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

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

So, I wanted to answer his wondering:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew notes:

The following sentiment is one I find admirable, however.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are better connected

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

The intent is ownership, connection, and control.

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

And that’s just one example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evil

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

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

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

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

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

I took about 12 weeks off from volleyball after a collision on the court took out my shoulder. I’ve had pain just when extending to the edges of my shoulder mobility that just won’t go away.

After a deep massage in London ¹, things have felt better for the last week so I decided to play for 90 minutes last night.

1. Good lord I’ve lost a lot of cardio stamina going from playing 5-6 hours over 3 nights a week to nothing.
2. Fuck me, my shoulder made it through, but it is super sore this morning. More sore than pain, but it’s still not what it was.

I know nothing serious is wrong— I can still lift weights and have full mobility in most planes/alignments, and the pain is specific versus radiating and diffuse. But it’s absolutely insane that getting knocked, and not even that hard, required 12 weeks of rest and still isn’t right. I have a feeling I’ll be rehabbing this for a year. I’m going to try just playing 2x a week and see how I can tolerate it. I have too much fun and really need the cardio.

I will now make this the standard travel plan for red eyes going east to Europe.

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

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

We’ve been trying to upgrade our flight all week with British and running into issues online. After forty five minutes on the phone, they told us they can’t honor the online price and wanted to charge us £1600. Figured we’d take our chances as the airport.

When we got here we learned not only are there no upgrades, there’s no change of changing our seats. So we have two middle seats on a 777 for over eight hours.

I was mad about how British Airways had technical systems that kept offering us upgrades for reasonable prices that didn’t exist. But now I’m just frustrated that it would take an astronomical amount of money beforehand to make the trip comfortable. On our flight out, I could not even fit an 11” iPad on my tray with the person in front of me fully reclined.

All of this came after our morning plans being thrown for a loop because the Elizabeth Line is not running. We chose our second hotel in part for its proximity to the Elizabeth line, making it easy for us to get to the airport in a timely fashion so we could have a relaxed morning. Our alternative options involved walking a half mile and a transfer— too much on a beautiful, but hot and sunny day with our bags. And, because it would have involved taking the Heathrow Express, the cost was higher than a cab.

So we got an Uber, a Model 3, which is not that comfortable, and no AC running. He then proceeded to circle SoHo in a bizarre way and take the objectively longest route any of our mapping programs could figure to get here.

We still have plenty of time and everything is going to be fine, but overall not an ideal travel day when I didn’t take the remainder of the week off from work.

Joe Biden joined the raise in 2020 to beat Trump. He succeeded. Since then, his record of accomplishment as president with the narrowest of Senate majorities has been strong. He was far more progressive than the Obama administration.

I wish he had decided not to run a year ago, sticking to the oft-repeated notion that he was playing the role of custodian. However, his effectiveness in office and the failure for other clear leaders to emerge in the Democratic Party made his decision to run in 2024 understandable. He had earned the right to tell us when he was no longer up for the job. And even though he was diminished from four years earlier, when I cast my vote on May 14th for President Biden to be the nominee, it was a vote for him. Even at that time, he remained seemingly capable, and he had earned my trust and faith.

I am not sure if now is the right time to drop out strategically. But I know that President Biden wants to be president and I know how seriously he takes the thread that Donald Trump poses to the future of our country. President Biden is leaving the race because in spite of the turmoil and chaos that will be created over the next several weeks, he believes this is the best way to defeat Trump and elect another American President who will make us proud and do right by the country.

I can make my peace with that. I don’t see this as a disgrace, but a triumph. I don’t see the time he’s taken to make that decision as selfish or intransigent, but as considered given the gravity of what will be unleashed.

President Biden has dedicated himself to serving this country, and his final four years of service have been crucial.

Now it’s up to us.

Note: I wrote this within 20 minutes of learning the news, without having read further analysis. These are my feelings captured in the moment, though I don’t think they’ll change, new facts will surely emerge.

