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They like us best with bionic arms and legs. They like us deaf with hearing aids, though they prefer cochlear implants. It would be an affront to ask the hearing to learn sign language. Instead they wish for us to lose our language, abandon our culture and consider ourselves cured. They like exoskeletons, which none of us use. They would never consider cyborg those of us with pacemakers or on dialysis, those of us kept alive by machines or made ambulatory by wheelchairs, those of us on biologics or anti-depressants. They want us shiny and metallic and in their image.

Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.

A devastatingly perfect blog post.

The core concept of digital accessibility is that everyone, including people with disabilities, should be able to access information and accomplish tasks via computer independently.

Continuing later,

This is an intensely political statement, backed by decades of protests and lobbying and litigation. And that’s important context for understanding everything else that’s happening now.

If “accessibility as compliance” is a staircase where outcomes are restricted to the normative limitations of the law, Accessibility Beyond Compliance is an exponential curve. It isn’t limited to fulfilling legal constraints, and we can use it to explore, understand, and better address the needs of the full, complex, and intersectional diversity of the disabled experience.

A post I helped to write at work was recently published.

The worst kind of blogging is blogging about blogging, so, I’ll keep this blogging about blogging short!

I’ve made some minor updates to the design of the website that have improved it’s usability a wee bit, and are a step in the right direction toward upping my accessibility game. The major remaining accessibility issues are around color contrast and some structural stuff.

I’ve started to introduce an updated color pallet to resolve the contrast issues. The structural stuff is going to be a wee bit harder to address, but I’ve started to make inroads there, too, mostly by removing a lot of indieweb specific microformat markup. The entire site should be more or less totally navigable by keyboard now.

I’ve also added a page to help situate folks and invite ya in to different ways of finding stuff here.

The idea is that as you start to find patterns in your application, you can encode them in a little language—this language would then allow you to express these patterns in a more compact manner than would be possible by other means of abstraction. Not only could this buck the trend of ever-growing applications, it would actually allow the code base to shrink during the course of development!

A while ago someone asked what I liked about the programming languages I like — forth and lisp specifically.

I’ve noodled on it for a bit now, and I think the reason I like forth and scheme and other languages with something like a repl is because when I start a new project I’m dropped right into the entire language and the sky is the limit…everything is already right there.

When I start a project in Java or Go it feels empty; instead of having a system to play with I have to craft a Rube Goldberg machine of boilerplate code and then gingerly feed the compiler code like shoveling coal into a furnace.

👋 Oh hai!

I was interviewed on a podcast!

This is also something people keep getting wrong about Markdown as originally presented. Markdown isn’t a format. It’s a convenience tool that helps you write some of the boringest and commonest parts of HTML easier, and you can easily drop into more wonky HTML at any time.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes!

Markdown isn’t supposed to be a markup language unto itself. It is an intermediary format that usually targets HTML as it’s final form.

After giving my brain bleed time to heal the neurosurgeon called me back in to hospital; the plan was to reassess, attempt to fix it using the minimally invasive technique that they tried once before, and if that didn’t work, do something a bit more squidgy directly in my brain.

I’ll be honest, the last option sounded totally and completely horrific to me and I was very much not wanting to have to go with the big ol’ brain surgery. While the doctors seemed confident with that option, they were upfront about the extra risks and that it was sort of the option of last resort.

Last week I went back in and, great news, they think they’ve totally repaired my brain bleed using the minimally invasive method! I’m slated for a diagnostic scan in the fall to double check, but, so far, everything is looking great. I spent a few more nights in ICU and was discharged directly to home where I’ve been chillin’.

All in all I’m feeling super duper lucky, and, while this entire experience has been … let’s say a drag … I know that it could have been far worse, and I hope to have it completely behind me soon. So far the main symptoms I’ve faced are ringing ears, fatigue, a bit of difficulty focusing and multi-tasking, occasional low grade headaches, and, since the repair, I’ve developed a lisp. The lisp is a result of the repair itself, and the neurosurgeon thinks that it will probably pass within a few months.

There are too many people to thank directly here, but to all those who’ve supported me and my family throughout this bananas unexpected experience — for realizes — thank you so much. The words of support, well wishes, meals, help with kids and everything have been so deeply felt, and I honestly can’t imagine how I would have navigated this without ya’ll.

Hopefully this is my last health update for a long time, and I can go back to posting about forth now!

~dozens recently introduced me to this series where blog posts that are at least a year old and feature the phrase “no one will ever read this but” are read allowed…and…it is remarkable.

I feel like it took me a bit longer to fully understand how to work in Smalltalk than it did most languages. The IDE is different than anything I’ve used before, and probably anything you’ve seen as well. You’re not going to be opening myscript.st in your favorite text editor, and then run it from the command line as you would a Python program. It takes a little mental adjustment to start with.

That’s not the warning, however.

The warning is that once you delve into Smalltalk, you might not want to program in anything else ever again. It’s really that good.

I think this is my curse. I touched Smalltalk at a young age, and, ever since, nothing has felt “right,” or “complete,” in the same way.

Forth is getting close, though, and a lisp or scheme with a tight repl is also pretty wonderful…but Smalltalk defo does you dirty by being so phenomenal. Xcode is a flaming, festering pile of total and complete garbage by comparison. My wish whenever I touch Xcode or Android Studio (which I do daily for work), is that the folks behind such tooling spend just 1 week using a Smalltalk system like Squeak or Pharo to see how much better it could be.

It’s named after Texan exterminator Tom Rasberry, but you can call it a Raspberry Crazy Ant if you want and no one will notice I bet.

The Raspberry Crazy Ant, for some reason, loves electronics, so it will come and chew through wires and get electrocuted. When an ant dies, it releases an alarm pheromone which makes other ants rush to the scene of the crime,* which in turn causes more to be electrocuted, and if enough of them gather then it can short out electrical systems.

This is not why they’re called ‘crazy ants’ by the way — that’s because they move in a darting, erratic way. But if the tiny shoe fits.

A proposal, dear reader: Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to see. You decide what constitutes “interesting”.

Sable’s world is not a broken machine, it’s doing fine. You’re not on some grand quest to save it, or return the planet to its former glory. You’re just a girl growing up in this place, and growing up means choosing a new mask.

Closing,

Sable imagines identity and growth as playful, joyous, and nearly impossible to fail. It promises you that changing your mind is okay. You wanted to be an Innkeeper, and now you don’t. It encourages you to become something else then, without rejecting or hating the person you’re leaving behind.

Later on,

Sable imagines something different, and gentler. It imagines masks as objects which communicate to other people who you are, and how you can help them. You can find the machinist in any city, or the cartographer in any bar. These identities are not the only part of the person, of course, but they do express how they relate to other people. And I think that, at its best, that’s what identity is all about.

This, for me, points to the arbitrariness of the “desktop” as a prime metaphor in computer user interfaces.

It made sense at the birth of contemporary computing — business suits and what not — but maybe there’s a new paradigm worth exploring? Something not so exceedingly boring. Something that embraces scale, or relationships that can’t be easily modeled in 3d space?

Solarpunk sits at the intersection of possible positive futures and likely negative ones. It is a recognition of humanity’s wide-ranging damage upon the natural world and inevitably, upon itself. Solarpunk is also a reaction to the cynical and dystopian imaginaries that have come out of the fear of climate change. It is a way of tackling ecoanxieties and an invitation to complement the important work of climate scientists. Just as climate scientists have sought to warn the world about the dangers of climate change, Solarpunks are offering alternative visions to the helplessness often generated by such warnings. Solarpunk, then, is a challenge to the modern adage that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, to which I can add ‘and growth-oriented economies’. It seeks to make imagining the end of capitalism easier, to make alternatives more reachable to the popular imagination, and to build community resilience in the process.

A Kentwood High School student programmed it when it was installed in the 1980s. Whenever the district has a problem with it, they go back to the original programmer who still lives in the area.

These stories mean that playing Wildermyth is not just about doing tactical battles from one end of a scripted narrative to another. It means tracking a small crew of changing people through their careers as adventurers. Sometimes their personalities clash and they become rivals who have to one up each other; sometimes they fall in love and become an adventuring couple. All of these systems lean into one another, creating contexts and stories that follow through an entire tale of saving the world.

A small dynamically typed programming language with first-class comments, where every value is explained by a comment.

TIL that NASA has an archive of ebooks.

Bottom line is that we have zero years left to avoid dangerous climate change, because it’s here

Concatenative programming is so called because it uses function composition instead of function application—a non-concatenative language is thus called applicative. That’s the defining difference…

I’ve never had so many journalists reach out to me with interview requests than they have since the heat dome. Some talk about having to rethink assumptions about their kids being able to live to certain ages they’d previously taken for granted. Others ask about their own survival and that of society. In my experience, these are not things that journalists writing for large mainstream outlets have ever raised so freely in conversation before. We are in the midst of a mass awakening, and our task is to figure out how to get the most energy for change and resilience that we can out of it.

Nearly every paragraph of this biography reads as if it comes from someone else’s life.

Picotron is Lexaloffle’s third and final fantasy machine, and has been co-designed with PICO-8 and Voxatron to offer a complementary set of features and specifications. Although it has its own particular look and feel, it is more committed to being a practical and flexible development environment. In fact, Picotron itself is almost completely made in Picotron.

I am hyped!

One such agenda is that of “agile transformation,” which promises to remake organizations to optimize their processes for developer efficiency. This is a win for developers tired of businesses that can’t articulate what they want, but, perhaps more important, it’s a win for businesses trying to wring maximum productivity out of their growing armies of engineers. However, in the rush toward transformation, something has been lost.

The truth, as will become a common refrain in this piece, is difficult to know.

Rick has taken the time to write up a really solid explainer on deferred behavior in retroforth, my favorite forth system. I learned a heap from this!

The affordances of the filing cabinet as an information technology have produced new relationships between power and epistemology. 15 The distinct concepts of storage, filing, information, and efficiency have been activated in certain institutional settings to establish social dynamics and relationships, especially those of gender and labor. In this light there are two crucial and overlapping points: first, the filing cabinet illuminates an important moment in the genealogy of information; and second, the filing cabinet belongs to the material history of efficiency. Indeed, the vertical filing cabinet brings to the fore a commitment to particularization that shaped the use and conception of information at the beginning of the 20th century.

The biggest problem—and this isn’t limited to web development—is how it has baked exploitation into the core worldview of so many people. We use open-source software. We get paid to use open-source software. Our employers benefit, but the money never trickles down—money never trickles down. This is fine when the project in question is directly funded by a tech multinational. Less so when the project is something specialised, a little bit niche, or inventive, and therefore not financed by a gigantic corporation.

A few posts ago I set out to make a program that could bleep and bloop. I was met with middling success.

But then, while noodling with GUI programming in Racket, I stumbled across this excellent post, Learn Racket by Example: GUI Programming, that walks you through how to create a program that bleeps and bloops!

BEHOLD!

With this tiny program I’m able to bleep and bloop in style! Not heaps useful, but heaps fun.

Here is a link to my take on the walk through.

In a field that has elevated boy geniuses and rockstar coders, obscure hacks and complex black-boxed algorithms, it’s perhaps no wonder that a committee-designed language meant to be easier to learn and use—and which was created by a team that included multiple women in positions of authority—would be held in low esteem. But modern computing has started to become undone, and to undo other parts of our societies, through the field’s high opinion of itself, and through the way that it concentrates power into the hands of programmers who mistake social, political, and economic problems for technical ones, often with disastrous results.

Like tetris, but the game hates you.

Replay my best game ذ๙సএ௨ටฐJઅඖړןѻඦඍݸƁಉVJߜಇಊݹ௧ࡄҽʥ୭ඖІρƏชଈݲಗڌໃࢭ௧๓ໃܢ௨ආІɞ௨ชܘܮۑ൱СݸРϺณח௮୮ໃӽ௧ঘໃऐமలȣچஒඞΓࠇߙԾරݏدȻۺƺɜՕܐஞସՈ

Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands, Oh where have you been? They have slain the Earl o’ Moray And layd him on the green.

Airship Scheme is a new implementation of the Scheme programming language, implemented in Common Lisp and designed to run within a Common Lisp environment. The embedded nature of this architecture allows programs to run both Scheme and Common Lisp code in the same runtime.

I’ve day dreamed for a long time about an entire OS like this — at every level a game or puzzle of some sort.

Equa! is an very minimal OSR adjacent game system for tabletop role playing games. The whole of the game is formatted as a small set of equations that represent the mechanics of play, how you use them is up to you.

I like that, so far, we all seem to agree that the boat is stuck. There’s no debate over whether or not the big boat is stuck: it is a big boat, and it is stuck, and we are all aware of those facts, even those of us who are currently located in outer space.

Nokia Bell Labs has handed Plan9 to the Plan9 Foundation.

Editions 1, 2, 3 and 4 have been released under MIT license by the foundation.

Inferno OS too!

Each commit of this project corresponds to a section of the book. For this purpose, not only the final state of the project but each commit was carefully written with readability in mind. Readers should be able to learn how a C language feature can be implemented just by reading one or a few commits of this project.

In fact, as cell phones become more and more general-purpose, I suspect there will be more room for non-general-purpose personal computers. There is a ton of software, just like HyperCard, waiting to be discovered in the depths of computer history, and the computers needed to run them are cheap. If you like WordStar, why not get an old DOS machine? Even if WordStar is the only program you’ll run on it, it might be a worthwhile endeavor — as long as you have space for it.

Because of this, absolutely any discussion of preparing for the consequences of the Climate Catastrophe is going to run smack dab into these issues. Any discussion of something someone might do to prepare will entail proposals that will be inaccessible to some people. Maybe even many people.

THE TWINE EDITOR looks like an architect’s drafting table crossed with a conspiracy chart. Users start by creating a “passage,” or a simple text field, that can be linked to new passages. When you’re done with the story, you “publish” it as a single web file, which you can load in any ordinary browser.

A cryptocurrency’s energy cost is tied to its current price. This is because cryptocurrencies are designed to incentivize miners- if they were not tied together, the potential value return of a making a bitcoin could fall below the price of electricity required to make it.

Because of this, Bitcoin’s continued financial return depends on coins being harder to make in the future. The people who invest in cryptocurrencies- like any kind of futures speculation- are betting that it will be better to be holding this resource tomorrow than making it.

It turns out my release of 6 CryptoArt works consumed in 10 seconds more electricity than the entire studio over the past 2 years.

A failure is one part of a system breaking; a catastrophe is when many failures accumulate to a point beyond recovery.1 When a catastrophe happens, it often seems like something very safe failed suddenly. But when we analyze the contributing causes, we find it wasn’t really sudden at all: The warning signs were present, the early failures, but we didn’t predict how they’d combine.

Astronomers have always focused on stars and galaxies. They literally are the bright sparkling bits of astronomy that everybody gets drawn to. But actually, dust is one of the most important parts of astronomy, because OK, the stars sit there producing elements that eventually make planets, but it’s the dust that delivers that stuff from stars to planets. If it wasn’t for the dust, our universe would be a pretty mundane place: flickering stars with nothing around them. The dust links stars with everything else, with all the planets, all the living things on those planets. It’s the dust that’s responsible, ultimately.

Nothing wins the internet! It’s a forever-game where we all perpetually lose.

Just as there is “podcast voice”—that inquisitive, staccato bedtime-story cadence—there is Substack tone, a semi-professional quality suited to mass e-mail. Some newsletters convey intimacy, in the language of psychotherapy and self-help, but their style is more polished and structured than that of the looser, rangier blogs of the early two-thousands.

I have spent months looking for Bucatini, now I know why!

The Oaxacan vision of community, indigenous rights, and autonomy from which Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias has emerged can be tied to a far more familiar story: that of the Zapatista indigenous rebellion.

Strubell’s study found that one language model with a particular type of “neural architecture search” (NAS) method would have produced the equivalent of 626,155 pounds (284 metric tons) of carbon dioxide—about the lifetime output of five average American cars. A version of Google’s language model, BERT, which underpins the company’s search engine, produced 1,438 pounds of CO2 equivalent in Strubell’s estimate—nearly the same as a roundtrip flight between New York City and San Francisco.

Continuing,

Gebru’s draft paper points out that the sheer resources required to build and sustain such large AI models means they tend to benefit wealthy organizations, while climate change hits marginalized communities hardest. “It is past time for researchers to prioritize energy efficiency and cost to reduce negative environmental impact and inequitable access to resources,” they write.

