The Democrats tried to figure out the complex process of how to use (or not use) the power of the government to make people’s lives better while trying to address a waning pandemic and the economic catastrophe it caused.

The Republicans said if things are not how you want them to be, it’s someone else’s fault, and here’s how we’re going to hurt them.

Americans didn’t understand the Democrats, and the Republicans made them feel good.

I said “This is who America is” not “This is who we are” because I am no part of a “we” that says this is who “we” are. I am not this. I didn’t fight for this. The people I spend time with are not this. None of the three spaces I’ve lived are like this. But America is like this.

If this is America, I need to reconstruct my politics. If this is who we elect, and this will be our judiciary, and these are our values, we need a different politics. We could have cared about each other, we could have worked to build an effective, efficient, operable government that ensures safety and equality of opportunity, and a minimum life of dignity.

We could do these things, if we had a public that supported them. Some states will still be able to do these things. But I think I have to abandon hope that we have the fortitude and desire to tackle the hard problems. Instead, I have to accept that we are going to fail those tests entirely, we have failed those tests, and I need to act to mitigate and protect against harms to my family and my community the best that I can.

What’s a bad decision that actually turned out good in your life?

— From @Annie

Adopting our dog, Gracie, is the easy winner here. I’m not sure I really made that choice— I went to meet her and discussed it with Elsa, but Elsa made it clear she was bringing Gracie to her home. I wasn’t quite ready, We hadn’t moved in together yet and we were picking Gracie up the very weekend I moved into a new condo I had just bought. I thought maybe a few months down the road, after we moved in and things were less hectic that it would be a better time. But I didn’t fight hard, and I admitted Gracie had captured my heart, at least a little, when I met her, so we drove 90 minutes each way to get her from a foster home.

We enjoyed the next 13 years with her.

As a reminder, I will be doing a month long Ask Me Anything this November. Email me your questions at ama@jbecker.co. I will only include your name and a link to your website if you want.

If Harris loses, I don’t think the appropriate response will be “where did the democrats get tactics wrong?” I think if she wins the popular vote, but loses the electoral college, it will be about how our system doesn’t work when we have partisan, geographic sorting.

If she loses outright, it will be about how we failed to convey the danger of Trump. It will be about how we have lost a shared notion of truth. It will be about how we’ve lost a common information architecture and with it, our common reality.

I’d like to hear some of your thoughts about urban development and transit policy, but I know so little about these topics I’m not quite sure what to ask. Maybe you could explain a few principles to an absolute beginner in this topic? (I know that’s not exactly a question, sorry.)

– from Annie

I’m going to try and describe a few ideas that influence how I think about urban development and transit policy. None of these are original, some of them likely have formal names and people associated with them. I’m not citing my sources, and I’ve never really studied these areas in an academic sense. Instead, consider these statements to be a crib sheet of things that have stuck with me because they either struck me as a true or came along with a boat load of evidence that convinced me they are true. Think of this is my crib sheet of “basic principles” I’ve come to largely believe.

The housing market is a lot like other markets– it responds to supply and demand.

The housing market is unalike many other markets, certainly the ones we study, because it’s expensive to move and expensive to buy and sell homes. Additionally, moving involves uprooting your connection to community resources, possibly requires you to change your job, etc. The housing market is full of high transaction costs.

The housing market is unalike many other markets because it takes a lot of time and capital to build new supply. Whereas interest rates and prices in the market can change overnight, building new housing cannot.

The high costs of building housing come from complicated rules around zoning and permitting alongside the fact that building housing is very labor intensive and hasn’t gotten much more efficient.

In the United States, our zoning and permitting rules are restrictive. We often do things in the name of “safety” with zero evidence they provide any safety benefits. We are grossly incurious of different safety standards set internationally and stick to what we wrote down in manuals in the early to mid 20th century as proven.

