My first car was a 2001 Honda Accord. My grandma leased it and put about 7000 miles on it over three years, just in time for me to get my license in 2004. I chipped in the money I had saved for a car and my parents chipped in the rest to buyout the lease. It was a great car. I used it, then my sister for a couple of years, and then I took it back in 2007. I drove it until about 2011/12, when it was totaled.

I didn’t have an accident, we just turned on the car one morning and it made a god awful sound. I drove about 8 miles to a dealership that day to have them check it out. Somehow, there was a large gash in my exhaust. It would cost about $4,000 to fix, and the car was worth about $1,200. I was early in my career and had just bought a condo. I did not have money set aside for a new car. I basically said to the dealership, while wearing my pajamas, “What’s the cheapest way for me to leave here today with a car?”

Elsa and I were together a couple of years and had just moved in together. We didn’t know how long we’d stay in Providence. We didn’t know yet if we wanted to start a family maybe someday. Electric cars were early, but seemed like they’d be coming along at some point. It just felt hard to make a huge decision like buying a car, which in my mind, meant choosing what we’d use for the next 10+ years. We also hadn’t done any research. So when we were offered a 3 year lease on a new Civic for $215 a month, that seemed pretty great. I think I had to put nothing down, just some taxes and fees, because of the tiny residual value on my Accord. So we left the dealership having leased a car, and that felt pretty good. No commitment before we knew what we needed and an affordable price– it felt like we managed to delay a major decision we weren’t really prepared to make.

What happened over the next year was pretty great. It turns out, a 2012 Civic is a lot more efficient than a 2001 Accord. We were spending easily $50-75 less a month on gas. Our insurance went down for some reason by about $400 a year. And then I looked back on what I spent on things like brake pads and calipers, a battery, tires, etc over the past few years. When all was said and done, I’m pretty sure that first year with the Civic we saved about $150 a month in costs we had with an aging, but good condition Accord. Our total cost to lease a new car was probably closer to $50-75 a month.

Over the next few years, we realized there are some nice things about leases, especially when you’re young and have good credit. The costs are consistent. There were no unexpected issues during an inspection or from a strange noise. Everything is in great shape, and within the first three years, virtually none of the regular wear and tear stuff happens. We know exactly how much we’re going to spend on a car.

Two years into our lease, we moved to Baltimore. We decided to move on a Monday. We sold the condo and moved to Baltimore that Saturday. That same night, Elsa’s mom arrived with her dog to live with us. The short version of the story is her mother had serious surgery and was diagnosed with cancer, and we needed her to move in with us from Mexico for her treatment. Suddenly, we had an extra dog and an extra adult. The idea that “we don’t know what our lives will be like over the next decade” turned out to be quite true– the car we needed in October of 2016 was nothing like the car we needed in 2014.

We traded up to the Honda HRV for our next lease. It would fit all three of us plus both dogs better. It would have been helpful in the move. I had only ever driven sedans, but Elsa liked SUVs, so the emerging crossover category was a good compromise. An HRV drove a lot like a Civic, so the choice was easy. Our costs barely budged. And we’ve essentially continued to lease HRVs since. I think we’re on our third… maybe fourth? We only drive about 6-7,000 miles a year. We can easily predict our costs– it’s the lease, oil changes, and gas. And each time we are up for a lease, I review what’s going on with the EV market because that’s what I have really wanted for some time.

In 2022, we almost got an Hyundai Ioniq 5. They were new and looked like exactly what I wanted. But a coworker of mine got one and had an immediate problem. It spooked me a little bit. This turned out to be a tiny blip– he loves that car and it’s been great to him, and he actually regrets that his small issue even happened because he knows it’s a part of what scared me off. But what really messed me up was how strong residuals on used cars were at that point in time. We were able to lease an HRV again, and our costs when down $50 a month. It was pretty hard to turn down lower monthly costs in favor of doubling my lease costs while working for a start up. I would have been fine, but I can be a bit conservative.

But now it’s time to look at cars again. It’s a lot easier to find the same EVs I was considering three years ago. And for various reasons, lease costs for EVs can be had quite affordably– if I’m paying $275 a month right now for an HRV and I can get an EV in that ballpark, it’s hard to keep leasing a gas car. And EV tech is still new, and many of the attractive models haven’t been around long enough to prove out their viability. A lease is much lower risk than buying a car that will massively decrease in value once it’s off the lot and may have troubles that don’t show up for 7 or 8 years.

