Raw size isn't enough A few months ago there was a sequence of posts to Hacker News about various “clubs” you could post your small website on: the 1MB Club, 512KB Club, 250KB Club, and even the 10KB Club. I think those are a fun indicator of renewed interested in minimalism, but I will say that raw size isn’t enough – a 2KB site with no real content isn’t much good, and a page with 512KB of very slow JavaScript is worse than a snappy site with 4MB of well-chosen images. ...[Instead, it's about] an “ethos of small”. It’s caring about the users of your site: that your pages download fast, are easy to read, have interesting content, and don’t load scads of JavaScript for Google or Facebook’s trackers. Ben Hoyt, The small web is beautiful benhoyt.com minimalismcontentsize
The quality of thought It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site. Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture thinkinginformationsize
As inanimate as it was gigantic A Fragment by John Ruskin blog.ayjay.org And among such false means largeness of scale in the dwelling-house was of course one of the easiest and most direct. All persons, however senseless or dull, could appreciate size: it required some exertion of intelligence to enter into the spirit of the quaint carving of the Gothic times, but none to perceive that one heap of stones was higher than another. And therefore, while in the execution and manner of work the Renaissance builders zealously vindicated for themselves the attribute of cold and superior learning, they appealed for such approbation as they needed from the multitude, to the lowest possible standard of taste; and while the older workman lavished his labor on the minute niche and narrow casement, on the doorways no higher than the head, and the contracted angles of the turreted chamber, the Renaissance builder spared such cost and toil in his detail, that he might spend it in bringing larger stones from a distance; and restricted himself to rustication and five orders, that he might load the ground with colossal piers, and raise an ambitious barrenness of architecture, as inanimate as it was gigantic, above the feasts and follies of the powerful or the rich. architecturesizescale
How to do what you love An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com To do something well you have to like itWow, that's pretty coolPrestige is just fossilized inspirationAlways produce worklife
To do something well you have to like it If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school. painprogress
Wow, that's pretty cool To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test. So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive. interestreading
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself. fame
Always produce "Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof. Flow interesting (The Meander) productivity