Ira Cogan

Caution: This is a post about me switching from one markdown editor to another. If that sounds boring, read no further.

So check it out. I have a 16” laptop I mostly keep at home on my desk. It’s a $600ish Lenovo IdeaPad with a monitor, keyboard, and other peripherals plugged into it. I’ll sometimes bring it with me when traveling, but not when day to day commuting. I pretty much use it as one would a desktop.

When day to day commuting, I have a $170ish 14” HP laptop on me at almost all times. It’s light, and the specs are about as basic as a laptop gets by today’s standards. That’s a deliberate choice on my part. The idea is for that one to be almost exclusively a word processor.

And, I have an iPhone.

I wrote a little about this recently but to recap, I do most of my writing with Word and OneNote on all three machines and that writing is synced up with Microsoft OneDrive. I really like Word and OneNote, but neither of them are markdown friendly, so I developed a bad habit of drafting for this blog directly into the CMS instead of there. So, I got back into drafting for the blog with IA Writer. The idea is I draft there, save as .md or .txt, and publish here. IA Writer is a fantastic markdown editor, but I hit a brick wall with sync between the phone and the PCs for a variety of reasons that I don’t feel like getting too into. Maybe if I used OneDrive for everything or iCloud for everything, this wouldn’t be an issue, or maybe if I could install iCloud on the HP machine this wouldn’t be an issue -I technically can, but that machine doesn’t really have the horsepower for much use as something other than a word processor. And that, the cross platform sync issue isn’t a failure on the part of IA Writer, it’s about the idiosyncratic way I save my stuff and I will go no further into that because I’m boring myself just thinking about it. Alls I’m sayin’ is this post isn’t a dig against IA Writer.

If Word or OneNote were markdown friendly, or if Microsoft were to release an ios app for their NotePad software which is markdown friendly now, I could just use one of those and when that day comes I probably will, but in the meantime I found something else that solves the problem for now.

I’d heard good things from friends about Obsidian, and I’d read good things about StandardNotes on the write.as discussion forums. StandardNotes seemed simpler so I’ve been trying it out for the last day or so.

StandardNotes is owned by Proton. Proton’s thing is super duper encryption features. At press time, I really couldn’t care less about the super duper encryption but what I do care about is it seems to tick all the boxes of what I want in a markdown editor:

• Little to no set up toggling

• Little to no toggling in general

• Little to no learning curve -the whole point of markdown is it’s easy.

• a side by side edit/view option -I’d been spoiled by this feature in IA Writer and now I really would prefer not to use anything that doesn’t have this.

• an ios app

• a Windows app

• a web app -I wasn’t looking for it, but I love it. I’m a big fan of web apps. When people make stuff for the web, they’re making stuff for everybody. So far I haven’t encountered anything the web app can’t do that the other apps can, including the side by side edit/view. Awesome.

• reliable cross platform sync that isn’t a pain in the ass.

So far so good and it seems to do what I need it to do, and there was nothing else I’ve found that ticks all of those boxes. Although I’m a little resentful about getting yet another thing, for now, I’ve made peace with that.

-Ira

Has There Ever Been a Better Time to Be a 'Degenerate' by Nitsuh Abebe, On Language in The NYTimes

Marco Rubio is turning Venezuela into a colony by Zeeshan Aleem at MSNow

Google's AI search features pose 'unacceptable risk' to children, new report finds from PBS News, the first paragraph really says it all here:

The organization found that across more than 2,600 test interactions, Google's two built-in AI search functions, AI Overview and AI Mode, routinely failed to recognize risky and harmful behavior, answered 100% of hypothetical homework assignments students should do themselves, and provided incorrect and inconsistent responses to questions. Both AI Overview and AI Mode are built into Google Search, and cannot be disabled.

Tbh I really don't give a shit that this thing is bad at being a psychiatrist, however, I do give a shit that its inaccurate and can't be turned off. In case you missed it, I shared this related story from Techdirt yesterday. It's about how a German court recently ruled that Google is liable for false claims in it's AI overviews, as it should be.

Napalm Death's Tiny Desk Concert at NPR... And while that's a sentence I thought unlikely I'd ever type, NPR is often in touch with things that are culturally relevant to me. Anyway, awesome!

That's all for now.

-Ira

The Lo-Fi Way I Broke My Addiction to the Algorithm by Mehar Ahmad in the NYTimes (gift link). I can’t say Ahmad’s ideas would work for me, but they’re good ideas and they work for them and that’s what matters. This is another affirmation about something a lot of people are struggling with. That it isn’t just me and people are talking about it.

Why Mamdani Won’t Take off that Damn Suit by Fariha Rahman in City & State New York I enjoyed this, it’s a fun deep dive of shoe-leather reporting. I always thought to dress appropriately for the occasion whatever the occasion is. Mamdani sets an example of how to be a good person and how to present and carry yourself so you are taken seriously. It demonstrates respect and that is a thing that should be universally appreciated. And if you think this image stuff doesn’t matter, go be an idiot away from me.

