I had a dream in which the
Eisenhower interstate system was designed as a minimum spanning tree. Less pavement, I guess, but more driving.To quantify that assessment, Wikipedia
reports that the US interstate highway system is 48,890 miles of road and that it was originally proposed to connect all US cities with a population of over 50,000, though the Smithsonian National Museum of American History
says 100,000. According to
this Wikipedia page, there are 330 cities of more than 100,000 people in the 2020 census. Here's a minimum spanning tree of those cities, excluding those in Alaska and Hawaii:
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Here's a quick
Obsidian tip. I've written quite a bit of lengthy prose in Obsidian then revised it, and when the work is broken across multiple sittings, it's easy to lose my place in a document. All the more so on a mobile device where the scroll sometimes resets unpredictably in large notes. I used to mark my place with some sequence of symbols, such as
//, then search for that to find where I left off. Obsidian offers an improvement via
block links.
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I wrote about some
local-only web apps I made and how they differ from
local-first software that synchronizes data across devices. Often, local-first software is about documents. That's certainly the case for the specialized diagramming tools I've been creating. They allow exporting and importing YAML files, but it's cumbersome for those files to be the primary means of managing documents, since every download produces a new file rather than updating an existing file. Chrome has a file system API that allows direct access to local files, but Firefox is my default browser and it's
opposed to adding similar capability. However, since I use
Obsidian Sync, I already have a local-first app that synchronizes across devices. My initial attempt to leverage Obsidian in my web apps was to add a button that copies the app's YAML data to the system clipboard, which can then be pasted into the frontmatter of a note. While that worked, it still wasn't ergonomic enough to do frequently. A better workflow required integrating the apps directly into Obsidian using a plugin.
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I may finally read
The End of Average, now that LLMs have given us
The Revenge of Average. Average output is acceptable for computer code, for which the purpose is to get a computer to operate in a specific way, but the human central processor works differently. We tend to ignore sameness and remember novelty. That's the root of a lot of our
cognitive biases.
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Last week I wrote about a few
local-only web apps I've made recently. Since I don't have a server to persist data in the cloud, they're all static sites that can export and import YAML data. A downloaded YAML file can be reloaded later to restore the app's state, or you can transfer a file to another device and load it up there. Exploring this local-centric model of state management led me to the term
Local-first Software.
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