manual until it hurts

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manual until it hurts is an indieweb principle of resisting automation until you have done it enough times to really understand it, and know that it is worth doing.

Brainstorming

Tantek Çelik proposes this rough equation: manual as long as the cost to doing so has a greater benefit than the reduced cost of doing it automatically minus the cost of setting up / maintaining automation.

See Also

• https://xkcd.com/1205/
• https://xkcd.com/1319/
• http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
• “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” —Teller http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-his-secrets-100744801/?story=fullstory
• https://elezea.com/2011/09/paving-cowpaths-design/
• Sentimental side benefits too: https://www.arush.io/archives/95599/2019/12/23/07/39/
  • "One of the best parts of doing a manual Facebook content migration is going through and remembering occasions which consequently sparked posts.
    I’ve just come across one that I’m about to migrate that references my nepphew turning up my work phone as part of a weekend visit.
    My nepphew is now on the edge of becoming a teenager. God, I feel old.
    And I promise I won’t embarrass him later in life by pointing at these posts, because if he’s going to learn that the internet never forgets, it won’t be from his aunt." @Amanda Hi and thanks for stopping by. My name is Amanda Rush, and I'm building a homepage like it's 1999. I'm doing this for a number of reasons. First, I want to own all my content and have control over it, and to that end I am constantly updating this site so that it contains as much of my data as possible from any silo I may have an account on. I decided to start doing this when I finally got tired of all the curated timeline nonsense and the social media design element that encourages us to be horrible to each other online for clicks. I'm not saying you have to join me but of course I'd love it if you jumped ship and joined the indieweb with me. In the meantime, enjoy my content. December 23, 2019
• https://blog.steren.fr/2020/my-stack-will-outlive-yours/
• Cory's process https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1349348952433258497?s=20 https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd
  • "It's been twenty years, to the day, since I published my first blog-post.
    
    I'm a blogger.
    
    Blogging - publicly breaking down the things that seem significant, then synthesizing them in longer pieces - is the defining activity of my days.
    
    https://boingboing.net/2001/01/13/hey-mark-made-me-a.html
    
    1/" @doctorow January 13, 2021