commit 4c27410691044c836fcac0ab87ec528722b43579
parent 107f99192e218daeb97c00df06698b69cb55c8d1
Author: David Eisinger <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2023 23:58:39 -0400
Add link backups
Diffstat:
8 files changed, 1918 insertions(+), 31 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023.md b/content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023.md
@@ -1,29 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "Dispatch #1 (March 2023)"
-date: 2023-03-02T12:18:17-05:00
-draft: false
-tags:
-- dispatch
-- ebikes
----
-
-With the warm winter we've been having in NC, I've gotten to take Nev to and from daycare on the e-bike a whole bunch, which has been just fantastic. I'm wary of becoming too much of an evangelist, but it really does feel like they can replace cars for a lot of folks, and they're fun as hell.
-
-<!--more-->
-
-This month:
-
-* Adventure: glamping with Claire, Nev, and Steve
-* Project: rebuild shelves in bedroom closet
-* Skill: [Affinity Designer](https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/)
-
-Reading:
-
-* Fiction: [_Burner_](https://bookshop.org/p/books/burner-mark-greaney/18519742), Mark Greaney
-* Non-fiction: [_The Power of Habit_](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-power-of-habit-why-we-do-what-we-do-in-life-and-business-charles-duhigg/7843601), Charles Duhigg
-
-Links:
-
-* [Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life — by Craig Mod](https://craigmod.com/essays/electric_bikes/)
-* [Programming is a Pop Culture – Baldur Bjarnason](https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/programming-is-a-pop-culture/)
-* [Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages - The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/style/julia-cameron-the-artists-way.html)
diff --git a/content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023/craigmod-com-ts8csh.txt b/content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023/craigmod-com-ts8csh.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,349 @@
+
+About Craig
+Books & Essays
+Talks
+Membership
+Shop!
+“Special Projects” Membership
+Podcasts:🎧 On Margins & SW945
+Newsletters:📩 Roden & Ridgeline
+
+
+Header image for Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life
+
+
+Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life
+
+Reflections on eighteen months of electric bike ownership
+
+
+
+My electric bike sings, emits a nearly imperceptible hum from its tiny motor. I
+love its song. A song of peace and magic. Has money ever bought as much delight
+as the delight of an electric bike?
+
+The first time I rode one was nearly a decade ago, in Kyoto. The electric bike
+I rented was huge and unwieldy, but that tug of its motor never left my mind. I
+went to climb a hill and it felt as if a giant had gently placed his hand on my
+back and pushed me forward. That stupid smile has been on my face ever since.
+
+Two years ago I rented another one. This one smaller, lighter, the motor more
+powerful. I was convinced. This is the way. Eighteen months ago, in the heart
+of the pandemic, I committed and bought my first electric bike and have never
+looked back.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+Indulge me — a summer afternoon: Soaring down the coast, the ocean to one side
+and a strand of old pines to the other. The afternoon sun beats down but it
+feels cool and there’s something irrationally stirring — downright emotional —
+about the efficiency of this dumb machine beneath my body. The motor looks too
+small — just a black cylinder on the hub of the wheel. And yet it moves. It
+sings that song. A subtle hum. A beautiful hum. It makes me want to ride and
+ride, ridiculous distances, nonsensical distances. I don’t want to get to where
+I’m going because I want the ride to last longer. I want to linger in this
+space as long as possible, this space of smooth and efficient movement through
+the world, gliding in near total mechanical silence, just the sound of rubber
+on the pavement, wind in my ears, breaking waves, salt, the smell of pine. This
+is what electric bikes do: They drive you insane with the poetry of the world.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+A strange trio A few of my old bikes: A mamachari, carbon fiber road bike, and
+Kalavinka
+
+#So Many Bikes
+
+All my standing life, I’ve biked. As a kid I rode a K-Mart Huffy to a rusted
+nub and then managed to nab a Haro Group 1. As an adult, bikes have been one of
+my few material indulgences (unwittingly, organically). In the past twenty
+years alone I’ve owned some fifteen bikes. I’ve had aluminum and carbon Bianchi
+road bikes. I’ve had steel Kalavinka keirin bikes with gorgeous head badges.
+I’ve had folding Dahon and Birdy BD-1s. I’ve had a handful of beloved brandless
+throwaway mamacharis — shopping bikes — that have proven hearty and fun in
+their own ways, and have each died uniquely. I’ve gone out of my way to get a
+handmade Arrow cruiser from a builder in Ogikubo. I still have a custom orange
+Moulton that I’ve modified into a single-speed city bomber that goes remarkably
+fast while floating atop its simple suspension.
+
+And on and on — bikes. Why? Because as any bike lover will tell you, to be
+ensorcelled by the bike is to crave one and only one thing: More bike. Each new
+bike is like riding once again for the first time. Exploring a city on a
+mamachari is different than a BD-1 is different than a Moulton. All thrilling.
+The bikes change, and so, too does your relationship to the pavement. My love
+for bikes has no categorical allegiances; if it has two wheels, and pedals, I’m
+interested. I want to ride them all.
+
+A Moulton Tiny, but fast, nearly flawless as a city machine — a Moulton with
+converted stem, Sugino cranks, coaster brake
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+Summers in most of Japan have never been easy. The temperatures England flirted
+with in 2022 are temperatures Tokyoites have contended with for centuries (and
+now contend with ones even higher). Crushing heat coupled with suffocating
+humidity. A three-shower-a-day kinda summer. Watch an Ozu film and observe the
+languid and supine impulse of its inhabitants during summertime scenes — that’s
+not affect, it’s survival. In Japan’s August, you simply can’t walk a block
+without losing most of your moisture.
+
+Bikes have always helped. A bicycle generates a microclimate with minimal
+effort. Standing on a street corner you may be soaked, but on a bike, the wind
+whooshing past, you are crisp(er) and dry(er). An electric bike only amplifies
+the effect.
+
+When I was a child I dreamt of having a personal helicopter. Powered by my feet
+and a bit of magic (certainly not gasoline, oddly, thinking back on it now). I
+imagined quietly gliding over the city in this tiny contraption, floating from
+home to video rental shop to diner, stopping by a friend’s house along the way.
+An electric bike gets me most of the way to this feeling.
+
+In the past eighteen months I’ve put several thousand kilometers on my electric
+bikes. It feels like cheating in every best possible way. I live in a seaside
+town south of Tokyo and traffic can get ridiculous, its ancient roads sized for
+horses, not cars. The electric bike swoops between and alongside these stale
+processions of heat and burning fuel. Drifting behind a gas-powered scooter or
+moped feels like observing some Victorian contraption — inefficient and loud
+and clunky and burdensome and pollutant. And not much faster (often much
+slower) or more useful than an electric bike.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+A Vanmoof and a BESV My friend's S3 and my BESV (the X3 looks like a slightly
+smaller version of the S3)
+
+#Electrics
+
+I own two electric bikes. My first purchase was the strangely named BESV PSA1 —
+which is a smaller wheeled (20"), rear-wheel drive machine, with mostly
+off-the-shelf components allowing you to customize it to your liking. ^1 And
+then, because I was so enamored by the BESV — so seduced by its small motor of
+umph, so wanting more and different electric bike experiences — I went and
+picked up a front-wheel drive Vanmoof X3 — the smaller-wheeled brother (24") to
+Vanmoof’s (quite frankly) giant S3 — just a few months later.
+
+I love them both like damaged brothers, because both of these bikes are flawed
+in frustrating ways.
+
+The electronic brain on the BESV is as dumb as they come.^2 The settings reset
+each time you turn the bike on. The acceleration curves feel unrefined —
+herky-jerky, you might say. Its app is the worst app I have on my phone — badly
+designed, nearly functionally useless, clearly engineered without love. And
+yet. Despite these flaws I put hundreds of kilometers on this thing in the
+first month. The front and rear suspension turn every road to glass, and are
+even fine for dirt trails; I find myself hunting down paths through parks I’d
+never otherwise think about. Suddenly every hilly road is a thing demanding to
+be explored. Up up up the little machine yells, and you follow its command.
+
+Guests who stay at my studio are given the BESV to ride. We take it down the
+coast. It never fails to amaze. One friend felt compelled to pet it upon
+dismount, saying, Good job, buddy, so quick and deep was the affection for the
+thing.
+
+The Vanmoof is much smarter — the brain and software within it are refined, the
+app good, the acceleration curves smooth — but the bike is all custom
+components, and they aren’t the highest quality at that. The automatic shifting
+mechanism on mine failed twice in the first two months, requiring shipping the
+bike to the Vanmoof store.^3 The seat post bolt broke off in the post. The
+original plastic pedals felt cheap and flimsy (pedals are one of the few things
+you can swap for your own). The aluminum frame is too stiff for the speed the
+bike generates — it can feel like you’ve been rattled to death after a bumpy
+road. (And stiffness mitigation by lowering tire pressure seems to only
+increase possibility of puncture.) But, more than all that, the design of the
+bike has a dangerous fundamental flaw: The bottom bracket is simply too low.
+
+Of all my many, many bikes, I’ve never had a pedal bottom out. On this Vanmoof
+X3? Dozens of times. Most critically during a turn at speed — the pedal hit the
+pavement, jumped the bike sideways, and sent me flying. It’s the only bad crash
+I’ve had in decades. So I’ve had to modify the way I ride — no pedaling into or
+out of turns, hyper awareness of deviations in lateral road slope — because,
+despite all this, I can’t stop riding this stupid thing. It sings — that hum.
+It is joy. I reach for it daily and it takes me around the peninsula and makes
+me happy to be alive.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+BESV @ Lee's Bread, Oiso I've written about three electric bike rides for
+Papersky Magazine: Misaki, Oiso, and Yokosuka.
+
+Allow me to share a dirty secret: More often than not, at midnight I can’t
+repress the impulse — I have to take a bike out. Out the bike comes and
+together we head into the empty streets of my town and hum our way all over,
+visiting temples in total silence. There are no cars. Often no people. It feels
+illicit — this slipping around town, this sliding into temple parking lots in
+the shroud of the night, looking at their old beams, feeling ten years old and
+grateful for both the ability and awareness to be doing just this very thing at
+this very moment.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+I’ve long since posited world peace could be achieved if you bought everyone in
+the world a bike, but now I want those bikes to be electric. I want everyone to
+feel this silliness, this punch-drunk stupidity of pure love, this sense of
+cheating the rules, the norms, this sense of ever-present delight. At our
+worst, humans mindlessly consume, sear the earth and each other, fill our
+bodies with poisons. At our best we invent electric bikes. Batteries have
+gotten more efficient, motors smaller and more powerful. The last decade has
+brought great efficiency to these machines, and the next ten years will only
+double down on these gains. Electric bike numbers are up, year over year over
+year. Tremendously so. Those who know, proselytize. We can’t help it. The charm
+is too great. The game non- zero sum. The more people who know, the better the
+world. It’s a wild notion, this sense of goodness to be had if you just reach
+out for it. Goodness with no real downside. Like solar panels or wind turbines,
+electric bikes are machines that buoy the spirit and the earth.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+Buy the best electric bike you can within your budget. Stretch if possible.
