flâneur

Jacky Zhao

327 followers · 57 following · 7247 views

on the atlas — 272

highlights — 1177

  • I’m embracing the philosophy that it doesn’t matter how ambitious my goals are if I’m not having fun, giving to others, and feeling grateful for every day of my life.
    a normal 2025
  • To care about the etymologies of words is to care about the origins of the world’s story about itself.
    The Dictionary Story: A Love Letter to Language Tucked Into a Delightful Fable about the Difficult Question of How to Be Yourself – The Marginalian
  • Because what is visible is vulnerable, because what can be seen can be touched and what can be touched can be wounded,
    The Wound Is the Gift: David Whyte on the Relationship Between Anxiety and Intimacy – The Marginalian
  • Intimacy always carries the sense of something hidden about to be felt and known in surprising ways; something brought out and made visible, that previously could not be seen or understood. In intimacy what is hidden will become a gift, discovered and rediscovered again and again in the eyes of both giver and receiver.
    The Wound Is the Gift: David Whyte on the Relationship Between Anxiety and Intimacy – The Marginalian
  • Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.
    The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning – The Marginalian
  • And now in my career, I feel like I’ve “beat my first playthrough”, and I’m staring at the New Game+ screen, deciding if I want to PRESS START, or find a different game to play.
    New Game+ - Billy's Thoughts
  • A always responds with “let’s celebrate!” for when we see each other again.
    Process Notes - by Alicia - upcycled words
  • you don’t get to work on very many things for 10 years, so choose what you focus on carefully. Save your persistence for what’s truly close to your heart.
    against brute forcing - by Ava - bookbear express
  • “We are looking to achieve the goals A, B, C, under the constraints X, Y, Z. No system existed to do so when we set out on our efforts (otherwise we probably would have used it!), so from our experiences building systems in this area, we can distill these experiences into a specific set of system requirements. These requirements may not be obvious to readers who have not spent considerable time thinking about or building applications in this space.”
    One way to do applied research
  • Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.
    Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Bill Watterson
  • To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.
    Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Bill Watterson
  • For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity.
    Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Bill Watterson
  • I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.
    Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Bill Watterson
  • my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.
    Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Bill Watterson
  • Writing this code is much harder, because you're not just telling a computer what to do, you're also grappling with another user's mental model of your code. Now it's equal part computer science and psychology of reasoning, or something. How do you get that person to understand your code?
    It's hard to write code for computers, but it's even harder to write code for humans · Erik Bernhardsson
  • I don't feel able to let myself settle for less—perhaps, because for too long before this, I was constantly compromising and giving up what I wanted. I've tasted my dreams, and it's become my lifeline, for better or for worse.
    the weight of dreams - by Spencer Chang
  • My inbox is full of countless emails that contain the words regret and unfortunately and we hope for your future success. This work grinds away at your soul.
    the weight of dreams - by Spencer Chang
  • Tailscale makes the Internet work how you thought the Internet worked, before you learned how the Internet works.
    The New Internet
  • Now javascript matters more than all the operating systems put together, and there’s a new element that controls whether two programs can talk to each other: HTTPS. If you can HTTPS from one thing to another, you can interconnect. If you can’t, forget it.
    The New Internet
  • I read a post recently where someone bragged about using kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that’s 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep.
    The New Internet
  • As an industry, we’ve spent all our time making the hard things possible, and none of our time making the easy things easy.
    The New Internet
  • CONTINUE RANTING IF THAT’S WHAT KEEPS THE JOY IN YOUR EYES! WHO TOLD YOU TO SHRINK SO OTHERS COULD TRAMPLE ON YOU WHEN YOU COULD GROW TO BE 100 TIMES BIGGER THAN THEY EVER COULD!
    I'm at a Fred again concert but he only performed once wtf man
  • And by folk programming, we are encoding the stories of our dreams into our technological environments.
    We’re All (Folk) Programmers - by Spencer Chang - Reboot
  • In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula Le Guin proposes the gathering bag as the first “cultural device,” in its ability to enable people to do the very “human thing” of “put[ting] something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people.” In her view, fiction is a mechanism for arranging everything you’ve gathered in a way that tells a story.
    We’re All (Folk) Programmers - by Spencer Chang - Reboot
  • Like software engineers program by writing code, we are folk programming when we repurpose software, through their given interfaces, to address our problems and desires.
    We’re All (Folk) Programmers - by Spencer Chang - Reboot
  • This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.
    Good Bones by Maggie Smith | Poetry Foundation
  • you become a tad bit wiser on how you go about treating others (and become steadfast on how you want to be treated)!
