I do not believe for one second that working 9-9-6 or any of this shit makes for great companies or success. I do think it’s true that companies that win work really hard, but they do so because they’re doing quality work on quality problems for fair compensation. Hard work is a positive feedback loop from success– not the cause of success.

You cannot make a culture of overwork to succeed. You can work on important problems, do quality work, build quality teams, respect your employees and customers, and all manner of other things. And as a result, doing good quality work and working hard is infectious.

And sometimes we choose to overwork– especially those of us who have true ownership. Sometimes that’s necessary. Often it’s actually something to protect against.

Mostly overwork results in bad health and worse work.

I’ve been reading Parker Malloy so long that I’m pretty sure I was reading her before she began her transition. Certainly I remember her as someone who felt “early” to being very upfront about her identity online as someone who is transgender. I hate that we now live in a world where her visibility, which I’m certain saved lives, feels like a trap.

Parker (and Erin Reed and so many others) deserves a better world than the one she’s stuck living in.

Shame on all of us for failing to love and care for the vulnerable and accept people who aren’t us.

I hadn’t really decided what I would do if my Synology dies.

I was less mad than most people about the, now reversed, decision to only permit first party hard drives.

I have no immediate purchase decisions in front of me. And Synology’s hardware generally was moving away from what I wanted– a big box that could play media in its native format over ethernet to my AppleTV. I just figured when/if my current NAS died or showed signs of dying, I’d price and feature compare and make my decision.

For some reason, the reversal of their “first party hard drive only” decision makes me feel different. It’s not that I ever really thought there was a reason other than greed to restrict their NAS products to first party drives. I think it’s more that this reversal, after widespread customer backlash, emphasizes for me that this was pointless.

When a company makes it clear that it’s out of touch with me as a customer, it’s hard to make a long term investment in that company.

I build B2B software for a living. I have had the experience of offering someone a tool that was less full featured today than a competitor, but have them buy our tools anyway. It was always because they felt that my company understood their problems, understood what they were trying to accomplish, cared about those things, and were dedicated to working toward solutions– not for them as individuals necessarily, but for people who do the work they do. When you’re investing in critical systems you plan to use for years, values alignment, understanding and empathy– these things matter. The trajectory of the products matters as much as the current state.

Failing to make larger storage devices with CPUs that have hardware accelerated media encoders was kind of strike one. I don’t just want pools of storage, I want a server with memory to run services and I want media playback. First-party only hard drives, with no real explanation or discernible advantages, that was kind of strike 2. Both of these are cases that I could brush off as “serving some other set of customers who are not me, but maybe I’m not really forgotten”.

But strike 3 seems to be reversing their decision due to backlash after a year of bad sales. This doesn’t feel like wanting me to be their customer– it feels like reluctantly finding out I am their customer.

The right lionized Charlie Kirk because he was confrontational– not because he was correct, smart, kind, or convincing. His entire “doing politics the right way” was being ready to confront anyone to his left with maximum indignation and a disgust.

I think the left also rewards this behavior.

Which is to say that as a culture we’re surrounded by this kind of rhetorical jousting. This performative, combative form of conversation is not just the norm, it’s what is rewarded and valued.

I confront people all the time. No one would say that I am not “heated” as a general disposition– I blame my New York, Jewish cultural upbringing and just being an impatient prick in general. I absolutely see the logic in and am sometimes convinced by arguments that roughly end in “sometimes you have to punch the Nazis”.

But I think the internet is full of people who have convinced themselves they’re walking through the world punching Nazis when they’re just being jerks.

I say this next part gently and with a lot less certainty.

I also think there are punch of times where people feel like they’re being persecuted by Nazis on the internet when they’re just being confronted by jerks. What do I mean by that? I wouldn’t go as far as to say people are being “soft” – but I think that there is something to the idea that we have become very uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. I think it’s because the level of accessibility communication technology permits is unnatural. We’re so reachable by so many people for so much of the time that the sheer volume of microaggressions we can experience has gone through the roof. Our tolerance floor, I think, has dropped because we’re being “tested” all the time.

