I just walked downstairs from my office and realized I had my water and a bottle of Motrin. This was subconscious, so I guess when you turn 37 you get emotional support Motrin.

I’ll be in Pittsburgh visiting with my sister this weekend. What must I do/see? And if you want to hang out, that could happen too.

Me: What is it I’m thinking of… Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Me: googles

Me: Nope, that’s not the one.

Me: googles

Me: A yes, I meant Baeder-Meinhof. At least I remember what Dunning-Krueger is. Or do I …

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.

Elsa: “Do you need to give anyone a gift?”

Me: “Probably, but I’m not thoughtful.”

Elsa: “I’m asking you to be thoughtful, right now.”

I still reply a lot on the internet, but I’m getting better. Just now, I read something I know the answer to, started to write it out, and then stopped. I thought, “Is this worth it? What are the costs to helping?” And I decided this time, too high.

I was feeling sad and I’m already doing a West Wing rewatch to feel better (but I’m in season 6 now and woof 5 was a bigger let down than I remember and 6 feels more like 7 than I anticipated) so Elsa said, “You need to watch an anime.” That’s not working either, but I do like Demon Slayer.

TIL: datalist doesn’t really work in Firefox, which is crazy.

Yes, support for Social Security is bipartisan and strong. That is less surprising to me than the strong separation between the parties on other issues. I’ve allowed myself to believe that left and right have become incoherent or inconsistent. But their core values/beliefs are distinct.

This is like some weird SEO album name thing… and it totally works.

Probably won’t make any friends saying this, but this is a great post about why online leftish politics are a mess.

But these insights have been perverted into a style of politics that is more obsessed with maintaining one’s own sense of self-righteousness than actually achieving better outcomes for anyone.

I think Kamala Harris still loses this election if it’s held today, though it’d be very close. And I don’t think that the people who are excited about the sense of momentum over the last month realize how much more there is to this fight.

Almost everything I read about Israel and Palestine these days come from people with a worst-than-West Wing level of thinking. An absolutely incredible number of people think they have a PhD in this conflict they learned about on October 8th.

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.

It was funny and I enjoyed the memes about “trusting dogs” when it came to Kamala Harris.

But look at Gus Walz and his love for his dad.

Now think about how Trump’s family acts around him.

I was sad to not get a slot at the final XOXO Fest, but now I’m pretty down for the count with a health issue for the next week or two so I guess it was a blessing in disguise.

I do not recommend getting a cornea infection, especially if your existing cornea disease makes you reliant on scleral lenses and the infected eye is the “good one”. It’s going to be a long, painful week.

Band practice was delayed by traffic, so I did a quick (probably not thorough enough) update of my Uses page.

I am increasingly sure that Nate Silver is just the new Malcolm Gladwell.

This is 100% the case. We gotta raise taxes at some point.

I’ve swapped wifi equipment a few times over the last decade. I’m back on Ubiquiti and I can say that they really nailed it this time. The software is better and the Cloud Gateway Ultra and in-wall access points are great.

I had a strange experience today with dynamic ad insertion on a podcast. First, I heard a hyperlocal ad about the expansion of Baltimore’s Charm City Circulator. Then I heard an ad for Kia in German.

For months, I’ve been using high performance screen sharing from one Mac to another. Suddenly, I cannot connect this way and have to use the noticeably worse Standard version. Of course, Apple supplies no information to help diagnose the issue.

It’s been a while since I’ve read about it, but come on— isn’t the actual problematic monopoly Google has entirely on the ad tech side of their business? We need better laws or better regulators or something.

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.