Sean Voisen

The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman

The Antidote explores how we can attain happiness not by conventional methods of optimism or positive thinking, but rather through the “negative path”—acknowledging that life is fraught with suffering, failure and challenges, but even amidst all this we can still find peace in accepting “what is.” Burkeman’s earlier book, Four Thousand Weeks, is one of my all-time favorites, which is what spurned me to pick up The Antidote. The Antidote was plenty good, but for me ended up mostly a refresher of familiar ideas in Buddhism, Stoicism, and related philosophies.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs

I really enjoyed this meditation on the joys of reading books, and the challenges of doing so in our current technological environment. Jacobs’ advice is simple: read at Whim (with a capital-W), read for pleasure, read whatever holds your attention and brings you joy. Don’t worry about being one of those people who only reads “great works” or the classics. Refreshing!

Wind Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

My favorite summer read so far, and likely the best book I read this year. Beautiful prose, harrowing tales of adventure, and deep, profound reflections on the experience of being alive. It’s full of memorable, quotable passages, like this drawn from St. Exupéry’s experience of the Spanish Civil War:

No man can draw a free breath who does not share with other men a common and disinterested ideal. Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. There is no comradeship except through union in the same high effort.

Thus enthralled, and having never read Saint-Exupéry before, I immediately picked up The Little Prince and read it with my son soon afterwards.

The Accidental Universe by Alan Lightman

I loved Lightman’s fictional work, Einstein’s Dreams, so I thought I’d try some of his other writing. The Accidental Universe is a series of essays ruminating on everything from theories of the multiverse to the ephemerality of being to the immense vastness of the cosmos. It’s a fun, quick read and I enjoyed it, but if you’re going to read Lightman, read Einstein’s Dreams first.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

I cannot possibly hope to capture my thoughts on this book in a few sentences. It’s the best Stoic text of all time—a wonderful trove of wisdom that I find myself returning to again and again.

There are multitudes of editions and translations. I’m reading the annotated edition by Robin Waterfield, which is abundant with notes providing historical context and commentary. If you’re going to read Meditations, get this one.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

I’ve been reading Chiang’s collection of short stories intermittently, one at a time at a whim, and haven’t finished yet. But “The Tower of Babylon,” which envisions the biblical story in a world where ancient cosmology is accurate, was so brilliant I can’t get it out of my head. I’m looking forward to finishing the remaining stories.

From The Attention Cottage by A.J. Jacobs:

What I need, what I am trying to build, is — I coin this phrase by analogy to a memory palace — an attention cottage …

We think we should be living in the chaotic, cacophanous megalopolis and retreat to our cottage only in desperate circumstances. But the reverse is true: our attention cottage should be our home, our secure base, the place from which we set out on our adventures in contemporaneity and to which we always make our nostos.

I love this little metaphor. We could all use an attention cottage, a place in which to focus and sink, uninterrupted, into deep work.

I wonder, though, if the milieu of such a thing can be temporal as much as spatial. My current “attention cottage” primarily comprises my home office, but only at certain times of day (early mornings before my children awake, or late evenings, when they’re asleep). Outside these hours, I do live in the “chaotic, cacophonous megalopolis” just by virtue of my chosen job function and method of daily employment, even within the physical space of my attention cottage. As a manager, even if I eschew (and I mostly do) social media and involuntary distractions during the workday, context switching is inevitable and focal diversions inevitably still pop up. (Hello, Slack!)

So here’s what I—and most of us—can and should do: block out time. Sometimes my attention cottage is ambling—a mid-day stroll through the neighborhood to think. Sometimes it is sedentary—an hour or two to write documentation or strategy documents or catering to the whims of muses in an essay or a blog post. Sometimes it is both. One’s cottage must comprise both quiet time and quiet space to relax and bathe, uninterrupted in ideas and thoughts and dreams.

Every now and then, I end up revisiting the ideas of Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality and thinking about they might apply to computers. For a book that doesn’t mention the word “computer,” (that I can recall, at least) and was written well before the personal computing revolution, it’s surprisingly compatible the early ideal of computing as an empowering medium for thought. Think Alan Kay or the ideals of the free software movement.

For Illich, the idea of “conviviality” as it relates to tools is a balance between personal autonomy and freedom from dominiation by the majority. To quote:

A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others.

So it was nice to stumble on the Hope in Source podcast interview with Stephen Kell, which talks a lot about conviviality and computing. What struck me most in the conversation was the idea that Kell called “the monopoly of the recent,” namely that the tech world is too obsessed with newness, often to our detriment and to the exclusion of others. Drawing on Illich’s ideas of a radical monopoly, Kell says:

It definitely spoke to me when I read it in Tools for Conviviality. And he talked about how in the sort of seventies United States, there was a radical monopoly of the car, in that society was designed so that you had to use a car to get around and it was kind of impractical to survive without one. You could do it, but you confined yourself to the fringes. You weren’t a full participant.

So I thought what’s the equivalent in software. And what I came up with was this idea of change, right. Always working with the latest thing. That’s that’s to me the most equivalent concept in software, because it’s like the monopoly of the recent. If you want to use some old piece of software that you happen to know does what you want. And maybe it’s simpler or performs better than some newer version. Yeah, you can do that, but you’re confining yourself to the fringes, right? Because suddenly you need to install the old versions of a dozen other things, and suddenly you’ve got security problems to contend with maybe. Because everything is so interconnected, you’ve confined yourself to not being a Real participant in the software community anymore.

Today’s “monopoly of the car” is the smartphone. It’s increasingly more difficult to get by in society without one.

There are some connections to make here with the permacomputing movement, to be sure.