A car is a consumption good for us. We don’t drive a lot. We have three adult drivers in our house and we all share the one car. This keeps our costs down but it also reflects our light needs. Consistent, predictable costs, without committing to the kinds of needs we may have or where technology is going seems to make a lot of sense to me. People always say don’t lease, but cars are all around terrible investments. I can pay these monthly costs indefinitely and afford it. It’s not really that important to not have any payment in 5-6 years. And I don’t really want to trade a higher car payment for 5-6 years followed by large unexpected costs in years 6-whenever versus a consistent, affordable monthly fee for now.

One day, I’d like to not need a car at all. But for now, leasing continues to make sense for us.

Do endorsements have influence? Probably not. Is it cowardly to fail to endorse? Yes, especially in a year where the candidates couldn’t be more unalike.

What’s really troubling is rich ownership injecting themselves into editorial decisions, demonstrating the erosion of norms extends well beyond our government and into the fourth estate.

Norms used to be powerful governing forces. Now they’ve been eradicated, and we don’t have any of the safeties in place to live in that world.

We live in terrifying times.

So tonight Elsa played three Sabrina Carpenter songs on YouTube. Of course, I had heard 15 seconds of each in countless short videos on Instagram.

I was struck by how uninteresting the entire rest of the songs were (but how gorgeous the videos are). I don’t ever remember pop music, admittedly not my thing, being barely songs. Those small clips I have heard a thousand times are absolute bangers, but everything else is boring, bland, and straightforward. Maybe Rick Beato isn’t just cranky.

I guess pop music really has changed because of TikTok.

Personal websites are not just about words. The presentation of information about ourselves is just as important as anything we write on our blogs or webpages. Our personal sites are fashion statements. They are a critical part of how we want to present in the world and represent a strong signifier of how we see ourselves and want to be seen.

The reason more developer-minded folks gravitate towards static site generators is obvious– their technical simplicity makes it easy for us to make our websites our own. But this simplicity is a simplicity in implementation and not a simplicity in use. Complex blogging engines and content management systems are not complex for complexity’s sake– they are trying to achieve simplicity in use for non-technical users who want to express themselves. The fact that the implementation of these systems is deeply complex to understand doesn’t matter if they provide their users with the ability to feel they can make precisely what they want.

It’s 2024, and we’re still discussing the merits and warts of WYSIWYG, no-code/low-code, and natural language systems. We are still oscillating around a mythical place that has all power and all of the simplicity and all of the accessibility.

Modern static site generators have learned a lot of lessons from the past. They serve as powerful systems that have changed the way it makes sense to build blogs. They have roared back to relevance, even as backend platforms for application/engine-like experiences. But we have not reached the stage where someone with no interest in the technical elements of the web can easily build a place that matches their potential for expression out into the world on the backs of basic HTML and CSS. I understand why, and I think that’s fine.

It’s surreal to see your cousin in a Washington Post video. It’s worse when the reason she’s being interviewed is because of her experience living in a community in Israel that was overrun on October 7th.

It’s been over a decade since I’ve seen her. She came to visit us in the states when I was young and spent some weeks living with my grandmother and I remembered being fond of her. Later, when I was older, I traveled to Israel a few times where we were able to reconnect. At the time, she still lived on the farm my family has lived on since shortly after World War I north of the West Bank. We both studied chemistry, though she went on to earn her PhD.

I stopped traveling to Israel for a few reasons. I got busy. I became a young adult with no money. But also, increasingly, it became impossible to ignore the rightward and hawkish shift of the Israeli government. I didn’t feel ok supporting them financially with my tourism dollars, even though I missed the family connections I had and frankly missed a place I loved. Elsa would ask if we would go, and I always told her that I hoped to go again one day, but not with this government and this posture. It took until my 20s to go to Israel because of the perceived lack of safety during the Second Intifada. But the window was short between then and when it became clear that Israel had all but abandoned peaceful coexistence with Palestinians and that was intolerable.

Throughout the last year I’ve seen a lot of my friends write about Israel. I see many people thoughtlessly supporting Israel. I see many people thoughtlessly criticizing Israel. I remember one of the only things I was able to say to Elsa about the situation (once it became clear that although my family had their lives upturned that they were safe) was how angry I felt toward Americans who overnight felt like they were experts on this conflict. What little I could say is “a whole lot of people seem to think that this is all very simple and clear – simple and clear what the United States should do and what Israel should do– and anyone who has ever spent any time understanding the Middle East would not be so sure.”