That’s it, all I wanted to do was gush about how much I love low spec consumer grade laptops.

8 years!

For the octopus, with thousands of suckers studding symmetric arms, each of which can bend at any point, building a central mental representation of how to move seems like a computational nightmare. But experiments show that the octopus doesn’t do that. “The brain doesn’t have to know how to move this floppy arm,” Cheng said. Rather, the arm knows how to move the arm.

My internet is substantially quieter than yours

In my experience, I’ve found that once code has been written, it is very hard to unwrite it. More often, code is a ball of clay. Once it exists, the best you can do is mold it to fit the demands of the day. If you are building anything remotely worthwhile, it is helpful to stop and think about things.

It took a while to come to a compromise of sorts. Just because there is great evil going on, doesn’t mean there isn’t also lesser badness going on. I can’t speak to the great evils authoritatively, but I can shed light on the (tech) stuff I personally know about.

And so, I will. But it’s not intended to steal any bandwidth from the truly important human rights issues going on, just to be clear.

So the most effective way to increase our chances of survival is to shift focus from extreme self-interest to a sense of stewardship for each other, other species, and the ecosystems in which we find ourselves.

The All-mother has spoken: Kicks Condor has strayed from the path of blogging-righteousness.

I have, in the past, advocated strongly for Kicks and the tools they produce. No longer.

For their disrespect against Disney, Kicks must be ostracized from the realms of the blogosphere.

Permanent banishment:

Look not upon their feeds.

Decompile the source of their tools.

May their name be like ash in the mouth; an important reminder of the power wielded by the All-mother.

Forget not the ways of the blogosphere:

Blog together.

Remain together.

The tangled feed — one vine may be pulled from the vineyard…

Theory: Kicks Condor, online nom de plume for one Nicolas Kim Coppola, aka Nicolas Cage.

A once and promised Superman.

༼ つ ╹ ╹ ༽つ

But really, Reiner thinks the secret to a long life is “having something to do in the morning”

All the tenets of intersectional feminism, web accessibility, and diversity and inclusion are inextricably tied up in making the web a better place, for all and by all.

Free, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging

No javascript, no stylesheets, no trackers. Just your words.

There is a website obesity crisis. Bloated websites full of scripts, ads, and trackers slowing your readers down every time they try to read your well crafted content.

Bear is all you need to build a fantastic and optimized site or blog. It works perfectly on any viewing device. All you need to focus on is writing good content.

TI Education has announced that the newest OS for the TI-83 Premium CE, the French version of the TI-84 Plus CE, removes the ability to run native programs - assembly, or ASM, and by extension C programs, which compile into assembly. This new version, OS 5.5.1, both disables assembly support and prevents the OS from being downgraded. BASIC, and where supported, Python, will continue to work as-is. Although no such software update has been announced for the TI-84 Plus CE yet, our observations of the broadly shared featureset between the TI-84 Plus CE and the TI-83 Premium CE makes us strongly suspect that ASM/C support will be removed from the TI-84 Plus CE in a similar OS update in the near future.

The end of an era. One of my forest forays into programming was fiddling with a friends TI calculator.

Before brainfuck and Befunge, there was INTERCAL. Its revival in 1990 by ESR may mark the beginning of the esolang movement, but the language dates back to 1972, when it was created in a famous late-night session at Princeton by Don Woods and Jim Lyon. The original version INTERCAL (sometimes called INTERCAL 72) is a rich parody with a more chaotic sense of play than its later revivals. Its instructions are deliberately vague and embrace an almost-believable hacker jargon, collected in a straight-faced, well-organized manual. Don Woods not only co-created INTERCAL, but is also noted for Colossal Cave Adventure, and the original version of the Hacker Dictionary: three essential cultural objects of geek culture.

Cambridge University Press is making higher education textbooks in HTML format free to access online during the coronavirus outbreak.

I’m participating in the March-agotchi game jam on itch!

Watch me work.

The municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, is the final resting place of 870 blades whose days making renewable energy have come to end. The severed fragments look like bleached whale bones nestled against one another.

I was responsible for the overall firmware for Structure Sensor. It used USB charger detection present on most USB chargers at that time - some resistor network between the USB D+ / D- signals. There was no digital communication. The firmware portion was implemented by Evan Fletcher and I think he reported it was easy to do. That was 2012-2013. Now in 2020 USB-C is here. Many USB chargers have a microcontroller with a CPU. Some are less capable than the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer. Some are more capable than the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer. Most of them with at least ~10x faster clock speed. USB-C Power Delivery solves problems and gives us new capabilities. But it is another step toward increasing complexity. It is another firmware and chip to handle during manufacturing. I don’t have an alternate proposal for power delivery that:

On flailing in the rising tides, as well as the ecological impact of vinyl records and digital music streaming.

If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.

I try not to yuck the proverbial yum, but I’m sure this piece of writing is gonna get a lot of eyeballs, and I think that is a real shame, because the whole thing completely discounts the efforts of a HUGE group of folks (read mainly as women and POC) whom don’t have the luxury of being paid to follow their passion.

+1!

7 years!?

So to that end I’m proposing a new hacker ethic. Of course proposing a closed set of rules for virtuous behavior would go against the very philosophy I’m trying to advance, so my ethic instead takes the form of questions that every hacker should ask themselves while they’re making programs and machines. So here they are.

Instead of saying access to computers should be unlimited and total, we should ask “Who gets to use what I make? Who am I leaving out? How does what I make facilitate or hinder access?”

Instead of saying all information should be free, we could ask “What data am I using? Whose labor produced it and what biases and assumptions are built into it? Why choose this particular phenomenon for digitization or transcription? And what do the data leave out?”

Instead of saying mistrust authority, promote decentralization, we should ask “What systems of authority am I enacting through what I make? What systems of support do I rely on? How does what I make support other people?”

And instead of saying hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position, we should ask “What kind of community am I assuming? What community do I invite through what I make? How are my own personal values reflected in what I make?”

So you might have noticed that there were two final points—the two last points of Levy’s hacker ethics that I left alone, and those are these: You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better. I think if there’s anything to be rescued from hacker culture it’s these two sentences. These two sentences are the reason that I’m a computer programmer and that I’m a teacher in the first place.

Just saying, ‘Everyone should stop driving and eat plants instead of beef’—that isn’t storytelling. That’s advertising, which doesn’t work any longer.

p5.js is a JavaScript library for creative coding, with a focus on making coding accessible and inclusive for artists, designers, educators, beginners, and anyone else!

It’s easier to optimize for less than to optimize to try and earn more money.

Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. (And while some inventions may indeed be the result of mishaps, the decision of a company to patent, produce, and market those inventions is not.) Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered.

Additionally, the goal of this project is to be as self-contained as possible. With a copy of this project, a capable and creative person should be able to manage to build and install Collapse OS without external resources (i.e. internet) on a machine of her design, built from scavenged parts with low-tech tools.

Noodle is a teeny tiny tool that lets you draw in the browser. Controls aren’t all that discoverable, but once you decipher the invisible UI it is an excellent little toy!

Try clicking and dragging around. Use the numbers 0 - 9 on your keyboard to toggle brush/line types.

I made some gnarly vegan wings out of eggplant this evening. Highly recommend. Gotta write down a recipe, but I winged it…get it. wing…

As we make decisions on the futures of our cities—on the future of our transportation systems that will move people across the space but also bring them together to understand one another—we need to re-think what a city should look like, what purpose it should serve.

A very cool little tool to make mind maps in the browser! Wicked calm. Very elegant. Do recommend.

This post describes an interesting approach to using git commit history and metadata to help guide code maintenance. Essentially, when you look at statistics on commits to see which files get updated at the same time, you can begin to get a sense for the logical coupling of the different parts of an application.

I think there is something to be inferred from this with regards to the ability to weaponize/exploit this metadata from git, too…but I’m still noodling on the exact details.

Some interesting insights on the architecture of Raspberry Pi. Namely that Linux runs on top of another, closed source, operating system called ThreadX on Raspberry Pi. ThreadX was recently purchased by Microsoft.

By no means a deal breaker, for me, but a nice insight into the architectural interconnectedness of modern computing and how inescapable some giants are.

Why I have a problem with React the library and spend a lot of time talking to my therapist

Your email might also be a mole. Anytime you receive a receipt in Gmail, Google adds to it to a purchases database. Google says it doesn’t use the contents of Gmail to target ads, but that leaves open other uses.

Edwood has reached the useful milestone (v0.1) and should serve as drop-in replacement for Plan9 Port Acme. (But probably with different bugs.)

The key insight was to stop trying to build a mechanical carriage, and instead build something more like a mechanical horse.

It taught me the power of well-chosen words to shake people out of their daily routines and patterns of thought. It showed me that all jobs, no matter how seemingly dull, can be an outlet for self-expression and excellence. And it reminds me, to this day, that each work of art can be—deserves to be—considered from multiple points of view, not all of which will be comfortable.

Safari 13 will get “support for ARIA roles: insertion, deletion, subscript, superscript, and time.”

The undeniable issue is that we have created a disposable culture, and no amount of recycling will fix it.

This is the web’s apotheosis.

Thanks @kicks! The layout of your site, and wiki-like structure where some of my major design inspirations going into the website re-build. Also the music of Sylvan Esso and this song.

As for National Treasure, I think you speak truth. Alas…the world isn’t ready for a 3rd installation.

This is awesome! Check out the project at its source, too.

Taxonomy is fun. Arbitrary numbering, however, is a wee bit problematic, maybe?

Many of us who’ve used a greenfield Slack account to coordinate activities with a group larger than a couple of people have experienced this. The environment’s design makes it easy to spin up new channels. Without an agreed-upon ontology, the result is duplication and confusion. Eventually, someone in the team either self-selects or is assigned the role of Slack channel curator. Not quite a bottom-up structuring of the environment; rather, a bottom-up nomination for the top-down role.

It’s tempting to see in the repurposed church an allegory of sorts, science and technology vanquishing faith and religion. It may be closer to the truth, however, to see instead something more akin to a displacement: science and technology assume the place of faith and religion. And in this case, we might put the matter more pointedly, data and computing power assuming the functions and roles once ascribed to the deity—source of all knowledge and arbiter of truth, for example.

Much of this data was actually already available, but there do seem to be a substantial number of new email addresses and passwords in the list, so it’s probably a good time to check and see if your data has been involve in any known data breaches — and then change your passwords for all affected services.

If you really want people to experience your content like a physical book, go print a book instead.

You’re not social when you hamper sharing by removing feeds. You’re happy to have customers creating content for your ecosystem, but you don’t want this content out - a content you do not even own. Google Takeout is just a gimmick. We want our data to flow, we want RSS or Atom feeds.

We want to share with friends, using open protocols: RSS, Atom, XMPP, whatever. Because no one wants to have your service with your applications using your API force-feeding them. Friends must be free to choose whatever software and service they want.

We are rebuilding bridges you have wilfully destroyed.

“You should write down your brand statement, and then EVERYTHING you communicate online (or around your customers) should be in line with that statement. In short, if it doesn’t advance your brand, don’t share or say it.”

And my heart rose up in revolt and shouted: F@CK THAT SH*T!

I guess “get recruiters to send you emails” is as good a reason as any?

For me, though, I enjoy blogging because of the folks I’ve gotten to know through their blogs. Community.

Blog, personal pizza or potluck?

Within the framework of Japanese speech exists the somewhat controversial practice of employing formulaic honorific speech by those in the service industry. Manual keigo—so named for the training manuals of phrases that clerks and employees are expected to memorize and use in interactions with the public—creates artificial, repetitious, or otherwise grammatically questionable honorific expressions as companies strive to outdo themselves in terms of reverentially addressing their customers.

Even if all a city can do is begin with two streets, Owens urges cities to start there. “How people are able to move around in a city that gets snow, who don’t have the benefit of a car, is important,” she said. “Does it mean we’re gonna get it right [immediately]? No. But we’re sure gonna try. We gotta start by trying something.”

It isn’t exactly the new Spider-Man game…but it is pretty wicked good.

Over the past 2-3 years, CSS has become the least bad part of the web, occasionally being actually quite pleasant. This makes it a bit painful for me to watch JS people try to ‘fix’ the least broken part of the web by breaking it just enough for it to be familiar to them.

One of the first interesting developments since Microsoft acquired GitHub a while back. It makes me wonder what sort of value they get from free users?

Custo emoji for the win! Looks great.

We played “What became of Edith Finch” through Steam. It was good! Dark and spooky while also not too taxing. But! There is no way the lead character (Edith) has that manicure! What the hell! The Venn intersection of “Perfect french tips with square shaping” and “wears grey knitted fingerless mittens” is empty. I am happy to be a nail consultant on your next game or kickstarter product video, please just stop torturing me with your bad manicures.

This thread of the codemirror.next issues cogently lays out some of the issues with moving CSS into JS.

I write CSS. I write JS. I get that it is sometimes useful to move CSS into JS, but for code that is going to be touched by lots of people I think it is best to keep them separate.

One reason I see folks reference for keeping them separate is that by doing so you don’t “raise the point of entry” for those who don’t know JS, but do know CSS.

I think this is true, but also weirdly demeaning and HUGELY undervalues the complexity, power, and importance of CSS in a project.

Keeping CSS separate from JS helps to ensure that CSS doesn’t become an after thought…just icing. CSS that is an afterthought is CSS that is difficult to, or straight up impossible to maintain. CSS that is an afterthought means that the user interface and interaction model will suffer.

</rant>

All that was old is new again.

What is glitter? The simplest answer is one that will leave you slightly unsatisfied, but at least with your confidence in comprehending basic physical properties intact. Glitter is made from glitter. Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets everywhere, all glitter is impossible to remove; now never ask this question again.

Rather than constantly harping on Internet infrastructure and access as the keystone technological issues of rural America, what experiences do rural people bring to the table that help us build a future digital world that can be equitable for everyone? Rural values related to neighborliness and tight-knight communities can be looked to by technology designers to create more open and welcoming online spaces.

IndieWeb, baby!

My friend @hisaac just published a fun iOS app. You should 100% go check it out! It is a little utility app that shows the time in a few different formats, including .beat Time and Metric Time.

[…] I think this is what ties us: to preserve humanity on the Web, perhaps to find more meaning in this work.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better explanation of how digital compression (namely Lempel-Ziv) works. There are some great visuals and graphs in this.

The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources

…

Put simply: each small moment of convenience — be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song — requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data.

Losing engines is like losing languages. People may wish that everyone spoke the same language, they may claim it leads to easier understanding, but what people fail to consider is that this leads to losing all the culture and way of thought that that language produced. If you are a Web developer smiling and happy that Microsoft might be adopting Chrome, and this will make your work easier because it will be one less browser to test, don’t be! You’re trading convenience for diversity. There is no ecosystem in the world that is strong as a monoculture. Monocultures are always destructive, may it be to the soil they are on or to the surrounding villages who now can’t survive without importing stuff. Monocultures are also fragile as whatever hurts it, hurts it everywhere. The one thing monocultures are good is generating money to whoever owns them, and fuck the rest.

I don’t think Microsoft using Chromium is the end of the world, but it is another step down a slippery slope. It’s one more way of bolstering the influence Google currently has on the web.

We need Google to keep pushing the web forward. But it’s critical that we have other voices, with different viewpoints, to maintain some sense of balance. Monocultures don’t benefit anyone.

But let’s not forget that that’s a choice. It’s not that CSS in inherently incapable of executing complex conditions. Quite the opposite. It’s precisely because CSS selectors (and the cascade) are so powerful that we choose to put guard rails in place.

Also, is another take-home moral form this incident that cryptocurrency is making the internet terrible? I think so.

So right now, we are in a weird valley where you have a bunch of dependencies that are “maintained” by someone who’s lost interest, or is even starting to burnout, and that they no longer use themselves. You can easily share the code, but no one wants to share the responsibility for maintaining that code. Like a module is like a piece of digital property, a right that can be transferred, but you don’t get any benefit owning it, like being able to sell or rent it, however you still retain the responsibility.

[…] When you depend on something, you should take part in maintaining it.

In many ways, Pokémon embodies everything good and appealing about video games. It touches on the social and competitive elements that fuel the likes of Fortnite, while presenting a world all its own. Pokémon manages the rare trick of having immense kid appeal while nevertheless possessing the depth to sustain adult interest.

