I am finally reviewing some of the pictures from our recent vacation to Spain that were shot on our Sony NER 5X instead of my iPhone XS.

A few observations on photography.

• The Sony photos still look better, mostly because they seem to do a far better job with dynamic range and noise.
• I take worse photos with the Sony camera, I think because the screen for previews is less good and difficult to see in bright lights. Additionally, the larger body means that I feel more awkward doing the work of physically moving to better frame my photos.
• It’s so freeing to take lots of pictures and delete many.
• It’s amazing what a small amount of cropping, color and light adjustments, and retouching can do for a photo. Spending 60-90s per photo makes a world of difference, and I don’t know what I’m doing at all.
• I really enjoy having true optical zoom, even with the kit lens. I think I’m going to end up either buying more lenses for the Sony or picking up a new camera soon to step up my game.

Here’s two pictures… can you tell which is which, even after processing and being resized?

The Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.

This lamb was incredible.

‪I think it’s a lot harder to serendipitously find and make connections to strangers online based on your interests and personality‬. Today’s social media is mostl;y optimizing for entertainment. But not all of us are entertainers and the best connections are reciprocal.

Yes, I’m feeling sad about Google Reader again. But also a little bit LiveJournal and internet forums and other things lost.

We may be retreating into The Dark Forest, but I miss the pseudonymous internet filled with small hidden corners and communities.

Not everyone who joined a bowling league (when people did such things) loved bowling. Many loved being with other people first and bowling came second or not at all. Being together is what mattered. The venue did not.

I miss feeling like the whole internet was a bowling ally, and it didn’t matter how much we sucked at bowling. We were just having fun together. And if that means ceding ground to a mainstream that I no longer influence, well, I already feel powerless and out of touch with that mainstream anyway. Isn’t that why those of us who remember the internet before the social giants flocked here anyway?

Earlier this year I said that my two of my most vulnerable subscriptions were Digital Ocean and Micro.blog. My reasoning was that I could just run my Hugo site using the free tier of Netlify.

Since then, Micro.blog has switched to being powered by Hugo. Today I re-did my Micro.blog to match my Hugo site, and even got all the posts on json.blog posted here.

There’s a bit less flexibility, for now, using Hugo on Micro.blog, but there’s a huge added benefit– I now have a site that works with the Micropub API. I can post from mobile using the Micro.blog app and others and use MarsEdit on my Mac instead of writing in a text editor, pushing to Git, ssh-ing into a server, pulling from git, and then building my Hugo site. Now, of course with the Netlify solution I would just have to do the first push to Github, but still, I have way easier ways to write blog posts now.

I haven’t fully decided if I’m going to shutdown micro.json.blog and just have my Micro.blog be json.blog going forward, but it’s looking fairly likely that’s where I am headed.

The AirBnB Invasion of Barcelona

AirBnB removes a lot of friction in the market. In the past, as a destination became more popular, the growth in tourism was mediated by the pace of approval and construction of new hotel rooms. Now we can activate existing housing stock when demand for tourism increases to keep prices low and space available.

I’m not convinced this is all bad. Cheaper travel is great because more people will do it. Traveling to new places and being exposed to different cultures, people, and geography are both key to building empathy and connectedness. Plus local economies benefit from the influx of money.

On the other hand, inexpensive and increased travel, along with the ease of communication facilitated by the internet, has really caused an urban sameness to settle across the globe. It is definitely true that places are losing their distinctiveness as we descend into a global elite monoculture.

And a final thought about the so-called AirBnB “problem”— every city is different. A small city that has little excess housing capacity and massive tourism has different dynamics compared to a city with declining populations and huge excesses in housing capacity.

1. Wide support in macOS for sharesheet-style extensions, along with better built system supported extensions (why can’t I copy links this way in every app?)
2. Meaningful improvements to Mail.app. It’s still the most stable mail app, but it feels really stagnant.
3. A unified language for app design, such that the macOS native look and the iOS native look begin to converge. I care a lot about the usability standards on macOS, but the actual look of a standard “mac app” is aging. Also, there’s little precious about that compared to things like standard Menu items and shortcuts, how the title bars work with files, etc.
4. New entitlements, widely available for Mac App Store apps.
5. Improvements to performance monitoring, maybe even some options to allow macOS to kill apps more aggressively ala iOS that can be optionally turned on. I want to know more about what is crufting up my system and I want more incentive for apps to be better written.
6. New tiling options for window management rather than just full screen or full screen L/R.

Road a bike up a bit from the beach to Diamond Head Trail. A long way up, but worth it. Killer views of a large crater and the southern beaches of Oahu.

Better Worlds is a series of 10 original science fiction stories commissioned by The Verge.