Months later, triggered by… I’m not sure what, I remember sitting in a booth at a restaurant and just crying. I hated feeling like I had to mourn an Israel I wanted to exist and once glimpsed. I hated feeling that despite my long standing complex anger and criticism of Israel, which started long before October 7th, was having all of its complexity stripped away. What I’ll loosely call the Western leftist pro-Palestine consensus has absolutely fueled anti-Semitism and has been empowered by it. This bloc is absolutely right to call out what is happening in Gaza as a fucking travesty. But I cannot believe that we’re going to rally behind “from the river to the sea” and pretend it doesn’t mean exactly what it means. I cannot believe we’re going to act like the United States is allies with Israel, especially from a military and intelligence standpoint, for no reason other than AIPAC or some thinly veiled notion of Jewish money in America.

October 7th was monstrous. The conditions in Gaza before then were monstrous. The actions of Israel in pursuing the end of Hamas has been monstrous. The actions of the Houthis and Hezbollah and Iran have been monstrous. I use the word monstrous over and over again not to create a sense of equivalency, but instead to suggest that all of these actions feel somewhat beyond our ability to measure and compare and understand. Netanyahu has been a piece of shit for a long time, and the Israeli government has been working hard to achieve Palestinian erasure. Israel does not deserve our support. Israel’s actions have long passed defensible.

How we got here is not simple. Where we go from here is not simple. There’s very little that’s obvious here other than the utter lack of heroes.

I love my family in Israel. I have had profound experiences there. I miss the food. I miss the language. But Israel lost its partner in peace and rapidly gave up on peace itself a long time ago. No one in power in the region is trying to solve this problem in any way but obliterating their perceived enemy. Israel, the nation state, hasn’t had my support for some time. October 7th didn’t change that. And yet, everywhere I look, everyone is trying to make this simple and I can’t sign on to that.

I am sad, I am dealing with this in a deeply personal way, and it feels utterly lonely to be surrounded by the self-righteousness of those who discovered Palestinians exist one year ago.

This past year there hasn’t been a lot that stands out to me as “media I enjoyed”. I feel like there was a long period of time that I was barely watching TV or movies of any kind. So, it seems worth mentioning that I’ve seen some great stuff lately.

Bad Monkey and Slow Horses on AppleTV are both having great seasons.

I felt pretty down on Rings of Power after Season 1, but I adored Season 2.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was a good time at the theater.

Love, Death, & Robots is a Netflix anthology Elsa introduced me to and there are some truly great episodes— not to mention stellar animation.

I’ve only just started Nobody Wants This, but as a total sucker for Kristen Bell it seems destined to be on this list so I’ll just put it here now.

There’s a lot more coming out to be excited about, like the new season of Shrinking.

One thing that’s interesting to watch with high profile rewrites that are struggling— so often, there are usage patterns that rely on non-decisions made by a developer. When rewriting software and coming across poorly defined behavior, the impulse is often correctly to make a decision that fits some kind of logic of how things should operate so that they are predictable and consistent.

The problem is, predictable and consistent existed before— by happenstance. Now you come to learn that your mental model of the application (as the developer) is different than your users, but you have no way to capture how things worked in that “undefined” state. It was, by nature, an anti-design.

A huge part of software change management involves being clear how the application models the domain. How do we think about these concepts? How can we teach people the appropriate amount to lead them to “pits of success”. Preferably, how do we make using the application just “feel right” without having to do a ton of work expressing our intent and design?

All domain models are wrong, and therein lies our challenge.

“Don’t Repeat Yourself” is often taught and shared, but I find it to be not that useful and often wrong. The aphorisms about programming I find myself revisiting are:

First make it easy (warning: this could be hard), then make the easy change.

And

Make it run, make it right, make it fast.

What common advice do you find unhelpful? Which bits do you find yourself often citing and coming back to in your own work?

The week that Apple releases new devices and new operating systems used to be exciting. Now it’s exhausting. ¹

Another year, another event, another set of posts about Steve Jobs. Another set of people furious some bug they face isn’t fixed or some feature they want doesn’t seem to be on Apple’s radar. Another set of people mad that a new feature they don’t have to use even exists. Another set of people mad that a feature came out that is only 85% of what they wanted. Another set of people talking about how Apple is great because they can use ancient hardware. Another set of people lamenting that Apple is terrible, because they love their ancient hardware and software and will never upgrade to the new bad thing.

Has the vibe shifted?² I don’t know. I don’t care. What’s boring is not devices or software but the conversation.

