Stunning these quotes come a paragraph apart in the first 10% of the same book.

Looking back, I spent a lot of my early 20s trying to save relationships that weren’t worth the trouble. I think I knew this at the time-some part of me must have-still, I soldiered on, pushing for a thing that could not be found (or found again, or in the same shape).

There’s a special kind of insensibility that comes to you in your early-young adulthood. It has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence and it’s harmless (until i’s not) and it must be weathered, survived, and grown out of. It comes from not from proven wrong enough or with sufficient repercussions, from stumbling into more triumphs than you’ve had defeats. It’s something you can go far with if you use it well and if others believe in your power as much as you do. This is a glory that is fleeting at best.

Both of these are from This is the End of Something but it’s Not the End of You. I’m not sure I’ve capitalized that right.

Did users demonstrate an interest in any of this? Have they demonstrated an interest in any of the myriad applications generative tech has been shoehorned into?

I like Cory Dransfeldt’s site. I disagree with a ton of things he says. This is a great example.

I have a lot of uncertainty around various ways we’re using LLMs and other new generative models. But the critique, “Did anyone want this?” is the height of “I am living within a filter bubble.”

ChatGPT has 600 million monthly active users— and that’s DOWN. They reached 100 million users in just 2 months.

I haven’t caught all the way up to what Apple released— but I saw things like grammar checking, summarization, and removing subjects from photos (presumably using generative fill) — these uses have tons of users. A lot of people want these things. How many people use things like priority inboxes on Gmail?

We can debate the environmental impact, the ethics of how these models are being built, privacy concerns, and the actual quality of the output (actual generated art is a thing I see a ton of online, much of it bad, and I’m not sure much of anything is better for it).

But the idea that these features are just some kind of AI-like hallucination on the part of Wall Street that is not reflected in ways real people want to use computers? That’s willful ignorance.

I currently play a Valvetech VAC22 I’ve owned for about 15 years. After a bit of a hiatus, I got back into playing more lately and found a few guys locally to start a band. While the VAC22 has a master volume that works reasonably well, it’s still damn loud for my office in a town home. I love that amp, but it’s just been living at the practice space for 2 months now and I’ve been playing acoustic exclusively at home.

Yesterday, Elsa was going to take a long ride to visit a friend of her’s down in St. Mary’s county. I figured I’d search if there are any cool guitar shops in the area and take the ride and then head over to the guitar shop. I ran across a place with a pretty solid assortment of gear– Island Music, and so plans were set.

I had a bit of an agenda– I thought I’d try out the Marshall SV20C and Vox AC15. I’ve owned an AC30 in the past and liked it, and thought either amp could stay at my house while the Valvetech hung out in the practice space. Both seemed like they’d blend nice with the VAC22 as well– back 15 years ago I always thought I’d pair the VAC with a Hayseed one day.

I was surprised at how loud the Marshall had to be to sound good to my ears. It was that classic sound, but I though the SV20C would be a bit more versatile take. Instead, it was simply great Marshall sounds at “too loud but don’t really really fuck your hearing" levels.

The AC15 was a great amp, with all the things I’ve always liked about a Vox and some of the things I never really did. I probably would have walked out with the with the red AC15. It would have looked great next to the purple tolex VAC22.

But then I saw the three Dr. Z amps in stock. A good friend of mine, Chris, has been telling me that the best amp he ever played was either the Dr. Z Maz 38 or a Matchless for… 20 years. I just never played one. A lot of folks who play Dr. Z amps are in country bands— they’re known for their killer cleans. But I’m not really a country guy, so while the cleans have always seemed incredible from afar and something I appreciate, I wasn’t really sure how dirty and aggressive these amps could get. Chris told me the Maz 38 was just bonkers loud, and I should try out a Carmen Ghia.

So I plugged into the Carmen Ghia, and it’s nice, but not all that. At least not for me. I understood why people like them, and thought with the right overdrive and setup I could make it sound great. But I wasn’t really drawn in.

Then I tried the Z Plus. Huh. This thing was pretty freaking great. And what was really impressive was how solid the master volume is. It sounded great even when I could still hear the strings on the electric. I would have spent a lot more time with this amp except that then I plugged into the Maz 18 Jr.

This thing rips. Monster sustain. Plenty of gain. I’m not sure I’ve ever played an amp with that much clarity even with tons of dirt. There’s a few things I like to play with every new amp that fall under the “sounds great acoustic, often gets buried with any kind of compression and saturation from gain/overdrive”. Not here– I’m talking acoustic level clarity at basically every level but when the pre-amp volume is fully dimed. And it always, always, always cleaned up with the volume knob. Just an insane amount of touch sensitivity.

I thought to myself, “Whelp, this is incredible. If I had an amp like this, I’d probably want a clean boost of some kind, because while it sounds great with the pre-amp volume dimed and that’s about as far as I’d want to go, it sounds better for most things around 2:30 to 3 o’clock-ish.”

So I turn the amp around and go “wait a tick, what is this?” Not only was I surprised (pleasantly) to find an effects loop (I haven’t had one since the Marshall DSL100 I sold 20 years ago, but now I play in a band that’s kind of post-rock/spacerock-y where some ambient modulation would be aweome). But there’s also an “eq-bypass”. But the pedal has a knob… what’s that a mix? I quickly do a search and realize no, there’s already a built in, footswitchable clean boost. Dang.

After a couple of hours I couldn’t help myself.

I only wish it had red or purple tolex.

So, happy first New Amp Day to me since… based on pictures at least February 2007?

I haven’t decided if I’m going to keep my Valvetech VAC22 yet. I need to spend some more time with it side by side for comparison. Maybe I’ll do a stereo or wet/dry or just straight A/B/Y setup.

When I wrote about how it’s sometimes hard to be undecided or hold a complex view on the internet, I also noted:

Shame is a powerful social and cultural tool to shape behavior. Norms are powerful. I think it’s great that most people can’t and won’t talk about members of the LGBTQ community the way we used to because you’ll be immediately shamed and dragged. I am perfectly happy at times to directly confront someone and ask if they’ve really thought about the consequences of what they’re saying or expressing.

I felt like I had to say that for two reasons.

1. Many bad actors who complain about “cancel culture” are actually just trying to avoid accountability for their own actions.
2. I thought it was important to note that there are times when I draw the line for myself on accountability.
3. I think one of the most challenging parts of being confronted with people outside of your community is that communities define where those lines are. Online, we’re all largely shoved into each other’s communities. Our bubbles are constantly overlapping and bouncing into each other.

The last time I confronted someone in this way on the internet was about LGBTQ issues, so it was easy to pull out that example. I directly told someone:

I have to tell you, this level of dedication to this view point presents a lack of compassion and empathy that is almost breathtaking.

When they didn’t respond well, I wrote a bit more. But the part I wanted to focus on was the last sentence in that ultimate reply:

I hope you consider this with fresh eyes and a more open heart in the future.

I do feel that way. I think part of why the idea of “cancellation” has become so popular is we have a standard operating procedure for excluding someone. Heck, in this case, I’m actually transitioning a service related to this conversation.

But, it’s a lot harder to know what forgiveness looks like. What does acceptance later look like? I don’t really know. Most of the people who complain about getting cancelled actually face no consequences, so this is a moot point. The worst that happens is a very small, specific set of people never forget, and don’t ever really forgive. There’s an entire category of meme post which is the bad apology (always an Apple Notes screenshot), followed by the outrage at that apology, and typically followed by at least one or two more rounds of bad apologies trying to correct. If we knew how to do this, it wouldn’t be so awkward.

I have done things or said things that have probably irreparably damaged by my reptutation and relationship with those that were around for it. My life has moved on, there are many people who have met a better person than I was because I felt that shame, embraced it, and learned from it. I think in a lot of those cases, if I ran into those folks today, I’d like to believe I would not fall into past patterns. I’d like to believe I’d show myself for who I am today, and that this person is better than I was then. And I hope I’d be, if not forgiven, then offered a little more acceptance.

To even have a shot at all this, it’s important to acknowledge, stop, listen, learn, grow, and often, make amends.

I think that works “in real life”, but I’m not sure it works nearly as well online. And that’s tough.

I realized what bugged me about Manu’s idea of a the consumption-to-creation ratio – he has the units wrong.