One of the most impactful policies on human behavior has actually been removing most of the street parking space inside the pedestrian-priority area. “We found that almost 60 percent of vehicles circulating inside town were actually going around in circles trying to find a parking spot. Now, since they know they won’t be able to park, they have stopped bringing their cars in and they use the outer parking areas,” Mosquera explained.

One theory I have of why modern web development has become a bit dysfunctional:

Most of the time, a venn diagram of “tech you need to focus on to improve your career” and “tech that’ll make the product you’re working on great” is just two almost separate circles.

100% this.

…also the first shoveling of the season 🙆‍♂️

…trying not to think too hard about this one.

Here is a slightly more grown up version of that emacs init.el, now hosted on github…I should probably use github more, but my own git server is so cozy and prone to failure!

I think the days of the Hackintosh may be numbered…

Little known fact: tilde.town is a great remote LISP environment.

The soundtrack to a manga in case it is ever turned into an anime show.

(A simple way to explain the idea [that modern marketplaces get their power from aggregating demand] is through Brussels sprouts. Given a choice, would you rather own the world’s supply of Brussel sprouts, or its demand? I say you should pick the latter. Owning all the supply would allow you to dictate your own prices, which is nice; but it would also require owning all the land on which Brussels sprouts can grow. That would be absurdly expensive and a nightmare to operate efficiently, on top of being quite a precarious position. How do you know you haven’t forgotten one piece of land somewhere? Or stay ahead of innovations like indoor farming? Controlling all the demand for Brussel sprouts, on the other hand, gives you the same pricing power, without the need to own and operate all that land.)

Closing,

Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall reckons Google will pay $9B to Apple this year to remain iOS’ default search engine — an amount that could go up to $12B next year (source). By comparison, Microsoft’s search engine Bing generated $1.7B in revenue in 2017. So Apple’s “search engine business” is roughly 5x as big as Microsoft’s — all while, you know, having no actual search engine.

I wonder if it’s possible for children’s television to ever be anything but [Neo-Capitalist fairy tales]—considering how much money is required to produce television.

I think so, yes — especially as kids get older (see Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Hilda). And, while many shows I’ve found fit the pattern that I described, I think that some break the mold, or at least problematize it. 2 examples of this are the Magic School Bus and a show called Tumble Leaf. Tumble Leaf is most interesting to me because it seems to take place in a nearly post-apocalyptic setting that is absolutely awesome. Shaun the Sheep is another interesting example, where, without dialog relationships are all implied, leading to a show more in the vein of the Looney Tunes built around slap-stick hi-jinx.

There are also a number of web-based shows that I’ve been keeping an eye on lately — mostly distributed over YouTube which is its own sort of Neo-Capitalist nightmare — and I wonder if there is where we’ll see the next Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood?

turtle.audio is an audio environment where simple text commands generate lines that can play music.

The Caselaw Access Project (“CAP”) expands public access to U.S. law. Our goal is to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law Library.

S is for “stochastic Terrorism”

Shout out to “hypertext markup language!” Also, I’m pretty sure “queso” didn’t first appear in print in 1989, but perhaps entered in the English lexicon then.

Thinking in incoherent code is demanding, never skip lunch because you’ll get nowhere the last hours of the day

In English, there are no words to describe the existential pain of watching the catastrophic impact of climate change on the world around you. How do we explain how we feel when we hear about rising sea levels, burning forests, tornadoes and tsunamis ravaging coastlines, or animals going extinct?

At what point do we stop calling it “climate change” and start to call it “climate crisis?”

So so so many great points here, as always, from the unstoppable @vasta

JavaScript is eating the world, and that has me just a bit worried. Designers and specialists of different stripes might not have the programming chops of a JavaScript engineer, but their perspectives are just as important to the success and health of a software product. I don’t like the idea of “you must be this tall to ride” when it comes to participating in software projects. I think it’s important to consider approachability when building tools and choosing technologies.

The cause of the accident was not a leak or an equipment failure or a design flaw or a worker turning the wrong valve. The pressure didn’t just creep up beyond safe limits while no one was paying attention; the pressure was driven up by the automatic control system meant to keep it in bounds. The pressure regulators were “trying” to do the right thing. Sensor readings told them the pressure was falling, and so the controllers took corrective action to keep the gas flowing to customers. But the feedback loop the regulators relied on was not in fact a loop. They were measuring pressure in one pipe and pumping gas into another.

Whoops! I meant 18.04 🤦

This world devours every person and moves on. It does not stop moving, even as we pass through the middle of life telling ourselves it is the front end.

Ahoy Kicks!

When there are fights, when there is isolation, when there is success in friendship—those are the moments to lay the topic out together, so this becomes the meta-class of every day.

I wonder if the struggle…or reasoning…behind this move to bring ‘social education’ more explicitly into the classroom is more about charting progress than about efficacy?

I agree with you about the classroom embodying ‘social education’ (I admit, I used to run a summer camp, and thought of that as one great big effort it a) letting kids have as much fun as possible, b) providing a playground for social education), while I am also pleased to see it being talked about more openly, especially when social isolation and loneliness seem to be more and more pervasive.

Hard left: When I read this article originally I kept wanting to find a something or whatnot from Proust, but never took the time to dig one up from my notes. I think his fiction did a good job encapsulating social isolation and loneliness despite massive social connectivity.

Ok ok, one other thing that has dawned on me: it’s not just the emergent connections between writers that is salient when clustering. It’s the connections between readers as well!

In this way, I think blogs are a whole lot like essays:

Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.

– Virginia Woolf, The modern essay

Emoji as cultural hegemony:

Should we let — in this case, Apple — or any company based in California dictate the style and visual representation of food emoji based on their own American — and specifically Californian — idea of that food?

— Federico Viticci, Connected #214.

The point raised by Federico Viticci on a recent episode of Connected was very refreshing to hear, and it was a shame that the other hosts sort of brushed it off.

There is value in diversity — not just of opinion and people, but also in modes of access. What is the implication of so many people accessing the internet (read here, perhaps, as “cultural zeitgeist?”) through 1 of 2 interfaces, e.g. Android or iOS.

Where the medium is the message, what becomes of a world with such a limited scope of message?

I’m 30 minutes into using Ubuntu 18.10, having upgraded from 18.04, and I am pretty smitten so far. Seemingly gone are the days of hours and hours of repairing all kinds of driver issues and configuration settings after upgrade! :knocks wood:

I bought a copy of Union last night! I’m wicked excited to read through the rules tonight and play sometime soon.

Loneliness and social isolation, it’s worth noting, are often used interchangeably, but they’re two distinct concepts. Loneliness is a feeling that may or may not depend on how many meaningful confidants they have in their life—some people feel lonely or suffer from chronic loneliness despite not being socially isolated. Still, social isolation is a leading contributor to loneliness.

I never used Frontier, but I’ve read a lot about it. I am so excited for Rainier’s release.

[…]Spinney said, he was originally asked to play as “a funny, dumb country yokel.”

After a few episodes, Spinney made a suggestion to the show’s producers. “I said, I think I should play him like he’s a child, a surrogate,” he recalled. “He can be all the things that children are. He can learn with the kids.”

That had a lasting effect on Big Bird and on “Sesame Street,” where the character came to embody the tender, nurturing soul of the show.

Moonin emoji!? 😍

…mooninmoji

Sara Vieira’s website is gnarly.

But with powerful computer models that can simulate how plants move water, carbon dioxide and other chemicals between ground and air, Swann has found that vegetation can control weather patterns across huge distances. The destruction or expansion of forests on one continent might boost rainfall or cause a drought halfway around the world.

We’ll have to change our behavior as individuals, too. Meaning, we’re looking at unprecedented change, what is essentially the restructuring of civilization.

In the face of things like this I really don’t know what to do. I get the importance of action, but as an individual I feel powerless.

In other words, the guru is an expert at gaming privilege. Many of his so-called life hacks are just that, hacks—sly methods of disrupting other people’s resources for the sake of your own. If you happen to have a few demographic advantages, plus the raw self-loathing and lack of affection for humanity that tend to accompany any sustained imperative to maximize your own delicious supremacy behind fortress walls, the guru can make you king or queen of all that you survey. Everyone else can, of course, get fucked.

Scandinavia was originally “Scadinavia”, but Pliny (seemingly mistakenly) added a second N in the first century AD. The popularity and influence of his writing in the centuries that followed only served to make the error more widespread, and eventually the dual-N spelling became the norm.

Universal Basic Mobility would be a system of partnerships and/or policies that provide a minimum level of mobility to all members of society. An isolated, static population is unhealthy, unproductive and unhappy. A mobile population is economically, culturally, and socially dynamic.

Another entry for my collection of articles about the sexist history of pockets.

This kind of myopia repeats throughout history. Seat belts were invented long before the automobile but weren’t mandatory in cars until the 1960s. The first confirmed death from asbestos exposure was recorded in 1906, but the U.S. didn’t start banning the substance until 1973. Every discovery in public health, no matter how significant, must compete with the traditions, assumptions and financial incentives of the society implementing it.

…

But my mother’s story, like Sam’s, like everyone’s, didn’t have to turn out like this. For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work.

…

The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages

…

The terrible irony is that for 60 years, we’ve approached the obesity epidemic like a fad dieter: If we just try the exact same thing one more time, we’ll get a different result. And so it’s time for a paradigm shift. We’re not going to become a skinnier country. But we still have a chance to become a healthier one.

Dear Sarah:

I am here to tell you the professional wrestler turned movie star Dwayne The Rock Johnson is going to be president, but before that happens, we are going to make a book, to make a movie, to make a mind.

Electrical power here does not come without concerted exertion or personal sacrifice. Gas-powered generators and their operators fill the void created by a strained electric grid. Most people in Lebanon, in turn, are often stuck with two bills, and sometimes get creative to keep their personal devices—laptops, cell phones, tablets, smart watches—from going dead. Meanwhile, as citizens scramble to keep their inanimate objects alive, the local authorities are complicit in this patchwork arrangement, taking payments from the gray-market generator operators and perpetuating a nation’s struggle to stay wired.

Reeder used to be my everyday driver when it came to all things RSS, but I recently switched over to Unread and have been wicked pleased. I am currently exploring the best setup for Wallabag, so I’ve been using both the native app, and Reeder pointed at my Wallabag recently added RSS feed. A huge portion of my social life online these days seems to be driven through RSS or microsub. I’m really loving it!

Thanks to @hisaac for pointing me towards this awesome tool that makes it wicked easy to create bookmarklets!

🎉 HARK! Adium runs a-okay on macOS Mojave!

:touches wood:

Confession: I am terrified of ticks, but I like The Tick.

TL;DR — federation can be bad because it carries with it the political culture of its launch, making it difficult to cultivate over time. Federation without federation, though, e.g. setting up a bunch of focused micro-communities is good (see the rise of Slack and other such P2P “private” or closed networks).

Citizen Kane might be Welles’ masterpiece, but thanks to Animaniacs we’ll always have that remote farm in Lincolnshire, where peas grow every July.

Chasing corporate headquarters and throwing money at them, reflects a great-man theory of economic development that reflects deep civic insecurity: only a corporation can save a city from its struggles. But corporations aren’t the civic heavyweights they used to be.

The future,

This period of change, when workers are being decoupled from their traditional employers, is a huge opportunity for cities. They should look to fill the vacuum created by receding corporations.

I’ve made the argument that the pop sphere is larger than it has ever been due to the ability to find anything. The gatekeeper role of radio and upper level music executives isn’t anywhere near as important…but I’m willing to make the opposite argument now. I think it is possible that due to trending patterns on social media we have less pop music than we ever have before. What happens is a new album drops (maybe its Eminem maybe its Nicki Minaj) it is just the largest name that week and that album gets blogged about and all caps shouted at by the whole world. So that giant internet information space turns out to be a giant garage with one car parked in it.

Talk to people. Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone in this city is looking for someone to listen. You’ll meet the most interesting people, and hear the most amazing stories. Make new friends, and tell yourself that you’ll be back soon, because really: how could you not?

The switch became a live-action metaphor of the authority and ability to get things done.

Continuing,

The light switch is part of a long history of control mechanisms that regulate an otherwise continuous flow.

Social infrastructure is a set of physical places and organizations that shape our interactions. When social infrastructure is robust, it fosters all kinds of social interactions, helps build relationships, and turns community from a vague, fuzzy concept into a lived experience. When social infrastructure is degraded and neglected, it makes it far more likely that we will grow isolated and be left to fend for ourselves.

Hello Social Swales and Anomie

No worries! Seeing a bunch of your content for a second time got me thinking about how much of online communication happens in the space of one or two transactional-loops. It has been interesting watching you and {h0p3} have a sort of multi-media hypertext exchange that is bigger than the average IndieWeb ping-pong.

Language can be weaponized; when used in certain ways, over lifetimes, language can be violent. To those of us whose life, lifestyle, and existence faces threat every day, especially from those who articulate that threat through language, words become trauma and that trauma accumulates over time.

When you use language to dismiss those who are always dismissed, when you marginalize those in the margins, when you denigrate those who are always insulted, when you exclude those who are never included: you are committing violence. Over the years, the trauma from that violence adds up to a lifetime of being told that we are never enough, we will never belong.

In which a company that helped make URLs obtuse and unreadable decides that URLs are too obtuse and unreadable and ought to be replaced 🤔

This began as something I needed because I kept opening files and needing to count how many times a term or pattern occurred in that file. I wrote a small script to do it, and I tacked on more things to the script over the next few days and weeks.

Missed Rosh Hashana by 1 day 🎉

A Do Date is a time to work on the things that have no due date; to give yourself permission to ignore the things you “have” to do, and instead do the things you want to do.

The best one I’ve found, yet.

But when it comes to abuse it isn’t safer than Twitter. It may well be less safe.

Thanks for sharing these insights! Reading them, I think you are totally right that it is a bit wonky to say (as I did!) that a Raspberry Pi is a better choice than a Chromebook. I also think you are 100% on the nose re: tech elitism. As the father of a young child, I’m heaps intrigued by what you’ve said about iPads and young kids (especially those who cannot read, yet). I’ve played a little bit with some apps meant for kids, and in a past life, before I confused myself with a liberal arts education I was set on becoming a pre-school/kindergarten teacher. If I ever go back to school I’d most certainly be interested in exploring how to design systems (digital, physical, and otherwise) with children in mind, e.g. what does a public transit system for kids look like.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this — mixed as someone who holds 2 humanities degrees, but who doesn’t really work in the “humanities” per se. But, then, I don’t think the “point” of a humanities is to work in the humanities (whatever that means). I think the humanities can sometimes be more about a certain world-view, and learning to think in certain ways, than they are about career prospects. What is missing from here is a serious conversation about career prospects and the value of vocational training.

Hey Kicks! I’d be interested in your thoughts on this piece about how Chromebooks (and I guess iPads, too) potentially limit students’ ability to push the boundaries of computing.

Above all, Fashion Climbing is a celebration of pleasure without the veil of exclusivity that the more pretentious sides of fashion feed on. Cunningham celebrates the feel and weight of a beautiful fabric, the smell of fresh flowers in a shabby apartment on a Monday, the visceral release of a wild costume party with friends, the sight of someone completely at ease and glowing in the outfit they chose for themselves that day

There is a really great conversation unfolding on micro.blog at the moment about what happens to our digital identities after we die. It is a subject that I find fascination, and one that I’d like to do more work with.

So will happen to this when you die?

The aim of Bash Infinity is to maximize readability of bash scripts, minimize the amount of code repeat and create a central repository for well-written, and a well-tested standard library for bash.

Fictional narrative expects the reader to keep turning pages to connect with a character and feel what they feel. Poetry demands that the reader decipher each line in for understanding — the world, or the self or others. Both poetry and fiction develop empathy, but fiction is better for that. Poetry, however, is the practice of simplifying complex topics.

I weirdly adore Steve Losh’s blog. I don’t know what it is about it, but the way in which Steve talks about technical things is really lucid and…human? As in, readable, maybe? I don’t know, but I find myself referring to his blog again and again. I first stumbled across his blog when I found his post about how to configure and use Mutt a few years ago. Here, he has done it again with an excellent LISP primer.