I have been reading various parts of the web in various ecstatic states and I just feel tired. I wasn’t talking about tech, or at least not tech alone, but I can see why I wrote about the perfect thing or being burnt out on contrarians, or maybe just takes that are contrary to my own. It’s all downstream of “You think it’s cool to hate things, but it’s not. It’s boring.”³ I love critique and there are times I love a deep dive. I just can’t sustain a fanatical enthusiast fervor about all things.

This is a few parts getting older. This is a few parts new things becoming important to me. This is a few parts overexposure of certain kinds of writing and ideas that get attention online.

And to be honest, I also think this is a few parts, “people’s opinions feel grossly distorted by the attention bubble and some misplaced reverence for what things were like whenever they liked themselves the most”. I think there’s something going on with me besides just disagreeing with a lot of these takes, but I can’t quite express it, hence the rambling post.

I find myself too old to say it, but deeply resonating with the idea that y’all need to go touch grass.

My computer has been really good for a while. So has my phone. So has my watch. The apps I use are really good. I’m glad they’re still around still being really good. Sometimes they add things that are nice. Mostly they add things that I end up not using or caring about. Sometimes they change in ways that are less nice. Often when that happens, within a few weeks, I forget how things were before. It’s fine.

Almost everyone talking or writing about tech these days feels like the people who spend their time on Threads in 2024 complaining about The Last Jedi.

Because not everyone has Bluesky, I’m going to recreate the content of a post there here.

In a quote post, Gillian Branstetter hits the nail right on the head. She quoted Phil Lewis, who posted a clip of JD Vance on CNN.

Phil wrote:

JD Vance attempts to justify spreading lies about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio:

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Branstetter posts an image in response, quoting Hannah Arendt on The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

This is the state of America. This is what the GOP has become. Just listen to so-called undecided voters. They express exasperation at their inability to sort out truth. They are convinced only that everything they are told is a lie. The media lies and politicians lie. And you see them immediately allow in the most sensationalist ideas as plausible as a result. Because everyone is lying all the time, only the craziest lies might be true because who could come up with that stuff? And when they are shown that the mass pedophile ring of the Democratic Party isn’t true, they move on to Haitians eating pets, and then move on to voter fraud and election stealing, and then move on to Central American insane asylum releasing patients in the US, and then move on to American cities being overrun by violent Black people, and then move on and move on and move on.

When we compare the GOP to Nazis, when we call them fascists, it’s not simply due to their beliefs, as horrific as many of those are. We make this comparison because they are adopting the means and methods of totalitarian and fascist regimes.

When it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck…

I have less patience for takes that are negative and contrary to some of my own these days. Does that mean I’m getting old? Does that mean I’m in favor of toxic positivity?

Mostly I feel that very few of these people cause me to reconsider my beliefs and just rile up my emotions.

I take this as a bad sign for our ability to convince people of our view points, something which is too important to give up on. I am fighting my instinct to stop reading just because I disagree, but I also can’t tell anymore who is being the cranky, stubborn one.

Probably me.

The BSRI Magawa sounds great on it’s own, but it’s a bit noisy in my setup and may not be quite right as my main dirt.

I’m really curious about some of the dual overdrives out there for a bit more stacking and maybe using the built in boost in the Maz as more of a solo boost (right now, it’s setup basically as great overdrive– pushes the amp where I’d set the gain on my own to just use amp gain which is actually my favorite tone).

Maybe, given how much I love the gain on the Maz, I actually want something that’s more of a flat boost out in front of the amp. I play a G&L Legacy – basically a strat– with a really hot Fralin SP43 in the bridge ¹. I’ve got plenty of honk, and I also tend to play my amp with a lot of mids. I don’t think I want a Tubescreamer style mid hump for my gain/overdrive.

I don’t know– I’m a bit lost on what I’m really looking for in my gain stacking at the moment.

Meanwhile, I know I want a new fuzz (buy my current fuzz please!). I probably should just get the orange OP Amp Big Muff – I love the Pumpkins. But I’m a little paralyzed– I know at the moment I’m looking for that shoegaze wall-of-sound style.

Of course, the real thing I should be buying is probably a Tele, 335, or LP. But… you know. GAS².

Am I wrong to assume that when Amazon has a package out for delivery that suddenly becomes “delayed in transit” and will come a few days later either:

1. The delivery person forgot to drop off that box and has no time to come back;
2. The delivery person stole the package; or
3. The delivery person damaged the package?

Anyway, Amazon delivered roughly half my Sonos order.

I can’t believe I haven’t updated this since March.

When I look back at that post though, I know at least partially why. I opened with, “Gracie is still with us.” April 30th was her last day with us. It’s still painful.