It doesn’t matter if you read more blog posts than you write. It doesn’t matter if I listen to more music than I write. It doesn’t matter if I look at art more than I make it.

What matters is how I spend my time.

I probably spend around four hours a day consuming some form of media/content, whether reading the internet, watching television or movies, listening to music, or reading a book. At most, I’m underestimating and it’s maybe six hours of time.¹ But I also spend at least five or six hours a week creating. Lately, a lot of that time is playing guitar– we’ve been meeting as a band about 2 hours a week, and I play for 20-30 minutes at least a few other days a week. I spend maybe an hour or two each week writing various blog posts.

So I think my real ratio is something like 6 or 7:1. By unit, I may be effectively 100:0, but I spend a pretty healthy chunk of my time creating.

I think it’s far more interesting to think about the ideal ratio of time spent consuming versus creating content. My current ratio feels pretty good, considering time and energy my job takes away from my creative mind. I suspect something like 9-10:1 feels pretty healthy. I think I’d really like to find a way to get closer to 5:1.

In America, if you want to vote for the people who would prefer to tax the wealthy more than the poor, you’re also going to vote for the people who want to protect a woman’s right to choose. Communities come with a set of ideals that seem to have nothing to do with each other.

The size of a community is determined by optimizing who is in and who is out based on that bundle of ideals. Smaller communities might have a smaller set of niche beliefs, or they may have many beliefs that lead to just a tiny intersection of folks who are interested, engaged, and belong.

Workplaces can be like this, too. Much of the dust up at 37 Signals/Basecamp has to do with bundles of belief. At one time, the community of folks who liked 37 Signals product and content had a particular set of beliefs. Then, it turned out, the founders were uncomfortable and challenged by the assumed values of the community they created and found themselves in. They chose a pathway that ran counter to those values, and the community changed. ¹

Organized religion is a powerful community because it is both explicit about belief and complicit in creating those beliefs. It is a community whose purpose is to generate folks who must adhere to its values.

Communities use beliefs as boundaries– in these areas we’ve identified, here are the values we hold as a community. And communities break when new challenges arise and they are forced to generate new values. Lately, it seems a new burden that has been placed on communities– the inability to opt out of holding any value at all. I don’t remember the particulars, but I think it was sometime during the George Floyd protest that there was some dust up within an online yarn pattern community. I don’t remember if the yarn folks were taking the side I agree with or not. I don’t really think that matters. I think what that incident points out is that whereas in the past, trading yarn patterns would never have required establishing beliefs about police brutality directed at African Americans, today, sometimes that’s a requirement.

This is a huge burden on communities.

I play volleyball a few nights a week here in Baltimore. I have no idea what these folks think about what’s happening in Gaza. I don’t have any clue how they feel about Donald Trump. I don’t know if they’re worried or excited about AI. Because we are all self-centered, I project the views and values I have onto these people– I like them, and so my assumption is that we would generally agree on all things. But because I’m also somewhat self-aware, I’m positive if the rec league volleyball pick up players suddenly had to express their values across all of these areas of belief, our community would be fractured.

This is the dance we require. There are times we have to take a stand. There are times that certain values need to be a part of a community. There are times where the broader global discussion might even require that we all, to a degree, “take a side”. But there’s also a lot of pleasure and joy and community in spaces that can be more narrow. There are times and places that have a right to be guarded from having to expand their bundle of belief.

In the US, our political system is structured to guarantee two political parties. And many folks are often dissatisfied by their choices, because a system with two parties incentives generating a set of opposing bundles of belief that come as close as possible to splitting the population evenly. In this optimization problem, very few people can point to one political party and feel satisfied with the bundle of beliefs they are signing up for. Few individual preferences are met while we optimize for a very specific compromise. In politics, we require parties to take a stand on virtually every matter and make values clear in all things.

It’s not always the right decision to require the same of every community we walk in.

Communities converge on an understanding of how they are supposed to feel about something very rapidly on the internet. It seems to take no time at all for influential voices to emphatically determine what views are Good and Right and what views are Wrong. The Good takes are rapidly understood and the community as a whole uptakes this posture. The Bad takes and apostates are rolled out just as quickly to be shunned.

We have to make clear who is in, who is out. The views now share are required for participation.

No, this is not about cancel culture or some right wing left wing thing. It’s not about any one event or topic– it’s just about how faster communication gives our self-organizing impulses super powers.

There are a host of complex issues that are decided, at least from the perspective of various communities. These topics can range from Middle East politics and warfare to whether streaming music is ok. That’s not a joke or exaggeration– I’ve seen people write with equal fervor and I’ve seen whole sets of people group together online to take down the apostates on both of these issues.

This is not all bad. Shame is a powerful social and cultural tool to shape behavior. Norms are powerful. I think it’s great that most people can’t and won’t talk about members of the LGBTQ community the way we used to because you’ll be immediately shamed and dragged. I am perfectly happy at times to directly confront someone and ask if they’ve really thought about the consequences of what they’re saying or expressing.

But it does mean that there are many things that are not safe to share. I don’t think it’s always safe to play Devil’s Advocate or “try out” an argument or even an identity to see how it feels. Something that was easier in a smaller, anonymous or at least pseudonymous internet was seeing what it took to deeply make an argument before deciding for real what you believe.

It also means that sometimes when your peers and people you respect have all decided what the “right” view is, it’s very hard to comfortably express a less strident, more lukewarm, more timid, and possibly more complex or nuanced take, especially if you’re not ready, willing, and able to present a dissertation about your view point.

The way I’ve chosen to operate in this environment is to listen to the intensity of others. The best indicator for me that I should sit something out is when I cannot muster the same passion, conviction, or care the rest of my community finds. This almost always means one of two things:

1. I will end up agreeing with them, but for various reasons, I need to listen more and more carefully to be convinced. My own mind and emotions take a lot more evidence to get to the same conclusion my peers made it to right away. ¹
2. Folks are jumping on a bandwagon and squashing nuances and loudly proclaiming the easy thing. Anything I add to the conversation will drain me of all kinds of energy, likely ending in the person I’m talking with claiming they held the same belief that I do the whole time.

In both of these cases, I don’t need to speak. I can just listen. And eventually, I can decide that if we’re not heading toward the first case, I can stop listening. I can just opt out. It’s not a conversation, it’s a signaling competition.

I’ve been here before

I had a vinyl collection from 2007 until 2011, when I decided to divest. It was small, but had a lot of great stuff. Some of the records really did sound better, but mostly because the early 2000s were flooded with remasters that were getting on board the loudness wars and compressing the shit out of tracks.

I don’t honestly remember much going into the decision to dump the record player. I think in the end, I just wasn’t using it that much. It was work, and I had no love for a tea ceremony in my 20s..

The Rethinking

In recent years, I’ve been lightly rethinking vinyl. I like a collection (I have … hundreds? Thousands? of books even though most of my reading is with eBooks). I like well-made objects. And in my world of indie post-rock, math rock, and various other hyphenated music with guitar, heavy vinyl pressings are becoming more and more common. I love streaming music (RIP Radio)– I discover more new music now than at any other time in my life (except maybe the first 6 weeks in a college dorm abusing the hell out of OurTunes). But I don’t love how small artists are treated, financially, by Apple or Spotify. I hate that what I pay is not divided among the artists I listen to, but instead thrown into a global listen count. If I spend an entire month listening to nothing but covet, they should get all of the money from my monthly fee that goes to artists. It shouldn’t matter that I only played that album 10 times that month.

I can’t bring myself to pay for digital files of songs I already pay to access, and I can’t be bothered to painstakingly curate a huge MP3 library. Those days are gone. Although I have no opposition to pay for digital media or software in general, I’m not sure my principles extend to buying the same thing effectively twice. But vinyl could be an interesting way to buy something a little different and support the artists I love.

None of this was helped by moving to Hampden in Baltimore, which has a seemingly rad record store right next to my favorite bookstore. I often think about, and then studiously avoid walking in after spending far too much on books I’ve already read.

That small itch, supported by the fact that there’s plenty of gear to geek out over, probably would remain unscratched. But now I have a new problem.

The Enabler

Elsa is vinyl curious. And by vinyl curious, I mean that Elsa has decided that the vinyl experience is something that should be a part of our lives. She knows what she’s doing, fully aware that this is the kind of thing that takes prodding me just the tiniest amount to turn into a reality I sink time and money into. She has out her prod, and it’s electrified.