People talk about filter bubbles online as though prior to being online we didn’t have significantly higher walls and greater isolation within a community of our choosing.

So not only are we rewarding being a jerk, we’re all so on edge that it feels like everyone is being a Nazi even when they’re just being a jerk.

And it’s even worse than that, because we literally live in a time where there are people who run our (US) government with a monopoly on violent force who are actual fascist inheritors of Nazism.

There’s no grand conclusion here except maybe “go touch grass”, as the kids say.

Not shown: many pedals not currently on the board, though I am actively swapping things in and out.

I’ve had my personal MacBook Air for around 9 months. I bought it in a bit of a rush– I no longer had a personal laptop, just my Mac Mini, and the band wanted to start recording some demo tracks. There was a great refurbished deal, and so I got my new Mac.

At the time, I thought the 13" Air was the right choice almost entirely because of size. I didn’t need any more power, and I use a 16" MacBook Pro for work (my first 16", and it’s just too damn big). I like having a smaller laptop, especially when I’m traveling with both.

Shortly after I got my laptop, Elsa needed one and she opted for the 15" Air. And I have to admit, every time I’ve looked at it I’ve been a bit envious. The 13" screen is just a little too small– I’m used to the 14" MacBook Pro, and that was just big enough.

I don’t love the idea of carrying a 15" and a 16" for those times when I need both machines, but the 15" Air is calling me. I may wait for the M5 laptops, and I may take another look at a 14" Pro at that time to compare, just in case. But I think the 13" Air, despite being the right laptop for almost everyone and being fully capable of doing everything I’ve ever asked of it, is just not for me.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Most of our parents taught us that. Some Democrats in Congress seem to have forgotten the lesson.

What a joke opening to this WSJ Opinion piece. How can you talk about Charlie Kirk and open with this line? The man had fucking awful things to say about people every single day. His career was built on saying awful things about others. That was the outrage he fed and the outrage he needed to get attention in the mainstream.

Charlie Kirk was not a public official like Melissa Hortman. Melissa Hortman didn’t have a history of deplorable things to say about the people she disagreed with.

And of course, this rage bait shit article mentions AOC in the headline though this is not about her at all. This doesn’t belong in a newspaper, certainly not a paper of reknown, and is yet another way the media has generated the fascist, authoritarian mess we’re in.

Jasper says, You’re not going to believe the number of headphones I think you should have.

Except, I have more than that (not all in active use) and a different set of preferences. So I thought I’d write about the headphones I use and why and in what order.

1. AirPods Pro 2 (soon 3)– these are my “everyday carry” literally 100% of the time in my pocket, and in my ears for hours every day. If I’m anywhere except at my desk or driving, as long as I’m not actively engaging with someone, these are probably in my ears. 90% of my listening is podcasts, not music, because music is rarely something I listen to passively.
2. Beyerdynamic DT770s – close-backed headphones that replaced (mostly) my open-backed Philips Fidelio X2s. I love open-backed headphones, but I needed close-backed headphones for monitoring while recording tracks for/with my band. The Beyerdynamic headphones are so comfortable, they work fine at my desk too. So that’s what I use for music during work, Zoom calls, and recording/mixing/mastering.
3. Sony WH-1000XM5 noise cancelling headphones. Over ear, active noise cancelling is a requirement for travel. AirPods are just not as good and not as comfortable (to date) for cross country or international flights. While I use my AirPods all the time, I need them out for a few minutes at least every few hours and you can overdo it. These headphones can be worn essentially endlessly.

I don’t think you need IEMs– but I do have a pair of audiologist custom fit ear plugs, which I require for hearing protection at concerts and when playing with the band. If you ever see live performed music, wear earplugs. And if you do it all the time or perform, spend the money to get proper, custom fitted ear plugs. Your future self with thank you.

I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.

This is a thing Charlie Kirk said.