Contemporary science fiction often feels fixated on a sort of pessimism that peers into the world of tomorrow and sees the apocalypse looming more often than not. At a time when simply reading the news is an exercise in exhaustion, anxiety, and fear, it’s no surprise that so many of our tales about the future are dark amplifications of the greatest terrors of the present. But now more than ever, we also need the reverse: stories that inspire hope.

The Verge is at its best when it’s not just a tech blog. I follow The Verge Long Reads in my RSS feed where some great journalism lives. But I still poke at the front page every couple of weeks because if I didn’t, I’d miss projects like Better Worlds. I wish we had more journalism making enough money to do projects like this.

There’s No Shortcut to Wisdom

A good read on Adam’s decision to dive away from reading as much philosophy as he can get his hands on and instead begin diving into fiction and poetry. While I share his view that he has “set [himself] up to argue with the Jamesons rather than the Geoghegans”, and believe me this is worth reading just to appreciate that line, I am decidely less optimistic than he is on the power of the humanities and literature to reveal truth.

The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Why not pair someone walking away from philosophy with an account of a famed philosopher whose philsophy was, itself, rejecting modern philosophy (and post-Enlightenment leanings of all kinds, it seems).

r/postrock Best Albums of 2018

This one is a playlist. The subreddit r/postrock compiled a Spotify playlist of their favorite albums of 2018. I’m mostly through it and it’s pretty damn good. This will probably be my go to playlist when nothing particular strikes me for much of the early part of this year.

Why we need to slow time and scale down

Om Malik (inspired by writing by Tariq Krim) has really captured some ideas I have been starting to put into practice in my own as a way to deal with today’s world. Three key ideas: shift focus from quantity to quality, go analog, and unscale your life.

It is a sane correction to our times. Social media and the whole “digital world” defaults to a firehose of useless information and value-free interactions. And as globalization, information technology, and the technology of capitalism itself races towards zero marginal cost, it feels easy to lose a sense of value. I have been explicitly working on slowing down. I am reading more longer form journalism, curtailing channels that push information to me rather than allowing me to pull information I wantwhen I am ready for it, and trying to chase lasting, rather than ephemeral pleasures. There’s a lot about this process which is privileged and hard, but I think it will make for a healthier psychology.

CSS Grid for Designers

When I did the redesign here on json.blog, I decided to use the opportunity to learn the basics of CSS grid. There was a fair amount of good material out there, but I wish this great post by the New York Times team was out there. A great introduction to Grid, what’s great about it, and the basics on how to use it.

A lot of people in my life are trying to diversify who they read. I know I’m doing poorly on reading people of color, but I felt subconsciously like I read quite a few books by women. So I decided to check the last three years of books I’ve read.

I exported my data from Goodreads as a CSV ¹, hand coded the authors, and found, to my surprise, I was now reading mostly women.

I find it pretty challenging to be intentional about what I am reading. It is pretty easy for me to get out of the habit of reading if I pause for a few days– it almost always stretches to weeks if I stop reading for just three or four nights in a row. This almost always happens between books when I become paralyzed by choice and my “mood”. I am going to try and keep more authors of color “handy” though so that I can be more likely to unintentional change my balance there like I have with gender in the past couple of years.

A quick inventory of things I currently subscribe to (prices per year):

1. Washington Post ($48)
2. Netflix ($132)
3. Hulu ($144)
4. DirecTV Now (mostly for my mother-in-law) ($180)
5. Amazon Prime ($99)
6. Spotify ($180)
7. Overcast ($10)
8. Setapp ($120)
9. Six Colors ($60)
10. Digital Ocean ($60)
11. Slate Plus ($59)
12. Micro.blog ($60)
13. iCloud Drive ($120)
14. The Incomparable ($60)
15. Feedbin ($30)
16. Backblaze ($60)

Total: $1,422

I think I might be missing a few things. The overall cost there is not insignificant, but I have a hard time knowing what I’d cut. Right now, I’d say the three most vulnerable are The Incomparable (I listen a lot less than I used to), Digital Ocean (I could probably just use Netlify), and Micro.blog (I could just use this Hugo site with title-less micro posts).

I’ve saved about $720 a year by cutting the cord and not having traditional cable, which pays for items 2-6. That makes me feel a little better about the considerable chunk of money I’m spending on these services. I think I’d like to support more journalism then I do. I’ve been toying with getting an Ars Technica membership for a while. It’s one of the few sites I’ve read for literally more than a decade and still really like. And if the Agenda app sticks (I just started using it a few weeks ago), then I think I’m likely going to shell out for the subscription.