So now I have to figure out what record player to buy, whether or not I need to drop extra money on a special cartridge and supplies to clean dust off. I need to think about storage, where the record player will go, and how to make using it more convenient in our lives. I get to open about 100 tabs for the next month to just buy the obvious thing.

In the meantime, after years of feeling bad that I just “skipped” this part of music, I made a Band Camp account and started preordering some records.

Yes, I’m aware that Jess bought a record player when she went out to Seattle.

This is what ChatGPT is supposed to be good at

This morning I had a question that I would normally post online. It was as follows:

Ok, I need a little CSS help. I have a structure like this:

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<div class="post-item"></div>
<div class="post-item"></div>
<h2>Stuff</h2>

I want to add a margin after the last .div.post-item prior to an H2. I thought this would work:

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div.post-item:last-child {
  margin-bottom: var(--size-step-2);
}

It does not. Advice?

I would have gotten an answer, for sure. But ChatGPT gives me an answer and really taught me something. Here’s what I got back in an instant.

ChatGPT’s wrong answer

The :last-child pseudo-class selects the last child element of its parent, regardless of its class. So in your case, it’s selecting the last child div element, not specifically the last .post-item element.

To achieve what you want, you can use the adjacent sibling combinator (+) to select the h2 element that follows the last .post-item. Here’s how you can do it:

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.post-item:last-child + h2 { margin-top: var(--size-step-2); }

This CSS rule will select the h2 element that immediately follows the last .post-item element and apply the margin to it.

The problem is, this doesn’t work. It’ll keep telling me over and over again that .post-item + h2 or other variants will work. None did. I could do a broader selector (div + h2 works for my purpose, though I would prefer to have been more selective).

I still need my brain

The problem I actually had was structural. My page looked like this:

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h2
div.post-item
div.post-item
div.post-item
h2

And although that looks hierarchical, it’s not. The correct “fix” in my opinion, was to change the DOM structure to look like this:

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h2/
div.post-list
  div.post-item/
  div.post-item/
/div.post-list
h2/

And then use the following CSS:

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.post-list .post-item:first-child {
  margin-top: var(--size-step-0);
}

.post-list + h2 {
  margin-top: var(--size-step-2);
}

If I had asked my question on social media, would people have given me a better response? If I had Googled, would I have found my answer?

I’m not really sure if ChatGPT’s false direction saved or cost me time. But I do know that even relatively straightforward seeming coding questions are often hard to answer. Problems are tricky, and making them minimally reproducible and asking the right question is the hardest part. Looking at my page structure and realizing that it was too flat to use selectors how I wanted required understanding and intuition, some of which I had already, and some of which I had to learn and reinforce while playing around with my own site in context.

I have used Copilot a bit and been pretty impressed with a narrow set of specific tasks. But so far at least, most of what I’ve been able to get out of language models for coding is just a tiny bit more than a rubber duck. It’s like halfway between talking to myself and having a real person sit with me for fifteen minutes. Maybe that’s enough to be incredibly valuable. But so far, it’s kind of on the margins. When it hits, it’s magic. But you only get the magic once you know enough to ask really precise, smart, correct questions. And at my stage in my career and with my current knowledge, by the time I can confidently ask the right questions, the problems are as good as solved.

I haven’t read Keenan’s post yet, but I did read Troy’s followup, so I may as well confess: I don’t care about lyrics.

Troy writes:

The music is what ultimately spoke to me most. It always has been. I write the music first and the words that go over them are an afterthought.

I write music. I never care about the lyrics I write (and more often don’t bother writing them). When I listen to music, I have no idea what a song is about, and I don’t care. It doesn’t enter my mind, even if I can sing along to every word. For me, vocal performances are about creating sounds like any other instrument. The words don’t matter, except in cases where the sounds are impacted by the words. For example, a particular turn of phrase, emphasis, or pacing might catch my ear. But it’s my ears not my brain or heart that is captive– I’m noticing how the word choice leads to a percussive alliteration that leads to the inflection in the singing that makes the sounds I like.

I’ve discussed this with friends, not surprisingly, in reference to Taylor Swift, who Troy also brought up. I cannot relate to the adoration about storytelling and lyrics. So I’ve never been into Taylor Swift. I’ve never come across a Taylor Swift fan who doesn’t love lyrics and care about the poetry. I don’t even care about poetry.

This isn’t some badge of pride or honor. It’s an observation. There are seemingly two audiences for music: those for whom lyrics are a critical part of the experience and those who seem to not experience lyrics at all.

I’ve always been the latter.

Do tools become popular because they enable labor arbitrage? Maybe. But I don’t think it’s so simple. All tools are meant to lead to some kind of efficiency– they help us do more and do more complex things than before. If they didn’t it wouldn’t be much of a tool.

In all cases, improved efficiency and efficacy like this can be turned into some form of lowering labor costs.

Of course, Baldur isn’t saying “things that make work easier” are what cause labor arbitrage. Instead, it’s tools that enabled reduced specialization that seem to grow, in his view, problematically. But this just feels like moving the goal posts on an age old argument about “higher level languages”.

Are abstractions good? Often. Is reducing the amount of code and deep understanding you need to solve a problem a good things? Often. I’m so glad we don’t have to solve every problem associated with authorization from scratch and have much more safe defaults these days. I’m also glad we can write for the web without maintaining our own TCP/IP stacks or server (software).

I think it’s hard to point where the line is between “abstraction” and “labor arbitrage”. I’m not surprised at the sort of bimodal distribution on tooling – some aggressively unconcerned, and some aggressively concerned– because (at least in the modern Anglosphere), nuance seems dead. But I think that everyone seems to define the line between what is a useful higher order abstraction and what is labor arbitrage based on what was a “tool” during their formative time in tech and what came afterwards.

It’s Douglas Adams all over again:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

What am I hoping to do with writing on the web? Well, for one, it’s an outlet for my thoughts that I want to remember and return to. But that alone is a diary or a journal. These are also thoughts that I hope others will read and engage with in some form or fashion. These are ideas that are satisfying to me because sometimes whispering our thoughts quietly to ourselves is important and sometimes shouting them into the void is important and sometimes we hope the void shouts back.

For years, I had Google Analytics on my personal websites because it was free and worked fine. But for various reasons, I got turned off by the service and the idea of analytics for a bit. So I turned everything off. And being hosted on Micro.blog, despite crossposting to Twitter (when it was available) and Mastodon and just about wherever else, I broadly didn’t know about readership, followers, etc. Interactions were my main measure of reach– do people choose to reply to my posts on their platform of choice?

I think that’s largely my goal– I want to know if people are responding to my writing on their platform of choice.

But there’s a huge problem with this idea today– webmentions. Webmentions is a shit show of a standard. It seems to only kind of work. It definitely confuses and perplexes many writers who are bought into the IndieWeb in spirit but are not writing their own (seemingly always PHP) CMS to implement standards. Folks who are writers first and non-developer tinkerers are met with bad plug-ins, inconsistent behavior, poorly documented inconsistencies, and a whole manner of things that cause them to give up ¹. Still, others have decided the very idea of a webmention, especially extended to social posts, and specifically displaying that others have linked (publicly) to your blog post is a privacy concern.

Why are webmentions a problem? Because if I want to know that people are responding to my writing on their platform of choice, I want to know when people write on their blogs and link to my content. Of course I do… my own blog is my personal platform of choice for commenting on the web! Webmentions was supposed to solve this– when someone links to my site, they add the right classes to that link and their server lets my server know that they’ve linked to my site or a specific post. Brilliant– pingbacks/trackbacks for the open web. But it’s just not working and it’s not complete enough. Adoption is low and horribly inconsistent. I’m glad I receive webmentions, but they are exceedingly rare.

Which brings me to my defense of analytics and my own use of tinylytics.app. I don’t care about the number of “hits” my blog gets. Considering how many places I post my content and my own hope that RSS is how most people read my site, hits are almost certainly no more than directionally accurate about readership. What I do care about are referrers. Without webmentions proactively telling me when folks on the web mention my content, I can see if anyone who read that post clicked on the link to my site and ended up here. I have discovered at least three blogs in the last year that linked to me that I now follow through this method. Somehow they found what I wrote. They linked to it, either with short commentary or even a fully on response, and then, because at least one person clicked the link over to my site, I learned about their blog post.

