Tanuj

We're biologically programmed to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They connect us to other people. So they're like a kind of candy that we're fed when we consume political information, when we read novels.

Links (rendered default blue and underlined—they’re the hypertext “HT” in HTML) are the oxygen of the web.

You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I... See more

For the people who’ve figured out the right incantations to type and buttons-buried-in-submenus to click, computers can automate administrivia, surface information, and make them feel “more fully participant in the future”. But getting there is an arduous journey, and many people get in a place where computers just make things harder. The... See more

The main challenge was to reduce page size without making the website less attractive. Because images take up most of the bandwidth, it would be easy to obtain very small page sizes and lower energy use by eliminating images, reducing their number, or making them much smaller. However, visuals are an important part of Low-tech Magazine’s appeal,... See more

Don’t learn a new language. You’ve covered what regular people talk about.5 Instead, dive deep into fields you know nothing about. Economics, Psychology, Philosophy, Physics, or applied rationality.

“You are the main character—the protagonist—the star at the center of your own unfolding story. You’re surrounded by your supporting cast: friends and family hanging in your immediate orbit. Scattered a little further out, a network of acquaintances who drift in and out of contact over the years.But there in the background, faint and out of focus,... See more

This problem is not easy to fix, but it’s not impossible either. I’ve mostly fixed it for myself. The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built. When you talk to... See more