“Why has he not been bailed out?” Kirk said Monday on his podcast of the man who allegedly beat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s husband Paul with a hammer last Friday. “By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out, I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks.” With a smirk, he added: “Bail him out and then go ask him some questions.”

This is a thing Charlie Kirk said.

Charlie Kirk was an awful human who believed awful things getting rich off of making the world a worse place.

I wish he wasn’t shot. I wish Melissa Hortman wasn’t shot. I wish those kids in Colorado going to school today weren’t shot.

Charlie Kirk being shot shouldn’t make a fucking difference, because we have normalized gun violence in this country and he has been a part of it. He and his ilk have fought to ensure we all live under the specter of gun violence. He is dead because of the world he was a part of creating and supporting. It’s his thoughts and prayers that bring us to this moment. We have let children die, year after year after year after year. I don’t feel worse because I knew the name of the person who died this time.

But I also don’t feel as furious as I normally am– Charlie Kirk more than earned my indifference– he’s earned my scorn and disdain.

Fuck gun violence, and fuck the people who are going to treat this differently because Charlie Kirk treated trans people like shit, gun victims like shit, non-white people like shit, non-Christians like shit.

He thought people like me and my family and my friends were shit. The feeling was mutual.

I consider empathy to be the greatest and most challenging virtue. Taken deeply serious it will eat you alive and crush you under the weight of the world’s cruelty.

It’s hard enough to muster empathy at times. I’m not sure I’m strong enough to find some for a man who said, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage."

His preference? Sympathy— he understood pity, but never strived to understand who you were.

Feedbin has been at the heart of my RSS usage I think basically since Google Reader went away. I know I settled on it quickly. But it has repeatedly silently failed to fetch a specific blog I follow, and when I use the feature to autocorrect to the new field, it deletes the subscription. I have to manually remember to re-add it every month.

The person who runs this blog will not want to hear this from me– I know it will be deeply upsetting to them. It’s totally unfair and I don’t want to cause them that distress. But also… although I am only certain it’s happening with this feed because I care enough about it to keep up with it, I’m pretty sure they’re not doing anything wrong and this is a Feedbin bug. And it’s kind of rocking my faith in Feedbin.

I use Reeder Classic ¹, so my experience won’t change much if I leave Feedbin (though that email newsletter feature is so great and will be a pain to migrate). Still, I’m pretty wary of using anything else. Feedbin is well-regarded for a reason, including by me, and I really thought it was rock solid and exactly what I want for so long.

This is deeply concerning stuff for me. RSS is basically how I’ve experienced the web since like 2004.

Warning: personal bullshit to come.

I misheard a lyric tonight. It was from an album I listened to non-stop in high school and college, so I’m surprised I misremembered and misheard it.

Due to random playlist serendipity, I was reminded of Dredg’s El Cielo while driving to band practice. I put on the album on the way to the rehearsal space and continued listening on the way home and while walking Mae tonight. Although this has to be one of my most frequently listened to albums of all time, I don’t think it was until now that I realized how influential it was on me. It has many of the elements of art rock, experimental rock, post-rock (ish) that consumed my taste as I grew away from the post-hardcore, post-punk, and emo I listened to as a teenager. El Cielo has rhythmic complexity. It’s sparse at times. It has brilliant use of reverb and delay and crunch that are all reflected in the kind of guitar tones I chase now. It’s got equal parts groove and triumph, melancholy and serenity, beauty and strangeness.

You should probably stop reading now and just listen to El Cielo instead of finishing this blog post.

I remember always finding the last track, The Canyon Behind Her, uplifting. The choral arrangement, rich harmonies, and full sound always felt like the relief of coming home after a strange journey. If you know me well, you’ll know that I don’t care much for lyrics. Even when I have nearly every word of an album memorized, despite the fact that I haven’t listened to it in at least a decade, possibly 15 years, I couldn’t tell you what they are about.

