40 / The Web of 2042

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Books

This week I read How to Take Smart Notes by Söhnke Ahrens (2017), and I really enjoyed it.

The author explains the Zettelkasten system by Niklas Luhmann, who had a physical box with DIN A6 (4.1×5.8 inches for my imperial friends) cards, each of which had contained one note and was densely linked and clustered to other notes. This technique allowed him to collect a lot of knowledge with their context and discover topics to write about.

Having all your ideas and knowledge embedded into this system frees your mind to think of new things and put clusters of notes into context.

And if you're a writer that uses this concept, you never have to start with a blank piece of paper. Always read with the slip-box in mind, collect notes first with arguments, counter-arguments and research. A topic to write about will present itself over time.

I really recommend reading this book (no matter if you write or not), it has given me lots of ideas to improve my personal second-brain/slip-box/Zettelkasten.

If you know German, make sure to subscribe to my podcast Sprachnachrichten, where we talked about this book, the episode will be published next week.

Tweet of the Week

Here's a great chess tip for beginners, I never knew the reason behind that rule!! — @KungFuChessOrg

Culture

• The Web of 2042 (buttondown.email)

  Robin Rendle talks about his predictions for the web in 10 years. Thanks, Jan!

• Are We Really Engineers? (hillelwayne.com)

  Hillel Wayne asked 17 crossovers that used to be traditional engineers and then worked in software to answer the question: Is building software engineering?

Software Engineering

• What I'd like to see in Go 2.0 (sethvargo.com)

  Seth Vargo has a wish-list for Go 2.0 and I agree with all of the points.

• NixOS: The Ultimate Dev Environment? (myme.no)

  Martin Myrseth guides you through a Nix (+ Flakes) setup for a real project he's been working on which consists of a frontend and a backend component.

• Hello Mac OS X Tiger (bunn.dev)

  Fernando Bunn takes you back to 2005 and guides you through the setup of an Xcode project on Mac OS X Tiger.

• Some ways DNS can break (jvns.ca)

  Julia Evans lists 15 common issues caused by DNS.

Cutting Room Floor

• Halting Progress and Happy Accidents: How mRNA Vaccines Were Made (nytimes.com)

  Gina Kolata and Benjamin Mueller explain the long history of mRNA and how it went from being overlooked to the most important defence against COVID. Thanks, Mum!

• Is Sharing a COVID Test a Bad Idea, or Just a Gross One? (theatlantic.com)

  Rachel Gutman about pool-testing at home (using one swab).

• The UK Has A Voyeuristic New Propaganda Campaign Against Encryption (techdirt.com)

  Riana Pfefferkorn about the new anti-encryption and anti-privacy campaign of the UK.

• I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone. (reddit.com)

  Throwaway59724 explains how he automated his job at a mid-size lawfirm.

• Roblox Return to Service 10/28-10/31 2021 (blog.roblox.com)

  Daniel Sturman and colleagues explain the background horror story of the 73 hour outage at Roblox.

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