+Usually, the more you spend the lighter the machine, the more powerful the
+motor, the longer-lasting the battery. Depending on which country you live in
+top speeds will differ. In Japan the bike’s are capped at 24km/h. In America,
+32km/h. Some places only allow for pedal-assist — meaning the motor only works
+when pedaling. Others allow throttles, blurring the line between bike and
+scooter. Laws will change in the coming years as more people adopt the machines
+and cities themselves adapt. This is just the start. Ten years ago it was
+fairly rare to see an electric bike around Tokyo. Today, it seems as if every
+parent hauling their kids is doing so electrically.
+
+A good strategy: Find a local bike shop that will let you try out several
+electric bikes. Some have front-hub motors, others rear-hub motors. Others, the
+motor sits in the center, between the cranks. Each has a subtly different feel.
+Going up a hill, a front-motor’d machine may skip or slip as you pull back on
+the handlebars, but on flat land will feel more like being tugged through the
+world.
+
+Sure, electric bikes aren’t cheap. But I believe they’re a rare object to be
+well worth the cost. This in spite of their annoying flaws, their often bad
+software, their defective geometries. Because they open the world. Whatever
+world may have been nearby, an electric bike brings it nearer. This is worth
+more than you might estimate. These bikes sing their little songs and the smile
+on your face makes you look like a village idiot, but what a wonderful idiot to
+be.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+A summer night: Biking home alongside a river. The air is thick with humidity
+and cicadas vibrate wildly in the distance. The moon is out. My choices:
+straight home along the shimmering moonlit river, or take a detour, up into the
+dark mountains, doubling the distance. To my surprise, I choose the mountains
+almost every time. More! That tiny child who fantasized about helicopters
+yells. More of this, whatever this is. More more more. And so I feed that
+impulse, an impulse generated and nurtured by the electric bike. Into the
+shadow mountains we go, up, pushed by the hand of that giant, always present,
+always ready to help. It is a ridiculous thing. A thing of peace and magic. An
+owl hoots. The smile has never left my face.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+#Noted:
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+ 1. I upgraded my BESV to an SRAM drivetrain and Paul brake levers and Klamper
+ disc calipers, some MKS pedals, and a set of Brooks grips and saddle and it
+ feels wonderful through and through. These Paul Klampers are mechanical.
+ The Vanmoof uses (generic?) hydraulic brakes. After thousands of
+ kilometers, my conclusion is: hydraulics feel nice, but they are fussy (and
+ perhaps Vanmoof’s chosen components are sub-optimal) and difficult (?) to
+ tune on your own. In the end, I just don’t think they’re worth it. Too
+ “delicate.” The Pauls feel as fresh today as the day I put them on, whereas
+ the hydraulics have required much bikeshop tuning over the course of the
+ last eighteen months. Were the Vanmoof more flexible, I’d happily swap out
+ for mechanicals. This lack of flexibility is a bummer because, unlike an
+ Apple iPhone, for example, where the components tend to be best of class
+ (think: modem, CPU, camera unit, etc), the physical components on a Vanmoof
+ most definitely aren’t — nor do they offer the option to pay more to get
+ better components. ↩︎
+
+ 2. Oh, how I wish this thing was open source, hackable — because it’s so close
+ to great. Sadly — and I don’t know how else to frame this — it feels like
+ the engineers behind the software don’t ride bikes. At least not this one.
+ The software flaws are so fundamentally obvious, that anyone who had a)
+ access to the code, and b) rode the bike, couldn’t NOT fix these obvious
+ issues. What I really wish, though, is that I could slap the Vanmoof brain
+ onto the BESV body and, well, then we’d be in Electric Bike Elysium. ↩︎
+
+ 3. I’ve since learned — the drive train of the Vanmoof is not to be “ridden”
+ like a “bike” but rather, “feathered” like a delicate sand castle — assume
+ the gears could explode at any moment and apply the least amount of
+ pressure you can; the motor is strong enough to take care of most of the
+ rest. In this way, the Vanmoof feels more like a moped that uses “pedal
+ assist” as a suggestion than a pure electric-assist bike — a smart way to
+ get around motorcycle laws in most countries, which I assume is the main
+ point. Not to say you don’t get a workout on the Vanmoof, you do, but not
+ nearly as much as the more classically committed BESV — which really does
+ require you to pedal.
+
+ Maybe this is a good place to bring up the question: Why not just get an
+ electric scooter? I think it mainly comes down to flexibility and
+ philosophy. With a pedal assist bike (even if the pedaling required is
+ minimal) you simply have more flexibility in parking, in riding, in
+ “lightness” of transportation, than with an electric scooter. Also:
+ Insurance costs, maintenance, and higher base cost. And philosophically,
+ being able to still use the bike as a “bike” without power feels like an
+ aspect of these machines we shouldn’t be so quick to toss aside. ↩︎
+
+
+
+This essay, published September 2022. Thoughts? Email [email protected].
+
+Craig Mod, his head, floating at the bottom of the article
+
+Craig Mod is a writer and photographer based in Japan. He's the author of Kissa
+by Kissa and a MacDowell, Ragdale, and VCCA writing fellow. His essays and
+articles have appeared in Eater, The Atlantic, California Sunday Magazine,
+Wired, Aeon, New Scientist, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, The New
+York Times, The Morning News, Codex: Journal of Typography, and elsewhere. He
+writes newsletters, oh yes, newsletters: Roden & Ridgeline.
+
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diff --git a/content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023/index.md b/content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023/index.md
@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+---
+title: "Dispatch #1 (March 2023)"
+date: 2023-03-02T12:18:17-05:00
+draft: false
+tags:
+- dispatch
+- ebikes
+---
+
+With the warm winter we've been having in NC, I've gotten to take Nev to and from daycare on the e-bike a whole bunch, which has been just fantastic. I'm wary of becoming too much of an evangelist, but it really does feel like they can replace cars for a lot of folks, and they're fun as hell.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+This month:
+
+* Adventure: glamping with Claire, Nev, and Steve
+* Project: rebuild shelves in bedroom closet
+* Skill: [Affinity Designer](https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/)
+
+Reading:
+
+* Fiction: [_Burner_](https://bookshop.org/p/books/burner-mark-greaney/18519742), Mark Greaney
+* Non-fiction: [_The Power of Habit_](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-power-of-habit-why-we-do-what-we-do-in-life-and-business-charles-duhigg/7843601), Charles Duhigg
+
+Links:
+
+* [Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life — by Craig Mod][1][^1-backup]
+* [Programming is a Pop Culture – Baldur Bjarnason][2][^2-backup]
+* [Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages - The New York Times][3][^3-backup]
+
+[1]: https://craigmod.com/essays/electric_bikes/
+[2]: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/programming-is-a-pop-culture/
+[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/style/julia-cameron-the-artists-way.html
+
+[^1-backup]: <a href="craigmod-com-ts8csh.txt">Backed up 2023-04-03 23:56:02 -0400</a>
+[^2-backup]: <a href="www-baldurbjarnason-com-7p5031.txt">Backed up 2023-04-03 23:57:18 -0400</a>
+[^3-backup]: <a href="www-nytimes-com-tq2xdi.txt">Backed up 2023-04-03 23:57:38 -0400</a>
diff --git a/content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023/www-baldurbjarnason-com-7p5031.txt b/content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023/www-baldurbjarnason-com-7p5031.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,610 @@
+ • Essays
+ • Newsletter
+ • Ebook
+ • Contact
+
+Baldur Bjarnason
+
+Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
+
+I’m available as a consultant. I also have a book out.
+
+21 November 2022
+
+Programming is a Pop Culture
+
+(What follows is an extract from Out of the Software Crisis, lightly edited to
+work as a blog post.)
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+
+ So I think what happened is computing has turned into pop culture and the
+ universities are not helping in general, at least not in the US.
+
+ So, Cicero---anybody know a good Cicero quote having to do with the present
+ and past? Let's check your classical education here. So, you know who
+ Cicero was. He was one of those old Roman guys.
+
+ So, Cicero once wrote: 'He who knows only his own generation remains
+ forever a child.'
+
+Programming and Scaling (Alan Kay, 2011)
+
+The programming pop culture defines change—any change—as progress. Most
+developers, myself included, have a fascination with novelty. If it’s new, then
+it must be an improvement. You even hear this stated outright as an argument by
+developers: it’s newer and therefore better. Trends in software development are
+rarely based on objective observation or sensible practice. This endless
+chasing of trends leads to projects being needlessly rewritten, code being
+abandoned, and new projects being started when fixing the bugs in an old
+project would have done the same. The stocks of the software development system
+are flushed out at a moment’s notice simply because the developers found
+something shinier.
+
+Experienced developers are aware of this tendency in themselves and work to
+mitigate it, but younger developers are often under the mistaken impression
+that this is how software development works. Unless they can pare back this
+tendency or are matched with teammates who hold them back, this tendency can
+lead to immense destruction of value for an organisation.
+
+Pop cultures favour the visual aesthetic of the day. We all know what sort of
+aesthetic designers commonly favour. Small, low-contrast text, lots of
+whitespace, no pure whites or pure blacks (just greys). The details vary with
+fashion, but each generation of designers has a preferred visual aesthetic.
+That aesthetic tests poorly; the text is illegible; the layout doesn’t have
+enough contrast. The information density is so sparse it’s effectively
+non-existent.
+
+Looks pretty, though.
+
+Coders have a similar tendency, their preferred aesthetic is just a bit
+different, but as with designers, it tests horribly when put in front of
+genuine users. The exact details of the preferred aesthetic tend to vary from
+generation to generation. One group prefers light-on-dark text (despite not
+suffering from conditions that benefit from dark mode) and unusable
+hyper-complex layouts where everything is configurable. Another group goes for
+ultra-minimalism where nothing is shown by default. You constantly scrub around
+and hunt for a button, a widget—anything that even vaguely resembles an
+affordance. This is usually not an issue if you have designers on the team. If
+you’re letting the programmers design the user interface or are a programmer
+designing a user interface, you need to be aware of it.
+
+But this adherence to a specific aesthetic isn’t limited to designs. It’s also
+an issue when it comes to the code itself.
+
+The programming pop culture favours specific code aesthetics based on the
+trends of the day. I’m not talking about code style or formatting. The code in
+a project should adhere to a single style, simple as that. The issue is that
+the programming pop culture demands that code exhibit the latest popular
+aesthetics of rigour, formality, and cleverness. Whether the code actually is
+rigorous, formal, or clever matters less. A few years ago, as the popularity of
+the Ruby programming language peaked, a certain dynamism and trickery were en
+vogue. It didn’t matter if you were writing in Ruby, JavaScript, or
+Objective-C. Your code had to have a level of “magic” to it. Metaprogramming,
+syntax-hacking languages to create ad hoc Domain-Specific Languages, tricks
+with extreme late binding, and more were frequent topics on developer weblogs
+and forums. Even a phrase like “objective-c runtime metaprogramming” will date
+you to a specific generation of native app developers almost down to a single
+year.
+
+As with all of these pop culture trends in programming, this led to unreadable
+code that was impossible to work with or fix as soon as it faded from popular
+consciousness.
+
+The current trend is towards the aesthetics of correctness. Everything has to
+look like it has strong or static typing. It doesn’t have to really have static
+typing. That can all be made up after the fact in a declaration file. It merely
+needs to have the aesthetics of types. Type annotations everywhere,
+implementing logic through type system trickery, and forcing any and all
+dynamism out of the system in the name of correctness is the name of the game.