So today, walking the dog, breaking through the surface of the water for that final track, entering the final stretch, I heard:

Though half of me is gone, the loathsome part is left I cannot find the other half

The actual lyric is “the lonesome part is left”– which definitely would have resonated with me from 2002-2009 when I listened to this album at least weekly. But this time, I heard something that felt much more like the Jason of 2017-2023.

In particular, I’m thinking about the summer and fall of 2021. It was dark. I felt awful “re-entering” the world a bit at that time. I felt deeply unsure of my role in life– at home, at work, and with my friends. I had a deep spiral of anxiety and lack of confidence and low self worth. I wrote about my spiraling constantly in DayOne– I felt it, I knew it was wrong, I knew it was hurting me and people around me, but I was helpless to stop it.

I felt like those misheard lyrics– half of me was gone, the loathsome part is left, and I cannot find the other half.

I am a different person today. But I think about that time quite a bit. I worry it could return, and I worry a bit that I am not really sure how I got past it. It just… took almost a full year. A year during which I lost 40 pounds (which I regained, then lost again), threw myself into new hobbies, started traveling more, meditated, wrote, went to therapy, and a whole lot of other things. But still, from about May 2021 until October 2022 I was a mess.

I’m glad I found the other half.

Two weeks ago, Ancestral Worm had their second show. We’re working hard to get a few more booked this fall. We’ve got a solid 40+ minute set and three more songs that are more than half complete to add to that, so things are going pretty well. I wish we were playing out a bit more often, but I’m still enjoying playing music with friends at least once a week.

I continue to acquire gear, which, if you’ll notice if keep an eye on my Uses page. My new, first, Gibson Les Paul is a shit load of fun.

The actual big news of the summer is the addition of Mae to our household. We’re still waiting for a DNA test to come back, but we’re currently guessing some kind of West Highland Terrier and Cairn Terrier mix. Maybe some Schnauzer? Anyway, she joined our home on May 31st at about 5 months old. So we’ve been spending a lot of time on long walks outside and learning her personality and cues.

I have spent significantly more time writing code at work – somewhat because it’s fun, somewhat out of necessity. I have to say, agentic AI in my editor has completely changed the game here. Because I have a manager’s schedule, it’s been quite hard to get focused time to contribute for the last several years. It’s much easier for me to be a strong editor and planner than executor, and the AI support makes this a reasonable approach to getting work done.

America is in distress, and I have no real means, way, or plans to get out or fix it, like so many others.

This year I’ve been reading quite a bit less, in part because I started reading Brandon Sanderson and his books are… long. I’m currently taking a break halfway through Stormlight to read some quicker/easier things before hopefully finishing that up this year and moving into Mistborn Era 2.

I never came up with a theme for my year. I have no word, no concept, no guidance right now. If anything, this year has been filled with a sense of just letting time pass and letting things happen. There nothing intentional driving my moves. I’m not trying to be better at any particular thing. I think maybe this year was about stewing in myself and having total comfort in that. The world is so out of control that I think I am not trying to control even the things within my reach. Each day I do some combination of what I can and what I want and I let that be enough. I have the security and safety to allow for that, and I want to let that luxury be a luxury rather than a burden.

There was a brief period of time where I put a tiny, tiny bit of effort into LinkedIn. I wrote the smallest amount about what I did at work and I interacted the tiniest bit with others in my general field. I did this in part because I missed the professional elements of Twitter, and I did it a little bit because I was starting to feel anonymous in my own leadership.

Working for a small company for 10+ years was strange– on the one hand, because I would at least occasionally go to conferences and give talks and interact with the school districts using our product, my network was large and sprawling. On other hand, straddling all kinds of professional identities and staying in the same place made my professional network seem small.

But since the acquisition by PowerSchool 18 months ago, and especially after celebrating some key milestones, I have all but sworn off logging into LinkedIn. I’ve largely stopped talking about professional work on any form of social media as well. And in my current role, I virtually never go to conferences and only ever interact with customers when there are intense escalations.

