As someone who was researching and documenting impacts of the housing foreclosure crisis in 2008…👀

We both simultaneously said: “nurse shark!” because they hang out near us when we’ve gone snorkeling and they seem like lil sweeties.

Action shot of fluffy gray cat with white paws and muzzle. The photo catches the cat in mid-air, about 4 feet off the ground, forelegs outstretched, leaping from a fireplace mantle onto the sofa several feet away.

Caturday energy already dialed up to 11 over here…

Regardless, your sense of color and rhythm that comes through in the piece is stunning!

Gorgeous! If you’re open to indulging my curiosity, I’d love to know more about how you achieved the circle motifs. The edges don’t look like appliqué (too soft?)

…so I’m wondering if you achieved it with a dye/print technique (reminds me a bit of sun prints!) or if the fabric had it already

Honestly? That may be the ultimate superpower. Seriously badass.

“Yeah, we're dragging people into the office and forcing some of them to again live in high COL areas, but is that *really* enough misery? I'm sure we could do more, but budgets are tight.”

“Ooh! Got it! What if we also made them see each other’s gnarly FEET on the daily?!”

Of all the chotiners, this one made the cats jump when I LOLed

Close perspective portrait shot of fluffy grey and white cat on his person’s chest, gazing up at her. It’s not immediately clear whether it’s a look of love or attempted mental telepathy to make treats happen.

This one, y’all. He’s such a little evil goblin, and yet he has my whole heart.

A skillet and a plate sitting on the front burners of an older stove with a red teakettle on the left rear burner. The skillet has two pieces of flatbread cooking on it; the plate has a stack of finished flatbread

Week 6 of making flatbread instead of buying bagels or other breadstuffs. First time trying a yeasted recipe.

This stuff is SO cheap, so easy. This is a bit more than half of the batch. I don’t have a stand mixer, a ton of counter space, or any real skills, so if I can pull it off most folks can

Ahh I’m going to have to keep an eye out for a decent used one…

Looks fantastic! I’ve been experimenting with flatbreads, and noodles might need to be next on my list. Do you need a pasta machine to get them thin enough?

I ❤️ that I instantly got this reference

…and most people are fighting fires.

So again, it’s a two-tiered threshold dynamic. (1) the threshold to automate/bulk *a* process, (2) the threshold to acquire & gain competence with a tool/system to make & maintain automations readily. Once 2, then yes 1 goes down, but needs lots of 1 first.

In an org context, higher-ups punt that stuff down to someone else, and downline folks don’t have power to demand better (or need to spend clout & make a hard business case). And for individuals, it’s still about juice/squeeze and context. Sure I love fixing bulk ops! But not if I’m on a deadline…

I suspect it’s easier to think about this if you take it to specific personas and situations. Who is the person experiencing what repetitive task at what level of aggravation? And how does that fit in with their other priorities and the people breathing down their neck?

I’m not referring to LLMs to write code. When I say “user” I really do mean your typical user, my typical biz client. No one’s coding, they’re just out there doing business

“Small” tasks are also misleading, because most often to be useful, small ≈ specific. And specificity is more fragile. That’s why a lot of users now just throw the task into a LLM chat and hope/try to pick out the right bits…bc it blunts some of the work without fighting for every detail & edge case

I’m not assuming intense interventions or state of the art solutions. My own lil systems include dozens of the tiniest macros and automations imaginable, as well as bigger ones. But even for me, that carries some overhead cost — if nothing else, cognitive load of remembering what they all are

I get you. But people spare half a sec thinking that and then just get on with things. It’s not worth emotional energy to a degree that becomes observable. If it’s in a tool they use a lot, are invested in, and has an active user community, maybe they’ll upvote a feature request. If not, why bother

It’s far too easy with JTBD to forget that for most users, most of the time, the most salient word is not “job” it’s DONE

Classic xkcd comic “is it worth the time?” illustrating a matrix of task frequency x time saved to show how much time spent automating still delivers a payoff.

I think that among other things, a lot of normies implicitly have a greater internalized sense of “is it worth it?” than tinkerers do. I say this with love, as a non-normie who needs to actively evaluate where and why I'm drawing dopamine. imgs.xkcd.com/comics/is_it...

In the “a little dark but distant enough” and intriguing, I recently read & loved Alien Clay and Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (the latter is the first of a trilogy that IMO falters as a whole, but the first book stands on its own and is very fun)

In the former category: Legends & Lattes, and the prequel Bookshops & Bonedust. Both are charming and fun.

Less lighthearted but great escapist fantasy, impeccably executed: The Scholomance series by Naomi Novik, also her book Spinning Silver. All so tightly plotted, she’s changed how I see craft

I totally get it! Ok so I’ve got a selection of SFF genre I can recommend, some on the lighter/I-need-to-feel-ok-about-the-world-again side (I see in the thread you’re already onto Becky Chambers) and some in the heavily-intriguing-take-you-out-of-current-concerns vein

This is amazing! I always want to go back and shore up gaps in my understanding, but I’m so focused on applied work, pure theory material tends to slip out of my brain 😵‍💫

Genre preferences? (in/out?)

Recently read _Of Monsters and Mainframes_ and was pleasantly surprised by how well it held together through the end. It’s fun in a loopy-campy-absurdist way, but never gets into sloppy, overly repetitive, or self-indulgent territory.

They normalize pretty quickly! That said: I recently broke down and got a “computer Rx” pair as well (just single-vision so way cheaper but optimized for that distance) and that has been a boon for longer working sessions. Something to think about if you notice eyestrain.

No joke: I drove past the Wendy’s in my neighborhood this afternoon, and their street-side sign read: “Misery has arrived. Good luck!”

A brown ceramic plate stacked with freshly made flour tortillas. A cast iron tortilla press can just be seen in the upper left of the photo.

One of my coping strategies is to get basic in whatever forms make sense at the time—enjoying simple competence at simple things. I’ve always been a cook, but this spring I started making things from scratch I’d ordinarily buy.

Here’s a batch of tortillas I made this evening! Super good, sooo cheap