2024-04-03: Inboxes, Beeper, Slackening
(If you work at FF/FFDW đź„˝ links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Three Things I Did
1. Scrabbled
A day of administrivia: syncing my old wiki with this one, installing Telegram somewhat cagily (guess what compression utility I had to use to unpack it on Linux? xz! ), wrangling with my office chair to see if that’s what’s messing with my shoulder. Zoom doctoring. Some days are like this!
2. Emailed
Dug a little into my email backlog. Email is so important! It’s the authentication system of last resort: lose control of it, and the rest of your systems are at risk — where would you like that blanket password reset sent again? And it’s a place where you can still meet people for the first time. I got a wonderful email from a stranger last week, but it had to go through hello@fil.org because they didn’t know how else to reach me. It makes me so sad (and frustrated) that people don’t publish their email address, out of an almost folkloric belief it will keep spam at bay, and now it’s got to the point that people don’t even try to look. I’m danny@spesh.com, how do you do. Sorry I haven’t replied yet.
3. Slacked
So instead of evolving email, we created a million other forms of inboxes: I have dozens of Slack, Telegrams, Discords, WhatsApps, Signals, LinkedIns, which I have also not replied to. I think we oscillate between multiple inboxes, and single unified inboxes, but we don’t have a stable orbit yet. I re-downloaded Beeper to see if that helps; it was very rough when I was first on the beta, and I dropped out of using it. Let’s try again! (Update: it did not help. But I can send you an invite if you want to try yourself.)
TIL
- TIL that I was going to wow you with some email statistics to show how relevant it and I am, but I went through all of the ones listed in this article and they all seem pretty dubious. “In 2021, an average of just over 2 hours a day are spent on email”, says email marketer. Suuure.
- If you really hate email, https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ will turn newsletters into RSS feeds, so you don’t have to read them in your mail client before you unsubscribe. (This newsletter already comes with an RSS feed, chill).
- Banyan Computer opened for business! Another great tool, built on the coin of files.
Links Du Jour
- If you think open source security is bad, do not look behind the corporate veil, as an external report on Microsoft’s handling of a state actor attack on Outlook revealed. (WaPo, archive.is).
- Two years ago, today, Unwanted Thoughts: “A friend of mine was terrified of backing into just one role, ending up stuck in just one life. I, optimistic and insufferable, told her that I was looking forward to transforming into many different people, bouncing around the mental state-space as the world changed around me. The truth seems to be that you can steer between these two camps, and thank god. How we change is under some of our control, or it feels that way.”