Does my network feel smaller? Yes, in many ways it feels evaporated. To the degree that I feel like I am “known” outside of an intentionally small, immediate team, it’s through a slowly growing profile internal to my role. And I have to say, even then, I wish my footprint was smaller– my responsibilities are already sprawling and near impossible to keep up with within the boundaries I’ve set for myself now at work (no more weekends, 10 hours max per day).

My goals have changed, at least somewhat. While I wouldn’t say that anyone in tech, and especially public sector tech, should feel “safe” right now, not working at a startup has removed an entire layer of dread I carried for a decade– that at any moment, everything could evaporate, and that if I wasn’t careful, no one would know what I did and what I was good at and finding a job would be incredibly challenging. Now, while I think it’s probably just as likely I might suddenly lose my job ¹, I am less worried. I can point to having been an early employee with a successful exit. I can point at a moderately fancy title at a fairly well known place. And frankly, I did well enough that I have the cushion to pause a bit if things go south and not worry about my material safety.

I am not even sure what I want to be known for professionally any more. I am not even sure who I want to know it. Am I a product manager? I mean, maybe? Am I a software engineer? I mean not really. Am I an engineering manager or architect? Sort of, but not meaningfully. Am I a strategy leader? What does that mean? Am I an expert on K12 school finance? Yeah, I mean I guess I am. Mostly I try and pay attention, learn things, and solve what problems I think I can have an impact on. If that means writing code– fine. If that means talking to customers, sure. If that means giving advice on how to talk to another manager or colleague, sure. If that means designing how data needs to be structured to support a feature, let’s go. If that means writing a SQL query, ok.

I think all jobs are eventually the holes you choose to fill. I’ve never worked somewhere that didn’t have more to be done than resources to do it. Jobs you’ve had for a long time have a way of reshaping people and teams and organizations around the shape you leave.

It’s not how you build a career, but I’m not sure I want that. I don’t want to be invisible– some part of everyone wants to be seen– but I also don’t want to present myself.

LinkedIn didn’t feel bad because of the lunatics– that was entertaining if nothing else. LinkedIn felt bad because I don’t like performing my job instead of doing it. It felt bad because of that paradox of wanting to be seen without wanting to promote. I realized that I am not willing to do what’s necessary to be a “figure” or to maintain all of those loose ties that I’ve built over the years. I admire people who can truly network. I see the truth in how powerful it is to help others you’ve met, over and over again, just to help people. And I see how great it is to expand the reach of your expertise. And I see the problems folks are able to solve because they can connect other people. But at some point in my life, I decided that I prefer to shrink away from all of that. It’s a bit of bizarre thing, because if you’re in the room with me while we’re working, I will expand to eat the whole room. In fact, I consider it a huge problem that I can’t help but to interject myself, get involve, speak too much, take the reins too often from someone else. But externalizing all of that feels… off-putting. There’s a line, and it’s a line that probably makes no sense to anyone else, but I feel it all the time and I feel bad when it’s crossed.

There’s also another reason I hated reading LinkedIn. Like so much of our world today, LinkedIn also suffers from a flattening of expertise. There’s so much being said authoritatively that lacks authority. It’s filled with dumb shit presenting itself as profound. Left and right folks who know little or nothing are spouting about the topics I spend my life working on. And I realized that I don’t miss this at all about Twitter, and I don’t like this at all about the “discourse”. I don’t want to have to explain to someone why their basic assertions are wrong on all the facts. I don’t want to go and share the links. I don’t want to do the research for someone else. When I want to talk about work, I can talk about it with the people I work with who know their shit. I’m thrilled to talk to the public or other practitioners about what I do and share my expertise. I’m thrilled to work on educating people seeking to learn. I have no time to debate with people who have decided they know what’s true already, even as they are just as ignorant as a layperson. I’m not in this game for bad faith conversations.