Is it wrong if I call AWK from a PHP script? 🤷

For Wilson, cities that want to support adventure playgrounds need to carve out some money in their budgets for staffing. But to make play more inclusive, cities need to think beyond playgrounds altogether. These may not cater to everyday needs of children—and may not be accessible to kids who don’t have the luxury of having parents or caregivers to cart them around, she said. Apart from instituting better urban design that lends itself to play in the streets, she added, local governments could shut down certain streets so kids can play near their homes; put up a climbing wall at the public library that has an after-school program; and link up play with school lunch programs, to give a few examples. Lastly, while cities are paranoid of certain types of perceived “risk,” they ignore a key reason why parents of color restrict their children’s outdoors play time: harsh policing. Creating more playful cities requires a reckoning with broader systemic issues.

Kids once took special pride in “knowing how to get places” alone, and in finding shortcuts adults normally wouldn’t use.

Don’t get me wrong, I really really like PHP, but…yes to most of this list.

When I think about the responsibility we have to each other, this is where I start:

Every kind of user information relates to privacy.

You never know where a trail leads. We are connected in unbelievable ways.

People have the right to know how information is used.

If you ask someone to share information about themselves, help them understand where it’s going and how it benefits other people.

[Trigger warning for the linked piece, Sexual Assault]

Thank you for your considered response. You have not offended, and I do understand the value of this gift. Thank you for it.

In response to your insights I will offer this:

I love insects. I think they are beautiful and complicated. This being said, I have no desire to collect their bodies and preserve them. I do not pin them to boards and view them out of context.

I try not to begrudge those who do, but it isn’t for me. The beauty of an insect is the individual in larger context, Ecosystem.

Noun or gerund. I hope for gerund.

Similarly, I believe an act of archiving can either be a force of integration or of separation. By drawing a circle around something do we merely call attention to it, or do we cut it out of its larger context?

Again, thank you for your considered response.

It’s unlikely that Flatpack or Snaps are going to replace traditional GNU/Linux package management systems anytime soon. But it’s nice to see that they are shaping up to be more robust alternatives with Canonical continuing to invest in Snaps and the Flatpak team continuing to refine their system.

Asking people better questions is a great way into a more interesting conversation.

The boundaries of every culture are always being contested, from within and from without. To know what boundaries to bend, and which to maintain, involves knowing who we want to be. These are good discussions. We will see what emerges.

When we think of old photography, we tend to imagine things being in black-and-white. […] a popular early photographic form was the cyanotype, in which only blue hues were transferred from film to prints.

On 8 September, climate groups are calling for a mass mobilisation ahead of the California summit. Asked if he thinks scientists should attend, Rockström has little hesitation. “There’s a time to sit down and work at your desk and there’s a time to get up and leave the area where you are comfortable. That time is now.”

This is a pattern I’ve seen a lot in the context of learning to code, and I think it’s really effective: learn to do something from scratch first, then learn a popular library for doing the same thing. You will understand a problem much better if you try to solve it on your own first than you will if you are just handed a solution.

As someone who is more or less self-taught I often find that I start from the framework and then work to replicate on my own. I often times don’t have the know-how to start from scratch, but once I’ve fiddled with a framework for long enough I’m able to reverse engineer my way forward…that being said, as I’m learning LISP I’m trying not to let myself do this. Instead I’m trying to do what @fiona suggests: start from scratch then learn a framework.

We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames. We calmly carried it outside to avoid setting off smoke detectors, plugged in another monitor, and tried again. The software hadn’t caused the fire; the monitor had just chosen that moment to malfunction. The software ran over fifty times faster than it had run on the old microprocessor. We played with it for a while and agreed, “This doesn’t suck”

The source of the whole system is a single Org mode file. If you had any doubts as to whether Org could support a literate programming approach in a non-trivial project

While RSS has disappeared into the plumbing of the internet, there’s still something fundamental about it. Its durability is remarkably impressive, especially in the context of the lack of the evolution and perceived displacement of the protocol over the past few years

When designing APIs, this Wikipedia page is your friend. HTTP codes are good. They are important. They are beautiful. They should be used…not ignored. Respected…not ignored. HTTP codes are good.

In a way, it’s a silo—a central info container. Silos make it easy. You go there and dump stuff in. But, here in the Indieweb, we want No Central. We want Decentral. Which is more difficult because all these little sites and blogs out there have to work together—that’s tough!

• /en/indieweb

In Romania, the greatest threat to life today is not poverty, climate change or al-Qa’eda. It’s moving air. Fans, air conditioning and open windows are not - as I had thought - useful mechanisms to generate a nice breeze, or give a little respite as summer temperatures climb to around 40 degrees. They are weapons of mass destruction.

Continuing:

It turned out that “cur-rent”, or the draught that circulates when two windows are open, is blamed in Romania for almost every ill one can think of. Toothache, headache, cold, flu, meningitis, paralysis, even death - all are apparently the result of moving air. This was solemnly confirmed to me by Vasile’s mum, who has just retired from a 30-year career as a nurse.

Micro.blog or bust!

[…] every family is considered an island that must provision for itself. The idea of designing a neighborhood for families as part of a public good just goes against the whole way we think about family life.

Family life has become so stressed in this country. That’s connected to the way we design cities, and to things like commute times, not having communal play spaces, and having streets be unsafe. All of those things take more of the parents’ time or money to navigate, because the child can’t do it on their own. [If you said,] “We want to build a family-friendly city,” it would seem almost un-American.

In which we review some chocolate.

I’ve updated m.b.wiki.eli.li to include search and tagging! It is now hopefully a bit more useful. More updates soon!

[…] there is no overriding Congressional rule governing how frequently voicemails should be listened to, and very few offices disclose their approaches to voicemail systems. Depending on your congressperson and the intensity of the political climate, it might take anywhere from one minute to a week for voicemail inboxes to empty out.

While I may have no hope left for avoiding a heat-blighted future, I do reserve some for human civilization’s ability to survive it anyway. Unless the effects wrought by global warming happen with far more terrible suddenness than science seems to currently predict, then I feel hopeful that humanity will indeed change its carbon-outgassing habits — if only as a form a purely mechanical self-correcting behavior, rather than anything consciously preventative. Life will still become profoundly harder for all but the mega-wealthy, all in ways that will seem infuriatingly preventable in hindsight. But the behavioral adaptations forced upon us may end up enough to keep society knit together in a changed world.

Ultimately, I think it is unrealistic to think that an open web solves the worst abuses we see on the big social networks. If Twitter and/or FaceBook vanished tomorrow, it would, at least in the foreseeable future, have an unintended consequence of amplifying the voices of the more tech savvy over those who are less so. If we, as a society, fail to recognize that abuse, harassment, and spread of toxic/hateful/false information have, do, and will continue to exist on the open web just as they do on social networks, we are setting ourselves up for a rude awakening. If we do acknowledge this, we can protect against it and build a better and more rewardingly social Internet.

Ignore all that. Functional code is characterised by one thing: the absence of side effects. It doesn’t rely on data outside the current function, and it doesn’t change data that exists outside the current function. Every other “functional” thing can be derived from this property. Use it as a guide rope as you learn.

I am terrified of ticks.

An interesting post, especially in the context of my own “CMS.” I’ve run into different hurdles, partially because my site isn’t “static,” per se. The most interesting bit here is the bit about YAML as a data format. I don’t have much expirience with it, but have seen it used in many static site generators…this was exactly why I didn’t use YAML, and instead settled on raw JSON stores. It struck me as strange that there was a type of markup used almost, as far as I could tell, just for static site generators. Well, that and JSON is easier to parse in PHP.

Like Pandoc…but backwards. A weird and wild tool.

What we see here really could be the beginning of a slippery slope towards a horrific ordeal in which any citizen who violates hate speech policies or blatantly spreads lies that cause other individuals to receive death threats will immediately be discredited and, perhaps, even asked to host their demonstrably false content on a website that they actually own.

Arguably, these virtual places are now as significant as the real environments of the outer world, and they are attracting increasing critical attention as both art and narrative.

In an area as large as the U.S., successful water management has to involve sharing money, data, and resources between federal and local governments. Huge bodies of water like the Mississippi River or the Great Lakes are used by many different communities. If all water management is on a local level, then it’s very difficult to understand the body of water as a whole and plan for long-term changes that are a result of climate change.

What I don’t hear often in the discussion is the moral imperative to help others: the understanding that taking care of the people around us is the right and only thing we must do, and that it is at the core of who we are and how we must act as humans in this world.

In which I go way back by learning a JS framework from 2013!

The recommendation problem is designed to give a recommendation for products that users will like. Consider the case of Netflix. It knows what films you’ve watched. It knows what all of its other millions of users have watched. Given this information, what are you likely to want to watch next?

You can think of this data as being arranged in a giant grid, or matrix, with movies listed across the top, users listed down the side, and values at points in the grid quantifying whether, or to what extent, each user likes each film. A good algorithm would generate recommendations by quickly and accurately recognizing similarities between movies and users and filling in the blanks in the matrix.

To sum up - in 1978 a series of small mistakes created some characters out of nothing. The errors went undiscovered just long enough to be set in stone, and now these ghosts are, at least in potential, a part of every computer on the planet, lurking in the dark corners of character tables.

So as you’re evaluating your decision-making process, consider not just the desired outcome, but what position it puts you in for taking the next step, the one after this one. Often, decisions and moves are as much as about collecting data and learning from the results as they are about “getting it right.”

But does it have a better keyboard than current MacBooks and MacBooks Pro?

The suspicion, harbored by many physicists and mathematicians over the decades but rarely actively pursued, is that the peculiar panoply of forces and particles that comprise reality spring logically from the properties of eight-dimensional numbers called “octonions.

And then I rediscovered Oolite, an open source clone of Elite

…and the IndieWeb finds a new framing narrative.

In which Google walks away from “paper” skeumorphs

🌮

[…] I’m starting a blogroll of my own. A list of links delivered to you each month. Links I’ve dug up in my research that I think you’d get a kick out of. Some of them are future sources, some of them are just plain fascinating.

All a status indicator can do is tell you whether someone has the app open at that very second, which is a totally irrelevant indication of whether they are reachable. Push alerts arrive regardless of whether the app is open or closed, whether the phone is sleeping or not.

Shout out to the Animorphs reference!

The key is not individuals’ car use, but the way we sort into communities based on our reliance on cars.

For one, the geography of car use tracks with income and wealth: Car-dependent places are considerably less affluent. Metros in which a higher share of people depend on their cars to get to work are poorer, and those where more people use transit or bike or walk to work are considerably more affluent. The share of commuters who drive to work alone is negatively correlated with both wages and income. Conversely, in more affluent metros, a higher proportion of commuters use transit, walk, or bike.

The Silicon Valley model for doing things is a mix of can-do optimism, a faith that expertise in one domain can be transferred seamlessly to another and a preference for rapid, flashy, high-profile action. But what got the kids and their coach out of the cave was a different model: a slower, more methodical, more narrowly specialized approach to problems, one that has turned many risky enterprises into safe endeavors — commercial airline travel, for example, or rock climbing, both of which have extensive protocols and safety procedures that have taken years to develop.

This “safety culture” model is neither stilted nor uncreative. On the contrary, deep expertise, lengthy training and the ability to learn from experience (and to incorporate the lessons of those experiences into future practices) is a valuable form of ingenuity.

“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places … [increasing centralization of the Web] ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.” “While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people—and can be fixed by people.” “You don’t have to have any coding skills. You just have to have a heart to decide enough is enough. Get out your Magic Marker and your signboard and your broomstick. And go out on the streets.” —Tim Berners-Lee, Vanity Fair

On the contrary, Tim, the World Wide Web is very human, and these are not “bugs” or “emergent”: It’s not a perfect crystalline utopia inhabited by rule-following robots reading RDF tags, but instead it’s like an organically grown city, with a mix of lovely things and nice people, and also back alleys and skyscraper offices full of predators. There’s surveillance systems everywhere because the predators wanted surveillance, paid engineers well to make them, and it’s much harder to stop Internet surveillance than spray-painting a closed-circuit camera.

The uneasy part is what happens with the information, collected by gunshot scanners, traffic detectors, even public wifi kiosks. It’s not that governments necessarily intend to do anything nefarious with people’s data. But “smart cities” are usually designed from the top-down with predetermined objectives, be it surveillance, prediction, science, or profit.

Many reacted to the paper’s findings by calling it anthropocentric and narrow-minded, arguing that any conclusion suggesting we Earthlings are somehow special is simply human arrogance.

This is somewhat understandable because the idea that intelligent life is extremely rare in the universe feels completely counterintuitive. We exist, along with other intelligent life like dolphins and octopi, so we assume what we see must be extrapolatable beyond Earth.

But this alone is not proof that intelligent civilizations are therefore ubiquitous. Whether the true likelihood is as high as one in two, or as inconceivable as one in a trillion trillion trillion, the mere ability to consciously ask ourselves that question depends on the fact that life has already successfully originated.

This phenomenon is known as an observer selection effect — a bias that can occur when thinking about the likelihood of an event because an observer has to be there to observe the event in the first place. As we only have one data point (us), we have no reliable way to predict the true likelihood of intelligent life. The only conclusion we can confidently draw is that it can exist.

In honor of Amazon Prime Day:

the focus isn’t so much on the appliances as it is on interacting with his community. “I have to be honest, when you go telling people you want to save the world, they often say, ‘That sounds nice, but I don’t have the time,’” he said. “But if there is this aspect of, ‘Do you want your toaster fixed, and while you’re having that done, can we talk about saving the world?’ they tend to be more receptive.”

I am flabbergasted; there isn’t a single mention of Virginia Woolf in this entire article about semicolon usage!?

Platforms like YouTube often embody the “fast web”: deep, black voids of mindless entertainment. But they can also give us access to a world much wider than our own. Hidden within the systems designed to capture your eyeballs and seize your attention, there is also a capacity to watch slowly and mindfully.

Whatever their place in the taxonomies of buildings, fountains are distinguished from other urban monuments by one essential element: water. 10 From the perspective of architecture history, this factor complicates both the design and experience of these structures; for it requires that the traditional cognitive scheme involving the object and the viewer be replaced by a more complex phenomenological triad consisting of architecture, water, and the body.

…and lo, a new dawn of science fiction and fantasy dawned.

PODCASTS IN SPACE!

… but for real, I think some of the best contemporary fantasy story telling is happening in podcasts right now.

I was on a podcast! It was fun. A thing I learned:

• Even when I intentionally try not to speak quickly, I end up speaking quickly.

The Takoma Park Youth Council is model local government turned pro. In fact, the group might just improve matters locally.

“A reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus,” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority holds otherwise by ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent, and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”

This action for Drafts 5 most certainly lives up to its name. It is “Fantastically good.” With it you can create 1 or more calendar events at a time using natural language, e.g. “Go to the movies at the mall from 15:30 until 18:00.” The script itself is also really interesting to comb through if you are interested in data handling with JS.

I joined the IndieWeb web ring today!

← An IndieWeb Webring 🕸💍 →

Because [the internet] looks less human and more of a technology-industrial complex, it’s easy to forget that people’s accounts and feeds are their homes on the Net. It’s easy to forget, when I land on someone’s Tumbleblog or Twitter account, that I am the guest who was invited to come in for a little while to listen to them speak and sing. It’s easy to stomp all over that person’s home on the Net and get into fights on their property. –Was it their property in the first place? It was the institution gave them that grey box to live in, identical to my grey box.

Have a good IndieWeb Summit ya’ll!

[The] search for common ground is vital to early prevention of genocide….

To combat dehumanization, incitement to genocide should not be confused with protected speech. Genocidal societies lack constitutional protection for countervailing speech, and should be treated differently than democracies.

Getting to mass adoption will require Little Vehicles for all seasons, for all sorts of trips, and for all types of people. Solutions to these obstacles exist, and many more will surely be dreamed up. The bigger challenge will be de-conditioning ourselves out of the belief that cars—whether privately owned or for hire—are the default mode of transportation in dense cities.

You can learn a lot about this country, and the dilemmas of contemporary capitalism, by taking a straw-eyed view.

Once upon a time I was considering getting a PhD in art history (I mean, once you have a masters in it, why not?) and was really interested in studying forgery and its place in the art world…which evidently has been done to death but isn’t heaps popular to talk about.

RIP

Vulnerability, at the end of the day, doesn’t belong to any particular identity of person.