+
+A part of this trend is the unpopularity of the approaches and languages that
+are seen as less rigorous. CSS is dropped in favour of statically typed
+CSS-in-JS approaches. HTML is dropped in favour of a strict inline XML-like
+markup format called JSX. Just a few years ago, everybody in web development
+hated and dropped XML and XHTML specifically because it was too strict and felt
+less dynamic and flexible than HTML. At some point, pop culture will bore of
+this and swing its attention back the other way.
+
+It’s a fashion industry. Trends come; trends go. The lack of historical
+awareness is considered by most to be a feature.
+
+This rigour is useful in moderation. Static typing does prevent bugs. Usually,
+they are the same sort of bugs unit testing prevents. Both have immense value
+as tools to manage your software development. Currently, the fashion is to
+favour static typing over unit testing for establishing a certain base level of
+correctness in your code. At some point, they are likely to switch again. They
+have a couple of times in the past. That you could use both at the same time
+and get the benefits of both doesn’t enter the discourse. Static typing with
+compile-time correctness checks has its uses. So do dynamism, extreme late
+binding, and metaprogramming. Most of these approaches can be used together,
+but that isn’t how pop culture works. Pop culture demands there be only one
+winner at a time. Choose one, not whichever works the best at each time.
+
+Product development can’t indulge in being pop culture. Be wary of these
+popularity contests.
+
+These issues with programming culture aren’t new.
+
+Jamie Zawinski calls it the “Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers” model. We
+can’t do much to change the nature of the field by now—Alan Kay has certainly
+tried—but we can mitigate the harm done by the trend-seeking. We can work to
+ensure that everybody on the team, programmers and designers, is aligned, and
+have the same understanding of what matters and how to accomplish it.
+
+For that, you need everybody to understand the context they are working in—the
+works of their field and how they are received. You need to develop taste and
+understanding.
+
+You need research.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+Bonus Alan Kay quote on programming as a pop culture that I didn’t include in
+the book:
+
+ But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about
+ identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with
+ cooperation, the past or the future—it’s living in the present. I think the
+ same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea
+ where [their culture came from]—and the Internet was done so well that most
+ people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather
+ than something that was man-made.
+
+Alan Kay, Dr. Dobb’s Interview with Alan Kay
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+Out of the Software Crisis
+
+Out of the Software Crisis by Baldur Bjarnason
+
+Software projects keep failing, not because we don’t have the right team or
+tools but because our software development system is broken. Out of the
+Software Crisis is a guide to fixing your software projects with
+systems-thinking making them more resilient to change and less likely to fail.
+
+Systems-Thinking For Software Projects
+
+WTF is a Framework?
+
+The response to Out of the Software Crisis has been amazing
+
+Join the Newsletter
+
+Subscribe to the Out of the Software Crisis newsletter to get my weekly (at
+least) essays on how to avoid or get out of software development crises.
+
+Join now and get a free PDF of three bonus essays from Out of the Software
+Crisis.
+
+[ ]
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+
+Writing
+
+ • GDPR and American AIs 3 April 2023
+ • Regulating AI (plus links & notes) 27 March 2023
+ • AI summaries and AI healthcare (links & notes) 20 March 2023
+ • Keeping up with and assessing AI research (links & notes) 13 March 2023
+ • Waiting for the AI Godot (Links & Notes) 6 March 2023
+ • Copyright, Situating Search, and other links & notes 27 February 2023
+ • Deno, Shakespeare's Emoticon, Return to Office, and other links and notes
+ 20 February 2023
+ • Book production, AI, Single-Page-Apps, and other links and notes 13
+ February 2023
+ • Some thoughts on how to make a book, three months after I made one 10
+ February 2023
+ • AI is a Hail Mary pass and other links & notes 6 February 2023
+ • EU and copyright protections for AI-generated works and other notes 30
+ January 2023
+ • On the Layoffs, Narcissists, and Other Links & Notes 23 January 2023
+ • Madeline, Existential Terror and other links & notes 16 January 2023
+ • Out of the Software Crisis Available on Kindle 28 December 2022
+ • A lot can happen in a month: on AI art and the fediverse 16 December 2022
+ • The response to Out of the Software Crisis has been amazing 5 December 2022
+ • Programming is a Pop Culture 21 November 2022
+ • WTF is a Framework? 18 November 2022
+ • Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies 16
+ November 2022
+ • Great apps are rare 15 November 2022
+ • (Released!) Out of the Software Crisis: Systems-Thinking for Software
+ Projects 14 November 2022
+ • Out of the Software Crisis: the ebook is imminent! 11 November 2022
+ • I wrote a book – now you must suffer with me 26 October 2022
+ • I’m offering research, writing, and notetaking coaching for techies and
+ programmers 17 October 2022
+ • Playacting genius: the performative logic of reasoning from first
+ principles 18 September 2022
+ • I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps 4 July 2022
+ • Essay Archive 2 June 2022
+ • On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software 2 June
+ 2022
+ • The different kinds of notes 6 May 2022
+ • What I learned about markdown from interviewing a bunch of people 6 May
+ 2022
+ • The Colophon Cards User Survey 2 February 2022
+ • How to keep up with web development without falling into despair 31 January
+ 2022
+ • Let's just not talk about 2021 and look forward instead 5 January 2022
+ • Making Colophon Cards 29 November 2021
+ • What do I need to read to be a great at CSS? 19 October 2021
+ • The event listening toolkit: five ways to get out of an event handling mess
+ 11 October 2021
+ • FormData and fetch, why is serialising a form such a pain? 29 September
+ 2021
+ • The Single-Page-App Morality Play 6 September 2021
+ • Software Crisis 2.0 25 August 2021
+ • Lessons in Interactivity, 2021 redux 13 August 2021
+ • Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink 29 July 2021
+ • Spontant: in praise of grey 26 July 2021
+ • Ways of reading without the influence of community 6 July 2021
+ • The Open-Source Software bubble that is and the blogging bubble that was 11
+ May 2021
+ • You are what you do, not what you say or write 4 May 2021
+ • The Curious Case Of The Crashing Conic Gradient And How I Used A Technique
+ I Learned In The 90s To Fix It 28 April 2021
+ • 136 facts every web dev should know before they burn out and turn to
+ landscape painting or nude modelling 21 April 2021
+ • I’m available for projects and other work 20 April 2021
+ • Which type of novelty-seeking web developer are you? 31 March 2021
+ • Every Day; a Fair Warning (You Should Read These Articles) 3 March 2020
+ • Weeknote 3 - Resistance and the dull blade 10 February 2020
+ • Weeknote 2 (2020) - News, Bad News, and Star Wars 2 February 2020
+ • Weeknote 1 (2020) - Ending the hiatus 26 January 2020
+ • The Ed Tech Conundrum 2 January 2020
+ • Thinking about the past, present, and future of web development 1 January
+ 2020
+ • The Web Falls Apart 3 November 2019
+ • Weeknote 19 ─ blog redesign and changes at work 27 October 2019
+ • When life hands you lemonades, sit down and contemplate the meaning of life
+ 10 September 2019
+ • Weeknote 18 - Uncertainty and Discomfort 11 August 2019
+ • Web Dev: The Red Queen Wire Mommy of Modern Tech 6 August 2019
+ • Weeknote 16 – Vacation 29 July 2019
+ • Weeknote 15 - Counting Down the Days 1 July 2019
+ • Weeknote 14 - Shadows and DOMs 25 June 2019
+ • Weeknote 13 - The weight of deadlines 16 June 2019
+ • That Web Dev Thing Where Everybody Says Something Clever Involving Toast 15
+ June 2019
+ • SwiftUI, Privacy, macOS, and the Web 9 June 2019
+ • Weeknote 12 - The genres of web media 5 June 2019
+ • The Aesthetics of Concentration 3 June 2019
+ • Weeknote 11 - do I have focus? 29 May 2019
+ • Weeknote 10 - A clear view and more reading 20 May 2019
+ • Weeknote 9 - Being contemplative, finishing a photo project 12 May 2019
+ • Weeknote 8 – Moving, Endgame, and more musings on colour 5 May 2019
+ • Weeknote 7 - Story length and that thing about colour 29 April 2019
+ • Weeknote 6 – Star Trek, rest and spring finally arrives 22 April 2019
+ • Weeknote 5 – Stuff, comics, superheroes, and other nonsense 14 April 2019
+ • Weeknote 4 – TV week with The Expanse 7 April 2019
+ • Weeknote 3 — MVPs, fatigue, and emotional crutches 31 March 2019
+ • Web Development: with great power comes the ability to make great mistakes
+ 24 March 2019
+ • Weeknote 2 - Web Development Mistakes, Mary Sues, and Icy Spring 24 March
+ 2019
+ • Weeknote 1 18 March 2019
+ • Hitchcock and the author construct 12 February 2019
+ • Seams, Stitches, And The Decline Of The Mac 3 November 2018
+ • Neither Paper Nor Digital Does Active Reading Well 3 September 2018
+ • Focusing on market share blinds you to growth 7 January 2018
+ • The future of Software Development: Just Business Logic 7 January 2018
+ • Remote work is a completely different beast 7 January 2018
+ • Hypertext is still the fundamental model of the web 7 January 2018
+ • Leftover Thoughts From 2017 7 January 2018
+ • Over-engineering is under-engineering 25 November 2017
+ • The process is the thing 23 March 2017
+ • Von Be Don: A few notes on a recent digital publishing project in Iceland
+ 19 February 2017
+ • W3C and EME: it isn't about preventing DRM but saving the W3C 14 February
+ 2017
+ • Unpopular opinion: dismissing indirect pointers is a mistake 4 February
+ 2017
+ • Anger feels like poison 24 January 2017
+ • Is JavaScript more fragile? 7 December 2016
+ • Debating Progressive Enhancement 5 December 2016
+ • The downside of believing in Apple 1 November 2016
+ • A short primer on Icelandic politics on the day of the 2016 election 29
+ October 2016
+ • The Tragedy/Farce of the Open Web according to journalists 18 October 2016
+ • Notes on debating for the web development community 17 October 2016
+ • Addendum on loose coupling and the iOS App Store 11 October 2016
+ • Idle thoughts on modularity and loose coupling in digital media 9 October
+ 2016
+ • When fear is rational 24 June 2016
+ • Once upon a time, I couldn't imagine a better word processor than Word 7
+ June 2016
+ • A thought to consider 24 May 2016
+ • A few thoughts on standardisation, W3C, and the IDPF 16 May 2016
+ • Filling in the gaps – the dynamics of zero marginal cost 21 April 2016
+ • Which CMS/blog system would you choose? 12 April 2016
+ • A few simplified points on web and document security 30 March 2016
+ • Judge the work 21 January 2016
+ • Why did Paul Graham argue against equality? 13 January 2016
+ • Purpose, Joy, Capability 4 January 2016
+ • You can't fix the App Store, so here's how you fix it 20 November 2015
+ • Why I am worried about Twitter and why you should be too 4 November 2015
+ • The crossroads or the wilderness 23 October 2015
+ • You can't solve people problems with software 28 September 2015
+ • The discussion about ad blocking is very dumb (but not in the way you
+ think) 18 September 2015
+ • This is not a book, but it is a podcast 10 September 2015
+ • A week of 'This is not a book' 7 September 2015
+ • Launching "This is not a book" – what it is and why you should be
+ interested 1 September 2015
+ • My kingdom for a new bookstore 28 August 2015
+ • Modern software sucks 26 August 2015
+ • The cost versus benefits of disorganised programming power 25 August 2015
+ • Who benefits the most from Open Source Software? 25 August 2015
+ • Sex Apocalypse Later 24 August 2015
+ • Random thoughts on work and that Amazon thing 23 August 2015
+ • Bookmarks – UI flaws and other great capers 14 August 2015
+ • Bookmarks – learnable programming 13 August 2015
+ • Bookmarks – More money for open-source 12 August 2015
+ • Bookmarks – Leaving bosses 11 August 2015
+ • Bookmarks – Promoting other people's work 10 August 2015
+ • Bookmarks – What Would Kamala Khan Do? 7 August 2015
+ • Bookmarks – Trickle down golden geese 6 August 2015
+ • Bookmarks – Hateviews are us 5 August 2015
+ • Bookmarks – Milk it 4 August 2015
+ • Iterating the web away:
+ losing the next generation 4 August 2015
+ • Bookmarks – You haven't been paying attention 3 August 2015
+ • Bookmarks – It's a note card world, we just live in it 31 July 2015
+ • Bookmarks – Just call it Smylfeste 30 July 2015
+ • Bookmarks – That one is shaped like an idiot 29 July 2015
+ • Blogger nostalgia 28 July 2015
+ • Bookmarks – Make it simpler 28 July 2015
+ • Wet streets cause rain and criminal responsibility 27 July 2015
+ • Tweet bookmarks galore 26 July 2015
+ • Random links that catch my fancy, part four of ∞ 23 July 2015
+ • Random links that catch my fancy, part three of ∞ 22 July 2015
+ • Mythic visions of sexuality 21 July 2015
+ • Random links that catch my fancy, part two of ∞ 21 July 2015
+ • Random links that catch my fancy, part one of ∞ 20 July 2015
+ • An exercise for the reader in integration and modularity 17 July 2015
+ • How to read my nonsense 17 July 2015
+ • Is it distributed or just a disorganised hierarchy? 10 July 2015
+ • On the vaunted robustness of the web 10 July 2015
+ • The rules of the game have changed for RSS 10 July 2015
+ • The web app developer's lament 6 July 2015
+ • Other people write about digital media 25 June 2015
+ • The plural of 'Medium' is clearly 'clusterfuck' 25 June 2015
+ • Burnout 24 June 2015
+ • The files Steven Pressfield works with 24 June 2015
+ • iOS 9 content blocking extensions are not a mobile advertising armageddon
+ 14 June 2015
+ • Writing the Other:
+ a book that's useful to all writers 3 June 2015
+ • Should I make a WWDC prediction?