Gentrification is one of the most complicated and fraught topics to discuss. It’s kind of like defining pornography, except if the folks defining it came from vastly different cultures and time periods. Most of what people describe as gentrification is very much not gentrification. We use the language of gentrification and displacement to describe any change to place and rarely dig in. Often, what’s described as pro-gentrification actually reduces displacement by ensuring desirable areas maintain supply, stay desirable, and continue to offer quality housing at a price many residents can afford. Absent that growth, many of those people would move to neighboring areas and cause even greater displacement.

The sprawling suburbs and exurbs of America were a huge mistake, and we should be living in denser, more walkable neighborhoods with sufficient public transit to cover many aspects of daily life.

There is nothing more pro-environment than denser housing, and any idea of a return to rural pastoralism is a symbolic, aesthetic choice. The proper way to heal the environment is to reduce the need for human transit and reduce our land use footprint. Most people who react negatively to this can only imagine “Manhattan-ifcation” and lack the experience of traveling to many cities and neighborhoods which are significantly more dense than their experience while being obviously pleasant and desirable. These same people often imagine a sense of community that does not actually exist in American suburbs and small towns but very much does where there is denser housing.

Streets are safer when there are reasons for people to be there as often as possible. Unsafe streets are unlit and empty. Safe streets have folks picking up a coffee or dropping of kids in the morning, having lunch and entering/leaving offices and professional services all day long, then have folks picking up kids, leaving work, going out to dinner in the evening, followed by after dinner drinks or late night entertainment events in the evening. A street like that has people moving on it all the time. We don’t see crime where there are always lots of people around with good reason to be there– it’s the ultimate place-based cultural deterrent (the true deterrent is tackling poverty).

Organization before Electronics before Concrete– I think this originated in Germany, and it’s one of the most powerful ideas in transit/train policy. Basically, first you need to actually get the operating of trains right. Get a solid time table, run trains frequently and on time, provide good service. Once you’re at the limits of what can be done through organization, then you electrify your rail service. Trains operating with electrified lines over diesel run faster– they break down less often and they have lower penalties for adding more stops because they can accelerate and decelerate faster. They can also be operated with centralized control systems rather than drivers, reducing staff costs for operating trains more frequently and on tighter time schedules. Lastly, you use concrete– actual construction like grade-separated crossings over roads, level boarding at stops to decrease dwell time, or establishing new rights of way/expansions. We don’t do this anywhere in the US with any kind of success because we’re not serious about transit.

Frequency and predictability beats speed– I need to know when my train will depart and I need my train to be available as often as possible. That’s what drive usage. It’s no good to me to have two trains in the morning and two in the evening that arrive in 65 minutes but leave at different times every day. I’d rather take a train that always leaves at 5 after the hour, every hour and take 80 minutes.

Increasing transit service frequency and reliability is more important than decreasing fare box prices, at least in the US, but possibly everywhere.

There should be very little politics as we see them today at the municipal level. Most of the political questions around how we organize our society will not and cannot be solved at the municipal level and shouldn’t be the focus there. Instead, municipal government should be about public service provision– how do we operate as effectively as possible? You should get elected and hire people based on how well they can run city services. Unfortunately, we often elect folks based on issues they can’t really effectively tackle and settle for poorly run cities and gross underfunding, especially of schools and bread-and-butter infrastructure like sewage and water pipes, electrical lines, street maintenance, transit operations, and more.

I like to do things alone (specifically I also enjoy traveling alone, wandering new places alone, going to bars and reading alone). Has there ever been a time in your life when doing things alone was scary? If so, how did you overcome it? Or, conversely, has there been a time in your life when you weren’t able to get adequate time alone, and how did you handle that?

– from Annie

I’m a white male born into the middle class who was 5'8" at 14 and hasn’t seem 200 lbs on the scale since he’s 16. Given all that, I am not sure I’ve ever really felt fear being alone. I vaguely remember having a little bit of fear the second time I traveled to Israel in 2009? I was joining a group, but I had to leave a day or two later than everyone else. I had been to Israel before and at that time had enough conversational Hebrew ¹ (and English is commonly spoken) that I wasn’t terrified, but the logistics of finding people I didn’t know without a working cell phone getting off a long flight at an odd time definitely generated some anxiety if not fear.

