A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
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A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
There’s this idea in IndieWeb circles of the admin tax. That’s the work you have to do in order to be somewhat independent of the big silo platforms, the price you pay instead of paying with your attention. Mostly, I not only don’t mind, I quite enjoy some aspects of the tinkering, but as you move into the upper echelons of independence, so too the admin tax rate goes up. And there’s another weird thing. If you’re doing this for love rather than as a job, paying the tax gets harder and harder because the instructions you find online are very often geared to those whose job it is to do the admin. This drives me nuts, but in expounding on the problem to The Squeeze, I realised I’m no better myself. Let me explain.
Another area of life in which I aim to independent of big industry is bread. I have baked my own bread, on and off, since being old enough to object to my mother’s Grant Loaf. I switched to 100% natural leavens some time in the mid 1990s, and kept going all the way through Covid and the rest of it. I am definitely a better bread baker than I am a system administrator. And as a baker, if another baker asks me for a recipe, I will probably reply something like “10% each of whole rye, spelt and wheat at 72% hydration with an inoculant of 10% at 100%”.
An experienced baker will know exactly what I mean, because we are both using the same code, one based on bakers’ maths, where the total flour weight is 100% and everything else is measured relative to that.
A less experienced baker will be flumoxed, as I am when I see an instruction like “Spin up a new server and provision it with the necessary packages”.
The big difference is that the less-experienced baker is exceptionally well catered for online, with recipes up the wazoo that give weights and measures to the nearest spurious gram.1 The less experienced sysadmin finds it much more difficult to find more detailed recipes. That is why, when I discovered Adam’s Neatnik Guide to Setting up an IRC server I fell on it with a cry of joy. I have no need of an IRC server (yet) but the instructions on creating an additional user with limited potential to wreak havoc were just what I needed.
Admittedly, even Adam does not always explain why a particular instruction works, just as many bread recipes don’t explain why sometimes you should hydrolyse (soak the flour before adding salt), and that’s OK. There are ways to pursue those details if you really feel the need.
Another way in which recipes and tech tutorials online are similar is that too many of them make you wade through molasses to get to the meat. That why things like OnlyRecipe exist, and that wouldn’t work for tech sites. I’ve given up loading any site — tech or recipe — where permissions refuse to allow you to Reject All, but still the slop and repetitiveness persist.
I’ve no desire to become a source of tech tutorials myself, although I have noticed that people do visit pages that record my solution to a problem. Whether they are of any help, I don’t know. In the meantime, I will continue to share the formulae for my breads when asked and to look for ways to reduce my admin tax. If you know of any ...
Let me, right now and forever, curse the USA and it’s absurdly stupid volume measures. ↩
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