Vanmoof came up with an infuriatingly clever way to reduce shipping damage. I love this kind of stuff.
Vanmoof came up with an infuriatingly clever way to reduce shipping damage. I love this kind of stuff.
Most of the “business” books I’ve come across recently weigh in at ~300 pages. I posit that 99% of them are about 100-150 pages too long; after building their core premise and arguing their case, most authors pad the rest of the book out with redundant case studies or just fluff to hit an arbitrary word/page count (to be fair, the publishers probably have a hand in pushing this) so that the book feels “substantial” enough to get people to shell out $15-$30. Personally, I’d be happy to pay that for books that respect my time and get to the point. And because they’re shorter, I can get through more of them, meaning I’d be buying more of them. Something to think about, publishers?
Erin Kissane’s Blue skies over Mastodon post has been linked to like freakin’ everywhere over the last day or so, so I’m not going to spend too to much time chewing over the things that everyone else is saying about it. But largely, I feel the same way about almost everything she says, like how she feels about Bluesky:
…I’m also not really posting because it’s a chaos machine and it’s still way too early for me to know if I really want to contribute there.
But the parts that had me nodding along the most are the bits about how it seems like the first rule of Mastodon is that you don’t criticize Mastodon. The inevitable pile-on that happens if someone dares critique or question the platform. The passive-aggressive—and sometimes agrressive-agressive—responses don’t do anything to push the platform forward as a viable alternative to centralized social media. Before you getting all wound up and start lecturing people about how quote posts can be used for dunking on people or how search can be used to enable harassment, maybe take a look at how your responses are creating a(n un)welcoming environment for others, or not.
For the record, I do like Mastodon and I don’t have as many problems with the UI and onboarding, etc, etc as many others do (although I do see their points). Eugene Rochko and the rest of the Mastodon devs are taking steps to address some of the more frequently-encountered and glaring UX problems people are encountering, which is great, but in the meantime, helping people onboard and get used to the way Mastodon works would seem to be a more productive course of action than getting all shouty, no?
I installed Little Snitch Mini on my Mac a couple weeks back, and it has been fascinating—and a little scary—to see just how many external network connections my computer makes (Kazakhstan! Tanzania! Vietnam!). Although to be fair, a lot of them are for macOS’ timed, which does time synchronization between my local system clock and various NTP servers. But still, it’s enlightening to see just how much stuff is flying around.
Taking a look at where books are set in the US was a fun Sunday morning distraction… it’s no surprise that NYC is the most common location overall, and I totally get why such a high percentage of the books set in Washington, DC are thrillers. But I do have questions. Like why are such a large proportion of books sited around Bloomington, Indiana romance novels? And the same for mysteries in Bisbee, Arizona? Is it just because there aren’t that many books centered around those locations, so the numbers are skewed? Or are they genuinely places that are incredibly romantic/mysterious?
I managed to get my grubby little mitts on an invite to Bluesky (thanks, Ryan!) and it’s… OK, I guess. I’m not going to judge it too harshly just yet—it’s still very much a beta—but I can’t really wrap my head around why they’re inventing another protocol for federation when ActivityPub exists. And the app icon kinda sucks; it’s not very iOS-y. But I do like the the way they do the domain-as-user-handle thing. Will be interesting to watch this one evolve.
Hold up a minute… ice cream might be a health food?! Assuming this is real and not some kind of play by Big Ice Cream, it could be a dietary game changer for me. But given that chocolate milk is actually a pretty good post-exercise recovery drink, the idea that ice cream might not be completely bad for you isn’t so far-fetched.
(And before you start sending me “well, actually…” emails, I know the article does not establish that ice cream is a health food; I was employing hyperbole as a rhetorical device. That should go without saying, but, you know… the internet. 🤷🏻♂️)
I backed GoldenEye 007: The Making of an N64 Classic as soon as I heard about it, and my copy arrived today! Can’t wait to dive into it.
I’m not into making games, but a few of the concepts in How To Make Good Small Games can be abstracted out and applied to other creative endeavors; for example #4 (“A game succeeds when it fulfills its promises” and #5 (” It’s easier for a game to succeed if it makes smaller promises”) are useful guides, regardless of what you do—be careful and deliberate in setting expectations (#5), remove anything unnecessary or that may result in mis-set expectations, and make sure the payoffs (at least) meet the expectations that you’ve set (#4).
I screwed up: I did some Really Dumb Stuff and deleted a bunch of content from the past few days. I’ve managed to restore it all, but apologize in advance for the webmention and RSS shenanigans that are going to ensue.
To watch later: Becky Chambers & Annalee Newitz: Resisting Dystopia.
Known for challenging classic science fiction tropes such as war, violence, and colonialism, both authors create vivid and immersive worlds that are filled with non-human persons, peace, and a subtle sense of hope. The authors will discuss what it means to take these alternative themes seriously, delve into their writing & world building process, and explore how science fiction can help us imagine new futures that can make sense of our current civilizational struggles.
Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers and Monk & Robot series have been among my favorite reads over the last year or so; I’m definitely keen to hear more about her process.
While I generally find myself nodding along with Manu’s posts, I really only half agree with his thoughts on internal linking; linking exclusively to internal content for the sake of SEO usually does lead to a shitty experience, forcing people into a circular path around a single site.
But on a personal site, linking to a past thought or related concept can be a great experience—it lets me explore the ideas that lead someone to where they are today. And if the first thing I read is great content that I enjoy, pointing me to more of it is definitely welcome.
External links are still appreciated of course, I just don’t think we should be too quick to discount the value of internal links.
