The most clearheaded takes on the Apple ad are those that point out that the backlash is a consequence of Apple’s current relationship with the broader community of developers, customers, and our culture. The literal, visceral response feels silly– it’s not about the ad.

Very happy for Ed Dwight, who upon finally making it to space said:

I thought I really didn’t need this in my life, but now I need it in my life.

What a win for The Verge’s redesign. This kind of post about Blue Origin today would have been a Tweet. And that sucks. Now it’s the kind of post that has me checking The Verge’s homepage a couple of times a day. Blogging is still a great format for journalism.

This week on Core Intuition, Daniel and Manton discuss the cost of some “.blog” domains. Somehow (maybe because I registered the first day it was possible?), I pay only $29.99 a year for json.blog.

I am bored with iPad discourse but holy hell pricing one out really brings into focus how the Pro is insanely expensive for what most of us could do with it.

me: “I wish people would stop calling individual blog posts ‘a blog.’” monkey’s paw curls

A financial planner I haven’t talked to in 20 years emailed to thank me for something I’d written on my blog which was super nice but they opened their email with “I just read your substack and it was wonderful” and now I’m a little mad to hear the nazi-loving email service is a generic phrase synonymous with “personal essays” in business people’s minds already.

Andy Baio and Matt Haughey both breaking me.

Elsa just pulled the classic move— cut the slice of pizza in half, take it away. Eat it, then return and eat the other half anyway.

We have not had one dang clear night during these magnetic storms.

Work is pushing me up to the 16” MBP. Unfortunately, I don’t have any good bags for this size class. Before I “just” buy yet another chocolate bag from Waterfield, what are your favorites? I tend to avoid backpacks (sweaty back) and use it 90% in a work context and on planes.

So, how much further is the podcast advertising market about to crash when private equity decides that Squarespace should kill its ad spend?

I think most critiques of capitalism are lazy, but Freedom From Struggle is at least funny, in a tragic way.

Add Athletics to the list of artists coming out with great new stuff this year.

An interesting side effect of writing music with a band again– my mind is now constantly filled with music. I think I’m always tinkering with little melodies or songs deep in the background, but now that I have an outlet for them, it’s like they are pushed to the forefront.

Speaking of music, MONO and Maybeshewill are back at it and showing why they are masters of their craft.

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.

I didn’t feel like pulling out my receiver to double check, but realized I could just scroll through the labeled inputs. Confirmed that’s one thing I don’t have to buy.

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.

Want to see a millennial die?

We are as far away from Matchbox 20’s debut as that album was from The Beatles (White Album), or if you prefer, the disbandment of the Yardbirds and formation of Led Zeppelin.

The pace of storytelling in X-Men ‘97 is insane.

The power of owning your own identity through owning your own domain.

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.”

Something I should have mentioned about tech and labor arbitrage— if a new framework or tool makes it 10% easier to build a product, it makes it 10% easier for my competitors too. I’m not cutting staff— I’m increasing scope.

One of the reasons why the internet is a bit sick is it allows us to keep sharing narratives that are not in fact true. Of course, this is a link to television news, but make no mistake, this narrative is incredibly online in nature.

Kristi Noem becoming unacceptable because of her atrocious treatment of a dog would feel a lot better if she didn’t have a record of public service being atrocious toward people.