So if you’ve messaged me on LinkedIn, I’m sorry for leaving you on read– or more likely, unread. I may have connected back with you when you requested it, but I probably didn’t click anywhere else on that website after clicking the link in the email. I rarely, and reluctantly, interact with something that catches my eye when I get tossed on the site for some other reason. But I avoid it all like the plague and plan to keep it that way. I’m glad I can look at someone’s resume super easily online, but I’m just not “there”.

If you actually know me, or try even a little bit to find me, there are better, more direct ways to reach out.

I travel a lot less for work at my new job. And although Allovue was always remote, we had enough people in Baltimore and enough culture of meeting in person that the last 18 months of work-from-home has been far more solitary.

That made this week’s work conference feel pretty different. There was a strange mix of “on” time with customers, some I’ve known a long time and some I’m just meeting, and “on” time with coworkers– some I’ve worked with for a decade and others who I’ve been working with for 18 months but never met.

It was like different batteries being drained in filled in different measures at different times. I was both filled and emptied.

I’m glad that I came home on Friday and have the weekend to regulate.

I gave in. I’ve had the Sony WH-1000XM2s for a very long time. The cups have been tearing, and I’ve wanted an upgrade on the move toward USB-C-only lifestyle. But the AirPods Max don’t fold. They’re just too big to not fold, as much as I love the way AirPods Pro connect over bluetooth etc.

Well, the WH-1000XM6 got great reviews, fold, and were a few bucks off so I just went and did it. The software won’t be as good, but the performance will be better.

It’s kind of crazy how bad Apple is at design outside of their core products.

I was reading through some forum posts and having a really hard time understanding a bit of technical criticism. I thought to myself, 95% of this is going over my head, but I feel like I’m learning something reading this and I’m hoping to get to understanding."

I kept reading down the posts, spending 20 minutes in this long thread of replies. I see people talking about theoretical challenges I’ve never come across, but hey, I build what I build and these guys are pros.

But then something happened, and I realized I had wasted my time. The main person offering criticism said, in slightly different words, “PostgreSQL has been a huge problem and that’s why I’m building my own database.”

I now know I don’t have to take this person very seriously.

For me, the three tax policies that are the most obvious we should pursue are a sacrilegious to the GOP:

• Uncap the tax on Social Security while maintaining the benefit cap
• 100% estate tax over … $X0M and go ahead and index to inflation
• Fund IRS modernization, eliminate tax preparation for any household with less than … $500K in income or $XM in assets

What are some of my other “no brainer” policies?

• Set anti-gerrymandering standards. There are many options, virtually all of them more fair than the current set. And we need federal law to ensure fairness. All of the lost court battles suggest congress can pass laws to set standards that reduce gerrymandering, but that they haven’t and the constitution doesn’t guarantee it.
• Equal Rights Amendment, but also worded carefully to make clear we are eliminating any discrimination on the basis of gender – fuck transphobes. This just shouldn’t be a debated issue.
• Make it illegal for states to rebrand federal programs– Medicaid and Medicare are called Medicaid and Medicare everywhere you are. The ACA Health Exchanges are exactly that.
• Eliminate the tax exempt status for religious institutions and their employees.
• Increase the federal minimum wage– it’s a fucking joke already– but yes, it should be adjusted based on geography and indexed over time.
• Federally fund universal 12 weeks of parental leave for birthing parents and 4 weeks for non-birthing parents (I think both should be more and equal, but I think more takes it out of no-brainer zone)
• Eliminate the debt ceiling
• DC Statehood
• Puerto Rican self-determination
• Massively invest in battery, solar, wind, and geothermal power. Massively invest in the electrical grid infrastructure.
• Take over payment processing from the 12 regional banks to have a single, instant clearance, digital payments/settlement system. Offer free basic personal banking (maybe at the Post Office?).

What are some interesting ideas?

I remember reading in the past about having a legislative body that can only eliminate laws or block laws from being passed as a hedge against complexity. It’s an interesting idea, but instead, the last decade or so has made me think we actually need to eliminate the idea of time-bound or sunsetting provisions in laws. Laws should stay in place until action is taken to stop them– there should be no time-based shenanigans on the price of legislation, and we should assume a steady state absent action. Stability is critical for decision making, and you shouldn’t have the ability to make your laws someone’s future bomb. This also makes the “budget fight” fucking moot. We are always in a state of continuing resolution until we vote to change things.