Without analytics on referrers, I’d never know these people were a part of my small circle of the internet in conversation with my writing. So for now, I’m all in on having analytics. It’s one of the few reliable ways to know that someone had written about your content. I still want people to respond on their platform of choice, and I don’t want to lose their voice or conversation.

April is a good month for “good enough”. Most years, including this one, April is when I celebrate Passover. During the seder, we sing an over 1000 year old song, Dayenu – “it would have been enough”.

This year “enough” has been on my mind. My parents are nearing retirement and I am nearing middle age. Both of those feel like milestones to think about “what is enough”.

I feel bombarded with messaging about “enough”– all the new crop of pop-financial advice is about “enough”. Die with Zero, Living Your Rich Life, and FIRE are all, to a degree, about understanding what is “enough” when it comes to money. My own experience, being fortunate enough to see my income and wealth grow over time, is it’s hard to feel “enough”. My mind knows that I can live with less fear, but my body still feels nervous, like ruin and catastrophe is always around the corner.

My two nervous systems have a different idea about what is enough.

I’ve continued to struggle with my weight and my body like I have all my life. For me, it’s not what I eat so much, but it’s about portion control. I am hungry– often. It’s hard to feel satisfied. I want to be entertained by my food and can’t make myself have a purely instrumental relationship with food.

My mind and my stomach and my body all have different ideas about what is “enough”

I let this blog post sit in almost this exact state for most of April. I sat on my blog redesign for almost 6 months before just releasing it as is for the same reason.

My energy level to write and my idealized version of this blog post (and blog) have different ideas about what is “enough”.

This month’s indieweb carnival is actually about “good enough”. But I don’t really have problem with the “good” part– I have problems with the “enough” part. If it’s enough, it’s always good. And my problem is really about allowing myself to recognize and feel when we’ve hit “good” so that I can say “enough”.

The pandemic forced a change. I was no longer commuting a mile to an office each day for work, work happened at home. I lived that life before I moved to Baltimore, but at that time Elsa and I lived together in a small one bedroom condo and my desk was in the bedroom. Working from my bedroom was not always great. But this time, we had a large house and I could set myself up at home. Previously, I had a small desk on the top floor where Elsa kept her office. Working from home full time meant making a more permanent space, hopefully with greater separation between Elsa and myself.

So we made an adjustment I had thought about for some time, moving all of our gym equipment out from one of the smaller bedrooms and up to the loft where my desk was. Down went my desk into the bedroom and I now had a dedicated room at home for me. It is clearly my office, but it also opened up another opportunity.

From the time I was 14 until college, I played guitar for hours every day. Slowly through college, I played a bit less all the time– it’s hard to be loud in dorms and apartments, but I still played all the time and was deeply invested in my identity as a guitar player. But grad school came, and so did work, and suddenly I basically stopped, almost entirely. I know that this happens to a lot of folks, but to this day I remain surprised. Guitar was a huge part of my identity, not just a thing I did sometimes. I played in bands all throughout high school. I obsessed over gear. I used to drive to find new guitar shops or even return to ones I frequent to see what new used equipment was there and play for hours. But a part of living is shedding parts of ourselves to make room for new things and somehow guitar was a casualty.

Like many folks who rediscovered hobbies during the pandemic, guitar crept back into my life. In this instance, however, I’m not so sure how much of my playing was about having time. I think a fair bit of my resurgence came from having space. As I put together my office, rather than fill the walls just with art or furniture, I hung my primary electric and acoustic guitars. They were now right behind, in reach, in a room with a door. Just that difference was enough to start me playing a bit again.

I’ve never taken up guitar like I used to–there’s very little which I can dedicate even one hour a day to. But I’ve been more consistent than in years. Some weeks it may only be twenty minutes of noodling, other weeks I pick it up for a bit every day. Slowly, I’ve at least started to redevelop and maintain my calluses. I don’t play nearly as well as I used to– I can feel the difference in my dexterity and confidence– but I’m getting to passably close to where I was.

For the first time in over a decade, I’m starting to play with other people again. The last few Saturday afternoons I’ve piled into a small basement with my guitar and amp and hung out playing with a drummer, two keyboardist/synth players, and another guitarist. And we’ve been improvising over a few things and writing some new music. It’s music I’d listen to, and I’m having a blast. Yesterday we played for almost 15 minutes straight off of a small riff I wrote in April of 2020. It was just something I recorded to my phone because it sounded cooler than I expected. I was playing it to practice my picking and timing, and now I’ve got my own song (really our song now– it’s gone so much beyond my start point) stuck in my head.

It’s funny. My senior year of high school I went to the gym to lift weights at least a couple of times a week. I was playing volleyball every day after school in the spring. And most weekends, and even some weekdays, I got together with friends and played guitar and wrote music. Twenty plus years later, I’m going to the gym 3 days a week to lift weights. I’m playing volleyball 2-3 nights a week. And most weekends, I am getting together with friends and playing guitar and writing music.

I am not sure if the 20 years I spent (largely) away from these things would have been better if I tried to keep it up. I think it was important for me to grow out of the things I loved to do for a while. But about 6 years ago I started lifting weights again. And about 3 years ago I started playing volleyball again. And although I started playing guitar at home a bit more starting 4 years ago as well, it’s really just the last few months I’ve started playing with other people and writing music again. All of these things are utterly recreational. I can do them entirely with a joy and ease that I didn’t have when I was younger. I have returned to them all way more willing to be silly and without expectations. And I’m just having so much fun.

A Partial Redesign

Site redesign is at least partially done. I realized right now that my idea of only showing seven days of posts on my home page doesn’t quite work.

1. I’m not really sure how to filter to the last seven days of content effectively.
2. I don’t post every day, and the site won’t be rebuilt if I don’t post.

Still, I like the idea of having seven days on my home page, with some days just saying “No posts were written on this day” for any previous days and “No posts have been written yet today.” for the current day.

There’s almost certainly a way to do this with date math in Hugo and triggering regular builds, but I don’t think it’s worth it. This is an idea I’ll keep in mind. Much like my desire to have working URLs for things like /year/ showing all posts in that year, /year/month showing all posts in that year-month, and /year/month/day showing all posts on that day, this is one of those Hugo limitations that makes me consider writing my own CMS.

Notable Changes Around Here

I have been playing with this design locally for a while. I came to like it so much, I swapped to this color scheme on the site like 6 months ago. Today, I decided things were at least “close enough” to move things to the main site.

The primary changes are:

• I am using a fixed width font now across the whole site for all content. This font is Berkeley Mono, which I paid for and have used as a my main fixed-width font locally for quite a while. Please don’t steal it from my site– you need a license to use it, which you can purchase from US Graphics.
• I am using background colors on my headers. I like them so much, I hope it’ll encourage me to write posts worthy of having headers down to H4.
• I’ve added some block drawing/block characters to the dates on the homepage, taking advantage of some of Berkeley Mono’s cool built in stuff. I have also switched from a more human “April 14, 2024” to ISO8601 (2024-04-14) dates to continue with my retro, almost brutalist flair.

Pages that Flex the Design

I think my Archive, which I’m not generally fond of, looks great now. I’m also happy with Uses. One of my favorite posts, Delimited files are hell also looks pretty good. I think it shows off how nicely code blocks blend with and stick out from the rest of the site. This was a major concern of mine going to a fixed-width font everywhere.

Where it falls down

I still don’t love my index page. It feels crowded. I know how much work has gone into it over time, but it’s still not quite right. One idea I’m playing with is removing the site title entirely and possibly moving the navigation to the bottom or to a menu button. Neither seems quite right.