German Court Says Google Is Liable For False Claims In Its AI Overviews Because They Are Its Own Words by Glyn Moody in Techdirt

The Triceratops – Candy on the Subway Crank this!

That’s all for now.

-Ira

A while back I read an interview with Cory Doctorow in The New Yorker and the whole thing is a great read, and towards the end of it Doctorow was asked about how he manages his workload and he mentioned the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. He didn't just mention it, he described the book as “life-changing”. Doctorow cranks out a lot of quality writing all the time in between everything else he does so I figured whatever he has to say about that, I ought to pay attention to. And, not only that, whether you like Doctorow or not, he does all this stuff his way. These days, he's most known for coining the term enshittification and standing up to it. The man is a literal bullshit detector, so if he's describing a book in a genre that's 99% bullshit as “life-changing” I should probably read the thing.

So anyways, I read the book shortly after, and I'd describe it as life-changing too, to the point that here I am writing about it four years later because I still revisit parts of it every now and then. The audiobook too. I can't get too into the specifics because that would be a lot to get into. I get different things out of that book at different times depending on what I'm dealing with but if I had to pick one, it's that I'm better able to get the stuff that's on my mind someplace else where I can refer to it or deal with it. Obviously, the best way to get something off my mind is to deal with it, but what about the things I can't deal with, or at least can't deal with right now? The book was helpful with that, and with prioritizing those things, and deciding what goes where systematically, so I don't have that stuff on my mind. I'm freed up to think about other things with the confidence that everything that needs dealing with, or just to be filed somewhere is someplace safe.

I recall Cal Newport, another author in the productivity genre criticizing the systems in there as having too many steps, but Allen even says in the book to tailor this stuff so that it works for you. It isn't that anything in the book is too detailed or too much, it's that Allen's intention, at least to me, was to not leave anything out that might apply to anyone's given situation. There's room for criticism of anything, but that's a ridiculous criticism. Like, you're gonna criticize a productivity book for being too detailed about how to organize all your shit? Come on.

My only criticism is the corny turns of phrase here and there throughout the book that give a wink to the professional managerial class, but, I get it. That stuff is there because it's supposed to be, and as corny as that is to me, I'm not the only one reading this thing.

When I was reading it after that Doctorow interview, I mentioned it to someone at work and he was like “Oh I heard of that, (Howard) Stern's into that book.” There's another one, whether you like Stern or not, there's another perfect example of someone with a lot on their plate at all times that they have to keep organized otherwise they'd go nuts.

If you already have it all figured out, terrific. If not, I found the book helpful and maybe you might too.

[This is not advertising or an endorsement or a disavowal of any products or services, I'm just writing about the stuff I use.]

I recently wrote about the stuff this blog is made of; my domain registrar, platform, and email service respectively. In that spirit I want to write about the other stuff I've been using lately and how I arrived at the process I currently have. Over the years I've used so many different kinds of writing software, and I've gone from Windows to Mac and back. I mention this because it's relevant to the topic of writing software.

So like, in summary to be expanded on some other time, I was a PC person from the early 90s up until the XP era in the early aughts. And then the iPhone 3GS came out. I liked it so much that when my computer died, I got Mac and almost exclusively used Mac hardware products up until about three years ago when I took a spreadsheet class. The experience of Excel on a Windows machine was so superior to the experience on a Mac, I switched back. Throughout it all, I've been, and still am an iPhone person. As far as my position on this stuff goes, everybody should use whatever makes them happy. I don't think one is better than the other. Windows machines are more versatile. Macs are more secure. Linux is the most socially conscious.

Anyway, at different times over the years, some pieces of software were not available on whichever platform I was using, or the software was and, in some cases, still is, just better on one over the other. I experimented with Google Docs, IA Writer, Notability, Apple Notes, Google Keep, Scrivener, Microsoft Word, Microsoft OneNote, and a slew of others... Which resulted in me having a lot of writing scattered across a slew of formats. Unless I saw something through from beginning to completion in a short amount of time, it got filed away and forgotten about. I still got a buncha stuff all over the place but moved most of the important stuff to Word/Docx.

I decided when I made the switch back to PC that I would serve myself better becoming proficient at Word and Google Docs since Microsoft Office and Google Workspace are what most of the business world uses and given my making a habit of using Excel for more things instead of a bazillion different apps and services doing what a spreadsheet can do but prettier, I decided on Word. But more importantly I decided to pick one piece of writing software and stick with it exclusively. Until a couple of days ago.

