I find older essays much better than contemporary ones, which is why I currently read Chesterton, Emerson and Montaigne the most. Thanks for this, I'll explore other writers from your list.
For what it's worth, Roam team has just recently added end-to-end encryption option for graphs.
I'm a Roam user, although I've tried Obsidian, Bear, Zettlr and vimwiki. I keep coming back to Roam because I find thinking in blocks suits me better than thinking in documents.
I know exactly what you are talking about. After following Ultraworking Lights [1] for a couple of months, everything started feeling mechanical for me. So, I've stopped doing it and instead started doing anything I just feel like doing each day. Which comes with its own set of problems.
I think this is the effect of various companies trying to capture as much of our attention as possible because it makes sense for their bottom line. We are all victims of recency bias, so it makes sense for companies to prioritize more recent content. If it wasn't the case, the various social media apps wouldn't be as addictive as they are.
I am not aware of a social media app feed that puts quality above recency (not counting the plugins that enable that, like Twemex [1]). Instead they keep us in what David Perell calls "Never-Ending Now" [2]. We endlessly consume temporary, short-lived content and we are mostly blind to the past.
Google search is not social media, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google ranked more recent content higher, given how they have changed the Youtube algorithm.
I think the biggest problem with Medium is the fact that nothing was paywalled and then they introduced the paywall, which caused frustration. Substack, on the other hand, is much more pleasurable because there is an expectation from the start that some of the articles are going to be paywalled.
I also hate visiting Medium, but enjoy visiting Substack. They both have paywalls on some of the content, but Substack is much more enjoyable, even when you don't get to see the full article.
I think software quality is always decreasing because of multiple factors.
1) The tension between leadership that usually only prioritizes shipping new features and engineering that wants to write sustainable code. There is usually no incentive for engineering to decrease technical debt or increase sustainability, as these changes are usually not tangible to leadership. The only short-term beneficiaries of one engineer's code quality improvements are other engineers, which often don't care that much, as they are busy shipping new features as quickly as possible.
2) Speaking of short-term, not all leadership thinks long-term. Sustainable code makes sense if you're thinking long-term, but not if leadership is chasing lucrative exits in a couple of months. If a project survives for 20 years, chances are it survived multiple leadership changes, which all thought short-term.
3) In software, the only constant is change. As project gets older, it has to deal with all the changes that aging entails. Aging means increased exposure to reality and all the "surprising amount of detail"[1] it contains. This increases complexity, introduces bugs, adds edge cases to deal with, etc.
The only metric I currently pay attention to is the readiness score from my Oura ring.
It's interesting to see how much alcohol, eating just before sleeping or stress affects this score. And it's also nice to get the confirmation on how well I'm feeling from a tool that measures it.
Write about whatever interests you. What article would the past you like to read? Some suggestions:
- you could write a low-effort "today I learned" posts, where you would share tips and tricks about something that you've learned during your day job (e.g. https://shime.sh/til/)
- you could write a high-effort "deep dive" posts, where you would explore how a certain library works under the hood (e.g. https://shime.sh/deep-dive/)
Although deep dive posts take more effort, it's worth it, since you'll learn a lot about something just by explaining how it works.
I have a meaningful (which is subjective) part-time job and I've been mostly freelancing for the last 10 years (out of which the last 4 years I've been mostly freelancing part-time).
Although I've started with UpWork, I don't recommend it for job search anymore, because the quality of clients was low from my experience. A lot of job postings ended up being a race to the bottom with rates. I think WeWorkRemotely is a better option for search, while HN hiring threads are even better.