Ideas and criticism welcome

My design skill is the worst– I have enough taste to know things aren’t as polished or “correct” as I’d like, but not enough skill with CSS or design to get that final spit shine. So I’m more than happy to take ideas on how to improve things. I am glad to have moved almost entirely to using a few CSS variables versus all the hand tweaked sizes I had splattered all over the place. It’s not a solid as I’d like, but with a bit of help from some online calculators, this is about the prettiest top-of-the-CSS file I’ve ever written:

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:root {
  --color-primary: #21A179;
  --color-content: #ffffff;
  --color-background: #1E1E24;
  --color-links: #8093f1;
  --color-visited: #ef476f;
  --color-inactive: #81ae9d;
  --size-step-0: clamp(1rem, calc(0.96rem + 0.22vw), 1.13rem);
  --size-step-1: clamp(1.25rem, calc(1.16rem + 0.43vw), 1.5rem);
  --size-step-2: clamp(1.56rem, calc(1.41rem + 0.76vw), 2rem);
  --size-step-3: clamp(1.95rem, calc(1.71rem + 1.24vw), 2.66rem);
  --size-step-4: clamp(2.44rem, calc(2.05rem + 1.93vw), 3.55rem);
}

And yes, this section is partially to have a code block in this post because reasons.

Today I learned about the :has selector. This is helping me keep times aligned on my index page when some posts have titles and some do not. Posts without titles get margin-top: var(--size-step-4) for the time stamps. But using this handy selector, I can set the margin to the next size of H1 elements when there’s a title:

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.date:has(+ .post-title) {
  margin-top: var(--size-step-4);
}

I’ve been holding on to a response to Greg Morris’s post about how some things are just too easy now. I have a pretty large set of ideas around how rapidly removing friction and transaction costs in an increasingly digital world has had a host of negative consequences. I don’t think these consequences largely outweigh the benefits, but I do think many of us are scrambling with uneasiness or unhappiness with our destination post-internet connectedness. It’s important that we think about how the things have played out and come up with new culture and structure to refine the world back toward a better compromise.

I just haven’t had the brain space to sit, write, edit, and really explain my thinking. It’s an easy conversation over a beer, but a hard one to put out in writing.

Sure enough, Greg comes back today with a post about embracing complexity. Of course, because this one goes meta about blogging and the internet, it feels way easier to respond to.

Now, let’s consider responding to a social media post. As previously mentioned, this task is overly simple, allowing users to quickly tap a button and share their thoughts with minimal effort. I believe adding complexity to this process, such as requiring a more thoughtful response posted on one’s blog, could balance the effort with the desire to engage. While it might not eliminate all frivolous responses, it could significantly reduce them.

He continues later:

This complexity reduces my posting frequency since I now require significant motivation to write and publish, leading to many potential posts remaining in Apple Notes.

I am confident that this is a complexity I do not want to embrace. If I make it hard to post to my own website, I don’t. That may not be so bad– the world is not worse off for my lack of posting. But what’s crumby is that I still often want to write or say something. I still often want to share a photo or a thought. And for me, if that complexity exists on my blog, eventually, I will decide to still post but somewhere else. And I think posting somewhere else is much, much worse most of the time.

So for me, posting somewhere I control and on my own site has to be easy. Ideas that want to be expressed that are simple are simply posted. Thoughtful responses are complex enough. Being thoughtful is not easy. Making the mechanics of sharing a thoughtful post complex doesn’t enforce being thoughtful, it ensures being thoughtful feels like a waste of time and effort. It’s one more thing I have to do after the hard work of writing. If I make blogging hard, I won’t blog, quality be damned.

I do think a whole host of things have been made easy to ill effect. I don’t think it’s great that work can contact me all of the time. I think it’s worse that this is a pervasive ability, so that customers/clients are always connected and this can impose a sense of needing to “keep up” with that pace as well. I think about systems and processes we build to do things a thousand times that I wish we’d just do once, with higher quality– the world is filled with this. Most of the things I view as problematic have been areas where we’ve managed to massively increase the pace of our world.

And yet, when it comes to socializing, and I do view blogging as a form of socializing, I can’t help but to think how much lonelier a friction-filled world would feel.

On a recent Accidental Tech Podcast member special, John Siracusa walked through his window management strategy. It was a fun episode, going over how John tends to have many (I think honestly over a hundred) windows open at the same time on his Mac using a single space and monitor. He does a lot of window sizing and arrangement that allows for easy click handles because of how windows freeform overlap that’s pretty neat. I can’t say it’s having a big impact on how I work, but I can say it made me think again about how I set up my computing world.

Similarly, on the most recent episode of the same program, the “after show” (not gated) was about why two hosts, Marco and John, don’t use multiple monitors. I found myself largely nodding along at their rationale as someone whose journey was quite like Marcos– back in 2005, I was using 2 x 17" LCD monitors and desperate for space, but somewhere around the 27" monitor time I switched to a single monitor with no desire for more.

Unlike John and Marco, I heavily use a macOS feature called spaces which is a part of the feature known as Mission Control. This feature is more generally known as “virtual desktops”. If you haven’t used virtual desktops before, the best explanation I can provide is imagine having two screens and setting up your window just so. Now imagine instead of those screens being physical an always present, you can use a keyboard shortcut or gesture to swap those screens. Now imagine there is no limit to the number of these screens you have. That’s virtual desktops.

I first used virtual desktops in the fall of 2006 at the Sun Lab at Brown University. There was some Debian-flavored minimal Linux distribution used on each of those computers used for computer science classes. ¹ The default window management system was a very plain setup of fvwm. But one thing that was there by default was a 3x3 grid of nine virtual desktops. I wish I had taken a lot more with me from that computing setup than I did, but one thing I immediately wanted to emulate were these virtual desktops. I immediately downloaded some cracked software to do this on my Windows machine, and it was one of the driving forces that led me quickly to use Linux at home.

I still miss when macOS permitted spaces to be setup in a 2x2 grid rather than a ribbon of infinite spaces. And I still miss the 3x3 grid setup I used for years. But I know so many people who use Macs and never use spaces. So I thought I’d document a little bit about how I use them here.

Big Picture

I’ll describe a bit about each of my four “desktop types” below. But overall, I have an “email” screen to my left, a “primary screen” with the majority of my communications and browsing, followed by any number of “focus” or “work” screens to the right, ending with a set of “fun” screens that contain things like Music or other apps I occasionally switch to for control purposes.

Email

I use three apps right now for email– Mail.app, Mimestream, and Outlook. This is because my personal email is on Fastmail, I have some email accounts on Gmail (including my old work account) and my new work email is Outlook only. I used to just have Mimestream and Mail.app on this page, but the addition of Outlook is a new necessity. I don’t mind Outlook the app very much, but I do hate the service. That said, I put email all together because it’s a thing I want to intentionally go to, not a thing I want in my face all the time. That said, I do frequently need to go to email, so I like having it close at hand. During the workday, when I’m not in any focus modes, my work email can send me a notification on my Mac– not my phone, and not my watch. I can decide from there to head left, take care of it, and back right out of email. Out of sight, mostly, and mostly out of mind.

Primary

I spend a good chunk of my time on my so-called “primary” screen which is actually very work light. This is actually my “communications center” where I have Slack, Messages, some social media for scrolling, and my main browser windows. Any time I’m doing work that’s web-based or communications oriented, this where I live. As a manager in these modern times, most of my work is communications or web oriented. Any form of non-focused work happens here, and it’s my “home base” for computing. It’s messy, and there’s a lot of ephemeral stuff that ends up on this page, but the above diagram has most of the “almost always open” stuff on it, roughly how I arrange things.

Focus

I have any number of “focus” screens at any given time depending on my work. This is often Nova, RStudio, or iAWriter, for general coding, R coding, or writing. But it also can be a ton of iTerm 2 windows, browsers, or any combination of the above. This is space for focus tasks. By putting this to the right of “primary”, in my brain, moving left is moving “up” the distraction tree. Moving right is largely moving into more focused, digging in tasks. I almost never have more than three focus desktops and I strive for a single one. This is the one thing I’m meant to be working on, with everything setup to focus on that once I’m in that space, and no other distractions. If I need a browser for my work, the browser window in this space is only task related browsing.

As a general rule, if I expect a task to take more than 30 minutes, I move it into a focus space.

The exceptions to “right is focus”

All the way to the right, at the end of my chain, are applications that I lightly interact with but want open. Things like Apple Music or MarsEdit often live out here open in their own spaces. While I’m showing these windows as “overlapping”, these are often one-space apps. I sometimes want a full view of my calendar in Fantastical to do more complex scheduling. I sometimes want to browse Apple Music versus just hitting play/pause/love/next (all of which I can do from a keyboard layer or the Stream Deck). I sometimes want to write a long blog post.

Conclusions?