My blog host is just too awesome. The CMS just works too great for markdown and uploading photos from a browser, and Word, well, doesn't do that as well. So I started out drafting in Word, and due to the friction (best word for it I can think of) I developed the bad habit of drafting directly into the CMS and publishing there... And the other day I caught myself not copy/pasting it into a Word Document and saving it immediately. I realized I need to add a little friction. Speed is nice, but the process is just too fast and I want this stuff to have a little friction to it, but not so much that it's a pain in the ass. Drafting markdown in Word is a little bit of a pain in the ass. So I was like 'What's a good markdown editor (one that isn't the CMS of write.as)?' and I've heard good things about Obsidian, but then I remembered IA Writer. I remembered the inventor of markdown really likes the iOS version so rather than try out a new thing, let me download the thing I already had but for Windows this time and see if I still like it. And, I do! I'm writing this in IA Writer right now, and I can export to Word with one click! And upon testing, it exports with all the styling looking as it's supposed to in Word.

So now I have the best of all three worlds; A place to draft for the blog that isn't the blog itself, a way to save it in .md and in .docx quickly, and the place to share it, and with just the right amount of friction to the process.

That's all for now.

-Ira

I re-download the app to my phone. I open up Facebook. There's a default feed in front of me. I don't understand it.

There's a post from UNICEF Ireland. The white text on black background reads “This week, a 12-year-old girl in a tent in Gaza was shot...” and I'll spare you the rest of the quote.

I scroll down a post. There's a humorous post from some entity I am not familiar with. The Scottish Sun. It's a picture of a handsome young man surrounded by attractive young women. The caption in the picture reads “Boston braces for Tartan Army baby boom as smitten locals enjoy kilted flings”. An accompanying quote reads “It takes a real man to rock a kilt.” I giggle.

I scroll down. There are posts from entities that I do deliberately follow. Most of them are posts about posts from other entities. ...Which is literally what I'm doing right now. For what it's worth, I'm using my own words. I navigate over to some of their pages. A lot of it is screengrabs of posts with snarky commentary or “right on” commentary. There's little to no original content.

I click on “feeds”, I click on “friends”, and there's a feed in front of me of posts from friends, and the posts are in some order I don't understand. No context is given to me that helps me understand why I'm looking at what I am looking at, in the order that I'm looking at it. It isn't chronological. Some posts are higher up. Some are further down. Some are left out altogether.

Was some of it worth seeing or engaging with? Sure. Am I any more informed about what some of my friends are up to or thinking about? Also, sure. But why do I feel like such a sucker every time I log on there?

Deep down I know why. I ignore it.

In my subconscious somewhere, I recall the stat that only 8% of Facebook interactions are between friends these days. Sounds about right. I'd say about 8% of my time and interactions there are with friends myself. How did that happen? I got trained into disconnecting from my friends by a “social” network.

The bell rings. I salivate. I remind myself that everyone is susceptible to this stuff and it is not a good use of anyone's time. Facebook may not be the only offender these days, but you can quickly trace a direct line between everybody else's behavior and Facebook's.

I snap out of it after about fifteen minutes. Thankfully, before I can even get to “reels” this time.

I navigate over to the “memories” or “on this day” feed and see if there are any tasteless old posts that need deleting. I log out. I remove my login information from my device. I get back to living life.

Repeat tomorrow. Hopefully minus the fifteen soul sucking minutes.

-Ira

I went the last couple of years only participating there every now and then. I log in, I check the “memories” or “on this day” or whatever page to check if I posted something years ago that I’m embarrassed by. People change over time, and I don’t delete things that were written by a person who saw the world differently than he does now, and I don’t delete things that were written as a reaction in real time to current events. Like, conversations, or just whatever I was thinking about a particular thing that I don’t think anymore knowing what I now know -I don’t delete that because I think those posts should be held to that standard.

But I do delete idiotic or offensive things I wrote in the past for the sake of being idiotic or offensive. When I first signed up for that thing in 2007 (19 years ago!) it was a place to chat with a handful of friends not unlike the cafeteria lunch table in high school or a dive bar. Social Media Manager, Influencer, and Content Creator were not occupations, and smartphones and the mobile internet were still in their infancy compared to today. Also, it wasn’t a place I’d regularly bump into my relatives… So yeah, it was kinda like a dive bar for me.

So, I still log in there almost daily, I look at the “memories” page, and although tasteless posts don’t come up too often, they come up every once in a while and I delete those. And then, ideally, I log right out. But sometimes I don’t, and I waste a buncha time… but I did successfully barely participate on that thing for a while… And then the Knicks made the finals! So the last couple of weeks I participated again but I think I’m done with that, at least for now.

I figure by not participating, I avoid contributing to the network effects of that thing. And from what I see there, I am missing out on a few things, but the cost is too great.

I figure if I can abstain from contributing to the network effects of that place, maybe it will inspire others to do the same. I also figure by sticking with this thing you’re reading right now, it will remind people (well, myself really lol) that there is a world out there outside of Instagram, Facebook, and the like and that world is just… better.

That’s all for now.

-Ira

I don’t care if you moved here yesterday or have never even been to New York and I don’t care if you’ve never seen a basketball game before in your life.

YOU DO NOT NEED ANYONE’S PERMISSION TO ENJOY THIS. GATEKEEPERS IN EVERY FANDOM ARE BORING LOSERS AND ALWAYS WILL BE.

That is all.

-Ira