But there have been quite a few important updates since I last wrote.

Music

I am now playing in a band seriously for the first time basically since high school. I’m having a ton of fun writing music again, and I think we’re going to be ready to perform live soon. Once we have some more demos recorded, I might post some of the music. This has meant I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about guitar gear and music again and it’s bringing me a lot of joy.

Newish stuff I’m listening to

Health

After my weight crept up again, not nearly to its high, but enough, I started Wegovy. After years of concerns, I had my cholesterol close to under control. But this winter, even before I had started to gain back some weight, my cholesterol shot up way high. With my family history of severe heart disease, it was time to get on a statin. But my weight kept creeping up and we also have a history of weight-related diabetes. I was struggling, and I knew I didn’t want to get things out of control. After discussing it with my doctor in what was a quick and relatively easy conversation, he agreed that with my activity level and diet plus family history, it would be worth trying Wegovy as I could see some real benefits.

I haven’t lost monstrous amounts of weight– instead, I’ve lost weight just like I have in the past when I was the most successful counting calories. But the “no food noise” thing is real– I cannot believe how much less I think about food, how much faster I feel full, and how much easier it is to just eat less. While I was counting calories in the beginning, I am not at this time. I don’t really need to because my appetite doesn’t lead me to going over. I’m losing at a rate of about 1.5 lbs a week, depending on the week, and I’m now much closer to my “typical” healthy (but still quite over) weight, even though I’m not yet on a full dosage.

My most serious side effect seems to be increased heart rate– it makes it a little harder to do the most intense forms of exercise and it makes my sleep feel a bit less restful. It’s worth it for me.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to do my favorite exercise– volleyball– very much lately. Someone crashed into me while I was swinging for a hit back in May. At the time, it felt ok, but ever since I’ve had shoulder issues. It’s just on the very edge of my motion. I can do almost everything at the gym and never feel it in every day life. But if I try to play volleyball, I really feel it. And the other day I did a some pull-ups for the first time in a while and there it was. I probably should get some imaging, but I’ve been taking it easy and it has improved, just slowly. Welcome to being in your late 30s.

Travel

We went to Providence for our reunion, Nashville for a wedding, and Seattle just because and had a gra time late May through mid June. We also went to London this summer as our big trip for the year. It was my first time to the UK and we had a very good time. My review is short and simple: I’ve never been somewhere that reminded me of New York so much. I do love to travel, and it’s a bit tough on me that post PowerSchool acquisition I don’t get to travel much for work. Oh, and I just got back from visiting my sister and her husband in Pittsburgh over Labor Day weekend.

Miscellaneous

I started to go to a book club at my favorite local bookstore and I’ve had a really good time doing it. I missed the two summer ones (because I was in London for the first and in a rut with reading for the second), but September’s book is Slow Horses, which I expect will be an easy read given how much I love the AppleTV series so I’m excited to head back there.

I’ll try and do this once more before the end of the year.

Barry Sampson looks at website analytics and says:

I look at that list and while I think it might be interesting, for me it’s not actionable.

I disagree! I used to feel this way, but I recently changed my mind. In particular, I find it very valuable to know “Where those visitors appear to come from”– this is the most reliable way for me to know that someone who has a blog has linked to one of my posts. And so, without analytics, I’d never read some of the best responses to my writing, nor would I find bloggers who read me so that I can add their RSS feed and read them as well.

The best blogs to read are written by people who are interested enough in things that I write that they would bother writing a blog post in response. I’m curious if Barry will ever know this post exists– probably not! But with analytics, he would.

via Loren

I caught the attention of Matthew, leading to an update to his mega post on the IndieWeb.

As ever, I’m always thrilled when someone responds to something I write on their blog. I am sure he is sick of writing about this, so I hope my small followup doesn’t lead him to feel the need to jump back in (unless he wants to!).

So, I wanted to answer his wondering:

Jason also has this to say, which I’d like to address.

There’s this beautiful world where Integration is Not Your Problem, but we don’t live in that world. Not only are RSS/Atom feeds not generally supported by other systems, there’s little to know reason to ever expect them to be. Even API entry points are largely dead and a struggle right now. But I don’t agree this makes it not my problem.

I’m curious as to what Jason means by ‘we’ here. He might not live in that world, but I certainly do.

So do I! Almost everything I read on the internet I read using Feedbin. If something doens’t have a feed, I try to make it one. RSS has essentially been what I consider “the internet” since Google Reader. When I say “we don’t live in that world” what I mean is that the people who want to read my blog, to a reasonably approximation, do not live in that world. Just like it’s terribly difficult to get people to switch messaging apps, I can’t convince people to browse the web the way I want them to.

