the early stages of a nomadic journey to San Diego when the challenges of settling into new Airbnbs became apparent. The effect extends beyond literal light switches, encompassing the acclimatization process to a new environment, inclusive of locating essentials like coffee shops, understanding local laundry methods, and remembering Airbnb rules. As time passed and relocations became more frequent and environments more complex—such as moving to Mexico—the cognitive load of managing everyday logistics began to impede the ability to engage in productive, creative work. This effect has been termed the "light switch effect," which serves as a reminder to account for the decreased work capacity due to logistical overhead when planning transitions between multiple locations.
After a hike, I encountered Steph, leading to ongoing communication about hosting events. We discussed her co-organized salon on the AI alignment problem in March and my interest in hosting a website-building event during startup week, potentially in April or May. We also contemplated a tool for managing our projects and events, like a specialized project management software. Further, we talked about the connection between online communities and the physical gatherings they can inspire, emphasizing the cyclical relationship between the two.
The author is reflecting on the challenges of effectively showcasing their work on the internet, particularly in relation to portfolios and resumes. They express frustration with the limitations of resumes in capturing the depth of their experience and contributions. Additionally, they discuss the ongoing financial and practical challenges of maintaining online projects and the importance of preserving past work for the benefit of future creators. The author considers using archive.org as a potential solution but expresses reservations about outsourcing this responsibility to a non-profit organization. They ultimately prioritize the use of such resources for preserving knowledge that benefits the broader community rather than their own personal or professional work. The speaker is exploring the idea of preserving their work and experiences in a meaningful and sustainable way. They express concerns about relying on external platforms like archive.org and consider alternatives such as hosting their own content and encoding it into a lower fidelity medium. They also discuss the concept of creating their own encapsulation and representation of their work, which they hope will be more long-term sustainable. The text discusses the idea of creating a collaborative storytelling and writing platform that acts as a memory time capsule by archiving and snapshotting links. It addresses the challenge of link rot and suggests that decentralized hosting and a network of machines could potentially help in the future. The text discusses the concept of a scoped IPFS that functions similar to RAID, where each file is known only once but stored multiple times based on its significance. It also touches on the importance of data permanence on the internet, addressing concerns about archiving family photos and trusting companies like iCloud to maintain data indefinitely. The author questions if they should trust these companies and expresses uncertainty about the longevity of their data stored on such platforms.