Many of the rules include making our language clear so that any person encountering our privacy policies knows exactly what they’re reading. We’re not in the business of obscuring information (unless it’s your private data—we’re keeping that under wraps), but illuminating it. We’re gatekeepers.

No use sugar-coating it: the federal government of the United States of America now has a policy of taking children away from their families when they attempt to enter the US to request political asylum from violence & hardship in their native countries. These children and their parents are placed into concentration camps.

Where do you, dear reader, find the things that keep you engaged, the articles and explorations that make you want to learn more, to write more?

An unexpected (bread)twist on the future of Capitalism as a stand-in for Democracy.

How could an architect who had made the pursuit of lightness the essence of his design aspirations become one of the great form-givers of the aesthetics of weightiness?

Freddish, not only good for speaking with children.

I’d add Kishi Bashi to this list, too. 💯

But, like everything else that’s easy, cheap, and pleasurable, using a straw is fundamentally wrong. Straws consume a lot of energy to produce and distribute for vanishingly little purpose. Billions wind up in the trash without ever being opened.

Much research — and many spiritual and philosophical systems Buddhism, for example, suggest that detaching from daily concerns and spending time in simple reflection and contemplation are essential to health, sanity and personal growth.

Note that the “nothing” referenced here is a really big “nothing,” that sort of includes everything.

The problem is that this model now reflects a view popular in Silicon Valley that sees tech companies as progressive agents solving problems beyond governmental oversight. This worldview, in part, descends from the long history of utopian communities.

A large desk can increase the physical separation between manager and others, thereby supporting the symbolic or hierarchical distance between the two. Thus, desks can be used to reinforce the legitimacy and authority of a manager.

Trailing commas. Trailing commas. They’re okay. Trailing commas. Trailing commas.

Is it weird that I mostly want to go to Japan to watch a baseball game and ride around on the trains?

Hi James,

I very much agree with what you’ve written — I think another factor may be that many bloggers mimic styles of writing with which they’re familiar, e.g. newspaper-style journalism.

You’re post also reminds me of one of my favorite Virginia Woolf quotes:

Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.

— Virginia Woolf, The Modern Essay

Do you think blogs are a bit like essays as Woolf has described them?

…I would never leave emacs

How open source works is: If you want something, you can build it.

This isn’t exactly true, Ghost. As the stated stewards of an open source project it is your responsibility to cultivate a community and tooling to support that community…open source isn’t a free-to-play sandbox.

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

Hickam’s Dictum

Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please

… as opposed to

Occam’s Razor (Isaac Newton’s version)

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes

Occam’s Razor (layman’s version)

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one

In “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1831), Victor Hugo noted that, in the late Middle Ages, printing threatened architecture as the dominant mode for the church to convey cultural meaning. “The book of stone, so solid and so enduring, was to give way to the book of paper, more solid and more enduring still.” Put the book and the building together, and you have the potential for structures of almost overwhelming significance.

Dependency injection is the idea of giving a class its requirements from the outside, instead of having that class being responsible for them itself.

Pro tip #2: do bet on any business working for customers rather than sellers. Because signals of personal intent will produce many more positive outcomes in the digital marketplace than surveillance-fed guesswork by sellers ever could, even with the most advanced AI behind it.

It’s a peculiar problem. The emerging market for heritage and source-verified grains doesn’t really have a supply bottleneck, nor is there a lack of consumer demand. Instead, the missing piece is infrastructure for the wholesale buyer. Hungry as they are for local wheats, bakers are trying to drink from an ocean with a straw.

“Small restaurants like this are doing a kind of cultural ambassadorship, where they are introducing people to the different flavors of Mexico but also showing the diversity of what’s available,” Alvarez says, looking around the taqueria.

“It offers two different sides. It’s a place where folks can come learn more about the culture and for those who are deeply ingrained in the culture it has a kind of nostalgic pull and offer a way of maintaining transnational ties, really.”

Call it the virtue of architectural monotony: a relentless horizontality where commercial canyons recede into the distance. One stretch of cliff might be granite, another one concrete or tile or glass. But as the city’s core has filled up in recent decades, the materials have come to serve as seemingly interchangeable wrappings for squat containers of leasable space.

The result? An awkward yet oddly endearing terrain where, absolutely, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

And so the rules of typography fell into chaos.

Quick background: every development team since the beginning of time has been trying to figure out how to get institutional knowledge out of people’s heads and into written, searchable form where everyone can find it. Like new members of the team. And old members of the team working on new parts of the code. And people who forgot what they did three years ago and now have questions about their own code.

I like this idea a heap! I’ve set up a few systems to help manage institutional memory, and never found something that works for everyone. I don’t think this is the proverbial silver bullet, but it looks like a good solution for technical and dev. teams.

Regardless of who fits the criteria, there is one across-the-board commonality: dad rock is typically assumed to be music for straight, white, American dads, despite the observable truth that not all dads are straight, white, or American. Think about it: What would you call dad rock for black fathers? Latino fathers? Chinese fathers? Indian fathers? Fathers born in Europe? In Africa? In Asia? Gay fathers? Can you give an answer off the top of your head, or even after thinking about it? I’m betting no. When we talk about dad rock, we talk about just one kind of dad. And reader, there are so many kinds of dads in the world.

Let’s shift from “don’t be an asshole” to “be welcoming.”

I feel that anyone who is responsible for the creation and maintenance of any sort of community online ought to work at least 1 summer as a camp counselor before they do anything online. The internet would be a much nicer place.

I watched the video before reading Bostrom’s moral and thought it might have been about half a dozen other things (guns, climate change, agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, racism) before realizing it was more literal than that. Humanity has lots of dragons sitting on mountaintops, devouring people, waiting for a change in the world’s perspective or technology or culture to meet its doom.

I just discovered Graphviz. I’ve stopped caring about anything and everyone. All I want to do is make graphs. Please send help.

Cons cells, cooler than blockchain.

Don’t @ me.

But why does the distinction between the real and unreal, the true and fake, matter at all? Why does it matter to architecture? At the risk of radical simplification, it matters because there is a real world and there is a design world. In a design proposal, there is a necessary overlap between the two worlds, and, as with the intersecting sets of a Venn diagram, that overlap is negotiated at every stage of a project, getting ever thicker as the design moves from concept to construction. Certain elements of reality cannot be entirely excluded, of course. An architect and client may decide at the start to ignore a particular fact, such as the presence of a large oak in the middle of a site; but at some point the continuing existence of the oak might need to be weighed against the longing for a lap pool.

Wicked interesting blog from Yale exploring the roots and emergence of Literary Modernism.

The time you spend is not your own.

I’m really excited for this book, The Design of Childhood. I frequently try to think about design in the context of children, and what various systems would look like if children were made the primary focus (note, focus is different from “user”).

One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.

Today, about 40,000 mobile home parks exist across the United States. They were critical to filling housing shortages during World War II and even more so after the end of the war. They have the potential to create opportunities for low-income housing, yet many mobile home parks are in danger of erasure from our cultural landscape.

The popularity of the tutu can be traced to its unlikely flexibility as a statement—it can mean you love Minnie Mouse, or that you are part of a fundraising team that has qualified for the Boston Marathon, or that you actually hate running but this is the only way you’re going to have fun doing it.

I’ve fallen in love with Spacemacs, but the launch times are absolutely abysmal when compared to Vim. Enter Emacs server!

On the power of plug-ins (as opposed libraries and frameworks):

you can install the plug-in and activate it and it just works and there’s no other integration required because it’s all done through these known hooks, these published hooks that are part of the core.

Continuing…

In that way, you’re actually trying to build an ecosystem, an ecosystem of plug-ins that provide a lot of the functionality that you need.

I like the use of “ecosystem” in this context. I think the web would benefit from more folks thinking of web-based tooling in the context of how it fits into the wider ecosystem of the web itself. Rather than see the web as a means of distribution, think of it as a coherent space unto itself, like a continent with unique biomes and ecologies. Does your tool fit into the ecosystem? Does it work with, or against it?

Facebook and similar walled silos ignored the ecological aspect of the web, whereas the IndieWeb attempts to integrate itself, and to extend the web’s existing ecology.

Database Flow is one of the most powerful and easy to use data analytics tools I’ve ever seen (assuming you have a solid grasp of either or both SQL and GraphQL).

With a basic to middling understanding of both regex and VBA I feel invincible.

I have blended canonical works with those I know students will find interesting, and others they might find challenging, but will learn a lot from being exposed to because this is what my actual reading/writing life looks like. This is not the only way to design the course, but it is one way, and I’m pleased with how it has turned out. Wouldn’t it be great if all teachers felt empowered to bring their authentic reading and writing lives into the classroom?

Lamar’s win elevates him in rap’s long history of lyrical geniuses. Not only does this count as a historic moment of critical recognition for Lamar personally and rappers in general, it represents a shrewd attempt by the Pulitzers to stay relevant with a younger generation. Academic and classical musicians have often been Pulitzer’s go-to awardees, but with Lamar’s win, the door is open for more culturally visible and influential musicians to get their share of this elite recognition.

Lesson learned: the discoverable and understandable web is still do-able — it’s there waiting to be discovered. It just needs some commitment from the people who make websites.

This is SO important for the future of the web, and web accessibility.

Functional programming is not about lambda calculus, monads, morphisms, and combinators. It’s about having many small well-defined composable functions without mutations of global state, their arguments, and IO.

It doesn’t really matter whether Alexa provides Dad with useful knowledge or a seamless way to communicate. It does something more fundamental: It allows him to connect with people and ideas in a contemporary way. To live fully means more than sensing with the eyes and ears—it also means engaging with the technologies of the moment, and seeing the world through the triumphs and failures they uniquely offer.

When scientists study people on their deathbed and how they feel about their lives, they usually find that many of them feel some serious regrets. I think a lot of those regrets stem from the fact that most of us aren’t really taught about path-making in our childhoods, and most of us also don’t get much better at path-making as adults, which leaves many people looking back on a life path that didn’t really make sense, given who they are and the world they lived in.

Wait but Why is one of my favorite blogs. This post really resonated with me, because I’ve been thinking through a lot of this sort of thing lately.

My major critique of the post, however, is that it is wicked focused on you, whomever you may be, as an autonomous, singular unit. Solo. The “Yearning Octopus” doesn’t take into account the other creatures and tentacles in the mess. Sometimes other folks’ yernings need to be considered and prioritized over your own when making career choices. This isn’t a bad thing, just something that felt missing from the piece.

To be honest, it was initially surprising to me that you could just print a number after people’s handles and they would feel rewarded. Look at me! Look at my four digit number! But it does drive a tremendous amount of good behavior. Even people who aren’t participating in the system (by working to earn reputation) buy into it (e.g., by respecting high-reputation users for their demonstrated knowledge and helpfulness).

It’s not just about Facebook: When Google is building cities and cars are turning into data-harvesting machines, the need for laws that protect users has never been more urgent.

What three things do you need to do today?

You should be able to instantly answer this simple question, each day, every day, for the rest of your life. Without any tools other than the brain you were born with.

It is wicked inspiring to see the great work being done at and by the Ontario Digital Service.

In the meantime, WordPress developers focused on making things easy for users. They set up documentation and forums for users to post questions. They plucked new features straight from user requests, or Valdrighi’s wish list. WordPress was easy to install (in 5 minutes or less, the project promised) and had a unique admin. The goal was to make it as easy as possible to log into your site and post to your blog without ever having to see any code.

Seems like a lot of folks have been giving micro.blog a try this weekend. Thought I’d repost my short guide about the service and how to use it.

For Berger, the toaster is a depressing ruse, a mechanized way to cover up the demise of American bread and even American diversity.

It has been interesting watching the opinion of certain groups turn against Facebook. It seems wider spread than the usual ebb and flow of FB-directed skepticism (e.g. not just security conscious nerds this time). It is particularly interesting to see this happen now, as the IndieWeb seems to be at a generational inflection point, with the rise of services like Micro.Blog, Mastodon, and more folks rolling their own IndieWeb solutions everyday. My college was obsessed with a saying, supposedly coined by a founder: “Pay attention to when you are uncomfortable, it means you are about to learn something.” Are we reaching a point of general discomfort on social networks? Are we about to learn something? 🤷‍♂️

I’ve been really drawn to the IndieWeb and Micro.Blog because they provide something that I feel is missing from my experiences on the mainstream social networks: community. Rather than a place for communal interaction, Facebook and Twitter are sources of anomie. I’ve played with Mastodon, but not found an instance I like (read as “fit into”). But, it most certainly seems more community oriented than even Micro.Blog, which can lean to the mac-nerdy-app.net/serious side of the road.

Saga’s call to empathy lands more strongly still because of the way Vaughan’s story harnesses Staples’s images. The writer has a gift for fleshing out how a character’s intersecting identities and experiences inform how they see the world and the choices they make.

I was excited to see the Saga got some love in the Atlantic today. Saga is, hands down, the best comic, and one of the best pieces of fiction, I have ever encountered. It is simultaneously intense, beautiful, tragic, hopeful, and quiet.

And at that point, I realized the problem was never the medium. Emails were designed to be nothing but a way to exchange messages between people. It was we who tried to turn it into some sort of hub for all of our junk.

The imagery that accompanies this article is haunting, and beautiful. Each photo reminds me of the closing shot of a film — where a character we’ve gotten to know is in frame, but turned away. The movie is over. This story is over. Mine isn’t.

Are these the awards that Squarespace references in their podcast ads?

I don’t really care about Facebook, because Facebook is for old people. What I am interested in, though, is what the hell’s going on with Mark Zuckerberg’s signature.

By far the most radical part of the March for Our Lives was this: Hundreds of thousands of adults stood outside on a bright, cold spring day and seriously listened to children and teenagers talk about their lived experience. It was a day when adults paid attention to the everyday lives and traumas of young people—not out of fear, anxiety, or frustration—but out of respect.

The Slow Web would be more like a book, retaining many of the elements of the Popular Web, but unhurried, re-considered, additive. Research would no longer be restricted to rapid responders. Conclusions would be intentionally postponed until sufficiently noodled-with. Writers could budget sufficient dream-time before setting pixel to page. Fresh thinking would no longer have to happen in real time.

Granted, I’m a wee bit hesitant to put a secret key in JS…even if it is a key for a user only permitted to upload. Low, Amazon seems to have a solution for this, though.

I’ve been listening to the inaugural episode of the currently unnamed IndieWeb podcast this evening. The episode offers some great context about the history of the IndieWeb, specifically the WordPress plugins. I haven’t finished listening to the episode yet, but am excited to continue listening…especially since the conversation is partially orbiting one of my recent posts!

I’ve got to go to sleep before I can finish listening, but I wanted to take a moment to send a quick thanks to Chris Aldrich and David Shanske for the great conversation, and to let them both know that I am 100% willing and excited to roll up my sleeves and help out with this! My professional background is mostly in front-end dev. and product design, so I can’t help but to think of the IndieWeb in those contexts. 🎉

Culture as hyperobject

The weakness of the book is that it doesn’t seriously consider the second part of the conversation—the human values that the young woman from the small town talks about. Our local, particular connections to just one specific family, community, place, or tradition can seem irrational. Why stay in one town instead of chasing better opportunities? Why feel compelled to sacrifice your own well-being to care for your profoundly disabled child or fragile, dying grandparent, when you would never do the same for a stranger? And yet, psychologically and philosophically, those attachments are as central to human life as the individualist, rationalist, universalist values of classic Enlightenment utilitarianism.

…yet another post summarizing the zen-like glory of air travel without children.

I’m 100% with you. PHP’s tooling is…obtuse, at best. Generally speaking, I rely on PHP’s inbuilt ability to throw errors/warnings/alerts to debug. I use a HEAP of exception try-catch blocks. In my (limited) experience with development work, I would say that the biggest hurdle to entry is often setting up a development environment.

I really like the idea of micro.blog, or a similar service in an educational context. I’ve implemented, and used services like moodle before, and always found them to be more burdensome than helpful in facilitating conversation. It always seems easier to fall back to chat/text. Micro.blog, once set up, is frictionless enough, and flexible enough (e.g. cross platform support (save, maybe for windows?)) that it could offer a better way to facilitate conversation.

I had a personal realization recently: kottke.org isn’t so much a thing I’m making but a process I’m going through. A journey. A journey towards knowledge, discovery, empathy, connection, and a better way of seeing the world. Along the way, I’ve found myself and all of you. I feel so so so lucky to have had this opportunity.