Of course, everything was completely fine, and I actually don’t remember the fear or anxiety all that clearly. What I do remember is the joy I felt after taking a long ride and meeting up with the group.

I now need to take a bit of a context digression…

This trip was run by a sect of Orthodox Judaism that does significant outreach, especially on college campuses, to non-religious Jews in an attempt to bring them to Orthodoxy. While I had no intention of becoming an Orthodox Jew, I had long enjoyed the intellectual and study elements of Judaism. I continued Hebrew school past my bar mitzvah through high school. I wanted to understand the religion, its philosophy and ethics. The textualism and legalism of Judaism appealed to me, and I enjoyed meeting with students once a week to learn more about how Orthodox Judaism differed from my own. Although I studied chemistry in college, I also mistakenly made it 2/3s of the way to a Judaic Studies major as well. I took a class called Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls in the archaeology department. I took a course on the history of Jewish diaspora into the Middle Ages– covering from roughly the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem through the 1400s in the history department. I took an anthropology course about the formation of Israeli culture and contemporary issues. I took these courses in departments that were not Jewish studies, but they were all cross listed. I didn’t even realize that my embarking on a walk of various humanities disciplines that I was doing so with a topical focus. In many ways, I saw participation in more religious learning as a rounding out to all these other interests.

A free trip to Israel was available to those who attended these learning sessions. My university had very little participation, but the University of Pennsylvania had an incredibly popular program. So I was joining “their” trip.

One more bit of context– I was taking this particular trip directly after finishing my bachelor’s degree. I was going to return three weeks later and immediately start a fifth year master’s program in a completely different subject area. My life was in major transition, and I wasn’t ending college at my happiest. I was an adult at a moment of, not crisis, but a deep unmooring.

Ok, back to the main story.

I think I knew this before I got there, but one of the folks who was on the UPenn side of the trip was a friend from high school. She was one of my first girlfriend’s younger cousins. We got to know each other when we shared a science research class that spanned grade levels. I hung out with her a few times in high school and always felt a connection with her. I don’t think we would have dated if not for her cousin, but I do think we might have gotten quite a bit closer without that awkwardness (we met mostly after that relationship fizzled with quite a bit of ongoing teenage angst and drama). I hadn’t seen her for at least 3 or 4 years at this point, probably since I had graduated high school– she would have been maybe 16.

When I arrived, she was the first person who saw me. She ran up and gave me a huge hug, dragged me to her friends, and we sat and had a couple of drinks.

The reason I know I was anxious or afraid to be alone on this trip is because I know how it felt to see a familiar face and how it felt to be embraced by an old friend. We spent a lot of time together that trip, and I remembered how we had always had an easy friendship. It was a comfort over all those weeks.

It is the feeling of belonging and presence that stands out in contrast with the feeling of being alone that stuck with me.

Nowadays, this story feels like it doesn’t fit. While I was always someone who needed time alone to process (I was very much the stereotypical teenager who closed the door to his room and stayed there alone for a long time when I needed to), I think I’ve settled into even greater independence as I’ve gotten older. I love traveling alone. I take great comfort and restoration in walking around a new place on my own. Some of my best adult memories are from the trips I took myself. And yet.

Loving alone time is not the same as being alone. And sometimes we don’t realize that we have allowed our need for alone time to shift into convincing ourselves we are alone. The special people in our lives, those we really connect with for whatever reason, can be a powerful pillar to steady ourselves against in those moments.

Unfortunately, that was the last time I saw my friend. She ended up becoming observant and marrying an Orthodox man just a couple of years later. That made the opportunities we would have to cross paths drop to nothing, and it would have made actively pursuing an ongoing friendship pretty disruptive for her. She is still someone I think about from time to time, wondering if she’s happy with her choices and doing well.

I don’t think I really answered the question, but I think I touched on the spirit of the ask. For some reason, this is the story I felt like telling today about being alone. It’s really a story about not being alone at all.

As a reminder, I will be doing a month long Ask Me Anything this November. Email me your questions at ama@jbecker.co. I will only include your name and a link to your website if you want.