I am not publishing copies of my content to various platforms because I think Matt is wrong:

You owe these platforms nothing. You are not obligated to integrate with them. You are not obligated to provide them with “content”. You are not obligated to acknowledge their very existence.

I don’t owe platforms anything. Whatever obligation I have follows from the later part of my post– namely I want to make it easy to read my blog for the people who want or may want to read it.

Matthew notes:

The following sentiment is one I find admirable, however.

I like to make it easy for people who opt in to read what I write. I think it is important, or at least valuable, to put in some work to make it so that people who read have to do less work. POSSE, and the tech that supports it, is what makes this possible.

This is why I provide feeds. This is why I try to improve my website’s typography and accessibility. That much I can do. But if making my writing more accessible to other people means manually posting links on commercial platforms, then be damned to them.

Here we’re in total agreement. But I’m pleased that my host, partially inspired by the IndieWeb, and certainly inspired by POSSE, makes it so that manually posting links on commercial platforms is not a thing I have to do at all. It also makes it so that I don’t have to do anything to read people’s replies to my posts from whatever platform they read them on when that’s supported! It’s great!

And I’m glad Robb made something like Echofeed so that this is possible without doing things yourself if you don’t host somewhere like Micro.blog.

I, of course, wish platforms cared about my stupid little blog being able to publish directly to them in a way that they don’t. But I care much more that if people who may want to read my blog use those services, they can still find their way here.

If I didn’t use Plausible analytics to occasionally troll the what domains are referring people to my blog, I’d have never known Matthew saw what I wrote. Maybe that’s ok, but I think it’s better that I can find the folks interacting with me, from wherever they choose to do so.

I don’t fully understand the bill proposed in Lousiana that would have forced App Stores to enact age restrictions. ¹ I’m not sure that age restrictions at the App Store-level on apps is the way to go. However, I do think that there should be a secure API for physical devices to report if users are over a certain age, and I think that should be available to web browsers.

I think we need to permit and preserve the right to access adult content while still permitting protecting children. Rather than pointless dropdowns asking for your birthdate (like many online alcohol ordering services have, for example), there should be an API request that activates a passkey-like biometric authentication that will report back TRUE or FALSE. We should let apps and websites ask a device, “Is the current user over a certain age?” Maybe limit that to a few ages (in the US, 13, 18, and 21 would cover nearly all age-related restrictions) or have some kind of rate limiting (once asking for an age verification, you cannot change the age you verified for 3 minutes or something).

This way, if there’s content that we want to only show to those above a certain age, you can do so with some confidence. Maybe this can only be done in states that adopt the ISO 18013-5 standard– if you want to get age checks from the platform, adopt and provide identification that can be loaded electronically onto our devices. I worry a little bit about this because the US has a terrible history of limiting access to state IDs for all kinds of marginalized groups. But I think there’s something to be done here by the platforms. This is a level of safety that I think we should hold the duopoly platforms take on, but once, in a uniform, standards-based way. Not state by state, or even to a degree, country by country.

Just to briefly weigh in on my own experience with the SSO Tax as a provider and customer.

1. Any SSO that is not bog standard Microsoft or Google does come with meaningful costs that can get out of control.
2. SSO has never succeeding in reducing support for log in issues, and sometimes has increased it.
3. The SSO tax is more about a signal– SSO is required by large, sophisticated clients. But those customers and buyers almost always also require other things that are complex and expensive like negotiating contract terms versus standard terms of service, purchase order/invoice-based payment with net 30 or longer terms, etc. You’re not being upcharged for just SSO, it just so happens that requiring SSO is a pretty good sign you’re going to be a much more complex customer on the whole.

I quite often see the SSO tax only being applied to custom SAML BS, whereas a standard log in with Microsoft/Google/Github/OAuth provider-named-here is not an extra charge. I think that makes perfectly good sense.

And by the way, Microsoft Entra/ADFS/whatever they call it is an insanely jacked-up and dumb system– like all things Microsoft.

I appreciate Marty McGuire’s pushback on the IndieWeb pushback. I’m glad Manton shared it.

A lot of complaints about IndieWeb, to me, completely miss the mark. I emailed Manu on this topic after he posted about Yelling at the Web Clouds.

