Cam Pegg

I think it’s time to step away for a bit.

The way the discourse around the Bluesky bridge played out this week was… profoundly disappointing. Watching people with no interest in having a rational discussion making bad faith arguments and engaging in some disgusting ad hominem attacks has left a very bad taste in my mouth. What made it worse was the incredible hypocrisy of it all; you can’t engage in mob behavior like that and still play the victim card.

The more I think about it, the more I think Mark Pilgrim was on to something.

Rebecca Solnit’s In the Shadow of Silicon Valley is a worthwhile, if somewhat depressing, read.

I was originally going to add some commentary about unforeseen and unintended consequences, but after thinking about it, I’m not quite sure anymore if those consequences were unforeseen or unintended.

Eight years ago today, I landed in NYC with a couple of suitcases and a plan that was not much more thought out than “let’s see what happens.”

Spoiler alert: it turned out OK.

🚀 @polotek:

It sounds like a lot of mastodon people want to post in public but also have everybody leave them alone as if it’s not public. As far as I can see, their current strategy for achieving this is yelling very loudly in public posts hoping everyone else will see it and then shift everything around in order to accommodate them.

It’s a bold strategy. I look forward to finding out if it works.

🚀 @Elucidating:

One of the strangest parts of Mastodon culture (and don’t get me wrong, it isn’t unique that it has this but it’s more acute here) is that people believe:

1. Despite the fact that they’ve published their content on a public platform, people need permission to interact with or have opinions about that published content.

2. That despite the :birdsite:-esque model of Mastodon, it’s actually bad/dangerous/threatening when strangers interact with your public content.

Todays’s small win: I made it through whole year of reading (at least a little) every day… and this doesn’t include the actual dead-tree-type books I read as well. Really happy that I’ve managed to establish that habit.

Malka Older’s new book, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, is out today. I pre-ordered it last August as soon as I heard about it and can’t wait to get into it—I loved The Mimicking of Known Successes (thanks, for the tip on that one, Ben!).

Digging into the actual info from Tracy’s post about variations in the English language is really quite interesting, but the line “Everything’s coming up Battle of Hastings lately” might just be one of my favorite things that I have read recently. 😆

Today I encountered two groups of people who need to be introduced to the concept of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Is rigidly adhering to something “as a matter of principle” (🤦🏻‍♂️) really worth risking an incredibly destructive outcome?

Don’t try telling me that this person is wasting their talent by playing the Super Mario Bros theme on a bunch of different instruments. But also don’t try telling me that the “boomwhackers” and “slapaphone” are real instruments, either (no matter how well-suited the latter is to playing the underground music). 😆

(Via Kottke)

Having come close-but-not-quite a couple of times myself, I can relate to at least part of Casey Neistat’s obsession with hitting the 3-hour mark, especially this (but certainly not the broken femur bit):

You do a lot of meaningless, purposeless stupid things. You get obsessed, you spend years focused on them and literally no one cares but you but you persevere anyway.

It’s almost enough to make me want to lace up and try to shave off that three minutes and nine seconds (my Garmin said 3:01:28, but my official time was 3:03:09).

I love the idea of a Linux Laptop, and the Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 looks pretty rad (I’m also intrigued by the WebFAI thing), but $1,500+ seems like too big a bet that I’ll love the reality of a Linux Laptop, especially when I could get a MacBook Air that I already know I’ll like for a lot less than that.

@molly0xfff Here’s my blogroll, also available as an OPML download.

Chris posted a follow up to his earlier thoughts on webmentions, which also touches on some of the concepts Ryan outlines in Moderate people, not code.

I agree with the idea that a large part of the privacy problem outlined in the conversations over the last couple of days is how site owners treat the information that is transmitted via webmentions, not webmentions themselves. Add to that the disconnect between other peoples’ expectations around where their words will appear (and often a misunderstanding of how the underlying technologies that they’re using work), and you get all sorts of opportunities for unexpected outcomes and unpleasant surprises.

It all comes back to a pretty simple premise, which Chris outlines pretty succinctly:

By all means send and receive webmentions. Even backfeed interactions onto your site. Just be mindful of how you do it and whether displaying all the data you receive is the best thing to do.

(As an aside, I think “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” is a pretty good rule of thumb for life in general, not just websites.)

Reservations about how the images were generated aside (insert something about the irony of using ridiculously energy-intensive AI models to generate images of a non-climate collapse future), I do love these speculations about what the habitats of the future could look like, and I particularly like this quote from the former mayor of Bogotá:

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.
—Enrique Peñalosa

The author’s daughter also raises something I hadn’t considered when thinking about this kind of public transit-forward, non-vehicle-centric urban design: what about ambulances and firefighters?

(Via—where else?—Sentiers No.297)

Over the last day or so, I’ve seen some (not-so-great) commentary around webmentions, some around the implementation hurdles, most around the privacy implications; these posts by Wouter Groeneveld and Chris McLeod are considered and well-articulated and cover the core of the case against.

I’m not going to downplay the implementation piece—I can definitely attest to that side of things—fiddling around with microformats can be a huge pain, especially for the not-as-technically-inclined among us (like me).

But by far the more concerning pieces are the privacy implications, and this is something I’ve struggled to wrap my head around as well. To my mind, the problem is not webmentions per se so much as it is the concept of backfeed—displaying other people’s words in a location that doesn’t match the location or context of their original response, which can lead to context collapse and all sorts of mis-readings and mis-interpretations.

I don’t have a perfect solution, but I do like the connections that webmentions enable and want to be able to link those conversations together somehow, so I’ve rationalized it to myself this way: I post things publicly, and if people choose to respond to those things, they should assume the existence of those responses is also public (except for explicitly 1:1 responses like email, for example). But I don’t want to display someone else’s words where they weren’t originally written, so I only show that someone has responded, and link to that response; this is an example of what I mean. As I said, it’s not perfect, but it’s—in my view, at least—a workable and minimally-intrusive middle ground.

You may disagree, and that’s fine. You do you. If you do respond to something I post and don’t like that an indication of that response appears on my site, please let me know and I’ll remove it, no questions, no arguments.

I was ready to get all indignant after reading the first line of @edent’s Forget Technocrats - Let’s Get Some Realitycrats, but found myself nodding along with the thesis he outlines.

But personally, I do care about ideology; any beliefs that are centered on the dehumanization of people considered “others,” are absolutely abhorent, regardless of how effective or (allegedly) evidence-based the policy outcomes of those beliefs are; I don’t think I’m OK with doing the right things if it’s for the wrong reasons.

My first inclination was to hold up Have we forgotten how to build ethical things for the web? as a counterexample to Betteridge’s Law, but after thinking about it, I don’t believe that’s true. We haven’t forgotten how to build ethical things, we just choose not to.

That’s a much sadder state of affairs, I think.

🚀 @990000@mstdn.social:

This piece on halal carts is pretty good.

🎁🔗 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/nyregion/nyc-costs-chicken-rice-cart.html

The more I look at it, the more I like Pentagram’s rebrand of Scientific American—the bolder type works really well for the wordmark (and those ligatures!), and the design system and type treatment for the magazine are both spot-on.