Everything I read about Silicon Valley’s support of Trump comes down to this:

These are people who believe in spending massive amounts of public money to enrich themselves while they make shitty tunnels under Las Vegas or drop off scooters on city sidewalks or chase self-driving cars, so firmly believing that these are total solutions ready to solve all problems right now, in complete ignorance of any existing systems or mechanism or solutions that exist.

These are the folks who reinvent busses or trains, but do so in a way that will make them rich, and therefore, they’re better. Except in practice, each time we follow their lead we end up with something worse than what the rest of the world gets through competent government. These are the folks who think the solutions are $600 home test devices for COVID and not wearing a mask. These are the folks who will block real solutions while they waste money failing over and over to solve big problems and then walk away without a consequence. These are the folks who think the only thing we have to learn from each other or other countries is what cannot yet be exploited for profit by a Stanford drop out building something 1/8th as good for 10x the price.

These are the people who think the best things that have happened over the last fifteen years have come out of Silicon Valley, even though virtually all of those things are not profitable and have come with major downsides.

I work in tech. I think a lot of cool stuff is being built and a lot of good work is being done. But tech is a mature industry, and most of what is interesting these days has to do with bringing the things we learned from 2000-2015 about how to use software into places that have not yet modernized. We’re at the tail end of what’s interesting and good and novel. Software technology has very little left to change in a major way. And the entire ethos of a16z and the like has utterly failed to produce breakthroughs in computer hardware, biological sciences, energy, environment or any other major sector. The last decade of innovation has been entirely about reducing friction in commerce. That’s it. And it’s not that profitable and will end up with a very small number of winners.

The major successes in tech are largely SaaS companies selling tooling to hopeful SaaS companies. It’s a spiral-jerk that ends in an easier buying experience online or shitty advertising.

The problems we face in the US, and the problems faced by folks throughout the world, will not be solved on Sandhill Road. And the thing is, they all know this. Support for a monstrous fascist like Trump is the warning sign. It’s just like how companies don’t move to Texas to be great, but instead to squeeze margin out of cost cutting everywhere you can when you no longer capable of growth or innovation. The Trump-Vance ticket has the support of Silicon Valley because their goal is to have government give up. Elon Musk pushed the hyperloop to stop California high speed rail. And in that space, Silicon Valley can try and convince us to drive self-driving electric cars underground. When that doesn’t work, they walk away, and the problem remains unsolved. In the meantime, we’ve wasted billions and they’ve made millions off of carry fees. When the government isn’t even trying, it creates space for charlatans to step in.

Think of all the problems Silicon Valley won’t solve, but can look great telling LPs that they’re part of the solution. Doesn’t it feel better to be part of the solution and make a profit instead of paying taxes? Never mind nothing will be solved.

I have so few stats on my blog, so here are some interesting ones:

I have 4601 posts on my blog.

I have written 2067 replies on Micro.bog.

I have received 51 webmentions ¹

Since May first, I’ve had about 1,000 unique visitors. I have about 327 Mastodon followers. I would guess (because it’s not shared) that I have about 50 folks following me on Micro.blog. I crosspost to Bluesky and Threads as well, but would guess even fewer people follow there. My gut is the vast majority of my short posts are read natively in social apps, and that long posts get the click/hit.

My gut looking at the stats is I have about 50 active users. A day with a new long post might get 30ish hits. A popular post might get about 100. I rarely write something that is read more than 200 times.

Not bad for just, tossing out my thoughts whenever without a theme, rhyme, or reason.

Baldur thinks that when he leaves his tech bubble, everyone is much more critical of AI. I couldn’t disagree more. Everyone I know involved in tech, especially in the tech-adjacent fields of journalism and various parts of “nerd” culture is furious about AI. And in my experience, there’s no one more wary than web developers when it comes to AI. My own bubble here couldn’t be further from embracing it.