One excerpt from what I sent Manu was about what makes IndieWeb distinct from “just have your own website”:

I think it’s about the second bullet on the main page: indieweb.org :

You are better connected

Your articles and status messages can be distributed to any platform, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

The intent is ownership, connection, and control.

I love blogs, obviously. And I love personal websites, hopefully also obviously. I’m thankful that folks like IndieWeb are around. They’re experimenting with figuring out “Why do people choose siloed web applications over the web? How can we close that user experience gap?” The goal is not building a smooth product– that’s left to folks like Micro.blog– but tinkering with and trying to understand what are the interaction primitives that are offered by web applications that lead to mass adoption. IndieWeb observes, “People like to reply to each other’s posts. We’ve had email and comment sections for years, but as soon as ‘native’ replies in web applications came along, it dwarfed email and comments. How can we bring that experience to websites we own and control.”

And that’s just one example.

You may think, “everything that’s wrong with the internet are the interaction paradigms of social web applications.” Great! IndieWeb is less for you. The ownership and control ideas apply and appeal, but connection does not– at least as a newer technology.

But if instead what you think is, “I, too, like or liked those social web applications. I want to enjoy my blog and the experience with it more than that,” then some IndieWeb stuff may help you out.

Now, if you’re not a developer really building your own site, then I don’t think you fully fit what IndieWeb means by control. You are someone ready to take advantage of what we’ve learned from IndieWeb and probably want to use a service like Micro.blog or some of the plug-ins built into Wordpress, for example. But if you’re a developer, you may want to dig in further and start to use and build and alter tools folks have put together.

There’s this beautiful world where Integration is Not Your Problem, but we don’t live in that world. Not only are RSS/Atom feeds not generally supported by other systems, there’s little to no reason to ever expect them to be. Even API entry points are largely dead and a struggle right now. But I don’t agree this makes it not my problem.

I’ve written about this before, but POSSE is a profoundly egalitarian idea. I am never going to get all of the people I’m connected to online to go back to using RSS. And I’m not going to get them to bookmark my webpage and visit it multiple times a day. They have places they consistently read feeds. I’m having a lot more fun writing on my blog because people do reply to my posts, or comment in various ways, wherever they are.

I like to make it easy for people who opt in to read what I write. I think it is important, or at least valuable, to put in some work to make it so that people who read have to do less work. POSSE, and the tech that supports it, is what makes this possible.

I’m still dealing with viral keratitis. Most of the pain is gone, but I can still use just one contact lens. I can see ok like this (I can legally drive because my “bad” eye is the one that is not infected so my vision is actually corrected just fine). But the difference in vision still leaves me with a low grade headache most of the day. And although my eye itself is no longer in a lot of pain, I am still having some soreness around my brow and below the eye (I’ve been calling this “orbital pain” but who knows if that’s accurate.

For this reason, and just the way my calendar worked out, this week was particularly grueling at work. It just felt like constant pressure and a fair bit of exhaustion.

Despite that, now that we’re nearing the end, there were some nice things that happened. Today I got some really positive feedback from one of our customers directly and I indirectly heard about some solid validation on what we’ve been cooking. I had a couple of one-on-ones where I got to quick agreement and an action plan that we feel good about. There were rough parts of the week too, where things are not going as planned or smoothly. But I’m glad that after a week that felt endless, what I remember at 9pm on a Thursday were a few bright spots.

Tomorrow I am headed back to the eye doctor. I am not confident I’ll get the ok to put back in my right lens, but I’m choosing to be hopeful. It’d be real nice to be able to see and get rid for this dang headache.

While I like that @Havn wishes for a world of APIs and protocols for services, it’s mostly a dead end ¹.

We tried the world of services and APIs and called it Web 2.0. There are all kinds of places on the web that are talking about APIs and protocols again, very, very slowly gaining traction. The problem with the idea that some businesses are services and that they don’t need to be clients is that those are almost always terrible businesses compared to the alternative. Maintaining an API or protocol makes client applications your customer. But these clients generally do not want to pay for access to services or don’t have financial models that support passing those costs on to customers.

And for all the costs of maintaining a service or API, consumer preferences have longed shows that third-party or alternative clients are minuscule portions of usage compared to first party offerings, even when they’re superior. Apollo never impacted overall Reddit usage. Twitter apps barely registered on monthly active users.

“Services”, as though that boundary was clear, make less money with a more difficult to serve customer that represents a vanishingly small part of their business when they build to allow clients. So they eventually stop.

This just won’t happen unless users actually adopt clients, but they mostly don’t. This won’t happen unless clients and their customers are willing to pay for services access.