There is a subtle irony in this piece, or “letter,” by Tim Berners Lee being posted to medium.

At the root of each dispute over the river’s water was an argument over the meaning of improvement and its near cousin, progress…Yet even then the word was diverging from its agrarian roots, developing something of its current flavor: economic advancement enabled by new technologies.

This is SUCH a great post. I’ve noodled with a similar idea for a while, but haven’t gotten it up and running yet — trying to figure out if there is a way to build a service, or even local electron app, that would let folks post to a neocities site without needing another web host or server.

The amount of cognitive overhead needed to be a developer today results in a problem I’ve seen with senior developers sometimes. They forget how much context people need to learn in order to become proficient at development. And they forget that they were beginners once, too.

See also, “beginner’s mind.”

The I-Thou encounter has an inherent egalitarianism that dissolves self-interest. As Buber outlined, in the human realm there is no full escape from the I-It — we also love people for dull, functional reasons; we make selfish use even of our soulmates. But at the core, the I-Thou always demands vulnerability, weakness, a cracking of the hard shell of the egoistic self. Real love, the sort of love people wander through their lives craving, wants above all to distance itself from lust by shedding its preening self-regard. Falling in love is partly the terrifying realisation that you have stepped into reciprocity; that someone is now able to cause you terrible pain.

I grew up visiting White Flint Mall. Seeing these photos, I can smell my grandmother’s perfume.

It’s absurd — and fitting — that a century later, opponents and supporters of daylight saving are still not sure exactly what it does. Despite its name, daylight saving has never saved anyone anything. But it has proven to be a fantastically effective retail spending plan.

Because of their reputation as even-handed providers of unbiased information, museums can be public forums for people of different backgrounds and beliefs not only to learn and discover, but also to meet, discuss difficult subjects and build community.

Continuing later,

Cultural institutions and museums create virtual and physical spaces to engage in conversation outside our own political, social and cultural circles. They are places where people of different backgrounds, religions and ethnicities can engage about topics that are often contentious or even taboo.

While I whole heartedly agree with most everything said in this piece, I feel it omits the fact that museums can also do the exact opposite. Double edged sword — just as museums and similar cultural organization can be a force positive change and growth, they can also re-author the past, and be tools for oppression…colonization. We must ensure that museums are forces of decolonization, rather than colonization.

Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries: of heads of state, opera singers, the inventor of Stove Top stuffing and the namer of the Slinky. The vast majority chronicled the lives of men, mostly white ones; even in the last two years, just over one in five of our subjects were female.

These are all well worth a read, but I’d be amiss if I didn’t suggest you start with Charlotte Brontë…the best novelist. Full stop.

Privacy is considered a human right, but achieving privacy in a networked age requires a certain level of privilege. This Special Section on Privacy at the Margins brings together nine original social science papers and an editorial introduction to reveal the complex dynamics—such as coercion and consent—that underpin a range of privacy experiences around the world.

I also decided to incorporate crime.

In most Miyazaki movies, he resists turning the narrative into a love story. In Howl’s Moving Castle, he resists his own resistance. All of the characters are in love with each other. Instead, they have to learn how to accept love.

Millennials and now post-Millennials have long been dismissed as a digitally dazed generation, reliant on their parents for transportation and financial support, and disengaged with real-world issues. What we’re seeing in the wake of the Parkland shooting is another narrative emerging: young people who are very much on the move, wielding the digital tools they understand best to shift the political landscape around their needs and concerns. No wonder Lyft is hustling to meet them where they are—politically powerful consumers, growing up to be unlicensed adults.

I’m in love with this. A tumblr documenting a very specific corner of the world.

I’ve been reading a bit about flutter, a tool for cross platform development in Dart. I am intrigued…mostly because I think it may be a trojan horse. I think that beside iOS and Android as build targets, flutter will be able to build against Fuchsia down the road. It could be a way of coaxing/easing devs into the Fuchsia/Dart ecosystem.

In Clojure, if you adopt the ‘Data is the API’ paradigm then designing systems is primarily about identifying your data and how it flows through your functions. Data can be represented by a small set of abstractions, in particular a map, and so would reduce the requirement to write the glue code that is so commonplace in Java (a.setFoo(b.getFoo) , etc.).

Also, if functional programming is your jam, don’t miss this article’s use of Data Flow diagrams to describe Clojure code 💯

The Leicester researchers concluded that the ease of theft is likely inspiring people who might not otherwise steal to do so. Rather than walk into a store intending to take something, a shopper might, at the end of a trip, decide that a discount is in order.

The internet may be full of fake news, but it’s also home to obsessive, deep knowledge and unlikely passions

Among the many dazzling technologies in the new Marvel superhero film Black Panther—self-healing catsuits, holographic self-driving cars, indestructible woven capes—one technology is bittersweet to behold, at least for one subset of sci-fi nerd. That would be the trains.

Maglev, baby! But also no maglev 😭

But despite decades of development, maglev hasn’t spread widely across Asia, and it hasn’t taken off at all in the U.S. or Europe (excluding a now-shuttered airport line in the U.K., and a defunct test track in Germany.) That’s because traditional high-speed rail can run nearly as fast as maglev, is cheaper to build, and can connect to existing rail systems, whereas maglev guideways cannot. For many countries with rail networks already in place, it’s hard to justify spending billions of dollars on such a project.

If we are cursed to forget much of what we read, there are still charms in the moments of reading a particular book in a particular place.

This is what astonished and confronted me while watching Stoneman Douglas High’s speakers for the dead. Even as the shooting was happening, many of them talked about it not as an inexplicable catastrophe, not as an unforeseeable tragedy, but as something that just happens. A car crash, not an earthquake. It was something they had trained for, something they had perhaps visualized in their head once or twice before. And since it was almost normal, it was preventable—and thus political.

5,000 sols and counting! Pretty amazing considering the mission was slated to only last 90 sols.

…as so often happens in subjects that are taught in school, the template designed as a means toward attaining some important end turns into an end in itself. As a consequence, form trumps meaning.

Continuing…

The form becomes the product. Teachers teach the format as a tool; students use the tool to create five paragraphs that reflect the tool; teachers grade the papers on their degree of alignment with the tool. The form helps students to reproduce the form and get graded on this form. Content, meaning, style, originality and other such values are extraneous — nice but not necessary.

The medium is the message, and the tooling shapes the product — but sometimes the tooling becomes the product, too.

On a similar note, i wonder if many applications (especially desktop applications) are laid out in a similar manner to IDEs because developers working on these applications spend the majority of their time in IDEs so know how to think within their boundaries and patterns?

Navigator -> Workspace -> Modifiers/Detail

Our future relies on how successfully we become connoisseurs of the bits. Appreciate the delicate kitten without succumbing to the clown in the sewer.

I love this website starter kit from the folks making Glitch.

This is heartbreaking news. Jóhann Jóhannsson was truly helping to reshape modern movie scores.

“When you have a listener to a podcast, you have her attention,” Bailenson said. “There’s no other sounds going through those earphones. In VR, if you want somebody to look at a specific spot at a specific time, you can’t force that.”

”VR is anarchy, people can look anywhere they want,” he added. “Film is fascism. It’s great! The director tells you where to look, when to look, and they have your attention.”

…micromobility, a trend of adopting more compact, efficient, and often shared modes of transportation in the urban setting. It is a counterweight to macromobility— transportation that relies on large vehicles for long distances and generic applications. As industry analyst Horace Dediu put it, “it’s the personal computer of 1980s.”

Jams emerge from an elemental struggle between the natural and the mechanical. “Paper isn’t manufactured—it’s processed,” Warner said, as we ambled among the copiers in a vast Xerox showroom with Ruiz and a few other engineers. “It comes from living things—trees—which are unique, just like people are unique.” In Spain, paper is made from eucalyptus; in Kentucky, from Southern pine; in the Northwest, from Douglas fir. To transform these trees into copy paper, you must first turn them into wood chips, which are then mashed into pulp. The pulp is bleached, and run through screens and chemical processes that remove biological gunk until only water and wood fibre remain. In building-size paper mills, the fibre is sprayed onto rollers turning thirty-five miles per hour, which press it into fat cylinders of paper forty reams wide. It doesn’t take much to reverse this process. When paper gets too wet, it liquefies; when it gets too dry, it crumbles to dust.

But this cargo does carry some meaning. It’s just not the kind we’re used to, because, until only a few years ago, the thought that a commercial company (not the government, not nasa) would lay claim to the business of sending stuff into the solar system—well, it seemed nearly impossible. It’s not anymore. The Tesla, in addition to adding some pizzazz to an otherwise technically complicated test flight, signals another milestone in a shifting spaceflight industry. Commercial companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin have taken up the work historically done by nations, and they’re doing a good—and cheaper—job of it. The days of sending romantic mementos like the Golden Record are dwindling, and an era of private individuals launching what they want is nigh. A little less sentimentality, and a little more spice. It’s ad astra, with emphasis on the ad.

A thing that @manton keeps reminding me of, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by example, is that a better web, the web we want, is worth all the work we can do. But it is work, and often not easy.

Here’s what sucks about microservices: you took what was one of the most dependable abstractions in all of software (the humble function call) and added a networking layer to it…You took a whole category of a -> b calls and made them a -> IO Maybe b calls.

Over the last few days I’ve revisited a collection of blog posts, articles, and links that I tote around with me. Things I don’t want to loose track of. Pieces that I’ve read and re-read a number of times.

This essay by Nicole Fenton is most certainly one of those pieces.

Every kind of user information relates to privacy.

You never know where a trail leads. We are connected in unbelievable ways.

People have the right to know how information is used.

If you ask someone to share information about themselves, help them understand where it’s going and how it benefits other people.

Pain is hard to express.

Abusive situations and topics are extremely difficult to talk about, especially when they’re still happening. Simple words like “no” and “stop” aren’t always enough. Because my mom supported me with love and asked me open-ended questions, I eventually found a way to express myself and stop the abuse. When we talk about boundaries in our own lives, we help others find the courage and the words to do the same.

We have laws for a reason, but this stuff is complicated.

We build systems that talk to each other. We have to think about good and bad behaviors. We have to use our brains and our hearts. We should be sensitive to difficult situations in everything we make.

Some key quotes that really struck home from this excellent piece by Jared Sinclair on the importance of architecture, and having more time than you think/realize (in software development).

When facing an anxiety-provoking deadline for a software project, you have more time to plan your architecture than it may seem…

It’s worth noting the important difference between a sense of urgency and anxiety.

Facing a tall list of requirements and a fast-approaching, narrow delivery window, there is a temptation to bust out the keyboards and hammer out some code because how will we ever finish unless we can show immediate and significant progress oh god oh god.

…when there’s an aggressive and fixed delivery date, there’s no room in the process for such refinements. Each component has to be shippable in its first iteration, and it has to immediately lock into place alongside all the other components.

Under the pressure of a looming deadline, developers may spend an inadequate amount of time considering their architectural roadmap. At worst, this leads to a code base that fails to satisfy the launch-day product requirements on time.

…really I just want to repost the piece in full I’m so struck by it. I’ll stop here and just end with another link directly to it.

Yesterday evening I linked to an article about Designing Better Urban Spaces for Kids, and ever since cannot stop thinking about how one could design better digital spaces for kids. I haven’t come up with anything concrete yet, but would love to know if you have any insight into this idea.

Riding the streak! Last night I again got to knock on the neighbor’s door after midnight to ask that they “keep it down.” 😑

This is a nice, concise little vim cheat sheet.

This is pretty much my dream article.

In grad school, I read this article about why kids in Japan are so independent right after having finished reading Yi-Fu Taun’s Topophilia, I started to wonder, “what would a public transit system designed specifically for children look like?” Ever since then, I’ve been fascinated by the idea. Fascinated not only by the potential design challenges, but also because I really think if more aspects of public, private, and digital life were designed with children specifically in mind the world would be a better place.

What if, instead of devising ways to deter kids from using public space, cities were built to encourage it?

Continuing,

Not only [would] better design help these children thrive and become healthier, more successful adults, but planning for children, with their more limited range and unhurried pace, means simultaneously planning for other vulnerable groups, such as the disabled and the elderly. And the well-being of children can have a way of uniting policymakers who disagree on most everything else.

Not only that, but I think design with children in mind would help to break most folks’ inability to comprehend hyperobjects, and other diffuse disasters that we generally struggle to address with any urgency (I’m lookin’ at you climate change…and debt crisis…)

So what does designing a city around kids mean? The Arup report’s authors are clear that it’s not just about building more playgrounds, however important such spaces are and will continue to be. The report focuses on two main aspects of design: everyday freedoms and children’s infrastructure….Everyday freedoms refer to children’s ability to travel safely on foot or bike and without an adult in their neighborhood—to school, to a rec center, to a park….Children’s infrastructure means the network of spaces and streets that can make a city child-friendly and encourage these everyday freedoms.

So, maybe a weird question — but how does the indieweb address children? Does it? Should it?

Le Guin was a master of time, especially at manipulating it. Her novels can collapse centuries into a single point, like a dying star. Her 1985 novel Always Coming Home involves a future society that closely resembles the past, with lessons for the present: three timelines in one. Perhaps her most well-known novel, The Wizard of Earthsea, switches between the future and past so often, you’re never quite sure what time it is. Reading Le Guin isn’t always easy. It’s not meant to be.

So leave it to Le Guin to take something that we rush through as quickly as possible—breakfast—and turn it into a meditation, a ritual unstuck in time. Rather than grabbing a coffee and a KIND bar, Le Guin settled in every morning for what she called “a Viennese cafe breakfast”: berries, tea, toasted English muffins (She couldn’t get “those lovely, light, crispy European rolls” in Portland) and, critically, a soft-boiled egg in the shell.

If the web is a river, Micro.blog is water, where Twitter and Facebook are dams.

I love treemaps

The basis of language security is starting from a programming language with a well-defined, easy-to-understand semantics. From there you can prove (formally or informally) interesting security properties about particular programs.

Continuing…

But the Spectre and Meltdown attacks have seriously set back this endeavor. One manifestation of the Spectre vulnerability is that code running in a process can now read the entirety of its address space, bypassing invariants of the language in which it is written, even if it is written in a “safe” language. This is currently being used by JavaScript programs to exfiltrate passwords from a browser’s password manager, or bitcoin wallets.

In the wild, shortly after hatching, these squid would normally be colonized by microbes. But they are selective about their partners: Of the thousands of species of microbes in the ocean, only one—Vibrio fischeri—is allowed to enter the squid’s body. Once inside, it begins to glow. And that glow, it is said, perfectly matches the moonlight welling down on top of the squid, masking its silhouette from predators looking up from below. The bacteria provide the squid with a kind of luminous invisibility cloak.

🦑 🌔

This is a neat project out of the University of Texas working to digitize a large collection of movie posters. I’m glad to see they’re using IIIF, a standard that has been gaining a lot of traction in historical and cultural institutions across Europe, but that hasn’t done heaps in the US, yet.

Hurley notes that Relay FM is sticking to a 20 percent revenue growth target for 2018, and that the network is already on track to beat it. New show launches are also on the docket, and I’m told the team intends to play around with new formats, configurations, and topic areas. To branch out, in other words, from the playbook that has served it so well.

Wicked exited to see, well, I suppose, hear, what the future holds for Relay (and @ismh). I listen to a pretty embarrassing number of relay shows. I often feel like I know the hosts of the shows I listen to better than most (read as “any”) of my co-workers.

The Web has lost its spirit. The Web is no longer a distributed Web. It is, ironically, a couple of big tubes that belong to a handful of companies. Mainly Google (search), Facebook (social) and Amazon (e-commerce). There is an impressive Chinese line and there are some local players in Russia, Japan, here and there. Overall it has become monotonous and dull. What can we do?

IndiewebIndiewebIndieweb RA RA RA!

There seems to be a weak undercurrent of old and young bloggers like us that feel sentimental or curious and want to bring back blogging. Blogging won’t save the world. But, hell, after two weeks now, we can confirm: it feels great to be back on the blogging line.

🙌 ✊

My one-stop-shop, go-to source for all my desktop wallpaper needs.

Binghamton University researchers have been working on a self-healing concrete that uses a specific type of fungi as a healing agent. When the fungus is mixed with concrete, it lies dormant until cracks appear, when spores germinate, grow and precipitate calcium carbonate to heal the cracks.