Meanwhile, I know tons of people who love using CoPilot or Gemini or ChatGPT. Random people tell me all the time about how AI is a better editor/Grammarly for their writing. They talk about how some tedious things they did are easier. I hear things like:

It was so much easier than trying to figure out the right Google Search or watch a 15 minute video on YouTube to figure out what was subtly wrong about this Excel function I wrote. I hate writing sympathy notes. I never know what to say. ChatGPT wrote something trite, but it was enough for me to edit it up a bit and help me get over my procrastination/fear/anxiety. I can’t believe how well this summarized these research papers and helped me to actually figure out which one was relevant to my question.

I’m not all rah-rah about LLMs and what they’re bringing us, but I continue to think that the folks who are most ardently against AI are just plain wrong when they claim these tools are not useful or that no one wants them. That doesn’t mean I think that the hype is fully justified, but pretending these things don’t work or aren’t useful or only produce slop is a skeptic’s wish-casting.

Around the time I started at Allovue I started tracking my travel with TripIt. There are a lot of advantages– most importantly, the quality calendar syncing with information like check in times and addresses of hotels, flight time, and flight information. One of those advantages is I have a lot of data, particularly about my flying. ¹

I am not sure that all of this data is 100% accurate– I may have missed a cancelled trip or leg along the way when I had to move things around– but to a first approximation, these stats are pretty good. And what’s even better is that my favorite flight tracking app, Flighty, syncs with TripIt and provides great summaries.

The very first flight I tracked was on Jun 27, 2014, when Elsa and I flew from my parents in New York (LGA, before it was nice) to Fort Lauderdale to meet up with her family before flying to Port Au Prince, to visit more of her family. So this post has some fun facts from 10 years of flying.

I have been on 447 flights totaling 443,966 miles (714,494 kilometers).

My total flight time was 48 days and 11 hours across 76 distinct airports and 12 airlines.

Wednesday is the day I fly the most– having racked up over 100 flights.

November is the month I fly the most at just under 75 flights. I travel the least in January– under 25 flights, followed by June and then December.

2016 was the peek of my flying at 72 total flights. Unsurprisingly, 2020 was the year I flew the least– though I still managed to take 8 flights before the COVID lockdowns and by 2021 I took 24 flights.

My longest flight was JFK (New York) to TPE (Taipei) clocking in at 7,794 miles.

My average flight time was just 2 hours and 26 minutes– I suspect this is so low because of the amount of Providence to Baltimore and back flights I’ve done, as well as quite a few Baltimore to Midway (Chicago).

I have flown in or out of BWI 320 times– the next closest airport is Providence at 91 times.

I have flown Southwest 395 of the 477 flights for a whopping 82.8% of all air travel (how’s that for loyalty!).

I have flown 210 distinct routes, with the most common, unsurprisingly, being PVD to BWI (at 42) and BWI to PVD (37). It’s pretty obvious that moving to Baltimore in 2016 had a profound impact on my flying.

I’ve only been to 11 countries in this time, which makes me sad, and shows how flying a ton domestically has reduced my time and energy for international travel.

I’ve lost 73 hours to delays, with 172 flights out of 477 (36%) having some kind of delayed arrival. But actually, 60% of my flights arrived early, so the “net” of delays and early arrivals is 8 hours and 37 minutes of delays.

The newest plane I flew on was just 25 days old, whereas the oldest was 31 years old, with an average age of 18 years old.

At the Atomic Book club last night, I was just about the only person who liked the book of around 25 people. I was glad to go nearly last, and happy I had long decided my open comment was, “Some books I love and want to hand to everyone. This book I loved, but I have no idea who it is for, except maybe me.”

I was, however, disappointed to learn more about the author. What I read as a brilliant, very aware, attempt to build a very specific kind of art with a specific message, may, in fact, be a straight, earnest take. There’s a whole project around this work. One of the other things I decided to share before book club was, “I hope this is the only book he’s written like this. It would be a sign of his skill if this was built with an intent to go for a very specific language and intent versus this just being how he writes.” That seems… not to be true.

Oh well, death to the artist.

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.