cool links, short thoughts, etc.
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I have become a firm believer in linguistic evolution, and I’m interested in any methods that are interested in engaging students with literature by any means necessary. Carrie Santo-Thomas published this interesting rebuttal to this article in the Atlantic.
This is so cool, and it speaks to how withered our attention spans have become. I found this a real struggle right around the 2-minute mark (about as long as I spend on anything these days), but really hit a groove finding new details throughout the ten minutes. Having a definite goal in mind helped me as well, with a “might as well” attitude to zooming in on the picture and finding new details. The educational stuff after the challenge was great as well. I’d love to do these weekly.
“As women stretch themselves thin, homesteader influencers sell them an image of containment.”
“As data collection technology hollows out our inner worlds, all of us experience the working artist’s plight: our lot is to numericize and monetize the most private and personal parts of our experience.”
“Through it all, HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript have been constant. The ease with which any human on the planet can reliably access and read a web document from thirty years ago on any device with a browser today is beyond beautiful.
On the other hand, when creations from less than a year ago require making changes to the original document, untangling and upgrading a rat’s nest of conflicting dependencies, installing a specific version of a runtime or build tool, and then figuring out how to open it on a device that may or may not support it, isn’t a formula for success.”
Excuse the casual crass-ness (is there a sense in which we’ve all just slipped into over-emphasizing whatever we’re saying to the point of ridiculousness? When everything is “f***ing emphasized,” nothing is.) The subtitle provides a much better actual title: “The car-centric age of development is one long mistake.”
We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?
— Ted Chiang (anything written by him — fiction or otherwise — is a must-read)
I’m well aware that I’m late to the party in reading a classic essay published before I was born. But the concepts in here are still relevant 40 years later. Indeed, the sections on A.I. programming could have been written last week.
“the most important function that the software builder performs for the client is the iterative extraction and refinement of the product requirements.”
Frederick P. Brooks
This is required reading if you are a programmer or web developer (and probably everyone has read it except for us self-taught developers, so go get some education in you, even if it’s after 15 years like me!)
I love Palm Pilots, so this was a great deep dive, even if I only had one CLIE back in the day. Sadly, most of the collection is dispersed these days except for a Centro that refuses to die and a workhorse T|X.
“Another issue people run into is that you often get worse when you first begin to practice a skill thoughtfully. Your unconscious habits that were holding you in a rut are no longer helping you and are instead getting in the way. There is more work involved and your skills lag your taste, which is both used to good-enough automatic results and the output of those already practised. Your first step in practice is usually a step backwards. That’s normal.”
Baldur Bjarnason
[AI] is a serious misallocation of cognitive resources, and I urge those in influential positions to smarten up.
— Dorian Taylor
Simply the best article I’ve read in recent memory about how to talk about software with a client. This is a big area of focus for me in Mere 2.0. I don’t care that it’s 20 years old, go read this article.
There are still CSS issues on this page. Maybe a bright-red background wasn’t the best idea. The idea here was mainly an RSS feed of links, but I’m thinking about doing sets of links that spam the feed less often.
Without the extra design and pressure, I feel more free to write here than on the main site (smolweb effect?). Redesigning for redesigns’ sake is a classic fool’s errand, but maybe I’ve got the balance backwards. Maybe the articles should have their own page and the blorps should be front and center.
Finally, WordPress? I’ve been auditing a major WordPress site. It’s been years since we’ve built a new site in it but I was shocked how familiar it all is. Makes me second-guess why we’re building NextJS fanciness if WordPress meets needs. Probably just me glossing over the major house-of-cards issues that make it such a frustrating platform
WordPress is more than sufficient for a blog, you know, like this one. But it even still feels like overkill. I keep toying with the idea of doing something static but the idea of respecting all the accumulated archives (which have been WordPress for a decade) puts me off the project.
I’d like to surface Blorps on the homepage, but how do I reconcile this blorp with the link blorp before it? This blorp should have been a post — and if they’re pretty much posts anyways, why am I bothering with two different interfaces? And, who cares?
Planning to start blogging more often about work-related topics. I’ve been investing in some professional development and I’m feeling my own inadequacies. Lots to learn, lots to spin up on.
Incredibly neat. I don’t have the nostalgia for text-based games that some do (I wasn’t much of a gamer growing up) but this seems like a love letter to the genre.
From Baldur Bjarnason: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/blogging-in-the-age-of-ai/
Maybe it’s just the people I follow, but the AI backlash is real, and I’m here for it. The language in this post comes off as crass and a little bit performative, but maybe it’s effective.
Kate Wagner is always worth reading, but this essay on datedness and place is especially worthwhile. Reminds me of Kyle Chayka’s 2016 ‘Airspace’ essay.
I don’t use Google, but consider it a PSA to tell everybody how to de-Google Google. Are they assuming the average user isn’t smart enough to use a URL parameter? Set this up — and tell your friends.
