The truth according to Trump
Alan Jacobs rightly observes that Trump supporters don’t care about the ’truth’ of their claims.
He’s spot on to point out that the purpose of the constant barrage of egregious lying is to mock the idea that truth matters, and to gather a constituency of people who are in on the joke.
And certainly, there’s no point trying to correct these outlandish claims, as though their pushers ever cared a fig about the facts of the matter. They don’t.
💬Manuel says:
“people are slowly starting to realise that you can get immense human value from the web outside of traditional social media. You have to work for it but it’s absolutely worth it.”
That’s true. Facebook still has huge numbers, but you don’t need a theoretically mighty reach to connect meaningfully with the right people.
💬 “Doing and seeing and thinking about stuff. Writing things down. Sharing and talking about little things, simple ideas, tiny thoughts. Making and tweaking and adjusting and imagining. Changing and creating. Thinking and sharing. Finding and connecting. Connecting and imagining. Imagining and thinking and finding and sharing and writing and asking and answering and connecting and building and tweaking and trying and adjusting and creating and changing things.
One little tiny itty-bitty thing at a time.” - Annie Mueller
Yuri says social media platforms have killed links. If so, it’s a very bad thing. I wouldn’t know, because I’m all in on the Web. The Web is the social platform. Without links, I’m out. Hyperlinks are such a fundamentally great innovation that any platform that tries to avoid them will lose.
How to write an article from your notes - an example
In July 2024 educational technologist Andy Matuschak published a long article outlining his observations on the debate over discovery learning versus instructional learning, and how it relates to the Holy Grail of educational technology: “a wildly powerful learning environment”.
Exorcising us of the Primer is a great article, but it’s just as interesting to see how this piece of writing came into existence in the first place.
💬
It’s not that systems for getting things done are bad, exactly. It’s just that they’re not the main point. The main point – though it took me years to realise it – is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine. If you don’t prioritise the skill of just doing something, you risk falling into an exceedingly sneaky trap, which is that you end up embarking instead on the unnecessary and, worse, counterproductive project of becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing.
The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful
Here’s my perspective on ‘atomic notes’.
They’re atomic in time even before they’re atomic in any other dimension.
An atomic note, for me, is the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful.
I got this from computer game designers, who call the shortest viable unit of play an ‘atom’. A single life in Space Invaders (and yes, that shows my age). Just enough to make you desperate to keep going.
Enhanced markdown apps you can use for free to make effective notes
I’ve lost track of the ridiculous number of ‘Zettelkasten apps’ now on the loose on the wild wild web. When I checked the ChatGPT marketplace, for example, I had to stop counting at 50. I was losing the will to go on looking at them.
Everyone makes the apps, it seems, but who’s left to use them?
If you’re one of those sensible people who just want to make useful notes, plain text files with Markdown are simple, elegant, versatile and durable.
Finished reading: A System for Writing by Bob Doto 📚. Ok, I finished it a while ago, and here’s my enthusiastic review
Finished reading: The Looking-Glass by Machado De Assis 📚 My favourite late 19th century Brazilian author. His novella ‘The Alienist’, included in this collection, is hilarious. The style and tone strongly reminds me of my favourite contemporary Argentinian author, César Aira.