Pratik asks, “Mastodon as a Blog?” and thinks mostly “yes”, but I think that requires describing a blog as social media. Mastodon is social media, which of course, is deeply inspired by blogging. But it’s also all the things social media is, for better or worse. I’m a participant in social media and I like it. But social media applications are not blogs.

The question is of course, “What is a blog?” Or perhaps more importantly, “Why do I want to post?”– because who cares what a “blog” is instead of why you’re posting/writing on the internet. The reason why social media defeated “blogs” and the two are compared so often is they have two shared core features– they bundle identity and publishing user generated content.

Lots of things do that now, but blogs were really about how to have an identity you can point someone to online where you posted your content with some kind of chronology/timeliness element. Should we call all derivatives blogs? YouTube lets me post a link that someone go to and find user generated content with dates. That’s why it was called “vlogging”.

I guess that’s why I don’t care too much what’s a blog. Instead, I just think people should choose to post in a place that serves their needs.

It’s quite clear that the social media model is perfect for a lot of people. Far more people post content to Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, BlueSky, Reddit, Tumblr, Substack, and any number of other social media application. It’s the user experience that best meets most people’s desires for posting and establishing an identity (or several) online. That’s totally fine.

I really don’t think the fact that you can run your own Mastodon server makes it not a social media application. That may change who is willing to use it and whose needs it meets, just like it may turn some people away. But its features, structure, and setup is that of social media. Social media largely encourages something that looks like a deeply overlapping diagram with blogs– because social media’s birth was making blogging, commenting, and sharing easier. Using and liking social media is not a moral or ethical failing. It just might meet your needs, just like it meets most people’s needs.

Personally, I like both things– I like having my own site, and I like participating on social media. I like social media so much, that an important feature of my own blog is making it easy to participate in many social networks.

It’s ok to like what you like for what it is. No need to make it something it’s not.

I continue to think the right way to do age verification is at the operating system level. I am happy to provide a digital ID to an operating system and happy to allow an API call to confirm my age. I am not ok with any kind of distributed storage of my identity or eliminating anonymity when accessing content deemed objectionable.

My identity is already put at risk in so many ways— just look at how thoroughly compromised social security numbers are. There are data breaches all the time. And this government seems to be tirelessly gating my rights behind my identification and making it harder and harder to get a valid government ID. So why would I want to offer my identity to all these websites and force them to store it?

And there’s absolutely no way I should have to have my real identity so easily identified with every single piece of media I interact with.

The details here matter, but the concept of having a form of age-gating for content seems ok to me.

The Texas law is absolute shit, no surprise. And SCOTUS is absolute shit, no surprise (well, 6/9 are). But age verification seems fine— we should do this right.

I really wish Apple and Google would just fucking step it up and make a privacy protecting mechanism for this now that we know it’ll be the law of the land in so many states soon. Point the way so that legislatures that want to gate this content know how to do so without compromising identity or security and without creating the need for 400 different ways to be compliant.

I think The Future Doesn’t Suck has it mostly right. While I think the current crop of AI has made it well passed “works good enough to actually bend the efficiency curve”, I don’t think the result of this will be reduced headcount. Like with most things, simple supply and demand models are still at work here. When it becomes less expensive to deliver something, demand goes up. The fact that I can write more code, whether it’s delivering features or improving bugs, means that the expectation from users of software products will be higher. They’ll expect more features, at higher quality, delivered faster than ever before. And they’ll want that because if I don’t offer it, someone else will.

While I’d like a four day work week, making a white collar worker more efficient at building zero marginal cost products is not going to get me there. Customers will choose software that has engineers who work five days a week but produce 6+ days worth of improvement over those that work 4 days and get 5 days of improvement.