(description from r/science)

WHAT!? 😱

Inclusion, awareness, empathy, and serendipity are important to the idea of the metapolis, the meta-city. The metapolis, unlike the metropolis, is designed around the conscience and consciousness of the people who inhabit the space; it is the evolution of the city from what it is now to what it can aspire to be.

@vasta’s excellent essay articulates the power and value of public transit to a city. It makes me wonder what it means when (private) projects like The Boring Company and Hyperloop receive more funding than existing public transit options? Are these viable alternatives/supplements or — and this feels heaps more likely — new systems to further segregate communities?

Cognitive triangulation seems like a happy bedfellow of estimation by orders of magnitude

Tumblr’s reblog policy makes it a hothouse for toxoplasma-style memes that spread via outrage. Following the ancient imperative of evolution, if memes spread by outrage they adapt to become as outrage-inducing as possible.

I read this review of DAMN…and tangentially also a review Kendrick Lamar himself…when it was first published. I’ve easily thought about it every week since first reading it. Something about this review set weird with me. I’m still not heaps certain what it is about the review I’ve found so haunting. Maybe it is simply the fact that it was published by the Economist?

My problem is with the loss of the minutae. That value that was once created on blogs and static pages is now created on reddit and stackoverflow and obscure forums, if at all. That often means that the type of value creation that I (and Gordon) am looking for has just about disappeared. If no one asks the question on Quora or Stackoverflow, no one answers what the changes FB is making look like.

@cdevroe’s great interview with @manton. Also, when micro.blog does start hiring, let me know! 😬

Neopets, I’m proud to say, was one of the first places I really delved into HTML and CSS. From there it was geocities, and then a friendly fellow gave me an account on his server where I first started to fiddle with PHP and unix.

Whoops! Since I shut down my self hosted, publicly accessible git server there is no way to reach my old repos I’ve linked to in previous posts. Here is an updated link to ideavault on Github.

Huge props to @manton for praising the value of conferences. Both Marco Arment and Chris Adamson seem to completely ignore the value of meeting in person — as podcast hosts/producers, of course it is easier for them to share their points of view from their recording studios/home offices. Listening to conference talks isn’t the only value of a conference, though — meeting new folks in person is wicked valuable, especially for folks starting their career, or who don’t live in wicked techy places.

I’ve never been to a tech conference, but hope to be able to attend one sometime within the next year or two. One of my favorite parts of the indieweb community is that it feels sort of like a distributed conference. Through the indieweb I’ve been able to connect with other folks around a common topic.

i don’t need a globally consistent data structure to share cat photos or special music with my friends, or to play a video game. i’m not even convinced that i need that for anything, but i can’t prove it yet.

Absolutely by all means! If you need something specifically geared towards Open Graph I know there are a few composer package for just that, like this, or this.

🎉

This was written in 2015…eerily prescient?

… But is efficiency the point or purpose of writing? It seems to me that novels, especially, are almost anti-efficiency devices. Yes, we want to communicate clearly, but sometimes, just as crucially, we also want to clearly communicate the difficulty of communicating clearly.

It was just pointed out that “Teaching Tuesday” would probably have been a better title for this 😳🤷‍♂️ But I prefer being a learner to a teacher, I suppose.

His Christmas Eve vision took things further, to encompass the intrinsic interconnectedness of existence itself. “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” he preached in his booming voice, “tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly” — “Yes, sir,” someone in the audience responded — “affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”

We called it surfing because the web was an ocean; vast and limitless as far as the eye could see from the shore of one’s sandy colored monitor. It was a bit scary, at first. You weren’t quite certain where it would take you. But, you knew just beyond the horizon was probably something you wanted to know about, all you had to do was get in the boat and set sail.

🚨 SPOILERS follow

Johnson, though, uses The Last Jedi to underscore the power of the collective. Star Wars has always been a franchise about big, Joseph Campbell–inspired hero journeys—Luke Skywalker becoming a Jedi, Han Solo swooping to the rescue at the last minute, that lightsaber flying into Rey’s outstretched hand. But in The Last Jedi, Poe’s hotshot heroics are constantly dismissed and slapped down by Leia and her second-in-command Holdo (Laura Dern), both of whom know he’s after personal glory as much as anything else. And Finn’s final lesson comes as he tries to mount a suicide run in the film’s final battle, aiming to martyr himself to briefly forestall a First Order attack, until Rose knocks him out of the way to save his life.

What accounts for this unusual degree of independence? Not self-sufficiency, in fact, but “group reliance,” according to Dwayne Dixon, a cultural anthropologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese youth. “[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others,” he says…

…“Public space is scaled so much better—old, human-sized spaces that also control flow and speed,” Dixon notes. In Japanese cities, people are accustomed to walking everywhere, and public transportation trumps car culture; in Tokyo, half of all trips are made on rail or bus, and a quarter on foot. Drivers are used to sharing the road and yielding to pedestrians and cyclists.

I originally read this article a few years ago. I remember at the time being struck by the idea of a system’s design’s audience: what would public infrastructure look like if children weren’t seen as the accessories of adults, but rather first-class participants? What does the world become when childhood isn’t a state to be grown out of—adulthood being the end-all-be-all goal—but rather as a set of the world’s population worthy of primacy?

I was combing through my domain name’s history on the Way Back Machine this evening when I found a link back to something I wrote and posted to Medium waaaaaay back when. I remember being really excited about Medium when it was new, and exclusive…focused on writing and writers, and the experience of writing and reading.

…now, now when I click on an interesting sounding headline on Hacker News or Reddit or some other linkblog thing and it opens to Medium I rarely read it…I just close the tab and move on. What once felt like a haven for writing and reading now feels user hostile and slimy.

“If adults experienced and enacted the full range of feelings available to an average toddler in the course of a day,” Lieberman writes, “they would collapse from emotional exhaustion.” But Lieberman doesn’t view this range of emotions as the toddler’s downside. She sees toddlers as complex, compassionate human beings, and she has dedicated her life’s research to helping adults understand the feelings and the logic behind the most seemingly ridiculous or wild toddler behaviors.

How appealing it is to fashion metaphors out of a jellyfish. The animal is all stimulus, sensuousness without consciousness. Such evanescent creatures pose none of the anthropomorphizing complications of, say, octopuses. An octopus will regard you with features that resemble a face, and an intelligence that we’ve been advised is akin to that of dogs and dolphins. Most jellyfish are see-through, so we can tell they don’t have minds of their own to speak of. Eyeless, bloodless, brainless—jellyfish are more than alien enough to comfortably objectify.

I wasn’t the only one who’s noticed that anime is obsessed with power cables!

• Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?, via Atlas Obscura

Two headings of note:

1. “Infrastructure will have its Ruby on Rails moment”
2. “Security will move into the spotlight, permanently”

Daniel Nesbit proposes a metaphor shift from ‘attention economy’ to ‘attention war,’ in part because “viewing the landscape as one of war instills the right mindset for those caught in the crossfire.”

Invading forces want to not just have our share of attention, they want to own it. The war of attention is a battle over resources: who gets to dominate, where and when… We have to defend our territory (our attention) appropriately.

The wartime conflict metaphor conjures notice of the collateral damage, particularly the innocent civilian ‘causalities’ — all the co-opted time, all the defrayed mental resources, and all the cognitive and psychological externalities absorbing the actual cost of this rampage.

If The Zium Museum is about anything, it’s about that experience of going to an art gallery or a museum and encountering the cumulative effect that rises out of having all this disparate art put together in the same space; the way installations recast the more traditional art around them, the way curation places individual pieces so that they build upon each other. Virtual spaces allow for this experience to be stored and reproduced; they allow for installations that you can hold in your hand.

I want to play the quiet year soooooo badly.

I received a heap of feedback. All of it was great. Thank you all so much! After exploring a bunch of options, I’ve decided to stick with plaintext. I’m going to continue to use nvALT synced through Dropbox on macOS, but purchased a TaskPaper license to use for todo lists, and when I need to re-arrange items in an outline. It is set up as nvALT’s default external editor now. On iOS I’ve settled on using Editorial, and app I’ve had in my wish list for…probably years, but never purchased. So far I’m pleased with my new system. I had a day filled with meetings today, and was able to move smoothly between macOS at my desk, and iOS in the meeting while taking and reviewing notes.

But the largest thing that held game development back was a lack of leisure time. Agrarian America was a society of constant manual labor by people of all ages, meaning that only the children of the very rich could afford an idle hour to waste on games. But that began to change during the industrial revolution, when childhood was identified as a distinct time of life—a learning period where society used both play and study to shape children into productive adults. Simultaneously, the country’s new industrial techniques and products could, for the first time, manufacture games on a mass scale.

… video games are a hybrid medium that combines moving image and sound (video) with structured play (game). A lot of the discussion in games criticism focuses either on the systems that structure play, or on the narratives that video games communicate. There’s less recognition of the visual language being used to communicate, and sound design is talked about even less.

Perhaps because my academic background is in art history, design and exploring how the built world (both physical and digital) impacts our perception, I find that I think about the “visual” language of apps and other software a lot. Like this piece says about video games, I think that the visual language of software is often neglected. Folks dump a bunch of time and money into UI, sure but that UI is rarely placed in a larger historical context.

I’ve had to work during this holiday, but I’ve taken what time I can between work and hanging with family to catch up on my reading list. Last night I finished the first trade of Kaijumax. It was a totally unexpected read. Part Godzilla story, part Orange is the New Black, rendered in a vibrant sort of naive fan-made-feeling manga style. It toes an interesting line. It doesn’t pendulum between whimsy and darkness. instead the story lives in both spaces at the exact same time. It is heavy — wicked heavy at times — and it is Adventure Time-esqly weird and wonderful. This first season of Kaijumax does a fair bit of expository world building by introducing readers to the prison and its occupants. I’m interested to see if subsequent seasons look beyond the prison. The setting for this series feels rich, and I look forward to reading season 2.

I’ve loved being part of micro.blog since launch, and am excited to see folks start adopting it more and more. At this point, it and Instagram are the only social networks I use.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my website, and what changes/enhancements I want to make to it down the road. 4 - 5 years ago I was a big fan of tumblr, and have been using my website in a similar manner: posting some short form content, some long form content, heaps of links, and images. Micro.blog seems to be wicked well situated for that sort of content.

P.S. If you want an invite to micro.blog, I’ve got a few!

iPhone killed my Holga.

With great power comes great responsibility, and i didn’t feel that I was ready to wield the awesome power of zsh and/or fish :P …well, that and I wasn’t doing anything in either shell that I couldn’t also do in bash.

At my old job I had to use a lot of charting libraries. This looks to be the best I’ve seen.

I think about the need for a career path or trajectory a lot. I realize I’m relatively young and only at the start of my career, but constantly wonder what my work will look like in 10, even 5 years from now. Are there skills I should cultivate for the future? Are there connections I should focus on now? I took a meandering path into technology: from liberal arts, to design, to critical theory and education, to nonprofit management, a few stints in kitchens, project management, product design and management, and, now, here…PHP Dev.

I think about water catchment: a drop of water carves a groove in the sand. Another, and then another follow the same path. The groove grows deeper and deeper until it becomes a stream…

In 2017, gathering your friends in a room, setting your devices aside, and taking turns to contrive a story that exists largely in your head gives off a radical whiff for a completely different reason than it did in 1987. And the fear that a role-playing game might wound the psychologically fragile seems to have flipped on its head. Therapists use D. & D. to get troubled kids to talk about experiences that might otherwise embarrass them, and children with autism use the game to improve their social skills. Last year, researchers found that a group of a hundred and twenty-seven role players exhibited above-average levels of empathy, and a Brazilian study from 2013 showed that role-playing classes were an extremely effective way to teach cellular biology to medical undergraduates.

I’ve been playing D&D and other tabletop roleplaying games since I was in middle school. Lately, I’ve been wicked excited with the possibilities in GM-less games, like Follow and Kingdom, and if they may have a place on the indieweb?

Americans make up about 4.43 percent of the world’s population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.

… yet we share thoughts and prayers.

I think the pi-top offers a solid alternative to chromebooks. Heaps more capable. Get to build yourself, and available for a similar price point. I could foresee an entire curriculum built around this device itself, not merely its use.

Providing students with a Chromebook rather than a proper laptop computer is akin to replacing your school orchestra instruments with kazoos. We live in one of the richest nations in all of history. We can afford a cello and multimedia-capable computer for every child.

Gary Stager continues,

…If Chromebooks were sufficiently powerful, durable, and reliable, I’d endorse their use. When better computers are available at approximately the same price, disempowering kids and confusing teachers seems an imprudent option.

Thinking I may be slow to update to macOS 10.13 High Sierra on both my machines. Haven’t seen much talk of serious security improvements, but I am Interested in HEIF/HEVC support. I’m a wee bit worried about APFS conversion on the hackintosh, as well as EFI firmware checking and call-back.

Oh hey, look, Alexa in wireless headphones is already (or soon to be) a thing.

CSS development isn’t programming in the traditional sense where you have loops, conditions and variables. CSS is going that direction to a degree and Sass paved the way. But the most needed skill in CSS is not syntax. It is to understand what interfaces you describe with it. And how to ensure that they are flexible enough that users can’t do things wrong and get locked out. You can avoid a lot of code when you understand HTML and use CSS to style it.

Continuing…

A lot of “CSS is not real programming” arguments are a basic misunderstanding what CSS is there to achieve. If you want full control over and interface and strive for pixel perfection — don’t use it. If you want to build an interface for an inclusive and diverse web, CSS is a great tool. Writing CSS is describing interfaces and needs empathy with the users. It is not about turning a Photoshop file into a web interface. It requires a different skillset and attitude of the maintainer and initial programmer than a backend language would.

So much 🙌 for this.

I’m happy to have rediscovered a book of short stories by Donald Barthelme. They’re quick, electric feeling, and eminently readable.

Been playing a lot of twine games lately. Anyone have any recommendations?

I’m due for a new phone. My aged iPhone 6 Plus’ screen is shattered and the body is bent (but it still works!), and while the iPhone X is exciting, I can’t justify the expense now that I’m squarely a web developer, so I think I’ll go with an iPhone 7 Plus or maybe an 8 Plus. The announcement I’m most struck by from today’s event, however, is the Apple Watch 3. I’m heaps interested to see what the introduction of cellular connectivity does for the device. How will app developers be able to take advantage of this new found connectivity?

@colinwalker.blog 🎉 💯 Are there tools in particular you want to build, ideas you have? The perk of this community is there are most certainly folks who can help.

@colinwalker.blog and others are posting interesting thoughts on the state of blogging. I’ve read and re-read this particular post. Working out something. Still not 100% certain where I’m headed with this, but something that I keep thinking about is analytics and how it relates to readership.

I don’t use Google Analytics, but I’m able to get a rough idea of visits by watching traffic hit my server. I use webalizer to handle that. You can find 2 months worth of those stats at eli.li/navel-gazing. The bulk of my traffic seems to be RSS. I imagine that is because that is how my site posts to Micro.blog.

In his post, Colin Walker notes that “Social platforms claim to be powered by engagement but it’s the wrong kind of engagement,” and, if I can step in, the wrong kind of engagement in that social networks are predicated on devouring attention. Attention equals time spent on that social network during which you can be served ads.

The indieweb and blogging are also vying for folks attention, but not for the sake of advertising. Blogging is sort of like doing semaphore into a crowd and hoping someone knows how to answer. You flail your wordy-arms hopping to get someones attention. Why?

Leaning existential

I’d say to participate in a community. I’d say to build breadcrumbs of one’s daily life. I like the idea of a blog as a personal timeline. A timeline of the significant, and the mundane.

Anyways…analytics. I thought it interesting that one way social networks keep folks engaged is through showing folks how their posts are doing, either through likes, favs, or easily digestible analytics. Meanwhile, does knowing how many page views your blog is getting help? Does it make you feel heard?

I think bona fide responses are the only real way to gain that feeling…someone taking the time to work out a reply. Conversation is the ticket for blogging and the indieweb. I know I get warm fuzzies when I see a webmention come in that is a reply, not just a like. I think micro.blog is a good layer to the blogging ecosystem because it empowers conversation. Reduces the friction.

…of course, replies are usually contingent on worthwhile content.