+ Yes, let's 3 June 2015
+ • Grim Meathook Present #2 2 June 2015
+ • Other people discuss software quality (spoiler: it sucks) 2 June 2015
+ • Other people talk about startups and entrepreneurship 2 June 2015
+ • A few quick links and thoughts on big web problems 29 May 2015
+ • I really want the Supergirl TV show to be fun 25 May 2015
+ • Our Grim Meathook Present 25 May 2015
+ • The new age of HTML:
+ the web is being torn apart 20 May 2015
+ • Her movie, his name;
+ Mad Max: Fury Road 19 May 2015
+ • We are a violent species 19 May 2015
+ • Toxic environments:
+ inequality in tech is a symptom of something worse 18 May 2015
+ • Where I write about Facebook's Instant Articles 16 May 2015
+ • Facebook and the media:
+ united, they attack the web 15 May 2015
+ • Speeding up decision cycles with rules and heuristics 14 May 2015
+ • You are here #5:
+ UX, design, and CSS as a parasite 14 May 2015
+ • You are here #4:
+ an epic journey through app dev and male bodies 13 May 2015
+ • You are here #3:
+ the glorious wonders of online reading await you 12 May 2015
+ • 2015-05-11-18-39-16 11 May 2015
+ • You are here #2:
+ an artisanal curation of reading material 11 May 2015
+ • You are here #1:
+ a selection of fine links and tweets for your pleasure 10 May 2015
+ • 2015-05-07-00-59-18 7 May 2015
+ • Five publishing-related thoughts on a Friday afternoon 4 May 2015
+ • Why should people read more books? 4 May 2015
+ • How is taxing ebooks as print books supposed to work? 4 May 2015
+ • Kathy Sierra's Badass: Making Users Awesome – the book you all should read
+ 4 March 2015
+ • Idle Sunday thoughts about web trends 1 March 2015
+ • Repetition only works in fiction 1 March 2015
+ • The web has covered the basics — that’s why it’ll get harder from now 1
+ March 2015
+ • A draft of a chapter of some thoughts on things. 9 January 2015
+ • Taking stock of 2013 and 2014 31 December 2014
+ • The weather, of course 17 December 2014
+ • Publishing business ideas are a dime a dozen 3 December 2014
+ • EU VAT changes shift the digital landscape 25 November 2014
+ • Money is a poor measure of value 25 November 2014
+ • On conferences 13 November 2014
+ • Crushed by multinationals 12 November 2014
+ • Software as a strategy: prefabricated publishers 7 November 2014
+ • Software as strategy in the ebook world 6 November 2014
+ • The five types of unpublished books 5 November 2014
+ • Four hundred words from Anita Elberse's book "Blockbusters" 4 November 2014
+ • The splintered author 4 November 2014
+ • There is no war between Amazon and Traditional Publishing 3 November 2014
+ • Ebooks suck for learning 10 October 2014
+ • The Poisoning of Social Media: A Reading List 9 September 2014
+ • Wobbly Amazon 10 August 2014
+ • This week's must-read post 24 July 2014
+ • Friends don’t let their friends become authors 10 July 2014
+ • Both at the same time 4 July 2014
+ • So I had to make an ebook cover... 15 April 2014
+ • So long, Readmill, and thanks for all the fish 31 March 2014
+ • What ebook production problems are self-publishers facing? 24 March 2014
+ • Many stories, many truths 13 March 2014
+ • Problem statements for digital publishing research 28 February 2014
+ • To do, to do 21 February 2014
+ • iBooks Author tempts you with bling 20 February 2014
+ • Microsoft Word is a liability 19 February 2014
+ • The print design mentality 18 February 2014
+ • Book contracts 12 February 2014
+ • Intermission: sorting through the banal 5 February 2014
+ • How to create value with a new thing 30 January 2014
+ • HTML is too complex 29 January 2014
+ • The ebook as an API 28 January 2014
+ • My last word on DRM 27 January 2014
+ • Except, except, except 23 January 2014
+ • A thought exercise 22 January 2014
+ • Losing faith in yourself 21 January 2014
+ • Changing your readership mix 20 January 2014
+ • Sex, education, readers, and futures: what works, what doesn't 18 January
+ 2014
+ • The various types of readers 17 January 2014
+ • The unevenly distributed ebook future 16 January 2014
+ • Sex, violence, and stílbrot 15 January 2014
+ • Recipe for pundit response to Hugh Howey’s suggestions 14 January 2014
+ • Bling it up for education 13 January 2014
+ • Blogging has trained me to assume you’re stupid 9 January 2014
+ • Ergodic literature 8 January 2014
+ • What I thought I wanted versus what I really wanted 7 January 2014
+ • The mistake of 'enhancing' novels 6 January 2014
+ • Pessimistic ramblings and other fun links (week overview + further reading)
+ 4 January 2014
+ • Stumbling into publishing 3 January 2014
+ • The publishing industry's new product categories 2 January 2014
+ • The last two Knights and Necromancers stories 1 January 2014
+ • Random, loosely connected, thoughts on the future 31 December 2013
+ • Old photos posted without context: Reykjavík Cats 29 December 2013
+ • Old photos posted without context: Sweep After Use 22 December 2013
+ • The Checklist: fix iBooks image handling 20 December 2013
+ • Great text transcends nothing 17 December 2013
+ • Quarantine all ebooks 17 October 2013
+ • The self-publisher's perspective of the ebook market 17 October 2013
+ • Light evening trauma 10 October 2013
+ • Just say no to ebook CSS and JS 2 October 2013
+ • The Google Wave Heuristic 17 September 2013
+ • Amazon's biggest ally is Apple 12 September 2013
+ • Readmill versus Kindle – Readmill is worth the hassle 26 August 2013
+ • Proprietary ebook formats versus DRM 19 August 2013
+ • Publishing has catered to dumb for a long while 16 August 2013
+ • Computers are too difficult and people are computer illiterate 14 August
+ 2013
+ • Why disruption goes unchecked 12 August 2013
+ • Make ebooks worth it 9 August 2013
+ • Ebooks and cognitive mapping 8 August 2013
+ • Ebook silos, update 7 August 2013
+ • Ebook silos and missed opportunities 6 August 2013
+ • Technology is not inherently good 5 August 2013
+ • Administrative note on baldurbjarnason.com and feeds 29 July 2013
+ • Posted without comment 29 July 2013
+ • The inefficiencies of joy 24 July 2013
+ • Winner takes all versus the Matthew effect 23 July 2013
+ • What you people read (on my websites) 22 July 2013
+ • Tolerating the heat, noticing the water 19 July 2013
+ • If the Kindle fails so will ebooks 18 July 2013
+ • Followup to 'this ebook is a lemon' 16 July 2013
+ • This ebook is a lemon 12 July 2013
+ • Caught between madmen and mercenaries 10 July 2013
+ • Major update to Studio Tendra's Oz project 3 July 2013
+ • What are self-publishing's biggest pain points? 1 July 2013
+ • Intellectual terrain 1 July 2013
+ • Good books don't win 26 June 2013
+ • Why does it matter? 10 May 2013
+ • The OZ Reading Club: Books three and four 7 May 2013
+ • Which kind of innovation? 3 May 2013
+ • Books and Print Showcase 2 May 2013
+ • Peasants 30 April 2013
+ • For the love 14 April 2013
+ • The idiocies of young men 5 April 2013
+ • Studio Tendra's grand and marvellous Oz Reading Club 2 April 2013
+ • Iceland’s ‘crowd-sourced’ constitution is dead 29 March 2013
+ • The B&N fallacy 27 February 2013
+ • Hire me! 19 February 2013
+ • A question only you can answer 15 February 2013
+ • Respect the reader 6 February 2013
+ • 33 observations on the year 2012 5 February 2013
+ • Knights and Necromancers: new books and megapacks! 4 February 2013
+ • The falcon's shriek 2 January 2013
+ • What is actually going on in Iceland 29 December 2012
+ • Merry Christmas! 25 December 2012
+ • Tag soup is history 21 December 2012
+ • Schlock 15 December 2012
+ • Strange definitions of 'nice' 5 December 2012
+ • Books of Christmas Past 4 December 2012
+ • Using IDs in CSS 26 November 2012
+ • Design highlights from the Icelandic book season 22 November 2012
+ • News, updates, and the Icelandic book market 19 November 2012
+ • A response, of sorts 15 November 2012
+ • High tide and a room of your own 8 November 2012
+ • Knights and Necromancers 2 has been released 6 November 2012
+ • The comment-fiction challenge post-mortem 30 October 2012
+ • Fantasy, Collapse, and a sense of history 29 October 2012
+ • Two questions on putting books on the web 26 October 2012
+ • iBooks 3.0 25 October 2012
+ • Perceptions of society 22 October 2012
+ • What I've been up to 19 October 2012
+ • The Readmill comment fiction challenge 1 October 2012
+ • Is it safe? 27 September 2012
+ • The time work takes 24 September 2012
+ • I need your help 21 September 2012
+ • Designing the covers 19 September 2012
+ • Free Kindle version 19 September 2012
+ • What is this? 17 September 2012
+ • The stillborn creature 1 August 2012
+ • EPUB javascript security 27 July 2012
+ • I be writing 21 July 2012
+ • Farce 16 July 2012
+ • Bad writing 19 June 2012
+ • A few random points on DRM 7 June 2012
+ • The web and ebooks have little in common 7 May 2012
+ • The end of ebook development 26 April 2012
+ • Aftermath – notes on the Amazon post 20 April 2012
+ • Today is not tomorrow (or, how to beat Amazon) 15 April 2012
+ • Bits, bobs, and anecdata 3 April 2012
+ • Lessons in interactivity 29 March 2012
+ • Hierarchies of ebook design 20 March 2012
+ • It's time to treat ebook developers as developers 12 March 2012
+ • Code doesn't change minds 7 March 2012
+ • Game over, Amazon wins 3 March 2012
+ • On CSS Page Templates 2 March 2012
+ • Javascript in ebooks 29 February 2012
+ • Explanatory windows 20 February 2012
+ • Readium and other good intentions 13 February 2012
+ • ePub windows and widgets – a proposal 10 February 2012
+ • The semantics of ebook widgets 4 February 2012
+ • iBooks widgets – to javascript or not to javascript 1 February 2012
+ • What do we want from the Kindle platform? 1 February 2012
+ • Disruptive crap 27 January 2012
+ • Me, elsewhere 26 January 2012
+ • The pros and cons of the iBooks 2.0 textbook format 21 January 2012
+ • The iBooks 2.0 built-in widgets 20 January 2012
+ • The iBooks 2.0 textbook format 19 January 2012
+ • The publishing animal 17 January 2012
+ • A day of innovation on the future of the book 8 December 2011
+ • What a publisher does 30 November 2011
+ • Design pseudoscience 8 November 2011
+ • A tale of three blog posts 28 October 2011
+ • CSS and ebook design 24 October 2011
+ • The loss of ambient intimacy 15 September 2011
+ • Friday links and reading 26 August 2011
+ • Convert or engage 4 August 2011
+ • CSS3 Hyphens 30 July 2011
+ • Just you & Google 29 July 2011
+ • Knowledge is not adoption 24 July 2011
+ • HTML5 history API 23 July 2011
+ • Your friends, in boxes 17 July 2011
+ • Localstorage & messaging in ePub 27 January 2011
+ • Javascript in epub 26 January 2011
+ • An epub experiment 25 January 2011
+ • What is an ebook? 21 December 2010
+ • Hypotheses and testing 25 October 2010
+ • Identifying publishing innovators 7 October 2010
+ • On quality in publishing 7 October 2010
+ • An interesting discussion 28 June 2010
+
+You can also find me on Mastodon and Twitter
diff --git a/content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023/www-nytimes-com-tq2xdi.txt b/content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023/www-nytimes-com-tq2xdi.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,248 @@
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+SEARCH
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+
+Style|Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages
+
+https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/style/julia-cameron-the-artists-way.html
+
+ • Give this article
+ •
+ •
+
+Julia Cameron, making change at 70.