Using a corporate controlled computer comes with a lot of small annoyances and indignities. I get it, I work somewhere that handles a lot of sensitive, confidential data. That has been true for me my entire career– I’ve never not had access to individual student level records or employee records. But Powerschool is much more serious about device management.

The two things that are most difficult for me are separating out my Apple ID and not having access to (fairly benign) applications. Without my Apple ID, I am looking at my phone much more during the day for iMessages. I also have to use my phone and headphones to play music, since I can’t access my Apple Music library. And without my iCloud Photo Library, it’s much harder to share pictures of my family or from my life in Slack, which is kind of demoralizing. I can’t use SetApp or several of the applications I like to use for work on my machine– no CleanShot X, Yoink, TablePlus (DBeaver is fine, but TablePlus is better). I am not allowed to use the Elgato Stream Deck software, so I lost access to a lot of handy Zoom controls and Slack shortcuts.

It’s not a completely locked down hellscape. I am able to use quite a few tools that are valuable to me like Transmit, Alfred, iTerm2, RStudio, neovim, VS Code, etc. And although they made me swap out my old machine that was perfectly fine, they bought me a 16" MBP with M3 Pro and 36GB of RAM and 500 GB SSD – it is no slouch.

I actually end up Screen Sharing onto my Mac mini at various points in the day, but they’ve blocked the port that allows for high quality screen sharing somewhat recently. So while I used to get fast, retina or near retina level resolution, the experience now is… subpar.

None of these things are the end of the world, but the paper cuts are real.

What topic areas should we ask you about? Are personal questions ok, too?

• Pratik

Whatever you want! It’s true AMA, personal questions are totally fine. I plan to only not answer a question if there’s a security or legal reason I cannot answer. I find it pretty hard to believe any question that is asked in good faith would be outside the bounds of what I’d be willing to answer.

Always happy for the first question to be a question about the questions I’ll answer.

As a reminder, I will be doing a month long Ask Me Anything this November. Email me your questions at ama@jbecker.co. I will only include your name and a link to your website if you want.

I use a Logitech MX Master 3S mouse. It’s fine. It has a ton of buttons, and I use them all. I prefer the experience of using the Apple Magic Mouse in every way– that touch surface is incredible, and works great on Macs. The problem is that the Magic Mouse’s low profile and click feel rapidly gives me RSI pains. Just a couple of hours with that mouse and my right index finger and hand hurts.

I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with the charging port being on the bottom. The meme is funny, I guess, but tired. Plugging in for like 5 minutes gives you hours of use. It just doesn’t matter.

What does matter is the Magic Mouse is, and has been, quite uncomfortable for a long time. They’re there AirPods without silicone of Mac peripherals– they might work ok for a majority, or even large majority of customers, but there’s a sizable portion of the population who will just never be able to use it.

Bad design is not a charging port on the bottom that’s used for tens of minutes every 4 months. There are far greater sins committed by the Magic Mouse, which is a shame, because it’s otherwise quite brilliant and unparalleled.

Nick Heer on Siri:

As a reminder, Apple says users can ask Siri…

…to text a contact by using only their first name.

…for directions to locations using the place name.

…to play music by artist, album, or song.

…to start and stop timers.

…to convert from one set of units to another.

…to translate from one language to another.

…about Apple’s product features and documentation, new in iOS 18.1.

…all kinds of other stuff.

It continues to do none of these things reliably or predictably.

I don’t think Siri is very good, and I would have said I barely use it until I read this list. Because actually, I use Siri to do all of these things (well, except Apple Product features… but my “all kinds of stuff” include lots of home controls and starting specific workouts on my Watch). The only one that I find unreliable is playing Music, which I am quite sympathetic to because my tastes are not mainstream and the names of things are super weird. I wish that would get better.

But by my score, 6/7 of the use cases that exists pre-18.1 that Nick says cannot be done “reliably or predictably” work 100% of the time. The remaining use case, playing music, is a bit of a crap shoot. It’s also the least useful of all of these features (unless you’re still trying to make HomePods happen).

So maybe I do use Siri and maybe it’s fine?

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 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.