I’m not sure if I have any, but this is a rough view into how I work. I’d love to hear from others about their setups.

I wish I could have used the actual ASCII versions of the images above, but I was not willing to rework my site theme to make them appear well. These were all made with Monodraw and exported as SVGs. I then used neovim to replace rgb(0, 0, 0) with rgb(255, 255, 255) so that they would work with my dark-mode only website. All of this is bad and I feel bad, but I didn’t have the patience to figure out a better option on a Sunday afternoon.

I actually think Apple loves that you can use a Mac and iPhone this long and still be happy. It’s probably about the edge, because in today’s world security patching alone puts a huge burden at some point. But I think Apple wants its products to last and loves having users talk about their 8 year old Mac.

How many 8 year old Windows laptops exist?

How many people can talk fondly about even a four year old non-Mac laptop? Very few. Meanwhile, excluding the bad keyboard era blip, keeping a Mac for four years has been an easy choice since the SSD switch. Even 6 years is pretty easy for anyone who is just a bit careful with their laptop to ensure longevity.

I buy a new machine roughly every 2.5-3.5 years. I find this is the sweet spot for residual trade in value and meaningful upgrades. But it’s been a long time since I’ve felt a need to do that. Part of my loyalty to Apple products is precisely because they last. I think Apple knows this.

Gracie is still with us, though her decline continues. Multiple times I’ve thought, “If this is not one day, but two days like this in a row, it’s time.” Holding the power to decide when life ends and death begins for someone you love who cannot express themselves is challenging. We are playing a mix between dog nurse, dog psychologist, and dog priest. This kind of extended end time takes its toll– I don’t sleep well because every movement she makes at night means she could be getting ready to vomit or need to go for a walk to avoid an accident. That’s not literally true six of seven nights a week, but it only takes one night to set my nervous system on high alert.

She has had quality visits from my sister and my parents. We brought Elsa’s mom home a bit early– she’s arriving today– so that she can have quality time with her as well. When we made that decision, I was certain Monday or Tuesday would be the day, but now I’m less sure.

The big news is that Allovue was acquired by PowerSchool in January. This marks a transition after almost exactly ten years working on the same project with the same people. In a lot of ways, the work isn’t different– we’re aligned on mission and vision, especially in the near-ish term, and I’m working with the same team. But in other ways, everything is different. I’m going from being a clear leader at small company where every bit of history and every decision was one I witnessed or partook in to being a middle manager in a very large company. I remain optimistic and I am continuing to adjust. Being in management in general is kind of tough here, because I’m trying to help people navigate the change while going through it myself.

I have continued to deepen my Elixir knowledge, bit by bit, and it remains a language that makes me feel happy. The speed with which I can move from idea to prototype is great. It’s easy to look at complex code and consider how to pull it a part and make it better (almost too easy to spend all of my time tweaking and refactoring). It’s a pleasure to read. You can write garbage just like any other language, but the underlying elegance and expressiveness is impressive. You can go very far only understanding basic data structures and using Ecto. That’s the way I think it should be – for me, programming has always been about shuffling data around and Elixir jives with that, so it jives with me.

I’ve been sitting on a partial redesign of this site for quite some time. I became so annoyed with myself for having not completed it that I went ahead and applied the new (darker) color scheme a couple of months ago just to feel like I made some progress. Maybe it’ll actually roll out in 2024.

One thing that’s changed definitively is I now use Nova for almost all of my non-R code. I was much more heavily using neovim before, and I still do whenever I’m already in terminal land. I’ve just found it really hard to get things working how I like in neovim for a few key features. Nova’s vim binding support is terrible, and I still find that very frustrating, but the rest of the app sits much better with me than VS Code has, even if I’m missing out on the extension library.

We’ve got some upcoming trips to Chicago, Providence, and Nashville I’m looking forward to. The plan is still to go to London in July, although it appears we’ve chosen the absolute peak of the peak of travel season so I’m starting to second guess myself on that one.

Lately, I’ve had a hard time with consistency. My diet has been inconsistent. Getting to the gym and volleyball has been inconsistent. Reading has been inconsistent. Writing on my blog has been inconsistent. I’m hoping I can start to find some kind of groove again in the next few months.

A couple of days ago marked ten years since I met Jess at SXSWEdu.

She wrote this reflection on LinkedIn. My own reflections are below that.

10 years ago today I tapped Jason Becker on the shoulder at a conference between taco breaks and the rest, as they say, is history.

Casual observers think Jason and I agree on everything. This has become a running inside joke because the truth is that we have frequent, vehement disagreements in the same direction. We argue intensely with-and-not-against each other about problems and solutions. If we’re accused of sharing a brain, we must each have complementary halves because we often approach problems from polar opposite perspectives– but we know two heads (and at least one whole brain, on a good day) are better than one. And because we trust that the other has thought deeply about their perspective, we work hard to understand each other’s position. Together, we end up with a more complete understanding of a problem and get aligned on a path forward.

For two people who love numbers, we never keep score; we’re playing an infinite game.

If you love your work, I hope you’re lucky enough to find someone (not Jason, sorry, find your own co-conspirator) who puts up a good fight; this kind of creative tension is how good ideas become great and bad ideas end up in their rightful place in the discard pile.

Jason, thank you for being my best sparring partner and the one who showed me the value of a great editor and co-creator. You’re the five to my three. I’m glad I tricked you into working for Allovue all those years ago.

🥂 Cheers to making things together, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

(These are the only two occasions Jason has worn a tie in the past 10 years– April 2014 and December 2023. Yes, Jason’s first official day of work ended up in a cannabis grow facility. We might make a guest appearance in a documentary about it. It’s been a JOURNEY, ok?)

My thoughts:

Spending ten years pursuing the same vision at the same company takes passion, determination, and belief. I have only been able to have all three because something more precious came along with it– partnership and friendship that always challenges me and that refuses to accept the bar I set for myself.

The first time Jess Gartner and I met, we spoke for about five minutes. I remember telling Elsa I just met someone with a great idea. And this may be apocryphal, but I remember also telling Elsa it was a great example of why I was never an entrepreneur myself. For all my love of strategy and problem solving, I never seemed to think of an idea that was worth doing. I know for sure I thought, “She found something worth doing.”

The second time Jess and I met, she flew to Providence to have coffee with me. In a classic Jess Gartner move, she claimed she had to “be there anyway” (bullshit). She told me that day that she saw “C-level potential in me” before I knew what that meant.

So much of my own success of the last ten years comes from Jess seeing things in me I didn’t know were options. And then she makes them happen before I even catch on to her plans. I like to think I do a bit of the same when it comes to ensuring our company and product deliver on her, and now our, vision.

Thank you.

• I write the things I feel like writing
• in a place that feels easy to write
• with posts available in places that make it as easy for others to read my posts as I want it to be to write them
• and create a website experience that reflects who I am, which I’d like if it was someone else’s.

That’s what I think personal blogging should be like.

Jess and I went to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe back in November of 2019. It was such a bizarre and fun experience. I could have spent many more hours there than we did. I went in knowing nothing about what I was going to experience. I have mixed feelings about its continued expansion.

Part of what felt so interesting about Meow Wolf was it being this huge, expansive, comprehensive projected, grounded in this one space. For something so complex, it also felt completely haphazard. There was an element of anti-design that made it seem both more realistic/immersive and like it had just kept growing organically, purely by passion.

The idea of repeating something that felt tethered, unique, and layered like that– it removes a bit of the shine. It rubs off a sense of authenticity, even if that authenticity was equally manufactured the first go around.

I’m glad I experienced Meow Wolf how I did. We had an extra half day due to work travel schedules. I had no idea what it was– we were just told this is a fun thing to do in Santa Fe. We drove up to a very unassuming building in a very unassuming parking lot, with nothing of note around. We walked in and paid our ticket fee, and I still didn’t really know what it was. And suddenly, there’s just a house inside this building. It’s dark and there’s sound being piped in. And you walk into this strange house, and for the next two or so hours, everything you looked at, touched, peeled back, and wandered through was stranger and stranger. It began seeming like a completely random collage constructed by many hands with many styles and many visions, but slowly congeals into a cohesive and thought through idea. There is a narrative. There is a theme. Everything seems to fit, even when it really doesn’t.