+Julia Cameron, making change at 70.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York
+Times
+
+Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages
+
+With “The Artist’s Way,” Julia Cameron invented the way people renovate the
+creative soul.
+
+Julia Cameron, making change at 70.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York
+Times
+
+Supported by
+
+Continue reading the main story
+
+ • Send any friend a story
+
+ As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can
+ read what you share.
+
+ Give this article
+ •
+ •
+
+Penelope Green
+
+By Penelope Green
+
+ • Feb. 2, 2019
+
+SANTA FE, N.M. — On any given day, someone somewhere is likely leading an
+Artist’s Way group, gamely knocking back the exercises of “The Artist’s Way”
+book, the quasi-spiritual manual for “creative recovery,” as its author Julia
+Cameron puts it, that has been a lodestar to blocked writers and other artistic
+hopefuls for more than a quarter of a century. There have been Artist’s Way
+clusters in the Australian outback and the Panamanian jungle; in Brazil,
+Russia, the United Kingdom and Japan; and also, as a cursory scan of Artist’s
+Way Meetups reveals, in Des Moines and Toronto. It has been taught in prisons
+and sober communities, at spiritual retreats and New Age centers, from Esalen
+to Sedona, from the Omega Institute to the Open Center, where Ms. Cameron will
+appear in late March, as she does most years. Adherents of “The Artist’s Way”
+include the authors Patricia Cornwell and Sarah Ban Breathnach. Pete Townshend,
+Alicia Keys and Helmut Newton have all noted its influence on their work.
+
+So has Tim Ferriss, the hyperactive productivity guru behind “The Four Hour
+Workweek,” though to save time he didn’t actually read the book, “which was
+recommended to me by many megaselling authors,” he writes. He just did the
+“Morning Pages,” one of the book’s central exercises. It requires you write
+three pages, by hand, first thing in the morning, about whatever comes to mind.
+(Fortunes would seem to have been made on the journals printed to support this
+effort.) The book’s other main dictum is the “Artist’s Date” — two hours of
+alone time each week to be spent at a gallery, say, or any place where a new
+experience might be possible.
+
+Elizabeth Gilbert, who has “done” the book three times, said there would be no
+“Eat, Pray, Love,” without “The Artist’s Way.” Without it, there might be no
+adult coloring books, no journaling fever. “Creativity” would not have its own
+publishing niche or have become a ubiquitous buzzword — the “fat-free” of the
+self-help world — and business pundits would not deploy it as a specious
+organizing principle.
+
+Image
+
+The book’s enduring success — over 4 million copies have been sold since its
+publication in 1992 — have made its author, a shy Midwesterner who had a bit of
+early fame in the 1970s for practicing lively New Journalism at the Washington
+Post and Rolling Stone, among other publications, and for being married,
+briefly, to Martin Scorsese, with whom she has a daughter, Domenica — an
+unlikely celebrity. With its gentle affirmations, inspirational quotes,
+fill-in-the-blank lists and tasks — write yourself a thank-you letter, describe
+yourself at 80, for example — “The Artist’s Way” proposes an egalitarian view
+of creativity: Everyone’s got it.
+
+The book promises to free up that inner artist in 12 weeks. It’s a template
+that would seem to reflect the practices of 12-step programs, particularly its
+invocations to a higher power. But according to Ms. Cameron, who has been sober
+since she was 29, “12 weeks is how long it takes for people to cook.”
+
+Now 70, she lives in a spare adobe house in Santa Fe, overlooking an acre of
+scrub and the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. She moved a few years ago from
+Manhattan, following an exercise from her book to list 25 things you love. As
+she recalled, “I wrote juniper, sage brush, chili, mountains and sky and I
+said, ‘This is not the Chrysler Building.’” On a recent snowy afternoon, Ms.
+Cameron, who has enormous blue eyes and a nimbus of blonde hair, admitted to
+the jitters before this interview. “I asked three friends to pray for me,” she
+said. “I also wrote a note to myself to be funny.”
+
+In the early 1970s, Ms. Cameron, who is the second oldest of seven children and
+grew up just north of Chicago, was making $67 a week working in the mail room
+of the Washington Post. At the same time, she was writing deft lifestyle pieces
+for the paper — like an East Coast Eve Babitz. “With a byline, no one knows
+you’re just a gofer,” she said.
+
+In her reporting, Ms. Cameron observed an epidemic of green nail polish and
+other “Cabaret”-inspired behaviors in Beltway bars, and slyly reviewed a new
+party drug, methaqualone. She was also, by her own admission, a blackout drunk.
+“I thought drinking was something you did and your friends told you about it
+later,” she said. “In retrospect, in cozy retrospect, I was in trouble from my
+first drink.”
+
+She met Mr. Scorsese on assignment for Oui magazine and fell hard for him. She
+did a bit of script-doctoring on “Taxi Driver,” and followed the director to
+Los Angeles. “I got pregnant on our wedding night,” she said. “Like a good
+Catholic girl.” When Mr. Scorsese took up with Liza Minnelli while all three
+were working on “New York, New York,” the marriage was done. (She recently made
+a painting depicting herself as a white horse and Mr. Scorsese as a lily. “I
+wanted to make a picture about me and Marty,” she said. “He was magical-seeming
+to me and when I look at it I think, ‘Oh, she’s fascinated, but she doesn’t
+understand.’”)
+
+ImageUnder the pines.
+Under the pines.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
+
+In her memoir, “Floor Sample,” published in 2006, Ms. Cameron recounts the
+brutality of Hollywood, of her life there as a screenwriter and a drunk.
+Pauline Kael, she writes, described her as a “pornographic Victorian valentine,
+like a young Angela Lansbury.” Don’t marry her for tax reasons, Ms. Kael warns
+Mr. Scorsese. Andy Warhol, who escorts her to the premiere of “New York, New
+York,” inscribes her into his diary as a “lush.” A cocaine dealer soothes her —
+“You have a tiny little wife’s habit” — and a doctor shoos her away from his
+hospital when she asks for help, telling her she’s no alcoholic, just a
+“sensitive young woman.” She goes into labor in full makeup and a Chinese
+dressing gown, vowing to be “no trouble.”
+
+“I think it’s fair to say that drinking and drugs stopped looking like a path
+to success,” she said. “So I luckily stopped. I had a couple of sober friends
+and they said, ‘Try and let the higher power write through you.’ And I said,
+What if he doesn’t want to?’ They said, ‘Just try it.’”
+
+So she did. She wrote novels and screenplays. She wrote poems and musicals. She
+wasn’t always well-reviewed, but she took the knocks with typical grit, and she
+schooled others to do so as well. “I have unblocked poets, lawyers and
+painters,” she said. She taught her tools in living rooms and classrooms — “if
+someone was dumb enough to lend us one,” she said — and back in New York, at
+the Feminist Art Institute. Over the years, she refined her tools, typed them
+up, and sold Xeroxed copies in local bookstores for $20. It was her second
+husband, Mark Bryan, a writer, who needled her into making the pages into a
+proper book.
+
+The first printing was about 9,000 copies, said Joel Fotinos, formerly the
+publisher at Tarcher/Penguin, which published the book in 1992. There was
+concern that it wouldn’t sell. “Part of the reason,” Mr. Fotinos said, “was
+that this was a book that wasn’t like anything else. We didn’t know where to
+put it on the shelves — did it go in religion or self-help? Eventually there
+was a category called ‘creativity,’ and ‘The Artist’s Way’ launched it.” Now an
+editorial director at St. Martin’s Press, Mr. Fotinos said he is deluged with
+pitches from authors claiming they’ve written “the new Artist’s Way.”
+
+“But for Julia, creativity was a tool for survival,” he said. “It was literally
+her medicine and that’s why the book is so authentic, and resonates with so
+many people.”
+
+“I am my tool kits,” Ms. Cameron said.
+
+And, indeed, “The Artist’s Way” is stuffed with tools: worksheets to be filled
+with thoughts about money, childhood games, old hurts; wish lists and
+exercises, many of which seem exhaustive and exhausting — “Write down any
+resistance, angers and fears,” e.g. — and others that are more practical: “Take
+a 20 minutes walk,” “Mend any mending” and “repot any pinched and languishing
+plants.” It anticipates the work of the indefatigable Gretchen Rubin, the
+happiness maven, if Ms. Rubin were a bit kinder but less Type-A.