I know that Matt works in payments so he definitely loves Apple opening up the NFC chip for payments (including double tap to pay), but I’m personally terrified. I have at least 8 payment instruments with like 6 different issuers in my Apple Wallet. When they each retreat to their own app that wants to be my default, my life is going to get harder.

And I really do think this is a when— prior to Apple Pay, in the US, banks and credit cards avoided contactless pay like the plague. I don’t want to have to make Chase or Amex or my bank a default and lose easy access to switching and changing payment methods at will. There’s no world where I’m advantaged by any system produced by a first party payments company. In fact, we saw what happened when they tried their own QR code nonsense (lookup CurrentC to learn about this shit future we’re reintroducing).

Secure payments like this should be a platform feature. Like age verification technology, I want this extremely secure, extremely embedded, and providing little specific value to the platform creator.

I’m worried after years of the perfect electronic wallet, I’m about to get a mess.

Sometimes we get really lucky. There’s a product in the market that exactly meets our needs. It need not be The Perfect Thing, but importantly, it’s the perfect thing for you.

That’s all we are really looking for– great quality products we can afford that solve our problems just right, and maybe, just maybe, offer an extra something delightful into the mix.

But because we’re each individuals, with our own unique problems and preferences, we don’t often get The Perfect Thing. The market for The Perfect Thing may not be big enough to make it worth making, if it’s even possible to make your Perfect Thing. So we often compromise and it’s fine. There are plenty of good things out there.

A lot of pointless fighting on the internet happens between folks who have found or are very close to having The Perfect Thing and by those who are far away. It’s a tired argument. The folks who are happy with what’s out there aren’t defending it because they think it’s right for everyone– they are terrified at losing The Perfect Thing. And the folks who are unhappy are convinced they can’t get what they want because of obstinance instead of accepting that what they want may not be what enough people want.

It’s really nice to not have to think about things. My favorite products are The Perfect Thing, because I stop thinking about them. I don’t think about the TV stand I have. I don’t think about the bar we bought. I don’t think about my office chair. I don’t think about my home theater speakers. I am not sure I love these things the way I love my guitar, which I think about constantly. I just spend hundreds of dollars on my guitar ¹. But in some ways, maybe I love these things even more. They occupy no space and use no energy.

There’s a lot of relentless optimization/maximization out there. It’s exhausting. Don’t make it a hobby unless it’s fun. It’s fun for me to think about guitar equipment. It’s not fun for me to think about email apps.

Apple could probably make a great search engine to compete with Google, it just never was worth it. It might be worth it now, except it may not be legal.

I haven’t fully read about the case, but Google’s search supremacy never seemed like the place I’d go after them for anti-trust– it’s their two-sided advertising market that seemed like the place the real abuse happens.

Here’s something I’m struggling with in the midst of election enthusiasm:

• Barack Obama
• Joe Biden
• Kamala Harris
• Tim Walz

What do these people have in common? Other than being the most recent presidential and vice presidential nominees from the democrats, they are all also genuinely admirable humans. These are role models. Their biographies and accomplishments make that quite clear. The Democrats keep nominating people who should be admired. These are people whose lives read a lot like the people we teach kids about in elementary schools, not because they were consequential, but because of what their stories represent on the way to being consequential.

None of that should be controversial. I don’t think it would have been controversial at all to state from at least 1950-2000, give or take. Yet the GOP points to these people not as admirable, but instead, as almost subhuman. They are characterized as evil.

Evil

Saying these folks are evil is not even hyperbole— it’s just an unserious lie. And the people in power in the GOP and those who are empowered to shape the right wing narrative know that they are lying.

Even if you agree with everything Donald Trump wants to exercise the power of the presidency to accomplish, you cannot say that he is a role model the way these four folks are. You cannot possibly believe that someone who is born incredibly wealthy who is known more for the way he built himself into the brand embodiment of conspicuous wealth, and generally ran failing, highly leveraged businesses is admirable. JD Vance’s story is barely even true, forget about admirable.

I’m just filled with that Gen X/Millennial rage remembering all of the scolding of the 80s and 90s from the right wing about values and character. I look at who the Democrats choose to elevate and I think about their stories, and then I look at who the Republicans elevate and I want to scream about hypocrisy and express my disgust.

I am so tired of the fake virtue and morality of the right. I am so tired of the Evangelical Christian nationalists. I am so tired of the moving goal posts. I am so tired of the lying about who these people are instead of talking about what their ideas are for this country with respectful disagreement.

I am done. Let’s turn a page on this nonsense. We are not going back.