Steph Ango

When I learned to use a table saw, my teacher impressed upon me that the machine wants to cut fingers.

A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people.

Companies break promises all the time.

Our bias is to always add more.

Love is magic, it defies explanation.

The edge of a sheet of paper slices through the tip of your finger and blood begins to flow from the wound.

Why Obsidian is 100% user-supported and not backed by venture capital investors: We want to stay small, we don’t need to hire lots of people We follow strict principles that we do not want to compromise Our users are happy to support us, we don’t need VC…

Around the age of twenty-two I realized that my worldview had been deeply imbued with pessimism and cynicism.

Why do people flock to something?

As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you.

Quality software from independent makers is like quality food from the farmer’s market.

Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use.

I use Obsidian to think, take notes, write essays, and publish this site.

Oscar Wilde once said: “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

If you want to progress faster, write concise explanations.

There is a parasite, I see it everywhere.

There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands.

How many individual electric motors are part of your daily life?

There’s a French expression I like: L’appétit vient en mangeant Appetite comes when you eat.

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read.

For the past seven decades, computers have been designed to enhance what your brain can do: think and remember.

One of my first industrial design jobs was working on a headset that never shipped, for a now defunct startup.

Every week I create a weekly note, and write my to-dos for the week.

Tools convert something you can do into something you want to do.

Specialization is too heavily encouraged as a career path.

When I think about editing images, a vast array of options come to mind: contrast, saturation, sharpen, blur, airbrush, clone stamp, etc.

The cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has two simple words of advice for intergalactic travelers: Don’t panic.

Evergreen notes allow you to think about complex ideas by building them up from smaller composable ideas.

Emerging generative AI art tools such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and Midjourney have given rise to a new artform.

Every year I ask myself 40 questions that help me make sense of what happened over the past twelve months.

Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

How many days have you been alive?

For years I’ve had a fascination with the idea of digital paper.

When did the word “compromise” become vilified?

Methodologies for problem-solving are fairly well established.

When trying to jumpstart a new habit, the only thing that matters is making consistent progress.

One of my end-of-year rituals is asking myself these forty questions.

I saw a wonderful exhibit of Ishiuchi Miyako’s photography.

There’s a saying you may have heard called Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.”

When Google Maps first came out, it blew me away.

The term “vanilla” is often used to describe something ordinary, plain, or standard.

A professor of mine used to often quote Bob Dylan: “He not busy being born is busy dying” Some are comfortable making the same thing the same way their entire career But that approach is fragile, susceptible to unexpected events.

Stream of consciousness A world where knowledge is captured and categorized, interpreted by the masses almost instantaneously digested, regurgitated, masticated, ruminated… and immediately available to access, pre-chewed.