Honestly, I’m already feeling the subscription fatigue settle in. How many more $5 per month can I afford

A quick inventory of things I currently subscribe to (prices per year):

1. Washington Post ($48)
2. Netflix ($132)
3. Hulu ($144)
4. DirecTV Now (mostly for my mother-in-law) ($180)
5. Amazon Prime ($99)
6. Spotify ($180)
7. Overcast ($10)
8. Setapp ($120)
9. Six Colors ($60)
10. Digital Ocean ($60)
11. Slate Plus ($59)
12. Micro.blog ($60)
13. iCloud Drive ($120)
14. The Incomparable ($60)
15. Feedbin ($30)
16. Backblaze ($60)

Total: $1,422

I think I might be missing a few things. The overall cost there is not insignificant, but I have a hard time knowing what I’d cut. Right now, I’d say the three most vulnerable are The Incomparable (I listen a lot less than I used to), Digital Ocean (I could probably just use Netlify), and Micro.blog (I could just use this Hugo site with titleless micro posts).

I’ve saved about $720 a year by cutting the cord and not having traditonal cable, which pays for items 2-6. That makes me feel a little better about the considerable chunk of money I’m spending on these services. I think I’d like to support more journalism then I do. I’ve been toying with getting an Ars Technica membership for a while. It’s one of the few sites I’ve read for literally more than a decade and still really like. And if the Agenda app sticks (I just started using it a few weeks ago), then I think I’m likely going to shell out for the subscription.

Honestly, I’m already feeling the subscription fatigue settle in. How many more $5 per month can I afford

The Yoda of Silicon Valley ↬

When Knuth chooses to be physically present, however, he is 100-per-cent there in the moment. “It just makes you happy to be around him,” said Jennifer Chayes, a managing director of Microsoft Research. “He’s a maximum in the community. If you had an optimization function that was in some way a combination of warmth and depth, Don would be it.”

Imagine being described this way? Warmth, depth, and presence for me are about as elusive as shedding the extra pounds in my midsection. These are things I want badly and should strive for, but constantly fail at achieving. Still, the striving seems worth it because being that person seems worth it.

Who are the grown-ups in the room at tech companies? ↬

Now, as Facebook’s approach toward the world comes into clearer view, the story is changing. Sandberg isn’t the grown-up in the room the same way that Cook, or Nadella, or Smith are. To be fair, the definition of what it means to be the grown-up in tech has changed a whole lot since the Lean In days. But Apple and Microsoft figured it out quickly: It’s in the best interest of their business to recognize and respond to changing consumer expectations of a business. Now, consumers expect their companies to acknowledge their power and impact on the world. By contrast, Facebook’s engaging in an old-school playbook: Find a scapegoat, let the press run with that narrative, and hope people confuse their misinterpretation of the past corporate narrative for current corporate reform.

Facebook is bad. Some people have said it for years. Now people are waking up to that fact. One of the most interesting stories for the next ten years will be how the social web and its giants continue to shape our society now that they are no longer perceived as frivolous entertainment curiosities.

The Real Promise of Elon’s Hyperloop ↬

Shorter distances don’t lend themselves to the full 760-mph treatment. The Loop system, as Boring’s Chicago project is called, will top out at 150 mph. Musk has said, however, that it could eventually fit into a larger transit network. Likewise, Virgin Hyperloop One’s roughly 100-mile planned project from Mumbai to the Indian city of Pune has no intermediate stops planned, but they could easily be added, the company says.

This is a stupid article, just like pretty much every “hyperloop” article. Do you know what we call a tunnel that has vehicles that can travel at 150 mph along a fixed route? Fairly conventional modern subway/commuter rail technology. Look, it’s not like I have any interest in defending the sandhogs, but it drives me crazy when Americans pretend like we need exotic, new techonology to provide reasonble public transit. We don’t. Any article about a “hyperloop” that doesn’t compare the benfits to conventional, top performing commuter rail patterns around the world is hype instead of stubstance.

Here in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, we talk constantly about congestion and how either high speed rail or maglev or hyperloops are going to make for a faster ride between Baltimore City and DC. But the reality at the current distances, conventional electrified commuter rail could make the trip fast enough adn frequently enough that none of that technology provides marginal benefits even remotely close to the costs involved. The benefits of any technological change to transit won’t kick in unless you are headed to New York or Boston, and those benefits are worth persuing conventional HSR along the Northeast Corridor. But we could have fast, frequent services today without the costs or risks.

Overpromising has crippled public pensions: A 50-state survey ↬

Some good evidence that Rhode Island has bent the cost curve on pensions, slowing benefit growth dramatically and keeping it in line with GDP growth, which raises two questions. First, has the resulting slow down in benefit growth contributed meaningfully to improving the actual health of the pension system? It doesn’t seem so, since Rhode Island’s asset growth is also bottom of the heap. It would be interesting and important to see how this is related to exiting payments, bad portfolio management, or other problems. Second, is keeping liabilities for pensions inline with GDP growth an appropriate measure? I am not sure.

It is good to see that the pain felt by retirees in Rhode Island and the political cost at least resulted in reforms that have truly changed the trajectory of the system. Too often “reform” comes with massive costs and little practical change.

Dyslexia Style Guide 2018: Creating Dyslexia Friendly Content ↬

Good rules for legibility for all readers.