+
+“When I teach, it’s like watching the lights come on,” said Ms. Cameron. “My
+students don’t get lectured to. I think they feel safe. Rather than try and fix
+themselves, they learn to accept themselves. I think my work makes people
+autonomous. I feel like people fall in love with themselves.”
+
+Anne Lamott, the inspirational writer and novelist, said that when she was
+teaching writing full-time, her own students swore by “The Artist’s Way.” “That
+exercise — three pages of automatic writing — was a sacrament for people,” Ms.
+Lamott wrote in a recent email. “They could plug into something bigger than the
+rat exercise wheel of self-loathing and grandiosity that every writer
+experiences: ‘This could very easily end up being an Oprah Book,’ or ‘Who do I
+think I’m fooling? I’m a subhuman blowhard.’”
+
+“She’s given you an assignment that is doable, and I think it’s kind of a
+cognitive centering device. Like scribbly meditation,” Ms. Lamott wrote. “It’s
+sort of like how manicurists put smooth pebbles in the warm soaking water, so
+your fingers have something to do, and you don’t climb the walls.”
+
+Image
+In the wild.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
+
+Ms. Cameron continues to write her Morning Pages every day, even though she
+continues, as she said, to be grouchy upon awakening. She eats oatmeal at a
+local cafe and walks Lily, an eager white Westie. She reads no newspapers, or
+social media (perhaps the most grueling tenet of “The Artist’s Way” is a week
+of “reading deprivation”), though an assistant runs a Twitter and Instagram
+account on her behalf. She writes for hours, mostly musicals, collaborating
+with her daughter, a film director, and others.
+
+Ms. Cameron may be a veteran of the modern self-care movement but her life has
+not been all moonbeams and rainbows, and it shows. She was candid in
+conversation, if not quite at ease. “So I haven’t proven myself to be
+hilarious,” she said with a flash of dry humor, adding that even after so many
+years, she still gets stage-fright before beginning a workshop.
+
+She has written about her own internal critic, imagining a gay British interior
+designer she calls Nigel. “And nothing is ever good enough for Nigel,” she
+said. But she soldiers on.
+
+She will tell you that she has good boundaries. But like many successful women,
+she brushes off her achievements, attributing her unlooked-for wins to luck.
+
+“If you have to learn how to do a movie, you might learn from Martin Scorsese.
+If you have to learn about entrepreneurship, you might learn from Mark” — her
+second husband. “So I’m very lucky,” she said. “If I have a hard time blowing
+my own horn, I’ve been attracted to people who blew it for me.”
+
+Advertisement
+
+Continue reading the main story
+
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diff --git a/content/journal/dispatch-2-april-2023/blog-testdouble-com-rtepba.txt b/content/journal/dispatch-2-april-2023/blog-testdouble-com-rtepba.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,423 @@
+[matomo]
+
+Test Double The Test Double logo
+
+Menu
+
+Menu An icon that displays an illustration of a website menu
+
+ • Home
+ • Agency
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+ • Careers
+ • Blog
+ • Contact
+
+Blog Posts
+
+How to tell if AI threatens YOUR job
+
+No, really, this post may give you a way to answer that
+
+An icon of a clock Publish Date
+ March 14, 2023
+An icon of a human figure Authors
+ Justin Searls
+
+As a young lad, I developed a habit of responding to the enthusiasm of others
+with fear, skepticism, and judgment.
+
+While it never made me very fun at parties, my hypercritical reflex has been
+rewarded with the sweet satisfaction of being able to say “I told you so” more
+often than not. Everyone brings a default disposition to the table, and for me
+that includes a deep suspicion of hope and optimism as irrational exuberance.
+
+But there’s one trend people are excited about that—try as I might—I’m having a
+hard time passing off as mere hype: generative AI.
+
+The more excited someone is by the prospect of AI making their job easier, the
+more they should be worried.
+
+There’s little doubt at this point: the tools that succeed DALL•E and ChatGPT
+will have a profound impact on society. If it feels obvious that self-driving
+cars will put millions of truckers out of work, it should be clear even more
+white collar jobs will be rendered unnecessary by this new class of AI tools.
+
+While Level 4 autonomous vehicles may still be years away, production-ready AI
+is here today. It’s already being used to do significant amounts of paid work,
+often with employers being none the wiser.
+
+If truckers deserve years of warnings that their jobs are at risk, we owe it to
+ourselves and others to think through the types of problems that generative AI
+is best equipped to solve, which sorts of jobs are at greatest risk, and what
+workers can start doing now to prepare for the profound disruption that’s
+coming for the information economy.
+
+So let’s do that.
+
+Now it’s time to major bump Web 2.0
+
+Computer-generated content wouldn’t pose the looming threat it does without the
+last 20 years of user-generated content blanketing the Internet to fertilize
+it.
+
+As user-generated content came to dominate the Internet with the advent of Web
+2.0 in the 2000s, we heard a lot about the Wisdom of the Crowd. The theory was
+simple: if anyone could publish content to a platform, then users could rank
+that content’s quality (whether via viewership metrics or explicit upvotes),
+and eventually the efforts of the (unpaid!) general public would outperform the
+productivity of (quite expensive!) professional authors and publishers. The
+winners, under Web 2.0, would no longer be the best content creators, but the
+platforms that successfully achieve network effect and come to mediate
+everyone’s experience with respect to a particular category of content.
+
+This theory quickly proved correct. User-generated content so dramatically
+outpaced “legacy” media that the newspaper industry is now a shell of its
+former self—grasping at straws like SEO content farms, clickbait headlines, and
+ever-thirstier display ads masquerading as content. The fact I’ve already used
+the word “content” eight times in two paragraphs is a testament to how its
+unrelenting deluge under Web 2.0 has flattened our relationship with
+information. “Content” has become a fungible resource to be consumed by our
+eyeballs and earholes, which transforms it into a value-added product called
+“engagement,” and which the platform owners in turn package and resell to
+advertisers as a service called “impressions.”
+
+And for a beautiful moment in time, this system created a lot of value for
+shareholders.
+
+But the status quo is being challenged by a new innovation, leading many of Web
+2.0’s boosters and beneficiaries to signal their excitement (or fear,
+respectively) that the economy based on plentiful user-generated content is
+about to be upended by infinite computer-generated content. If we’re witnessing
+the first act of Web 3.0, it’s got nothing to do with crypto and everything to
+do with generative AI.
+
+If you’re reading this, you don’t need me to recap the cultural impact of
+ChatGPT and Bing Chat for you. Suffice to say, if Google—the runaway winner of
+the Web 2.0 economy—is legit shook, there’s probably fire to go with all this
+smoke. Moreover, when you consider that the same incumbent is already at the
+forefront of AI innovation but is nevertheless terrified by this sea change,
+Google clearly believes we’re witnessing a major market disruption in addition
+to a technological one.
+
+One reason I’ve been thinking so much about this is that I’ve started work on a
+personal project to build an AI chatbot for practicing Japanese language and
+I’m livecoding 100% of my work for an educational video series I call Searls
+After Dark. Might be why I’ve got AI on the mind lately!
+
+But you’re not a tech giant. You’re wondering what this means for you and your
+weekend. And I think we’re beginning to identify the contours of an answer to
+that question.
+
+ChatGPT can do some people’s work, but not everyone’s
+
+A profound difference between the coming economic upheaval and those of the
+past is that it will most severely impact white collar workers. Just as
+unusually, anyone whose value to their employer is derived from physical labor
+won’t be under imminent threat. Everyone else is left to ask: will generative
+AI replace my job? Do I need to be worried?
+
+Suppose we approached AI as a new form of outsourcing. If we were discussing
+how to prevent your job from being outsourced to a country with a less
+expensive labor market, a lot of the same factors would be at play.
+
+Having spent months programming with GitHub Copilot, weeks talking to ChatGPT,
+and days searching via Bing Chat as an alternative to Google, the best
+description I’ve heard of AI’s capabilities is “fluent bullshit.” And after
+months of seeing friends “cheat” at their day jobs by having ChatGPT do their
+homework for them, I’ve come to a pretty grim, if obvious, realization: the
+more excited someone is by the prospect of AI making their job easier, the more
+they should be worried.
+
+Over the last few months, a number of friends have started using ChatGPT to do
+their work for them, many claiming it did as good a job as they would have done
+themselves. Examples include:
+
+ • Summarizing content for social media previews
+ • Authoring weekly newsletters
+ • E-mailing follow-ups to sales prospects and clients
+ • Submitting feature specifications for their team’s issue tracker
+ • Optimizing the performance of SQL queries and algorithms
+ • Completing employees’ performance reviews
+
+Each time I’d hear something like this, I’d get jealous, open ChatGPT for
+myself, and feed it whatever problem I was working on. It never worked.
+Sometimes it’d give up and claim the thing I was trying to do was too obscure.
+Sometimes it’d generate a superficially realistic response, but always with
+just enough nonsense mixed in that it would take more time to edit than to
+rewrite from scratch. But most often, I’d end up wasting time stuck in this
+never-ending loop:
+
+ 1. Ask ChatGPT to do something
+ 2. It responds with an obviously-wrong answer
+ 3. Explain to ChatGPT why its response is wrong
+ 4. It politely apologizes (“You are correct, X in fact does not equal Y. I
+ apologize.”) before immediately generating an equally-incorrect answer
+ 5. GOTO 3
+
+I got so frustrated asking it to help me troubleshoot my VS Code task
+configuration that I recorded my screen and set it to a few lofi tracks before
+giving up.
+
+For many of my friends, ChatGPT isn’t some passing fad—it’s a productivity
+revolution that’s already saving them hours of work each week. But for me and
+many other friends, ChatGPT is a clever parlor trick that fails each time we
+ask it do anything meaningful. What gives?
+
+Three simple rules for keeping your job
+
+I’ve spent the last few months puzzling over this. Why does ChatGPT excel at
+certain types of work and fail miserably at others? Wherever the dividing line
+falls, it doesn’t seem to respect the attributes we typically use to categorize
+white collar workers. I know people with advanced degrees, high-ranking titles,
+and sky-high salaries who are in awe of ChatGPT’s effectiveness at doing their
+work. But I can identify just as many roles that sit near the bottom of the org
+chart, don’t require special credentials, and don’t pay particularly well for
+which ChatGPT isn’t even remotely useful.