Read A Child’s Plaything by Toby Ord. Such a brilliant short story that says so much about modern life with so little.

And they would understand that the people of our time are so wealthy, so powerful, that every one of them has access to machines with thousands of parts working in concert, and that it is less effort to build such a wondrous machine than to simply paint a doll’s eyebrows in their right places.

I immediately think of software (because that’s always where my mind goes), where amazing capabilities have become rapidly commoditized, but where high levels of quality and craft remain scarce. With templates and boilerplate and starter packs and generative AI we can more easily spin-up complicated working systems than ever before—including tools with an astonishing simulacrum of intelligence—but to build something of beauty still requires ingredients that remain in short supply: time, attention, and care.

Like Casey Newton, I’ve found networked note-taking to be a practice that mostly overpromises and under-delivers.

As someone infatuated with the idea of tools for thought, I’ve tried a multitude of different note-taking applications, both of the networked and non-networked variety. Everything from Roam to Workflowy to Obsidian to Bear to Apple Notes to vim and vimwiki to Simplenote to Evernote and so on and so forth. Presently, I use Obsidian, but I don’t really need it.

Despite best intentions to create a Zettelkasten for myself over the years, I’ve repeatedly found the marginal increase in value—or insights-delivered-to-hours-spent ratio—not nearly worth the effort. My hunch is that digital Luhmann-ism really only provides dividends for a small population of academics and writers of non-fiction who need to cite references or make connections across disparate texts.

For the rest of us, just writing down notes is all that really matters. Any tool that allows you to compose and save text will do. It is the act of writing, not the act of linking or reading or revisiting, that clarifies thought and leads to insight. The rest is all superfluous.

I’m bullish on HTML-first, JavaScript-light frameworks and libraries gaining more developer mindshare over the coming years. We’re seeing more and more developers starting to realize that maybe JavaScript-heavy SPAs are not the best way to build many applications.

There are two HTML-first frameworks I’m particularly excited about and have been using in personal projects: Enhance and HTMX. This note is about my early experiences with HTMX, a hypermedia-based approach to application architecture. (Hypothetically, you could use Enhance and HTMX together, but I haven’t tried that.) Take all this with a grain of salt, I’ve only been using it a few weeks.

A few nice things about HTMX:

• It’s just markup! You write HTML, sprinkle in a few special attributes on any element, and you get a large portion of the AJAX-based dynamic behavior you get in a JavaScript-heavy SPA without all the JavaScript. It’s easy, simple, and feels kind of magical the first time you use it.
• The API is pretty damn simple and uniform—just use HTML attributes for specifying nearly all behavior. (You can also use custom response headers on the server side to invoke client-side behavior from the server when you need it.)
• Server-side rendering is the default. Your server needs to respond to HTTP requests with HTML rather than JSON. Admittedly, this is probably better for newer projects that don’t have pre-existing JSON APIs. (Though there are extensions to HTMX that allow you to use client-side rendering if you must use JSON). But for me, this way of working feels natural anyway, and harkens back to the days of 2007-2010 or so, when I was writing a lot of Ruby on Rails.

A few challenges I encountered:

• How you handle pure client-side behavior is left as an exercise to the reader. For instance, how do you handle animated modal dialogs and overlays? A server-side rendered modal can be injected on-demand, but there remains a need for client-side scripting to handle transitions, canceling, hiding or removing the dialog, etc. HTMX supports the new ViewTransition API, but alas, Firefox does not. Additionally, there are myriad ways of handling pure client-side behavior, some more compatible than others to the HTMX style and ethos. Alpine.js perhaps, or maybe Cami.js? Both are lightweight libraries that do just enough. Personally, I’ve landed on client-side enhanced web components (really just custom elements that are defined in JavaScript but are server-side rendered), and that has been working pretty well so far.
• Sometimes you do want some client-side state, and pure HATEOS feels limiting. For example, handling client-side state based on the current route is not-so-straightforward. If a user clicks a navigation bar, you may wish to both highlight the current location on the navigation bar and re-render section of the page to show the application contents corresponding to that location. In an SPA framework, a client-side router would allow reactive rendering behavior based on the current route. Unfortunately, browsers don’t make it easy to observe URL location changes despite the existence of the History API (the newer Navigation API may solve this problem). One solution has been to rely on HTMX events like htmx:afterSettle as triggers to check for location changes and handle accordingly.

I’m sure I’m doing some things “wrong.” That’s OK—it’s been fun to just dig in and try.

From The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life, where L.M. Sacasas reflects on the furor around the recent iPad ad:

A good life is supported by a diverse array of focal things and practices, which tend to reward us with deeper, more meaningful experiences; a gratifying measure of bodily skill and competence; and possibly even a stronger fabric of relationships. Alternatively, a life characterized merely by the consumption of virtual goods mediated through devices, and the subsequent dependence and isolation such a life necessarily entails, will not be conducive to our well-being.

iPads embody a device-centric paradigm towards computing, which is exactly why my wife and I have been extremely cautious in how and when we allow our children to use them. Their device-centric nature isn’t so much an artifact of the table form factor as it is of how Apple markets it and tailors the associated user experience towards consumption over creativity. The recent ad, which attempts to counter this perception—”look, your iPad can be your piano!”—instead fails miserably and only reinforces this hidden bias. We don’t want our devices to subsume those focal objects that make an embodied, creative life so fulfilling—if anything we want devices to remain in the periphery, to complement them instead.

I fully believe there could be an alternate universe where tablet devices excel at empowering creativity by complementing other tools and instruments without trying to supplant them. But, that’s clearly not the universe we inhabit today.