    friendships, play, and love | arielle lok
  • im seeking to curate spaces where everyone overcomes the natural feeling of not wanting to be wrong. when someone stumbles, be there to nonchalantly help them up without a second thought and proceed onwards
    friendships, play, and love | arielle lok
  • we are open and earnest with one another. there are no thoughts too silly nor do we beat around the bush when shutting things down.
    friendships, play, and love | arielle lok
  • even if we slowly stop talking, there is not a single world where i do not root for them.
    friendships, play, and love | arielle lok
  • i am constantly surrounded by people i love and it is returned exponentially in the depths of my days, ebbs and flows of utter fortune seem to greet me at every corner. but it is fragile as the thought of time, of scarcity of these golden days, creep in the back of my mind. when does the illusion break, and why will it always be the result of my own shortcomings?
    friendships, play, and love | arielle lok
  • That’s comforting but scary because it means you have to choose, a la Sylvia Plath’s fig tree. The anxiety of having infinite possibilities branch out before you. You think you’ll suffer if you continue down one trail and neglect all other pathways. The truth is: you’ll probably suffer more if you don’t choose at all.
    what's a good commitment? - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • You never want your org’s members, current and future, to feel stuck maintaining other people’s ideas—that’s a fast track to Telephone.
    Galactic Empire | Purdue Hackers
  • Telephone is exceedingly common in student orgs, which have high turnover rates and no full-time leadership. It’s almost inevitable that every student org will suffer from Telephone at least once in its life, even if it is very strong at one point.
    Galactic Empire | Purdue Hackers
  • The creators of an iOS app called Workflow, the grand prize at MHacks III, were hired by Apple to turn it into Shortcuts, which is now installed on every iPhone.
    Galactic Empire | Purdue Hackers
  • The community should naturally push you to make things and be radically kind and weird; Hack Night should naturally push you to make your closest friends and ship ambitious projects, constantly surprising yourself. And it should feel organic: the Current should make it the default state for people, not force or pressure them.
    Galactic Empire | Purdue Hackers
  • I want to try to commit. To dedicate myself to this life, one filled with time for the things and people I love, to build it piece by piece so that it lasts a lifetime.
    one year of independence
  • To do the work that I believe in, spark new ways of thinking about computers, touch hearts, and have the ability to craft a good, modest life from it.
    one year of independence
  • (2000/09) When I was designing the Web, I tried to use forms which people would recognize from elsewhere. Q: What is the history of the //? A: I wanted the syntax of the URI to separate the bit which the web browser has to know about (www.example.com) from the rest (the opaque string which is blindly requested by the client from the server). Within the rest of the URI, slashes (/) were the clear choice to separate parts of a hierarchical system, and I wanted to be able to make a link without having to know the name of the service (www.example.com) which was publishing the data. The relative UR…
    Frequently asked questions by the Press - Tim BL
  • I think about knowledge as debt, and action as paying it off. You have to do things to deplete the toxin or it will just built up in your body
    Cultivating Agency - by Charles Yang - Rough Drafts
  • Rather, memoir is a means to reclaim authorship over one’s perspective and identity—for the victim Emily Doe to become the artist Chanel Miller—for the world to finally know her name.
    🌻 internet archive - by Jasmine Sun - half-baked futures
  • Separately from the Page Visibility API, user agents typically have a number of policies in place to mitigate the performance impact of background or hidden tabs. These may include:
    Page Visibility API - Web APIs | MDN
  • Aside from terrible hacks like playing zero-volume sounds
    STRML: Chrome 56 Will Aggressively Throttle Background Tabs
  • He imparted to his students a sense of pedagogical responsibility: he was really expecting to learn from them at every weekly meeting, which in turn meant they had to understand their ideas to the bone.
    how to coparent baby ideas - by Anson Yu
  • My response (and hot take) is that criticism rarely has the desired effect and that it’s best reformulated into questions.
    how to coparent baby ideas - by Anson Yu
  • Not by way of ideological stubbornness, but by being engrossed enough with your own thing to develop mental models about how things should work
    how to coparent baby ideas - by Anson Yu
  • I think this also can explain how larger groups often are more draining. We have to do a lot more cognitive work to hold several models of the world in our head.
    On social energy - by Max Langenkamp - Unruly Sun
  • The more foreign the person, the more interpretation they require, and the more narrow the affordances we can take with them.
    On social energy - by Max Langenkamp - Unruly Sun
  • First, we are constantly interpreting ourselves for others.
    On social energy - by Max Langenkamp - Unruly Sun
  • one vision i had for the future - friends write programs that live on each others’ computers and interact in very simple ways, like occasionally changing the playlist or drawing flowers on the corner of your screen or something. i think we will invent very wholesome ways to transfer presence, and we will also invent very cringe ways of doing so (like badly-designed digital avatars)
    batteries - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind