Tanuj

[Clueyness] is feeling incredibly bad for certain people in certain situations—situations in which the person I feel bad for was probably barely affected by what happened. It’s an odd feeling of intense heartbreaking compassion for people who didn’t actually go through anything especially bad.

I feel like for these complex problems, it's basically impossible to design a framework de novo. And people try this all the time, but it very rarely works. Instead, what happens is you have an application that works well, and then basically you copy and paste that two or three times, and then you look at the diffs, and the things that aren't the... See more

The better your vocabulary, the more stories you can chunk, the more experiences you can pattern match.

I think these are symptoms of chronic, pervasive problems with the way we develop and interact with software. Messing up my formatting upon copy-and-paste is a data-corruption bug, but we don’t think of it this way. Imagine if every time you copied something, half the letters would just come out randomly scrambled.

The darkness is the natural dual of the adtech web, the zone of extreme overactivity above the surface of the cozyweb, with businesses trying desperately to penetrate into private spaces past the open-to-private boundary marked by email.This makes poetic sense. The adtech world is neither utopian nor dystopian. It is pragmatically mehtopian. It’s... See more

Why put "expandable explanations" in your writing?1. The reader can get the background information they need – just-in-time, not just-in-case – all without: a) you re-explaining the basics for every article, or b) your reader breaking the flow of reading by clicking a link to yet another article.2. So your reader can tailor your article to their... See more

This screen-centric visual experience has a lot going on: photographs and videos and vector graphics and overlapping chat windows pressed up together with spreadsheets and reminders that updates are ready to install if only I’d let them. It’s the everything-screen! And so I feel called to frame and claim and digest it all. I have limited control... See more