BUT! On that note, a return: “…does it make you feel heard?” Does that matter? Is that the goal?

It probably doesn’t need to be so defined. Sometimes you just wanna write, albeit into the void. Case and point, see above.

@miklb.com/author/miklb/ can you describe what you mean by taxonomies? In what context?

Oh, and reading comics and Kindle books. That’s a big one.

I think this is a hella good idea. The default convention with svn is to use “trunk.” I like that it is evocative of trees and elephants rather than slavery.

I think @manton’s micro.blog offers a great model of the indieweb. It, like quill or webmention.io, is a microservice or set of microservices that leverages indieweb tech in a user friendly way. When the indieweb works more like the social media that folks are already familiar with (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) the less friction there is to join. So…this is all to say, in the end, I think better on boarding materials and user-friendlier documentation would go a LOOOOONG way. BUT, before one can create such documents there needs to be a relatively stable way of joining the indieweb. Between wordpress and micro.blog I think that is starting to emerge.

I wonder if the generations are still applicable and/or useful? Generation 2 is so broadly defined it is difficult to say what “they” need, because as a group of users they’re not very clearly articulated. What if the focused shifted to features? …this isn’t to say away from users, but to re-articulate phases of indieweb growth by ease of use?

Grendel is the source of most of the descriptive language of borderlands in Beowulf. By describing him, the poet defines these edges, and thus it is the edges that define Grendel. Grendel is the “Mearcstapa” [border walker] (l.103) and even “moras heold” [held the moors] (l.103). Like the relationship between the society and Heorot, Grendel is defined in terms of his environment and, in turn, determines his environment. Grendel is inextricable from these borders. His trespassing of these borders causes the violence and conflict in Beowulf. His occupation of these borders is habitual; he continues his crossing of them for years between his first attack and his death at the hands of Beowulf.

Including a little shoutout to Beowulf!

Doesn’t having ligatures make a font not monospaced?

Embarrassingly excited for this and the new Star Trek series.

When the study began, nobody cared about empathy or attachment. But the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships.

Medicinal uses for the indieweb?

Researchers who have pored through data, including vast medical records and hundreds of in-person interviews and questionnaires, found a strong correlation between men’s flourishing lives and their relationships with family, friends, and community. Several studies found that people’s level of satisfaction with their relationships at age 50 was a better predictor of physical health than their cholesterol levels were.

It isn’t exactly the same thing, but check out Battle Decks:

Think of it as improv karaoke powerpoint.

Contenders each prepare a 10 slide deck for their opponent to present sight unseen. The audience judges by show of applause based on continuity, use of buzz words and general awesomeness.

While I understand the security concerns posed here, I still feel that any password manager is better than no password manager. It isn’t worth scaring folks away from strong passwords. KeepassX fo’ lyfe!

@colinwalker while putting an integrated RSS reader on the back burner, have you thought of using something like tt-rss, or miniflux? I’d be happy to set you up with an account on my install of tt-rss. I’ve been playing with @cweiske’s tt-rss-micropub plugin. I also have mini flux installed, but haven’t gotten it to successfully auto-update any feeds yet 😬

Apple, why no RSS or Atom feed? Your browser supports subscribing to such things…

DINOSAUR EMOJI!

Thanks! I’m checking out standardnotes. I’ve used simplenote in the past. Ideally I’d like to control the content source, and not have to host it on someone else’s servers, though.

So far the options in the running are dokuwiki, tiddlywiki, tagspaces, laverna, or a big pile of markdown files I sync to dropbox and figure out how to tag/organize some other time 🍍…or nvALT. Always back to nvALT.

Almost forgot blueberries and chickpeas in tatziki! Which is surprisingly yummy.

@unrelenting.technology I think it boarders on addiction at this point…that or I’m using podcasts as a replacement for bona fide human interaction

So glad you enjoyed it! I’m a bit behind, but excited to catch up.

Beaker Browser and Indieweb forevah!

I love the idea of terminal-like commands in the browser. I’d like to see this come to Beaker Browser one day…heck, I’d like to see it come to Safari one day.

On a recent episode of Core Intuition they made passing reference along the lines of, “wouldn’t it be neat if Siri became a sort of scripting language for iOS?” I doubt it would happen, and I don’t have anything concrete to say about that, but I think that would be awesome — especially in the context of a future where SiriKit has been extended with a wide variety of intents.

Right now I’m only displaying titles for liked content, but I am collecting titles for responses, too. From your site, I’m getting a 500 error as a title, though. Here is the raw json of my last post as an example. I’ll do some digging to see if it is something I’m doing wrong on my end. Also noticed that the title seems to include an embedded <p> tag when replying to micro.blog posts.

Edited to note that title seemed to work a-okay on my follow up post.

@colinwalker, makes me realize I ought to have included some annotations in that code explaining what I was trying to do with what 😆

Are you based in Portland, ME, or Chicago? Looking for works as a PHP web dev? Like history and archives? This is the job for you! HistoryIT, web developer

Here’s a wicked simple PHP function to parse a website’s title. It works a whole heap better than my initial attempt. Now I’m applying the function when I create a new u-like-of type post, instead of trying to render the link title dynamically. This means the title is written to my datastore, which seems a lot more future friendly.

@micro.blog/manton I hadn’t ever actually replied directly to a micro.blog post. I’m trying that with this post.

Two hundred years after Mary Godwin’s nighttime vision, Frankenstein can be read as both a warning of the perils of human hubris and a brilliantly imaginative response to a global disaster. As we enter another era of climate disruption—this time, a monster of our own making—we need both the reminder of the former and the inspiration of the latter.

(Ping, On the personal climate essay)

Building on my last note, the indieweb is currently an insular-ish community because there is a technical wall that needs to be scaled before you can enter into the community. I think this technical hurdle turns the indieweb into a de facto walled garden of sorts because a whole heap of folks are locked out.

Is there a solution to this? Simpler tech, engaging UI, and clear documentation for certain, but I also think projects like beaker browser offer a groovy way forward. What if participating in the indieweb was as simple as downloading an app? What if there was no need to necessarily own a domain name (this part could be debatable) or worry about hosting providers?

Beaker browser is a peer-to-peer web browser. What I’m wondering is what if we could leverage the same tech. behind beaker browser to create a peer-to-peer social network that was built using indieweb standards and was all bundled in an app?

…note, there are defo flaws in this — data integrity and spam prevention being high on this list, but, I’m into this as a thought experiment.

All well and good but, as I’ve mentioned before, we still end up with a fragmented landscape — the data and the conversation around it are two distinctly different things.

Colin continues,

The open web relates to non-proprietary, standards based publishing of content, the technologies behind it, and the ability to both produce and consume it anywhere.

The indieweb takes that further. Over course, it promotes and relies on the open web but recognises that the closed web exists, plays a large part of people’s lives, and tries to integrate with it.

That last bit took me a while to see. At first I was fairly down and cozy with walking away from big silos, like Facebook and Twitter, but quickly realized that also means walking away from a lot of people, too. It means walking away from diversity interests, gender, age, nationality, access to the internet, etc. Whilst the indieweb community itself seems to be fairly insular (this isn’t necessarily to say “homogeneous,” but maybe?) it’s principles and tech. seek to embrace the diversity of voice that the web can support.

Moving forward I hope that the indieweb is able to help bridge the various walled gardens of the internet, as opposed to creating a new one.

Go go gadget self hosted pastebin and URL shortener!

Responding to one of my own posts. Testing webmentions.

@colinwalker, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a couple of years now. Once I started using their !bang, and instant-answer features I was totally hooked. Have you checked those out? Both have really influenced my day-to-day workflows for a variety of tasks.

A PDF all about the merits of plaintext and R.

Generally speaking, I try to use plaintext everywhere and anywhere that I can. My reasoning is multiple:

1. Plaintext is pretty archival. I don’t think it is gonna go out of style (as in not be readable) anytime soon, and data integrity seems to be solid
2. Plaintext is quick. I don’t need fancy-shmancy software. I can use multiple tools to work on the same file without having that file occur artifacts form the tools themselves
3. Plaintext is scriptable. I can easily write a script to process, search, or alter a plaintext document. This is not so easy using some other proprietary format
4. Plaintext is equally machine and human-readable…for the most part

🤙 shout out to the pneumatic post!

Nowadays, (hyper)linking is an afterthought because most of the action occurs within platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and messaging apps, which all have carved space out of the open web. And the idea of “harnessing collective intelligence” simply feels much more interesting and productive than it does now. The great cathedrals of that time, nearly impossible projects like Wikipedia that worked and worked well, have all stagnated. And the portrait of humanity that most people see filtering through the mechanics of Facebook or Twitter does not exactly inspire confidence in our social co-productions.

Has wikipedia stagnated? Is that the general consensus? I totes get that it is sort of a white-sausage-fest. But stagnated? Compared to Facebook and other walled gardens? I think that depends on perspective, maybe…or how you interact with wikipedia as a resource, perhaps?

A fascinating post discussing automation in medicine. Reading it I also wondered how automation will impact the cost of healthcare? Will going to a human doctor (as opposed to a robotic/AI one) become a boutique experience for the very rich, or an act of desperation for the very poor? How will healthcare as an automated service be perceived?

This blog, written by Jane Solomon features heaps of great posts about all thing lexicographic, with a wee-bit focus on emoji as words, which I think is pretty groovy. If this sort of things piques your interest, also check out “Among the new words”, a quarterly article in American Speech that Solomon coauthors.

This article gives a solid overview of the indieweb ecosystem as I understand it. I like the idea of feed readers being the gravitational center to everyones social network. I’ve been using tt-rss and my newly indiewebified website for just that. Excited to keep experimenting and see where it goes.

Another great piece from Coding Horror about GUIDs that ends with a reference to occurs razor…meaning I have to call out Hickam’s Dictum:

Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please

Great piece discussing strategies for implementing primary keys at scale, that also points to a few other great resources: Simple tips to make scaling your database easier as you grow and Primary Keys: IDs versus GUIDs.

I’m hella excited to see mozilla focusing on web documentation. The lack of diversity in tech is an issue that has rightly receiving a heap of attention lately. I think it deserves even more.

Perhaps a major issue in the tech. community (especially in the open source world) is absolutely befuddlingly terrible documentation? 🤷‍♂️

Terrible documentation means stuff is harder to pick up. When stuff is hard to pick up and learn, some folks are forced out. There is no need for tech. to be an occult dark art, with secrets kept in caves dank and dark.

I hope that Initiatives like mozilla’s will lead to more accessible technical documentation. More accessible technical documentation is a step in the right direction, because it empowers more folks to pick up dem techy skills. This is by no means a quick cure to the unbearable whiteness of tech, but it is a step in the right direction.

Writing this, I realize I should probably practice a bit more of what I preach, and document some more stuff.

…let the adventures begin!

That makes sense. I used mustache for something similar and had to jump through a few weird hoops to get it to work…and even then it is a bit wonky. A study in minimalism?

https://gogs.eli.li/eli_oat/Mustache-Wax

miklb, I personally prefer mustache, because it is implemented in so many languages. that being said, it probably boils down to use-case, since handlebars is a bit more capable.

I don’t take that shortcoming lightly, and I don’t expect anyone else to, either. There are so many things I would change if I could start over — some narrative loopholes, some shitty and thoughtless tropes — but this would be the largest one. If we had known what this show would become, we would have been more thoughtful about representation when we first made these characters. Instead, we didn’t consider what they would look like beyond what it said on these pre-rolled character sheets. We didn’t consider race beyond deciding whether Halflings, Elves, Tieflings or Dwarves possessed the best passive abilities.

Doing this show has educated all of us about representation, and clearly, we’re still not great at it. But starting out, it wasn’t even an afterthought — it just wasn’t a thought, because we didn’t know it was a thing to think about. Now we know, and the difficulties involved with reconciling where we started with what we now know are, simply put, monumental.

I listen to a whole heap of podcasts that focus on a smorgasbord of topics. The Adventure Zone is fascinating to me for a number of reasons, but namely because it always seems to sneak up on me. Every episode is about an hour of goofs and redonk antics couched in a round of DnD…but at the same time the show is telling an amazingly well constructed story. A story, which if the hosts are to be believed (which I totes do) is more or less unscripted. And more than this, the hosts are really embedded in their fandom. They’re aware that folks are living this story as they play through it, and that folks care about it. That bits of it have meaning outside of the goofs.

I cringed listening to the first episode when they named one of the characters Taako, but since then, listening to them wrestle with and face issues of representation in a really candid and public manner has been awesome.

Should likes be public or private on a social network?

I like the solution outlined here a lot. This solution is clever because it capitalizes on the dopamine of passive interaction (e.g. not having to write a response, but still signaling agreement/support/like-y-ness) while disarming the issues around massive re-broadcast.

I think this sort of conscious design choice can simultaneously help prevent online harassment, preserve the usefulness and fun of social networks and not run into the trap of squashing “free speech,” which seems to be the internet’s favorite excuse for not addressing systemic abuse.

Here’s a great interview with Rebecca Sugar about Steven Universe.

From the piece:

Animation is such an incredible tool when it comes to making characters that the audience can empathize with. To watch an animated character and to believe that they’re real requires the viewer to project so much of themselves into the drawings they’re watching. With a cartoon, you can make something feel classic and iconic and absurdly simple. …This is the time and this is the tool to expand people’s visual language when it comes to what a couple looks like, and to create gender nonconforming characters that are so compelling that you can’t deny their humanity. Because by believing in them, they are already a reflection of your humanity.

@unrelenting.technology would an h-feed be different than an RSS feed? I have a folder in tt-rss where I subscribe to a heap of indieweb folks (like yourself), and am then able to reply through tt-rss-micropub (well…assuming I fix my micropub endpoint 😬)

@pfrazee wicked excited to see where @beakerbrowser is going. Interested to see if i can implement dat:// protocol on my site. #indieweb

@miklb.com/author/miklb/ I’ve oggled Sequel Pro, but never made the leap. I spend most days in Postgres, if I have to do much more exporting, though, I’ll check it out.

@miklb.com/author/miklb/ 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌 🙌

@gregorlove.com Thanks so much! I’ll see about editing that post…rolls up sleeves in order to add editing support to micropub endpoint

Testing webmentions 😳

I love the framing here: as I understand it, Colin is saying that the indieweb is more social network-y than the big-name social networks because those are each self contained. With the indieweb there is a bona fide network. An ecosystem.

There’s been a whole heap of media coverage about how best to combat fake news. I think the indieweb and its associated tech. offer an interesting angle on the fake news question. Fake news…or propaganda (let’s call it what it is)…leverages the architecture of big-name social networks to disseminate misinformation as widely as possible. By their very nature, big-name social networks sort of obscure shared and re-shared contents’ root source. The importance is the share: “my good bud shared it, therefore I’ll look at it.” The architecture of the indieweb on the other hand — and of the open internet — preserves the source. Threads lead back to point of origin.

This linking back to the source seems to be the current best practice, and I read about efforts to combat fake news by implementing blockchain. I wonder if the indieweb can rise to the challenge?

Scratch that. Gonna stick with Weechat as my IRC client for the time being (read as “I tried to get node working on my server, but failed”)

Woot, markdown support, via Parsedown.

@baty.blog moving from a twitter-first social-scene to a more indeiweb compatible setup has had the interesting side effect of reducing what little Push Notifications I received even lower. I know there are ways to enable PNs for webmentions, etc., but I like that I can manage this little wedge of my life through an RSS reader now, rather than having my phone do it for me. Reminds me of Amber Case’s book about “Calm Technology.”

What’s that you say, @jeremycherfas? Enable support for threaded messages, markdown, and indie-mark? 😬🦄

@unrelenting.technology baby steps, baby steps. I’ll implement markdown one day. I gotta cover the basics first.

With a little help from the indieweb IRC channel, shout out to @aaronpk, I’m able to post both html and plaintext notes now! 🎉

You found me out! Indeed, no login! I’ve now implemented a proper micropub endpoint, though, and just use that for posting. I’ll update the repo soon

@micro.blog/jeremycherfas thanks! I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say “I know what I’m doing.” The community has been wicked helpful. 😄 Excited to keep exploring. Next step is to set up a media and point, and then clean up my bajillions of PHP scripts.

HOORAY! Thanks to a whole 🙌 heap 🙌 of 🙌 help 🙌, I’ve got basic micropub support up and running!