The librarian’s service:

I saw a great story in James Clear’s “3-2-1” today.

Lillian Moore shares a quick story that reveals what really motivates people:

“A few months after my husband and I moved to a small Massachusetts town I grumbled to a resident about the poor service at the library, hoping she would repeat my complaints to the librarian. The next time I went to the library, the librarian had set aside two bestsellers for me and a new biography for my husband. What’s more, she appeared to be genuinely glad to see me.

Later I reported the miraculous change to my friend. “I suppose you told her how poor we thought the service was?” I asked.

“No,” she confessed. “In fact—I hope you don’t mind—I told her your husband was amazed at the way she had built up this small town library, and that you thought she showed unusually good taste in the new books she ordered.”

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This reminded me of the parable of the wind and the sun. It is an idea I don’t implement often enough.

What?

I also subscribe to James Clear’s newsletter and read the same bit.

When I read this story I immediately thought, this is not repeatable. Even if it is, how is going to a third party with an issue and hoping they’ll accurately convey your issues only to have the third party change it going to necessarily benefit the original person? There are any number of points in this story where things could have gone poorly and, as far as I can tell, exactly one that ends in this sunny outcome.

This is a passive-aggressive’s dream result. It’s impractical in practice.

Everything Is Silicon Valley Now | Defector:

It’s a cycle. People create something, together, that reflects their energy and weird work; that thing becomes compelling as a result, and that makes it valuable, and at some point someone puts a price on it and someone else pays that price. It is at that moment that the thing begins to change. The new owner will almost always decide that what is most interesting about this thing is not the human essence that gave it value, but The Owner Himself, and will act accordingly. People will come back for the valuable stuff until the owner succeeds in crowding it out; when that crowding is done, the owned thing dies. Until then, what’s left is just what’s valuable—the humanity and brilliance and unpredictability and fun that all that cynical and idiotic and self-serving wealth is always and everywhere busy replacing with itself. There’s nothing to do but look for the good stuff until the looking becomes too challenging, or until it’s gone.

From Nick Heer:

That is something to keep pinned in your brain. For most of us, it is a reminder to be wary of how things are changed in exploitative ways; for those in power, it should be seen as a cautionary pattern.

I cannot put into words how cool and frustrating this video is.

In it, Scott 3D prints a case for an M1 Mac Mini that he marries up with his iPad Mini as a display.

This is cool.

What’s frustrating is that I’ve noodled around with this same idea for years. When I lived in Tokyo I used my iPad Pro as the occasional display for my 2011 Mac Mini Server (Ama no Gawa) using both Duet and … ugh, the same basic technology but it used a dongle for improving display quality instead of a cable … ugh.

Anyway, it worked great for me but was sadly not as portable as I would have liked.

Scott’s design, which I’ve also considered using a Raspberry Pi 4 (with VNC) in place of the Mac Mini, IS PORTABLE … if one does not need it to be wirelessly portable.

Writing my thinking like this is bringing me to a fresh idea — what if I carried both? The Mac Mini for the more intensive work and the very light RPi4 for tooling around where I need more than the iPad Mini alone can provide? The lighter setup can be powered by a standard battery to be mobile.

Hmmmm.

Baby eating toast in an otherwise unrelated context