This is not literally always true or endlessly true, but it’s true enough and the accessibility of AI is enough that in competitive markets I expect this to be the case.

I can do my job more efficiently and effectively, but so can everyone I’m competing against. So I’ll have to keep chasing them. Doing a good job still means delivering a better product, but the bar has been raised.

I don’t think I’m going to work less– I think I’m going to ship better products. What I’m actually hopeful for is that my job will be more fun. The jury is still out on that one.

The more general lesson I take from Pocket (as I have taken from so many such acquisitions-and-eventual-shutdown stories before it) is this: Not all businesses need to be large, with paths to continual growth. Quite the contrary. The expectations of scale, continual growth, or especially both together, become perverse and destructive when they become defaults and norms. Some few businesses will grow very large and will experience continued growth for long periods of time. Most, however, will not, and the attempt to do so will lead them away from serving their existing customers along the way, and just as importantly will usually fail.

— Chris Krycho, writing about the failure of Pocket.

I don’t think anyone is surprised by the idea that “not all businesses need to be large” (nor is Chris— I’m using his post and point as a jumping off point). I think the corrosive problem of the zero interest rate internet world was the destruction of all non-scale business models.

It’s still hard to build any form of consumer software and charge for it. And the only way to be a business that reaches an end to its growth is to make enough money all along the way. But we’ve taught consumers to expect to spend nothing, leaving only mass advertising or charging businesses as the only option to build a business. And, at least at in the past, the initial costs of building software are high enough that many companies have taken on forms of debt that cannot be satisfied with mere profitability.

The end of living on the lower bounds of interest rates and the reduction in costs associated with building software will hopefully change all of this, but I’m not holding my breath. Consumers have been taught software should be free. We’re bombarded with people online who think that the marginal costs for delivering goods and services should fully determine the price (see all leftist pharmaceutical discussions). I remember telling somone I paid $10 for a calendaring app (this is pre-SaaS/subscription mania) and they were shocked. When I replied, “I use that app dozens of times a day, every single day, and every time I use it I have a better experience than with the alternative,” it only kind of sort of made sense to them.

Everyone thinks everything should be free because Google and Facebook found their way into a magical business model with winner take-all dynamics. But we already have the winners, so we need to do something else now.

Because MarsEdit doesn’t exist on iOS and I’m traveling without my personal laptop, I find myself only posting photos to Instagram. Hopefully, I’ll care to post on my blog soon. The problem is the Micro.blog app absolutely destroys photos— resolution gets fucked and the color space gets fucked. It also makes it too hard to insert Markdown for photos versus HTML, and I rely on a Markdown render hook for lightboxes and galleries.

Micro.social is a bit better, but also lacks the quick inline Markdown to place photos in longer posts to make galleries work better and doesn’t have the nice AI alt text feature, which really reduces the barrier to posting.

Netflix has been absolutely horrible at managing renewals— and the same is true for quite a few other streamers. I have completely dropped out of multiple shows that I liked because I couldn’t remember them by the time they returned.

Yes, yes, COVID and the strikes. But the above article mentioned another factor I hadn’t considered— shorter seasons mean actors have to book more work which means more complex shooting schedules.

I was so happy to hear about how The Pitt was not going to fall into this trap. The Pitt’s show structure also meant that actors got paid, well, even those without major parts. Because the show took place in “real time”, with each hour of the show being an hour in the same day in the same location, even background extra-type actors were in many scenes over many episodes.

My conclusion is different than Mike Goldstein’s (or what he purports to be John Arnold’s)- I think that we basically are doing close to as best we can within the resourcing and talent available to operate schools. Without changing their resources far more dramatically than philanthropy or changing goals, this is about as good as it gets.

Resource equity remains the most important game in town because it’s the most important difference between successful and functioning schools and dysfunctional places. But dysfunction does not evaporate with resources— they need both resources and time, beyond our political patience horizon.

And lastly, schools can’t improve much if society drags. If the opportunities and supports cease outside of school walls, nothing will change.