This product is so half-baked. At work we’re slowly making the switch back to DNSimple, who are great. We left to save a couple hundred bucks a year but then Google Domains got acquired. It just goes to show, it’s worth paying for the quality (and, IMO, it’s worth paying the smaller companies that aren’t part of the big tech megazords).
The Dead Internet Theory is real (also, OnlyFans is gross and exploitative). Support organic, free-range hyperlinks!
“Google is getting even worse for independent sites”
Why such extravagance? This isn’t just a small question. It’s a question that, if you let it, will reshape your paradigms about the nature of the world itself.
Kevin Burrell
It doesn’t save this movie (obviously), but streaming vagaries are a great reason to buy DVDs and Blurays. They’re available super cheap these days, from eBay to Half Price Books to garage sales.
“Software that isn’t correct leads to expensive errors and frustrating experiences. Slow software can be unusable and frustrating. And insecure software, well, we have a moral and an economic imperative to ensure our software is secure. But understandability supersedes these.”
— Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya
“The lie that only tech can and will save us.”
— Jürgen Geuter
“Why am I writing in the text box that pays money to Elon and Mark and not my text box?”
Here’s the best part. You can be that curator right now, at this very moment. You can start to rebuild the interconnectivity that made the web fun to explore. And you don’t need to be a computer scientist to do it.
Bleh, Substack. But,
Outside of algorithms, individuals are now more likely to be seen as influencers rather than critics and the individuals who come to our attention do so via algorithms. We are in an era of consumption over consideration, and an influencer is more useful than a critic when it comes to fueling consumption.
…this is spot on.
One of my favorite things about this kind of writing and these kinds of books is that they allow you to see another mind at work. I’ll never meet Robert Christgau or James Mustich, but in a way, I feel like I know them. That this can happen entirely through reading someone’s writing will never cease to be kind of amazing to me.
The only way to win in Chayka’s “Filterworld” is to grab the attention of the algorithm, an act which has nothing to do with being interesting, unique, or adding something of substance to the world for others to make new things for themselves.
“Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero, we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump.”
Erik Hoel
A little fear-mongery, but not necessarily wrong. Maybe the fear-mongering is necessary at this time to get the word out? I feel like I’ve read a lot of fear-mongering recently but would love to hear some available solutions. Maybe I should come up with some.
“The web is still mostly just links and forms.”
But this impulse is a world apart from the humility and respect implied by co-innovation. The constant, nonconsensual observation of users has more to do with controlling users than learning from them.
— Cory Doctorow
“the way we build/ship software these days is mostly ridiculous”
Matthew Ball has sold more than a couple hard cover books on the concept of the metaverse. I found the original helpful and considered, with some points I’d not thought of, but on the whole the impression I had was ‘everybody is going to run from the term Metaverse now that Facebook’s claimed it.’
Now there’s a revised and expanded version that I assume will feel out of date next year (Is this the inevitable fate of books that cover the tech industry?), and this post covers some of what’s new. Surprise, everybody ran from the term metaverse, so this post is a look at what others are calling the concept, and the general language + vocabulary around the metaverse over the last 40+ years.
All that to say, if you’ve read the first edition, read this and I think you’ll end up with the spark notes of the updates that are going to be in the new edition.
“to the extent the Metaverse is the “3D Internet” is the extent to which it is fully interoperable with and additive to the Internet.”
Ben Thompson is always worth a read. I myself teeter on the boundary of whether or not we’re going to see an actual acceleration in VR technology to bring about an “iPhone moment,” or if the current levels of hype are going to fizzle. If we do get a major new stage in the internet’s development, I agree with Ben that it’s almost certainly going to include AI generation as a key component.
The big question — one that we are only now coming in reach of answering — is if virtual reality will, for a meaningful number of people, be a better reality.
“This is a you and I problem once it gets out there. This is why pushing back on AI is so important to do now. Also, stop using plastic when there is a perfectly acceptable (and most of the time better) non-plastic alternative.”
— Anne Sturdivant
I struggle to come up with a personal action step for change after reading an article like this. Boycott modern capitalism? Boycott the country I live in for embracing systems that haven’t changed in a hundred years? It leaves me with more questions than answers.
from Cory Doctorow on pluralistic.net
“There’s a long history of companies leveraging their control of devices and operating systems to tilt the playing field in favor of their own browser.”
“Art is about people. It is by people. It is for people. Art — and by proxy, storytelling — is a conduit between the maker of the art and the witness to that art. I made this, the maker says, and they did so for myriad possible reasons.”
— Chuck Wendig
“AI Art has shown that if we want to be heard and seen we need to show that we care for humans as humans.”