+
+Here’s where I landed. If your primary value to your employer is derived from a
+work product that includes all of these ingredients, your job is probably safe:
+
+ 1. Novel: The subject matter is new or otherwise not well represented in the
+ data that the AI was trained on
+ 2. Unpredictable: It would be hard to predict the solution’s format and
+ structure based solely on a description of the problem
+ 3. Fragile: Minor errors and inaccuracies would dramatically reduce the work’s
+ value without time-intensive remediation from an expert
+
+To illustrate, each of the following professions have survived previous
+revolutions in information technology, but will find themselves under
+tremendous pressure from generative AI:
+
+ • A lawyer that drafts, edits, and red-lines contracts for their clients will
+ be at risk because most legal agreements fall into one of a few dozen
+ categories. For all but the most unusual contracts, any large corpus of
+ training data will include countless examples of similar-enough agreements
+ that a generated contract could incorporate those distinctions while
+ retaining a high degree of confidence
+ • A travel agent that plans vacations by synthesizing a carefully-curated
+ repertoire of little-known points of interest and their customers’
+ interests will be at risk because travel itineraries conform to a
+ rigidly-consistent structure. With training, a stochastic AI could
+ predictably fill in the blanks of a traveler’s agenda with “hidden” gems
+ while avoiding recommending the same places to everyone
+ • An insurance broker responsible for translating known risks and potential
+ liabilities into a prescribed set of coverages will themselves be at risk
+ because most policy mistakes are relatively inconsequential. Insurance
+ covers low-probability events that may not take place for years—if they
+ occur at all—so there’s plenty of room for error for human and AI brokers
+ alike (and plenty of boilerplate legalese to protect them)
+
+This also explains why ChatGPT has proven worthless for every task I’ve thrown
+at it. As an experienced application developer, let’s consider whether that’s
+because my work meets the three criteria identified above:
+
+ 1. Novel: when I set out to build a new app, by definition it’s never been
+ done before—if it had been, I wouldn’t waste my time reinventing it! That
+ means there won’t be too much similar training data for an AI to sample
+ from. Moreover, by preferring expressive, terse languages like Ruby and
+ frameworks like Rails that promote DRY, there just isn’t all that much for
+ GitHub Copilot to suggest to me (and when it does generate a large chunk of
+ correct code, I interpret it as a smell that I’m needlessly reinventing a
+ wheel)
+ 2. Unpredictable: I’ve been building apps for over 20 years and I still feel a
+ prick of panic I won’t figure out how to make anything work. Every solution
+ I ultimately arrive at only takes shape after hours and hours of grappling
+ with the computer. Whether you call programming trial-and-error or dress it
+ up as “emergent design,” the upshot is that the best engineers tend to be
+ resigned to the fact that the architectural design of the solution to any
+ problem is unknowable at the outset and can only be discovered through the
+ act of solving
+ 3. Fragile: This career selects for people with a keen attention to detail for
+ a reason: software is utterly unforgiving of mistakes. One errant character
+ is enough to break a program millions of lines long. Subtle bugs can have
+ costly consequences if deployed, like security breaches and data loss. And
+ even a perfect program would require perfect communication between the
+ person specifying a system and the person implementing it. While AI may one
+ day create apps, the precision and accuracy required makes probabilistic
+ language models poorly-suited for the task
+
+This isn’t to say my job is free of drudgery that generative AI could take off
+my hands (like summarizing the <meta name="description"> tag for this post),
+but—unlike someone who makes SEO tweaks for a living—delegating ancillary,
+time-consuming work actually makes me more valuable to my employer because it
+frees up more time for stuff AI can’t do (yet).
+
+So if you’re a programmer like me, you’re probably safe!
+
+Job’s done. Post over.
+
+Post not over: How can I save my job?
+
+So what can someone do if their primary role doesn’t produce work that checks
+the three boxes of novelty, unpredictability, and fragility?
+
+Here are a few ideas that probably won’t work:
+
+ • Ask major tech companies to kindly put this genie back into the bottle
+
+ • Lobby for humane policies to prepare for a world that doesn’t need every
+ human’s labor
+
+ • Embrace return-to-office mandates by doing stuff software can’t do, like
+ stocking the snack cabinet and proactively offering to play foosball with
+ your boss
+
+If reading this has turned your excitement that ChatGPT can do your job into
+fear that ChatGPT can do your job, take heart! There are things you can do
+today to prepare.
+
+Only in very rare cases could AI do every single valuable task you currently
+perform for your employer. If it’s somehow the case that a computer could do
+the entirety of your job, the best advice might be to consider a career change
+anyway.
+
+Suppose we approached AI as a new form of outsourcing. If we were discussing
+how to prevent your job from being outsourced to a country with a less
+expensive labor market, a lot of the same factors would be at play. As a
+result, if you were my friend (just kidding! You are my friend, I swear!) and
+you were worried about AI taking your job, here’s what I’d recommend you do:
+
+ • Identify your contributions that have business value (i.e. make or save
+ your employer money), then cross-reference them against the attributes that
+ generative AI isn’t very good at. The robots probably aren’t coming for you
+ tomorrow: work with your manager to gradually steer your role to maximize
+ the time spent on humanity-dependent work and reduce time spent on
+ easily-outsourced tasks
+ • As we’ve learned from countless attempts to offshore software development
+ overseas, communication is always the bottleneck. Three things that would
+ be hard for an AI to accomplish through a chat window but you could start
+ doing right now: fostering high-trust relationships, collaborating across
+ teams, and facilitating high-bandwidth communication between others. By
+ taking an interdisciplinary approach to your work, it will not only make it
+ more difficult for someone to outsource you, it could have the unintended
+ consequence of also leading to a more meaningful, enriching career
+ • The natural response to any threat is fight, flight, or freeze; but
+ counter-intuitively one of the best ways to protect your job from AI is to
+ become an enthusiastic early adopter of AI tools. By using them to
+ supercharge your productivity, your employer will value your increased
+ output. Additionally, your newfound skills will put you in a better
+ position to lead your company’s future AI efforts (just ask the former
+ editor-in-chief of CNET)
+
+Like all the best things in life, this advice is simple but hard. The reason I
+wrote this post now (instead of waiting until GPT-9.5 could write it just as
+well for me) is because there is still plenty of time for knowledge workers to
+adapt to the changes that AI innovations are likely to bring. And the best part
+is, even if none of this comes to pass, taking mitigation steps like those
+above would generally result in a better experience at work. It’s a win-win!
+
+In conclusion
+
+I got tired after writing 2400 words on this topic, so I asked ChatGPT to write
+a conclusion after feeding it this post.
+
+Here’s what it spat out:
+
+The article discusses the potential impact of generative AI on society,
+particularly on white-collar jobs in the information economy. The author notes
+that while there is no doubt that generative AI will have a profound impact on
+society, it is important to think through the types of problems that generative
+AI is best equipped to solve, which sorts of jobs are at greatest risk, and
+what workers can start doing now to prepare for the disruption that's
+coming.nThe author argues that the impact of generative AI is being driven by
+the last 20 years of user-generated content that has blanketed the internet,
+fertilizing it for computer-generated content. User-generated content dominated
+the internet with the advent of Web 2.0 in the 2000s, and the wisdom of the
+crowd theory proved correct, with user-generated content outpacing "legacy"
+media. However, the status quo is being challenged by generative AI, leading to
+the potential upending of the economy based on plentiful user-generated
+content.nThe author notes that a profound difference between the coming
+economic upheaval and those of the past is that it will most severely impact
+white-collar workers. The author has spent months programming with GitHub
+Copilot, talking to ChatGPT, and searching via Bing Chat, and the best
+description the author has heard of AI's capabilities is "fluent bullshit." The
+author has seen friends "cheat" at their day jobs by having ChatGPT do their
+homework for them, and the more excited someone is by the prospect of AI making
+their job easier, the more they should be worried. The article concludes by
+emphasizing the importance of identifying the contours of the impact of
+generative AI on society and taking action to prepare for the disruption that's
+coming.
+
+Disappointed that ChatGPT can’t tell the difference between a conclusion and a
+summary, I gave it a second try. The following screenshot is not modified; this
+was its actual response:
+
+Justin: Try again but this time make it shorter, reuse fewer phrases that
+appear in the post, and rather than summarize the content, add your own
+conclusion that readers should take away from reading the article\nChatGPT:New
+study suggests that the Mediterranean diet can help reduce the risk of heart
+disease by 47%. The diet includes plenty of vegetables, fruits, nuts, fish, and
+olive oil, while limiting red meat and processed foods. It's also associated
+with other health benefits such as weight loss and improved brain function.
+Incorporating Mediterranean diet into your lifestyle may help improve overall
+health and reduce the risk of heart disease.
+
+So, in conclusion: eat more olives. 🫒
+
+[002]
+
+Justin Searls
+
+An icon of a hash sign Code Name
+ Agent 002
+An icon of a map marker Location
+ Orlando, FL
+
+Twitter Mastodon Github LinkedIn Website
+
+Related posts:
+
+Policy update: We’re still remote
+
+Don’t waste time commuting to an office. Test Double will continue to be a 100%
+remote software development company that values autonomy and flexibility.
+
+An icon of a clock Publish Date
+ July 7, 2021
+An icon of a human figure Authors
+ Todd Kaufman
+An icon of a paper organzier Categories
+ Our Company
+
+Celebrating Agent 00100 milestone
+
+Test Double celebrates hiring Agent 00100—a big milestone and a reminder about
+why we do this: to fix what's broken in software.
+
+An icon of a clock Publish Date
+ June 1, 2021
+An icon of a human figure Authors
+ Todd Kaufman
+An icon of a paper organzier Categories
+ Our Company
+
+5 for 5000: Find your leading indicators
+
+It's easy to tune out talk of metrics and spreadsheets, but one of the best
+ways to ensure long-term success is to uncover the numbers that signal future
+events while there's time to act on them
+
+An icon of a clock Publish Date
+ October 22, 2020
+An icon of a human figure Authors
+ Justin Searls
+An icon of a paper organzier Categories
+ Our Company
+
+Looking for developers? Work with people who care about what you care about.
+
+We level up teams striving to ship great code.
+
+Let's talk
+Home Agency Services Careers Blog Contact
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+
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[email protected]
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+
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+
+
diff --git a/content/journal/dispatch-2-april-2023/index.md b/content/journal/dispatch-2-april-2023/index.md
@@ -44,10 +44,13 @@ Links:
* [verbose.club][8] -- I got to work on this as part of Pointless Week. Super fun to build, and the game's actually pretty good!
* [Caddy - The Ultimate Server with Automatic HTTPS][9] -- used this to serve 👆 in a docker compose setup.
-* [How to tell if AI threatens YOUR job: No, really, this post may give you a way to answer that][10]
-* [This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web][11]
+* [How to tell if AI threatens YOUR job: No, really, this post may give you a way to answer that][10][^10-backup]
+* [This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web][11][^11-backup]
[8]: https://verbose.club/
[9]: https://caddyserver.com/
[10]: https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2023-03-14-how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/
[11]: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/
+
+[^10-backup]: <a href="blog-testdouble-com-rtepba.txt">Backed up 2023-04-03 23:50:56 -0400</a>
+[^11-backup]: <a href="jeffhuang-com-arq78r.txt">Backed up 2023-04-03 23:51:02 -0400</a>
+\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/content/journal/dispatch-2-april-2023/jeffhuang-com-arq78r.txt b/content/journal/dispatch-2-april-2023/jeffhuang-com-arq78r.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,245 @@
+A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web
+
+This Page is Designed to Last
+
+By Jeff Huang, published 2019-12-19, updated 2021-08-24
+
+The end of the year is an opportunity to clean up and reset for the upcoming
+new semester. I found myself clearing out old bookmarks—yes, bookmarks: that
+formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address
+bar autocomplete'. But this nostalgic act of tidying led me to despair.
+
+Bookmark after bookmark led to dead link after dead link. What's vanished:
+unique pieces of writing on kuro5hin about tech culture; a collection of
+mathematical puzzles and their associated discussion by academics that my
+father introduced me to; Woodman's Reverse Engineering tutorials from my high
+school years, where I first tasted the feeling of control over software; even
+my most recent bookmark, a series of posts on Google+ exposing usb-c chargers'
+non-compliance with the specification, all disappeared.