I haven’t been to another Meow Wolf, and maybe I never will. But it’s a weird idea to replicate. I’m not sure it can be magical in the same way twice, and I’m not sure it can be magical transported and built anew. Maybe if you’ve never been, you can still have the experience I did, in whichever city you find yourself experiencing it. Part of me thinks not.

Software quality is a funny thing. Reflecting on the Six Colors report card, some folks have persistent, hard to solve bugs that sound horrific. Others, like myself, rarely, if ever have anything like these experiences. It’s hard to know whether these are differences in what we use, differences in our attitudes about software, or what exactly is going on.

State is the enemy of software, and it’s often far too complex to actually replicate or even understand.

“Works on my machine” is as dissatisfying and frustrating as it is real.

Every year, Jason Snell at Six Colors publishes his Apple Report Card. I always enjoy looking at what the commentariat have to say about where things are and seeing trends overtime.

I really like how Jarrod basically writes a version of the Clockwise Podcast each week as though he’s a guest. I’ve long thought, “I should do that sometimes, too,” but I never do.

So instead, I decided I’m going to participate in the Six Colors report card this year. I’m going to expand out a bit from Apple though and rank my experience in 2023 with all of tech by these categories. Of course, I’m primarily ¹ an Apple user, but I think that in many places that’s a bit incidental. I use those products because they best meet my needs, and my evaluation of where things are in 2023 has to do with what I want in each of these categories and whether any one is supplying that.

There are 12 categories rated from 1 to 5, with 5 being the best rating. They are:

• Mac (personal computers)
• iPhone (smart phones)
• iPad (tablets)
• Watch (stuff on your wrist)
• Apple TV (entertainment for communal and big screen viewing)
• Services (things you pay monthly for)
• HomeKit (smart home)
• Hardware reliability
• Software quality
• Dev relations (how well are big tech companies interacting with the folks who build things on their platforms)
• Environment/Social issues (how well are big tech companies responding to challenges that go beyond maximizing shareholder return under capitalism)
• Wearables (stuff on your body parts that are not your wrist)

I have added parenthetical comments to each category to explain the broader context in which I’m rating 2023. And also, since I haven’t done this before, 2023 is maybe too precise. I would say this is more of “how do I feel abut where things stand in 2023” versus “how do I rank what has happened in 2023”.

Mac (Personal Computers) 4.5/5

I can’t remember a time when personal computers were this good. Laptops are crazy powerful, have excellent battery life, and are reasonably sized. Their screens are incredible, such that there seems like there’s very little room to improve except black levels (OLED seems like the next step). The promise of USB-C is here, and I have just a tiny number of devices yet that require adapters or a USB-C to USB-something-else cable. I have been trying to live the laptop plus Mac mini lifestyle for some time– and with Apple Silicon, this has become a reality. I do not run into bottlenecks when it comes to power. I just wish Apple put better cameras into their products. The Studio Display camera and MacBook Pro cameras are just ok. My Opal looks much better, but it’s also completely unreliable.

Software is a place I’m less happy with– but not really system software. There are still some quirks, but 99 out of 100 days it’s not macOS I’m fighting, but bad, mostly third-party software. My complaints about Zoom are endless. My complaints about macOS mostly stop at System Settings, which I practically speaking is something I rarely think about or interact with. Oh, and Notifications Center– what a total piece of shit. I don’t love any text editor. Neovim is great, but I still find it hard to tweak and get setup and learn new capabilities of plug-ins. Nova is so damn close to being perfect, but its vim-mode is super lacking in the kinds of things my fingers just expect to be there, making navigation just a pain ². VS Code looks and feels bad to me. Applications like Dropbox have become absolutely shit-ware. Apple Music is there.

There are, however, rock solid stalwarts.

iPhone (smart phones) 4/5

Widgets and focus modes have combined to transform my relationship to my phone. What felt like chaos has calmed considerably. I have an automatic focus mode that turns on at 6 PM every night on weekdays and all weekend (Down Time), a Sleep mode, and a Travel mode. Each has their own Home Screen. Only my default mode has any apps outside of the dock (and even then, only 2 rows). Otherwise, I’m all Widgets. My phone shows me a limited set of data I know or need (Fantastical/Outlook Calendar, Carrot Weather, Apple Fitness/Lose It, Things, and Day One). Notifications are largely locked down to a few people.

Battery life is largely adequate, and having low power mode turn on when I hit the Travel focus is a big help. The Action Button is nice for taking pictures. The camera is not as good as I want, but it remains the best camera I own and takes the best pictures (and especially video) of anything I’ve ever owned.

Phone hardware is boring, but phone (OS) software has gotten meaningfully better over time.

Apps have stagnated. I’m not sure if this is just being in a mature market or what, but I don’t think there’s been a lot of major changes in what third-party apps I use or their capabilities in some time. It’s almost certainly market maturity. I have all my needs well met by apps I already have, many of which I’ve been using for years and years. Most of which have not seen a release that makes a big impact on my work flow in just as long. The big exceptions I can think of are the app Flighty, which I have been a subscriber of since day one and does continue to improve, and apps that have added Dynamic Island features and/or better widgets over time.

I’m not sure what I expect from the app world. I suspect without interesting hardware that enables something new, we’ve just reached the point where we understand what functions computers this size will play in our lives and have mature apps to meet each of those needs.

I don’t really see much that I’m jealous of on the Android side of the world. Folding phones don’t appeal to me– I think folding tablets are far more interesting– and while some camera system are clearly neck and neck or better than the iPhones (for stills), it’s not a difference that would drive me to something new.

Phones– I think we should consider them a solved problem, for now.

iPad (tablets) 3.5/5

I use my tablet every day. The 10.9" iPad Pro (I don’t even remember which one) with the keyboard case is a great size for me. Bigger enough to use on the couch or on planes as a laptop replacement when iOS is all I need, small enough to use in bed. Because I have bad eyesight, having a bigger-than-my-phone device for things like reading RSS feeds is great. The iPad is not a power tool for me, and never has been. I can get a particular kind of work done– reading, writing, and communication can live there pretty well.

We’ve gone a year without new iPads, but I’ve gone several years not really needing my iPad to do more. There’s plenty of room for improvement here.

I liked the iPad to be thinner and lighter– the iPad with the keyboard that has a track pad should weigh as much as the iPad Pro alone does today. I’d like it to have better battery life when doing things other than watching video. I cannot believe the keyboard doesn’t come in more, better colors at this stage. The front camera needs to be better and along the top when in landscape mode.

My Kindle is great and disappointing in equal measure. It’s the expensive one, which I can’t bother to look up. It hasn’t changed in a long time and it was way too much money. But I like that it’s water proof/resistant/whatever. I really like that it has physical buttons. I like the flush screen and the DPI is pretty good. The software is absolute trash, but most of the time that doesn’t matter when I’m just in a book reading. An e-ink device is great for me. I have terrible eyes– pretty bad keratoconus and corneal scarring that requires scleral lenses to correct. That means my vision after I take my contacts out at night is pretty rough. Having a display that does not cause eye strain and the ability to set text to an enormous size is great. I just wish the hardware I wanted existed. It really would just be an upgrade/update to the existing Kindle I have. It needs faster software. A browser that kind of works for the few times you need it in a pinch. Support for more modern wifi standards.

Tablets overall aren’t that interesting right now to me either. I don’t think I want a touch screen Mac (nor would I be ideologically opposed to one). That says to me I’m not seeking a tablet to be great at the things my Mac is or vice versa. If my eyesight was better, I might not need a device that’s bigger than my phone and works for mostly of the same thing (though I do like a good keyboard). I use my tablet instead of my Mac also because of eyesight. Maybe my satisfaction stems from my specific use and needs.

Watch (stuff on your wrist) 2/5

I am happy with the fitness features. Apple Pay is great. The HomeKey stuff is amazing (though I wish there were more locks that support it).

But I don’t really like my watch. It hasn’t changed form factor in a while. Battery life is just ok. I wear it every day for the fitness tracking and sleep tracking, but if I’m honest, I wish I could swap it for some other fitness band. The problem is, those all suck right now. The Apple Watch apparently cleared out the wrist. Elsa has an Oura ring– I think it’s too big to be something I’d want. The Watch has conveniences, but its hold on me is definitely the most tenuous. At this stage, nothing exists that I actually want, but this is the area where I am most “winnable” by some other product– or maybe no product at all.

