This unexpectedly became the most popular (controversial?) thing I've written

Because I wrote it so quickly, I should clarify a few things...

https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1951000025850585241

Obsidian is weird:

- 7 full-time employees
- ~1 million users per employee
- fully remote
- 1 in-person meetup per year
- no scheduled meetings
- no stand-ups
- deep focus is prioritized
- our manifesto guides our product

What works for us may not work for you.

Flexoki 2.0 introduces 88 new colors that feel like watercolor pigments on paper.

This is a continuation of my attempt to bring the feeling of analog color to digital emissive screens.

Flexoki 1.0 only provided the a range of values for the grayscale colors. What I have been working to solve since then is how to expand the palette to a full range of values for every color, without desaturating the pigment effect. I'm very happy with how this turned out.

Flexoki is open source under the MIT license, and already available for most text editors, terminals, and many other apps. Flexoki 2.0 makes it into a more capable color system for UIs and more complex projects. The problem is that using opacity to lighten a color makes it appear washed out.

Flexoki emulates the feeling of pigment on paper by exponentially increasing intensity as colors get lighter or darker. This makes the colors feel vibrant and warm, like watercolor.

Microsoft just released a tool that lets you convert Office files to Markdown. Never thought I'd see the day.

Google also added Markdown export to Google Docs a few months ago. Microsoft's new Office to Markdown converter

works with .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .pdf, and more
github.com/microsoft/mark…

Flexoki is an inky color scheme for prose and code that I created for my personal site. It's now open source.

Flexoki is designed for reading and writing on digital screens. It is inspired by analog printing inks and warm shades of paper.

The name Flexoki comes from flexography — a common printing process for paper and cardboard. I spent many years working with dyes and inks particularly for my companies Inkodye and Lumi. I also have a fascination with digital paper. I wanted to bring the comfort of analog color to emissive digital screens.

One challenge is that ink on paper is a subtractive process whereas LCD and OLED screens use additive color. Replicating the effect of mixing pigments digitally is difficult.

Mixing blue and yellow paint creates green, whereas digital color mixing results in a brownish hue. Watercolors retain their saturation when you dilute them, whereas reducing the opacity of digital colors makes them look desaturated.

Another challenge with digital color is human perception across color spaces. Ethan Schoonover’s color scheme Solarized (2011) was an important inspiration for Flexoki. His emphasis on CIELAB lightness relationships helped me understand how to find colors that appear cohesive.

I found that choosing colors with perfect perceptual consistency can be at odds with the distinctiveness of colors in practical applications like syntax highlighting. If you adhere too closely to evenness in perceptual lightness you can end up with a palette that looks washed out and difficult to parse.

Solving for all of these problems is how I arrived at Flexoki. I wish it could have been more science than art, but it wasn’t. Some day, I hope to arrive at a more reliable way to generate digital color palettes that respect the constraints I laid out. In the meantime, I hope you find this iteration of Flexoki useful. Flexoki, an inky color scheme for prose and code:
stephango.com/flexoki

Style is consistent constraint

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

When it comes to ideas, I agree — allow your mind to be changed. When it comes to process, I disagree. Style emerges from consistency, and having a style opens your imagination. Your mind should be flexible, but your process should be repeatable.

Style is a set of constraints that you stick to.

You can explore many types of constraints: colors, shapes, materials, textures, fonts, language, clothing, decor, beliefs, flavors, sounds, scents, rituals. Your style doesn't have to please anyone else. Play by your own rules. Everything you do is open to stylistic interpretation.

A style can be a system, a set of personal guidelines. Here are a few of mine:

– I wear monochromatic clothing without logos, buttons, or buckles
– I use YYYY-MM-DD dates everywhere
– I pluralize tag and folder names (e.g. #people not #person)
– I use plain text files for all my writing
– I ask myself 40 questions every year
– I meal prep lunches every week, shave my head twice a week
– I write concise essays, less than 500 words

Collect constraints you enjoy. Unusual constraints make things more fun. You can always change them later. This is your style, after all. It's not a life commitment, it's just the way you do things. For now.

Having a style collapses hundreds of future decisions into one, and gives you focus. I always pluralize tags so I never have to wonder what to name new tags.

Style gives you leverage. Every time you reuse your style you save time. A durable style is a great investment.

Style helps you know when you're breaking your constraints. Sometimes you have to. And if you want to edit your constraints, you can. It will be easier to adopt the new constraints if you already had some clearly defined.

You don't need a style for everything. Make a deliberate choice about what needs consistency and what doesn't.

If you do it long enough, your style becomes a point of view that is cohesive and recognizable.




Style is consistent constraint
stephanango.com/style

Sam DMd me to apologize. I like to give the benefit of the doubt so I deleted my tweet

It has not changed my view that @sama's vision is to diminish the freedom of individuals and put more power in the hands of fewer people

OpenAI and Worldcoin are on the wrong side of history. Sam Altman's perspective is that AI could destroy us all, therefore he must be the first create it and control it, so that he can ensure that nothing bad happens to him and his friends.

Sam is building a cohesively anti-humanistic top-down system of control because he is afraid.