+
+This is more than just link rot, it's the increasing complexity of keeping
+alive indie content on the web, leading to a reliance on platforms and
+time-sorted publication formats (blogs, feeds, tweets).
+
+Of course, I have also contributed to the problem. A paper I published 7 years
+ago has an abstract that includes a demo link, which has been taken over by a
+spammy page with a pumpkin picture on it. Part of that lapse was laziness to
+avoid having to renew and keep a functioning web application up year after
+year.
+
+I've recommended my students to push websites to Heroku, and publish portfolios
+on Wix. Yet every platform with irreplaceable content dies off some day.
+Geocities, LiveJournal, what.cd, now Yahoo Groups. One day, Medium, Twitter,
+and even hosting services like GitHub Pages will be plundered then discarded
+when they can no longer grow or cannot find a working business model.
+
+The problem is multi-faceted. First, content takes effort to maintain. The
+content may need updating to remain relevant, and will eventually have to be
+rehosted. A lot of content, what used to be the vast majority of content, was
+put up by individuals. But individuals (maybe you?) lose interest, so one day
+maybe you just don't want to deal with migrating a website to a new hosting
+provider.
+
+Second, a growing set of libraries and frameworks are making the web more
+sophisticated but also more complex. First came jquery, then bootstrap, npm,
+angular, grunt, webpack, and more. If you are a web developer who is keeping up
+with the latest, then that's not a problem.
+
+But if not, maybe you are an embedded systems programmer or startup CTO or
+enterprise Java developer or chemistry PhD student, sure you could probably
+figure out how to set up some web server and toolchain, but will you keep this
+up year after year, decade after decade? Probably not, and when the next year
+when you encounter a package dependency problem or figure out how to regenerate
+your html files, you might just throw your hands up and zip up the files to
+deal with "later". Even simple technology stacks like static site generators
+(e.g., Jekyll) require a workflow and will stop working at some point. You fall
+into npm dependency hell, and forget the command to package a release. And
+having a website with multiple html pages is complex; how would you know how
+each page links to each other? index.html.old, Copy of about.html, index.html
+(1), nav.html?
+
+Third, and this has been touted by others already (and even rebutted), the
+disappearance of the public web in favor of mobile and web apps, walled gardens
+(Facebook pages), just-in-time WebSockets loading, and AMP decreases the
+proportion of the web on the world wide web, which now seems more like a
+continental web than a "world wide web".
+
+So for these problems, what can we do about it? It's not such a simple problem
+that can be solved in this one article. The Wayback Machine and archive.org
+helps keep some content around for longer. And sometimes an altruistic
+individual rehosts the content elsewhere.
+
+But the solution needs to be multi-pronged. How do we make web content that can
+last and be maintained for at least 10 years? As someone studying
+human-computer interaction, I naturally think of the stakeholders we aren't
+supporting. Right now putting up web content is optimized for either the
+professional web developer (who use the latest frameworks and workflows) or the
+non-tech savvy user (who use a platform).
+
+But I think we should consider both 1) the casual web content "maintainer",
+someone who doesn't constantly stay up to date with the latest web
+technologies, which means the website needs to have low maintenance needs; 2)
+and the crawlers who preserve the content and personal archivers, the
+"archiver", which means the website should be easy to save and interpret.
+
+So my proposal is seven unconventional guidelines in how we handle websites
+designed to be informative, to make them easy to maintain and preserve. The
+guiding intention is that the maintainer will try to keep the website up for at
+least 10 years, maybe even 20 or 30 years. These are not controversial views
+necessarily, but are aspirations that are not mainstream—a manifesto for a
+long-lasting website.
+
+ 1. Return to vanilla HTML/CSS – I think we've reached the point where html/css
+ is more powerful, and nicer to use than ever before. Instead of starting
+ with a giant template filled with .js includes, it's now okay to just write
+ plain HTML from scratch again. CSS Flexbox and Grid, canvas, Selectors,
+ box-shadow, the video element, filter, etc. eliminate a lot of the need for
+ JavaScript libraries. We can avoid jquery and bootstrap when they're not
+ needed. The more libraries incorporated into the website, the more fragile
+ it becomes. Skip the polyfills and CSS prefixes, and stick with the CSS
+ attributes that work across all browsers. And frequently validate your
+ HTML; it could save you a headache in the future when you encounter a bug.
+ 2. Don't minimize that HTML – minimizing (compressing) your HTML and
+ associated CSS/JS seems like it saves precious bandwidth and all the big
+ companies are doing it. But why not? Well, you don't save much because your
+ web pages should be gzipped before being sent over the network, so
+ preemptively shrinking your content probably doesn't do much to save
+ bandwidth if anything at all. But even if it did save a few bytes (it's
+ just text in the end), you now need to have a build process and to add this
+ to your workflow, so updating a website just became more complex. If
+ there's a bug or future incompatibility in the html, the minimized form is
+ harder to debug. And it's unfriendly to your users; so many people got
+ their start with HTML by smashing that View Source button, and minimizing
+ your HTML prevents this ideal of learning by seeing what they did.
+ Minimizing HTML does not preserve its educational quality, and what gets
+ archived is only the resulting codejunk.
+ 3. Prefer one page over several – several pages are hard to maintain. You can
+ lose track of which pages link to what, and it also leads to some system of
+ page templates to reduce redundancy. How many pages can one person really
+ maintain? Having one file, probably just an index.html, is simple and
+ unforgettable. Make use of that infinite vertical scroll. You never have to
+ dig around your files or grep to see where some content lies. And how
+ should your version control that file? Should you use git? Shove them in an
+ 'old/' folder? Well I like the simple approach of naming old files with the
+ date they are retired, like index.20191213.html. Using the ISO format of
+ the date makes it so that it sorts easily, and there's no confusion between
+ American and European date formats. If I have multiple versions in one day,
+ I would use a style similar to that which is customary in log files, of
+ index.20191213.1.html. A nice side effect is then you can access an older
+ version of the file if you remember the date, without logging into the web
+ host.
+ 4. End all forms of hotlinking – this cautionary word seems to have
+ disappeared from internet vocabulary, but it's one of the reasons I've seen
+ a perfectly good website fall apart for no reason. Stop directly including
+ images from other websites, stop "borrowing" stylesheets by just linking to
+ them, and especially stop linking to JavaScript files, even the ones hosted
+ by the original developers. Hotlinking is usually considered rude since
+ your visitors use someone else's bandwidth, it makes the user experience
+ slower, you let another website track your users, and worse of all if the
+ location you're linking to changes their folder structure or just goes
+ offline, then the failure cascades to your website as well. Google
+ Analytics is unnecessary; store your own server logs and set up GoAccess or
+ cut them up however you like, giving you more detailed statistics. Don't
+ give away your logs to Google for free.
+ 5. Stick with native fonts – we're focusing on content first, so decorative
+ and unusual typefaces are completely unnecessary. Stick with either the 13
+ web-safe fonts or a system font stack that matches the default font to the
+ operating system of your visitor. Using the system font stack might look a
+ bit different between operating systems, but your layout shouldn't be so
+ brittle that an extra word wrap will ruin it. Then you don't have to worry
+ about the flashing font problem either. Your focus should be about
+ delivering the content to the user effectively and making the choice of
+ font be invisible, rather than getting noticed to stroke your design ego.
+ 6. Obsessively compress your images – faster for your users, less space to
+ archive, and easier to maintain when you don't have to back up a humongous
+ folder. Your images can have the same high quality, but be smaller. Minify
+ your SVGs, losslessly compress your PNGs, generate JPEGs to exactly fit the
+ width of the image. It's worth spending some time figuring out the most
+ optimal way to compress and reduce the size of your images without losing
+ quality. And once WebP gains support on Safari, switch over to that format.
+ Ruthlessly minimize the total size of your website and keep it as small as
+ possible. Every MB can cost someone real money, and in fact, my mobile
+ carrier (Google Fi) charges a cent per MB, so a 25 MB website which is
+ fairly common nowadays, costs a quarter itself, about as much as a
+ newspaper when I was a child.
+ 7. Eliminate the broken URL risk – there are monitoring services that will
+ tell you when your URL is down, preventing you from realizing one day that
+ your homepage hasn't been loading for a month and the search engines have
+ deindexed it. Because 10 years is longer than most hard drives or operating
+ systems are meant to last. But to eliminate the risk of a URL breaking
+ completely, set up a second monitoring service. Because if the first one
+ stops for any reason (they move to a pay model, they shut down, you forget
+ to renew something, etc.) you will still get one notification when your URL
+ is down, then realize the other monitoring service is down because you
+ didn't get the second notification. Remember that we're trying to keep
+ something up for over 10 years (ideally way longer, even 30 years), and a
+ lot of services will shut down during this period, so two monitoring
+ services is safer.
+
+After doing these things, go ahead and place a bit of text in the footer, "The
+page was designed to last", linking to this page explaining what that means.
+The words promise that the maintainer will do their best to follow the ideas in
+this manifesto.
+
+Before you protest, this is obviously not for web applications. If you are
+making an application, then make your web or mobile app with the workflow you
+need. I don't even know any web applications that have remained similarly
+functioning over 10 years so it seems like a lost cause anyway (except Philip
+Guo's python tutor, due to his minimalist strategy for maintaining it). It's
+also not for websites maintained by an organization like Wikipedia or Twitter.
+The salaries for an IT team is probably enough to keep a website alive for a
+while.
+
+In fact, it's not even that important you strictly follow the 7 "rules", as
+they're more of a provocation than strict rules.
+
+But let's say some small part of the web starts designing websites to last for
+content that is meant to last. What happens then? Well, people may prefer to
+link to them since they have a promise of working in the future. People more
+generally may be more mindful of making their pages more permanent. And users
+and archivers both save bandwidth when visiting and storing these pages.
+
+The effects are long term, but the achievements are incremental and can be
+implemented by website owners without being dependent on anyone else or waiting
+for a network effect. You can do this now for your website, and that already
+would be a positive outcome. Like using a recycled shopping bag instead of a
+taking a plastic one, it's a small individual action.
+
+This article is meant to provoke and lead to individual action, not propose a
+complete solution to the decaying web. It's a small simple step for a complex
+sociotechnical system. So I'd love to see this happen. I intend to keep this
+page up for at least 10 years.
+
+If you are interested in receiving updates to irchiver, our project for a
+personal archive of the web pages you visit, please subscribe here.
+
+Thanks to my Ph.D. students Shaun Wallace, Nediyana Daskalova, Talie Massachi,
+Alexandra Papoutsaki, my colleagues James Tompkin, Stephen Bach, my teaching
+assistant Kathleen Chai, and my research assistant Yusuf Karim for feedback on
+earlier drafts.
+
+See discussions on Hacker News and reddit /r/programming
+
+Also in this series
+
+Behind the scenes: the struggle for each paper to get published
+
+Illustrative notes for obsessing over publishing aesthetics
+
+Other articles I've written
+
+My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file
+
+The Coronavirus pandemic has changed our sleep behavior
+
+Extracting data from tracking devices by going to the cloud
+
+CS Faculty Composition and Hiring Trends
+
+Bias in Computer Science Rankings
+
+Who Wins CS Best Paper Awards?
+
+Verified Computer Science Ph.D. Stipends
+
+This page is designed to last.