AppleTV (entertainment for communal and big screen viewing) 3.5/5

I hate the Roku interface. I hate my smart TV’s interface. The Apple TV interface is not bad. The remote is not so bad. But the number of issues I have with HDCP stuff (go to play a video, get audio but all black screen, or all the colors are wrong etc) is insane. I have replaced all the cables, my equipment is modern, and this is a thing that has gotten much worse over time. Is it the Apps? Is it streaming services themselves? Is it the hardware? I don’t know, but it makes my experience bad regularly. It drives the other people in my household nuts, regularly.

AppleTV+ the service is really solid. It has a shockingly high hit rate for me. I hear a lot of people say there’s not enough content– but I find it refreshing to actually know when new shows come out, especially since I end up liking so many of them. Netflix has tons of shows, and I can’t ever figure out what’s worth watching. Most of what I try… isn’t.

Services (things you pay monthly for) 3.5/5

Apple One is a pretty ok deal. The price increase kind of sucks, but all services are getting to be too much money. I am much more annoyed at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc than Apple One– that tells me that I think I’m getting my money’s worth. I have been paying for iCloud so my family can backup their devices. It works great for that. Apple Photos works great. I like News+ – I have other subscriptions like Dwell, The Atlantic, etc that I can read in there. I like the crosswords. Apple Music needs way more algorithmic playlists – Spotify is just plain better at discovery– but it’s totally usable. Fitness+ is pretty great, even if I don’t use it.

Mostly, I think that things work well and are pretty high quality. Spotify is a better service (if terrible App), but not so much that it’s worth paying for on top of Apple Music, in my opinion.

My dissatisfaction is entirely with the rest of the world of services. They’re all getting too expensive for too little value. I’m tapped out on monthly fees, like a lot of folks. I’m just starting to feel like the juice is not worth the squeeze.

HomeKit (smart home) 2/5

HomeKit mostly works for the few things I ask it to do, but it’s terrible overall. HomeKey is great. Lutron Caseta lights work. HomeKit Secure Video should be great, but my Logitech Circle View devices cannot stay connected to Wifi for shit. I don’t really trust smart home stuff to do a lot or do a lot with complexity. My Ecobee seems totally fine, and I can’t think of a reason to upgrade it. My “smart shades” in the bedroom are great, but I entirely use them via a timer and the fact that they work with HomeKit doesn’t really matter.

Maybe I’m unimaginative, but also all of this stuff seems like a set of solutions without a problem. I’m amazed I can’t do something to hook into the alarm system wiring that exists already in my house to have something without a monthly fee. I’m mad at Chamberlain’s MyQ BS. Overall, the home is smarter than it used to be, but also, all of this stuff feels like a CES demonstration.

Hardware reliability 5/5

All of the physical things I buy works better than any hardware I’ve bought in the past, but if it goes bad it does have to be replaced. Appliances in particular seem to have dropped off in quality, but everything else in my life that’s a physical product seems to work pretty great. Consumer electronics are much more likely to fail because the company that made them attached them to a shit service that they stop supporting or the company goes out of business than something goes physically wrong with a product. Apple’s stuff is built as well as I can ever remember, but so is most of the rest of stuff I buy. Maybe it’s because I spend too much.

Software quality 3.5/5

It’s all over the place. The web is kind of shitty. Webkit and Electron-based stuff is everywhere and also kind of shitty. A lot of things crash without good logging or lack controls to help me to understand what’s happening and how to trigger what I want. There’s no manual sync button. There are no informative progress bars. There are some weird persistent bugs (how many times in my life will I only be able to dismiss a notification by typing sudo killall NotificationCenter?!). The HDCP errors I get trying to play back video drive me insane. There are still websites that don’t work well in Safari on macOS. Shortcuts is weird as hell. Better than Automator? Sort of.

But overall, I feel like my experience of using computers is one where the computer mostly gets out of my way and I have powerful tools to do my work. So for all the paper cuts, things are really not so bad.

Dev relations (how well are big tech companies interacting with the folks who build things on their platforms) 1/5

They’re terrible. All of the big tech companies are bad at this. Yes, Apple has really been intransigent about the App Store stuff (look, I actually really don’t want other App Stores, don’t really care for side loading, and think the 30%/15% thing is really not that crazy), but Apple has absolutely screwed up App Store review for a decade. They’ve neither been good enough at curation and removing scams nor permissive of reasonable, “good” apps on their platforms. The balance on tight v. loose is in an uncomfortable place where we seem to have the worst of both worlds.

This one is mostly a mark on Apple, because I don’t care enough about other companies that do devrel. I mean, I guess Amazon with AWS? They suck too, but not on devrel– it’s the UX and product strategy that’s a mess. Meh.

Environment/Social issues (how well are big tech companies responding to challenges that go beyond maximizing shareholder return under capitalism) 2.5/5

The AI rollout is a mess too. The expansive view companies took on training data sets and their “rights” rightfully leaves a lot of folks feeling sour. And by publishing something that is shockingly good, but with glaring challenges that are not obviously, definitely solvable, the AI tools coming out right now are balancing on the knife’s edge of harm versus benefit.

I think Apple is about as good as you can get selling physical goods and trying to do right by the environment, but I think we’re all falling on issues like authoritarian government controls, misinformation, moderation and safety, and the environment itself. Some of the major social issues tech companies are up against feel kind of unsolvable to me, but they’re making their case remarkably poorly, both in the court of public opinion and in the court of politics (not really the court of law, which is still mostly uninvolved).

The largest tech companies are not doing much to actively make the world a better place. I fault Apple somewhat the least, because I think they’re basically a hardware company that is outside of the information space. It’s in the information space where companies like Google and Meta are blowing it. I mean, crap almighty look at what has happened to Twitter. Is Netflix doing anything with its entertainment power? Nope. Amazon, the physical goods store, seems awful. The technology services provider is pretty great. Nvidia (wild to include them) was all too happy to make money off of the Bitcoin miners, and I’m dubious about the power behind the AI stuff. I don’t really see them using their power for much yet either, but they’re newly huge. Microsoft has hitched onto OpenAI, which also feels weird, and continues to mostly copy other stuff. They seem moderately less evil these days than I used to feel about them, but I still feel like their business practices with including things like Teams and PowerBI into existing subscriptions feel bad/weird.

Overall, I think tech is doing a lot that is of dubious value these days. I’m not surprised that we have stock buy backs and malaise instead of tech optimism. I’m just not sure the software world is where the next improvements will come from. I’m pretty sure that the software world has not made things much better this last decade. The big companies feel like they’re kind of blowing it to me. But maybe that’s just being big mature companies.

Wearables (stuff on your body parts that are not your wrist) 2/5

Sucks. The AirPods Pro are amazing. But very little else is appealing in this space. I thought for sure we’d have more variety of smart bracelets, rings, clothing, shoes, or something by now. Innovation here is mirroring the home– lots of stuff that only kind of works that feels just barely above a CES demonstration. I think there’s so much promise in small, networked computers, and we seem to have landed on the watch and headphones. Maybe Apple Vision Pro will change things here– by all accounts the technology is incredible and I’m already getting a bit of FOMO. This weekend I went away with my partner and dogs to a cabin. Both of our dogs are older now, and I decided to take some spatial video. I have no idea if it’ll come out nice, but I felt like this was something I might want to have someday. That tells you something. But the VR world (and AR world) seems a bit away from its final, most useful form. I’m excited about it as an early adopter, but not as something that’s really making a mark.

Meanwhile, I still wear this clunky Apple Watch because it’s the best thing on the market. That bums me out. I know hardware is hard, but Fitbit going to Google to die and everyone else shrugging this category away is a bummer.

Conclusion

I want to think about technology way less. Right now there are places that’s true– mostly in my personal computing life. There are many pieces of hardware and software at this point that are very close to being great. So much so that I suspect a lot of my complaints will fade away in the coming 2-3 years. I hope so, at least. But there are other areas where I think technology will continue to disappoint– in the home, wearables, and environmental/social issues feel lost already. In those categories, at least, I think we’re far down a path into a local maxima that we cannot escape and we’ll need a new generation of leaders, new ideas, and new inventions to back track and start down a different, better path.

And good lord, work on the bugs.