Transcript: Wrestling with basically coordination, I suppose, at a high level. So the first call was just about how we're undertaking the project, and there's four-ish people who haven't worked together before, and various sets of skills across front-end and back-end design. And it's just pretty fascinating to sit here and experience what I think is one of the hardest problems that people have, which is how you get a group of people to, once they're given a pretty clear goal, I'd say not having a goal is upstream of this problem, and it's a beastly problem as well. But containing this conversation to the topic of having a goal, and a reasonably well-defined goal at that, but then figuring out what everybody's abilities are, what makes the most sense to do first, to do in a way that doesn't block other people, so that there's no blocked nor idle time, really. You don't get too far ahead of other people. There's a certain level of orchestration here, and the tools that you're talking through matter a lot. I mean, this was Zoom, Slack, Notion, but there's a bunch of tools. The question is, what philosophy are you piping through the tool still? One person can try to draft the best plan in the world, but if the other people don't recognize it as something they could follow, something that they could change, interrogate, and understand, then it doesn't really go. It won't really go. There's been times where I've been able to just kind of sit in a place with three or five other people, and there was no grand plan. There was no big specification document, but we had just enough clarity to understand what needed to be done next by each of us, and what the stop condition was, and then we just broke apart from the huddle and got to work, and then we'd come back together, and a couple things didn't quite fit together, but then we'd sit there and make them fit, and then that was a success. So, yeah, I think what I'm trying to say is the methodology matters as much as the tool. The tool doesn't really give you much out of the box unless it's overprescriptive, like some project management software tends to be, but then you're fighting against that. Yeah, so the problem of how to coordinate a group of people with varying skills and abilities, it's an astonishingly difficult one, but it's also basically the one that shows up everywhere, more or less whatever you try to build. With more than just yourself, you're going to have this problem. I wonder if there's anything about software that makes it different or harder or easier in some way, but, yeah, this one comes up a lot, and that's why I think also it scales, and working with one other person, a couple, or a business partnership, there's a certain level of agility and ease that comes with that that's really nice, but once it's more than two, then it's like a three-body-plus problem, and that can get complicated pretty quickly. So there you have it, some notes on coordination and such.
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.
The speaker did not complete their weekly review, which usually provides clarity and insights for the upcoming week. Despite this, they have many projects, personal life commitments, and community efforts to attend to, not to mention taxes. They plan to set week intentions using voice instead of writing, including the exploration of websites for the Diagram Website Explorers Club and developing a Canvas element-based editor for Daily Jam. The technical aspects of this project involve real-time data updates, efficient pixel manipulation, and secure user authentication through tokenization. A function is set to run every five seconds to update the canvas with the latest pixel data, ensuring all viewers see a consistent image while minimizing performance impacts. Other tasks include preparing tax paperwork, organizing Boulder events for systems and AI, and sketching ideas for a project called "co-net." The intention is to spend more time outdoors in the nice weather and to schedule the next "Site Craft Hang," while thinking about potential content for the "Explorers Club" website. Overall, it's a productive Monday morning with good weather contributing to a positive start to the week.
The text provides insights into the challenges of finalizing and shipping a product, highlighting the complexities of resetting and managing various states and default values. It also touches on the need to consider potential issues and the importance of thorough testing. The author reflects on potential improvements for future projects, such as incorporating safeguards for duplicate signatures and considering time-based randomization. Additionally, the text emphasizes the importance of attention to detail, particularly in visual aspects, during the final stages of development and deployment. The speaker discusses their increasing comfort with refactoring and componentizing complex structures. They express excitement about making code more readable and coherent, although the components are currently specific to the project. The speaker notes the trade-off between using brain cycles to save CPU cycles and vice versa, while also reflecting on past regrets and lessons learned. They emphasize the importance of simplifying and automating processes to reduce complexity and potential confusion. Additionally, they mention the need to minimize the number of possible states to maintain control and avoid tangled situations. The text contains various thoughts on working with render loops and passing signals as props in React components. The author also discusses the importance of validating metadata before deployment in order to avoid costly mistakes on the main net. Additionally, the author reflects on the need for breaks during long coding sessions and the frustration of having to rename components. Overall, the text reflects the author's experiences and insights while working on a project.