It’s ok for some infrastructure to be old and boring and changed infrequently. But if I were an SF resident, I’d be afraid they’re going to make a choice like the SF school system did with payroll and spend $100M trying to custom build software instead of buying commercial off the shelf stuff.

These statistics on who supports Trump are remarkable, if expected.

Great essay on the advantage of “inside/outside” strategies to affect change.

it is a choice on our part to esteem those who provide real solutions and grapple with the difficulties of reality rather than those who stroke our egos, our fantasies of righteousness and power, fantasies in which there are but a few villains oppressing the righteous many, and if we could but identify and punish those villains, utopia would ensue.

Pretty excited for a restaurant whose tagline is “Cheese 🧀, swine 🐷, and wine🍷“.

Am I the only one who, when people say “My god!” or similar exclamation, immediately thinks, “Yes, that’s just what the Hebrews thought.”

“The reason I love sci-fi is because sci-fi has always permitted big ideas into it. It’s not embarrassed of big ideas…”

Alex Garland gets it.

Is anyone experiencing a bunch of bugs related to mouse clicks on macOS? Here’s what I’m seeing– dragging an area for CleanShotX often doesn’t work (you click and hold but it registers as a single click). Similarly, dragging a window to a new space often just “let’s go” of the window. Trying to figure out of this is OS or maybe my mouse is going bad?

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.

The new standards album, Fruit Galaxy is so much fun. Just great, energetic and happy feeling instrumental rock.

It’s hard to love niche languages with the onslaught of helpful tools being developed in languages that feel bad to write. And yet, at the same time, I find that relying on other people’s complexity has been the bad place.

Unfortunately, I have now learned that my IKEA counter top desk does have a sag, as was predicted. I need to decide if I care and want a new top.

Getting a cookie notice on a personal blog is quite the experience.

It’s kind of a bummer that the market for high quality blogging is nearly nothing these days. Folks like Brett Terpstra struggling to grow or monetize an audience feels insane to me. I guess I’m glad I only ever intended my blogging to be personal.

I think The Verge is the most interesting professional media property on the web. I hope it’s doing well financially. And I hope they bring back some of the weird culture and fiction that was more common in the early days.

Via @jarrod, yet another reason I spend too much on an AppleTV and wish they’d get their strategy figured out.

Is there any material where the gap between “professionals of good taste” and “everyone else” is as large as it is with bare plywood in homes? These architect/designers are nuts when this is their money saving choice.

I’m not sure what impact Python in Excel has had or will have, but I am desperate for Excel to be able to read and write parquet files so that I can, as the kid say, yeet CSVs into the Sun.

The last time I took extended “relax” time for myself was almost a year ago in Portland, OR for a weekend. Where should I recharge next?

I am convinced that every person who is trying to get healthy has a completely unhinged metric that they place undue importance on. For me, it’s my heart rate while sleeping.

A special time between light and dark

Wow– I am currently experience an Apple Music bug where starring a track results in playback dying– I fully lose track position and play list position. What an insane and shitty bug to have shipped.

Today I Learned: you can just drag files from one computer to the other using macOS’s native screen sharing. I just transferred 2.5 GB instantly from my computer to Elsa’s with drag and drop.

I don’t mind the idea of age verification spreading for adult content on the internet, but I don’t think anyone should trust these sites with their identity. There should be a passkey-like browser API that can be initiated and just confirm that the user is a verified adult.

Why does it feel like every story of failure comes along with COBOL, which is also somehow running tons of critical systems without interruption or error?

I would love to get a book contract to write deeply about what happened here, after someone would let me try and fix it.

How can someone with a chemistry degree not ❤️ and share today’s rather accurate XKCD entry?