Edit @ 12:48pm: After an email exchange with Manu, I think I probably read his post as more absolutist than was intended and inferred his point incorrectly. It’s probably fairer to say that we both hold the position that, regardless of what sort of site it is, internal linking out of context or without context is pretty awful, not that all internal linking is bad. Any mis-interpretation of Manu’s position is faulty inference on my part.
Finally got around to watching the Ahsoka trailer… it looks good—maybe not Andor good, but still pretty decent—am looking forward to watching it later in the summer.
I noticed some very mixed feelings while watching the Boston Marathon this morning. A big part of 2018 and 2019 was spent getting myself fit and fast enough to qualify, which I did; I qualified for the 2020 Boston Marathon with a run of 3:03:09, giving me a buffer of 6:51 under my (then) qualifying standard of 3:10:00. But then 2020 actually happened and the marathon was cancelled. The BAA allowed runners to re-apply with their 2020 qualifying times, and I was accepted to the planned 2021 running, but after that was moved to October and the field size reduced, I missed out on getting a bib by 64 seconds. Based on what I was reading at the time, the field size reductions were all at the expense of qualifying runners, not the charity slots. I don’t know if that’s entirely true and if it is, I can understand the decision, but it still stung.
That whole episode pretty much cratered my motivation to train and I haven’t really done much in the way of racing since; I’m just not as willing to go out and hurt myself to race properly and if I’m not in the game mentally, I’m never going to get there physically. And then when I did begin to feel like traing properly again and started gaining some momentum, I got injured training for the NYC marathon and haven’t really bounced back from that.
Compounding that is the fact that for the last 2 years, every runner who has hit their qualifiying time has been accepted. (Not that I begrudge anyone their chance to run, it’s just annoying AF that I had such a big buffer and still didn’t make it.) That should probably be a positive—hey, you don’t have to try and push as hard to go way under your qualifying time!—but given the state of my motivation, it mostly feels like another kick.
But so I don’t end on a negative note, it was awsome to see Australia representing in the wheelchair event, with a couple of Aussies finishing in the top ten of the elite races; Christie Dawes with 6th in the women’s and Jake Lappin with 8th in the men’s.
Tracy nails pretty much all of the emotional obstacles that I encounter when thinking about what I post here, but ones that weight heaviest on me are around risk, especially concerning cultural and political topics. I build and maintain this site as a hobby, and having to deal with any kind of fallout (spam, DDOS, etc, etc) from being too vocal about those kinds of fraught topics would not be fun, so I tend to self-censor a bit around those areas. I’ll admit to that being not the most courageous of approaches, but adding another source of stress to my life isn’t something I’m keen on doing.
OK, time to start again. This time, I’m going to track my progress and—hopefully!—document some of my thought processes (I was about to write “logic” instead of “thought processes” there, but then realized that is not a whole lot of logic going in to this 😆) on a dedicated ActivityPub page. If you see me doing something boneheaded, I’d definitely appreciate a heads-up, either via email or Mastodon.
Well that was a wild ride! After giving up on Wordpress as a potential Django replacement, I spent a significant amount of time (re-)reading up on ActivityPub and thought I had gotten myself to a place where I could take another stab at it.
I had the basic skeleton of an implementation working locally, so thought I’d push some of the changes and see how it went in the real world. One completely broken site and incredibly frustrating afternoon later, I think it’s time to close the laptop for a while and do something else.
A book that “… posits that we—and Americans, especially—have fetishized work to the point that we’ve lost our identities to it”? Added to the reading list. As a non-American living in America, I’ve often been struck by just how closely Americans identify who they are with what they do. That, and the shared cultural delusion that if they “just work hard(er)”, that they’ll somehow end up wealthy.
Only four weeks until Tears of the Kingdom! Circumstances are a little different now from when I got my Switch and Breath of the Wild in 2020 and gaming was probably my main form of escapism, but I’m still just as excited to jump in and run around Hyrule a bit more.
Some very interesting thoughts from Alex Murrell on how pretty much everything is trending towards the average. As we rely more and more on data to inform decision making, it’s more-or-less inevitable that this will happen, I guess… if everyone is looking to use proven approaches to any given problem, the solutions are all going to start looking more and more like the same thing. Data-driven decision making is definitely not the only factor for sure, but it would certainly be a significant contributor.
I’ve been meaning to link to this article on how Big Tech are purposefully making their core products worse (or enshittifying, as Cory Doctorow would call it) since it was published a couple of weeks back; there are some good examples raised in the piece, but the key message is pretty simple:
In Silicon Valley, the user’s experience has become subordinate to the company’s stock price.
Go back and read that again (and set aside the fact that ‘user’ is a terrible way to describe people that engage with a piece of software). It’s an unfortunate reality that when it comes to making something that will make people happy vs making something that will make investors happy, the former is always going to lose out to the latter.
There’s been a pretty noticeable uptick in the amount of spam email I’ve been getting at work this week; all of them are using a job title that is over two years out of date, and most of them want “just 15 (or 20) minutes” of my time and include a Calendly link. A few points to note for the crap merchants clogging up my inbox:
From 🧱 to 📱—TIL that the mobile phone turned 50 years old this week.
Manu nails it with his take on excerpt-only RSS feeds:
RSS is not a notification system. It’s a distribution system. Distribution of content. I don’t want a notification. I want to read your content.
Excerpt-only RSS feeds drive me up the wall. I know I can turn on the full-text view in Reeder (which is one of the reasons I use it), but having to do that is annoying as hell. If you serve RSS, please—for the love of all that is good in the world—serve full text, not just an excerpt.
GQ’s profile of Tim Cook is worth a read, but one quote in particular outlines an idea that I wish more people would take to heart:
“…if presented with something new that says you were wrong, admit it and go forward instead of continuing to hunker down and say why you’re right.”
Something that I need to remember on occasion as well.