“In the earlier internet days, you went to a fun website or read the latest thing because you decided to go do it. Now, all of this content is pushed in your face, designed to be as addicting as possible, so you keep coming back. You can curate it to a point, but companies design these systems this way on purpose.”
— Cassidy Williams
“Proper browser choice could upend this situation, finally allowing the web to provide “table stakes” features in a compelling way. For the first time, developers could bring the modern web’s full power to wealthy mobile users, enabling the “write once, test everywhere” vision, and cut out the app store middleman — all without sacrificing essential app features or undermining security.”
— Alex Russell
Not sure where I saw it, but there was a Tweet or Thread or something going around about fun New Year’s Resolutions. I’m going to attempt trying 24 kinds of cheese in 2024. Every couple weeks, I buy a cheese from the store and get a comment from my obliging wife. We have 3 of 24 so far:
Red cheddar 1/2
Me: i didn’t know cheese could taste this…much.
A: a tasty block of orange
Carr Valley Cheese Marisa 1/2
Me: perfectly stretchy for sourdough grilled cheese with lots of butter
A: best when stretched. Didn’t like raw
Havarti 1/21
Me: Nice and creamy, reminded me of a requeijão flavor
A: it’s not cheddar
This article instantly reminded me of the AirSpace article (back when the Verge was really great) and I realized halfway through the article that it’s the same author, Kyle Chayka. Interesting stuff.
Things are getting real dumb. I’d rather have a blog for my own purposes, even if nobody reads it.
“That, to me, is an unmissable part of creation. We create because we cannot help but create. Our creations always start out bad. Always. But if we work at it enough, our creations become better. In the process, we become better, too.”
— Dan Thurot
The Washington Post has published crime scene photos from 11 mass shootings from 2012 to 2023 that show just how destructive the AR-15 is. *Very* disturbing and upsetting.
Help end gun violence:
Ban assault weapons NOW.
Sheesh. Whatever we’re doing to teach digital literacy, it is not working.
An interesting study that purports to show the economic value lost by highway expansion.
I’d be curious to see extrapolated numbers for something like US71 in Kansas City, where a highway beat down an already economically-depressed area. In this scenario, home sales and property tax may not have added up to such a staggering number, but the highway has definitely had a depressing effect on the remaining neighborhoods, especially when all the low-density commercial on Prospect was cut off from half of its audience, now east of the highway with limited pedestrian access across.
A roundup of a couple resources around Web Environment Integrity:
https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
Great thoughts from Baldur Bjarnason on authorship.
(Have been absent due to the birth of our son)
Manuel knocks it out of the park again. We’re all sick of the corporate web.
“I was told that all the substance was in the ether of my essays, floating around in the empty space between lines of dialogue and paragraph breaks.
I worry sometimes that my brain only functions in this ether. I worry that I am mostly ether, in fact. That so much is missing that my only hope is to write it down and trust that the reader can fill in the unconformities for me.”
If you want to make the internet good again, it’s time to go rogue, and a bunch of us already know how. […] What does the web look like if we decide to erase everything we’ve done since the dot-com crash? What kinds of communities can we build with the people who’ve come online since then? It’s certainly possible — even delightful — to teach them the old ways. But more and more, I think I don’t want an intermediated experience; I’m not interested in your algorithm. I’ve loved online because there are people there.
Feels like there’s a growing movement around this, and that people are getting genuinely exhausted from the algorithmic internet. Let’s do this — jump on in, the water’s fine.
The grid is the lens through which we understand the natural world. It abstracts over the messy reality of blobs, fluids, particles, trees, mountains, oceans and streams. Seen through the grid, all of the objects you touch, all of the landscapes you see, all the experiences you live, happen in the same place. That place has a name, space, and it is measured, quantified, and standardized by the grid, tamed by its regular meter. No nook or cranny of nature is safe from this blanket of rationalization, stretching to cover the entire Earth in a global-scale grid of longitude and latitude.
As someone who also used to draw maps on grid paper, and later on computers, I appreciated this essay. It’s also beautifully constructed and reads as a web-first piece, which I appreciate.
(Found via Daring Fireball)
Seems relevant to my recent post Rage Italic against the Machine. Google doesn’t serve the audiences anymore, and the concern around LLMs just adds fuel to the fire, in my mind. We need to start building the web for humans again.
“Why would anyone make a website in 2023? Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena has some ideas”
Decoder remains the best reason to keep visiting the Verge, and this interview with Squarespace’s CEO answers some interesting questions about building websites in 2023, whether or not generative AI will replace website CMS products, and how Squarespace views itself in the web content creation world.
As a web developer, I’m admittedly biased, but as a web agency we live in the shadow of Squarespace. In fact, Squarespace is what I typically recommend for our smallest potential clients, who can’t afford us: “go do it yourself.”
