Ian Vanagas

All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess.

Thinking about inputs and outputs to the system in a method-agnostic way lets you take a step back from the algorithmic jargon and consider whether other fields have developed methods that might work here using different terminology.

Just as important as the ability to share content itself is the ability to easily share how something is made. The most common remixed media is all visual; meme templates lay out the recognizable format and it’s intuitively obvious how to change them into messages that suit your niche or community.

You should be able to easily see connections between all of the web pages you have open at once, any subset of them, and explore them / navigate through them visually.

High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt t... See more

Our relation to ideas is an inextricable symbiosis, like that between plant and pollinator, a mutualism in which neither can survive without the other. At the dawn of civilization, a covenant was made between humans and these alien entities that live in our minds—honor and respect each other and all will flourish beyond their wildest dreams.

It is a bad sign when a large percentage of members are declaring information bankruptcy. It means the community is providing too much information members don’t care about. They aren’t helping members make sense of that information.