The value add, what we bring to the table, is the professional experience and the answer to every question you could imagine about building a website. We bring creativity and experience, instead of leaving you alone to shoot blindly in the dark with a (capable) but mute CMS. How do you know you’re following the right strategy? Does Squarespace tell you, apart from some getting started tutorials?
At that point, our value add is the same whether it’s Squarespace or a generative AI website that we’re competing again. I remain convinced that generative AI tools are never going to replace human creativity. For rehashing a generic website competently, they may get good enough, and it seems that’s concerning to Squarespace. It’s not concerning to us, because we exist a tier above that in either case.
Humans taught themselves how to structure their information to appeal to Google’s machinery, and now machines have copied and outstripped the humans to publish text even better suited to impress the machines.
What if you could just look things up and read them on the internet? Things produced by humans, for humans to look at, before the decay and mandatory demolition took over?
I really resonated with this post. I frequently use archive.org to find information, and I appreciate the idea that no website is ever lost. I’ve written some about digital permanence, myself, but that’s not everyone on the web, and link rot is very real.
(Related: I’m a little concerned that so much of the zeitgeist of the internet seems to be on substack. Remember when everything was on Medium? How’s that working out now?)
Rex Woodbury with some interesting thoughts on the AI-generated internet. So much of what we find on the internet is generated for machines, anyways, and now it’s official. We have license to ignore every product blurb, product title, and useless listicle — that is, if you weren’t ignoring them already. The main reason I want flags on AI-generated content is so that real humans can ignore it.
“Wix will let you build an entire website using only AI prompts”
My gut wants to dismiss this as a naked cash-grab. And maybe that’s all it is. Still, as a web developer, I can’t afford to ignore this entirely. Might have to spin up the tool and see what it’s capable of.
I thought about joining Threads for a while, but then I looked at the privacy concessions and changed my mind. Honestly, Substack Notes was similar — this ‘blorps’ page is my own text-based answer to the problem, on a platform I fully control.
I’ve always wanted to be someone who rides trains. Heck, I follow Geoff Marshall religiously on YouTube! The geography of the US has always made it difficult, though. Service is so slow that taking the train up to company headquarters, in Iowa, makes far less sense than simply driving the three hours.
Ted Gioia’s got a good pulse on the money-making potential of AI, and how that might not actually be useful to consumers.
Back in February, I warned of a mind-numbing oversupply of content in my “State of the Culture 2023” address. As many of you know, I hate the word content, when it’s used to describe human creativity. But it is the perfect term to describe the output of the AI sausage factories that are making inroads everywhere in the culture.
Some experts in generative AI predict that as much as 90% of content on the internet could be artificially generated within a few years. As these tools proliferate, the biases they reflect aren’t just further perpetuating stereotypes that threaten to stall progress toward greater equality in representation — they could also result in unfair treatment.
The gold standard is trust, not information. A single trustworthy voice is worth more than ten thousand bot-written articles. Our society as a whole hasn’t figured this out yet. But nothing prevents you from taking prudent steps on your own. Find those trusted voices—nurture them, support them, and spread the word.
A storefront for robots. More on the enshittification of the web (h/t Doctorow)
“The Titanic of the Pacific”
‘A merry-go-round of buck-passing’: inside the four-year Grenfell inquiry
Jonathan Rogers does it again.
“Let me return to a point I made earlier: Anglo-Saxon is your native tongue. It is your reader’s native tongue. Yes, there are plenty of good reasons to use Latinate words, but I suggest that you rely on Anglo-Saxon (Old English) words as much as you can unless you have a good reason to do otherwise. Writing is an act of hospitality. It’s an act of welcome. And one way to welcome your reader is to speak in her native tongue when you can.”
This applies to writing as well as development.
“It’s possible to refactor yourself into oblivion, which is what I think I can do with writing. You can tweak and rearrange and polish to the point where nobody ever sees a word, so concerned with precision that you decline to see the alchemy that happens when it hits the open air.”
“Do we really need an app for everything?”
Your data stream is like a morphine drip at the hospital. And with the same result—you want to make sure you’re always hooked to the machine that provides the drip.
“How to Quit Cars”
Yes, there is an actual human being on the other side of these words you’re reading right now. One you can connect with at any time, if you so desire.
Let’s get back to the human-powered web. This was the genesis for a lot of the ‘lo-fi’ efforts I’ve started at Into the Book recently. Manuel also checked out this site and gave me some comments, which I deeply appreciated.
Ted Chiang is brilliant, and this is the best picture of the state of AI that I’ve seen yet. AI can’t create anything new — it can remix existing content at a basic level of competence. That’s life-altering for some folks, but not really for those of us who are already composing original content ‘by the sweat of our brow.’
“Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023)”
Possibly the most important article of 2023, and it’s come out in the first month of the year. The takeaway: platforms do not make life better for anyone except advertisers and brands.
See also: nymag.com/intelligencer/why-does-it-feel-like-amazon-is-making-itself-worse