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#[1]Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
[2]About Craig
[3]Books & [4]Essays
[5]Talks
[6]Membership
[7]Shop!
[8]“Special Projects” Membership
Podcasts:🎧 [9]On Margins & [10]SW945
Newsletters:📩 [11]Roden & [12]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
[13]#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)
[14]#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. ^[15]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.^[16]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.^[17]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.
__________________________________________________________________
[18]#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. [19]↩︎
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. [20]↩︎
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. [21]↩︎
This essay, published September 2022. Thoughts? Email
[22]me@craigmod.com.
[23]Craig Mod, his head, floating at the bottom of the article
[24]Craig Mod is a writer and photographer based in Japan. He's the
author of [25]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, [26]newsletters: [27]Roden & [28]Ridgeline.
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#[1]alternate [2]Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages
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[4]Style|Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/style/julia-cameron-the-artists-way.
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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
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[6]Penelope Green
By [7]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 [8]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,” [9]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 [10]adult coloring books, no [11]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.’”)
Image Under 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 [12]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.”
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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 [10]DALL•E
and [11]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 [12]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 [13]years [14]of [15]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.
[16]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 [17]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 [18]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
[19]generative AI.
If you’re reading this, you don’t need me to recap the cultural impact
of [20]ChatGPT and [21]Bing Chat for you. Suffice to say, if Google—the
runaway winner of the Web 2.0 economy—is [22]legit shook, there’s
probably fire to go with all this smoke. Moreover, when you consider
that [23]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 [24]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.
[25]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 [26]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
“[27]fluent bullshit.” And after months of seeing friends “cheat” at
their day jobs by having [28]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 [29]more [30]time to [31]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 [32]I recorded my screen and set it to a few lofi
tracks before [33]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?
[34]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 [35]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
[36]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 [37]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 “[38]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.
[39]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 [40]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 [41]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 [42]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!
[43]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:
[44]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:
[45]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. 🫒
[46]Justin Searls
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10. https://openai.com/product/dall-e-2
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12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car
13. https://www.automotivelogistics.media/transition-to-automated-trucks-must-be-managed-warn-trade-bodies/18446.article
14. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/business/dealbook/teamsters-union-tries-to-slow-self-driving-truck-push.html
15. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/millions-professional-drivers-will-be-replaced-self-driving-vehicles-n817356
16. https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2023-03-14-how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/#_now_-its-time-to-major-bump-web-20
17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd
18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
20. https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/8/23499728/ai-capability-accessibility-chatgpt-stable-diffusion-commercialization
21. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/15/23599072/microsoft-ai-bing-personality-conversations-spy-employees-webcams
22. https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt
23. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/18/22442328/google-io-2021-ai-language-model-lamda-pluto
24. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIuJbrOVyGjkRj7UM_whr-CPoqcXTOsZa
25. https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2023-03-14-how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/#chatgpt-can-do-some-peoples-work-but-not-everyones
26. https://github.com/features/copilot
27. https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/5/23493932/chatgpt-ai-generated-answers-temporarily-banned-stack-overflow-llms-dangers
28. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/19/1143912956/chatgpt-ai-chatbot-homework-academia
29. https://cdn-blog.testdouble.com/img/how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/bing-1.ebd5fca31dbdd729c4dcc7388630e69f6d26b128d967b20a38c41409b7ee0099.png
30. https://cdn-blog.testdouble.com/img/how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/bing-2.c1830c7fb3f4634158a9fffc0ccac3396f09619761d7ccd2218ce9b77d19b826.png
31. https://cdn-blog.testdouble.com/img/how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/bing-3.a2922e3b785ab4216bb01299f118c55a7cd2b43a82db909f66bdc9c83e956fe6.png
32. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gllCXqnR-5E
33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gllCXqnR-5E&t=1004s
34. https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2023-03-14-how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/#three-simple-rules-for-keeping-your-job
35. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network#Stochastic_neural_network
36. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_repeat_yourself
37. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_the_wheel
38. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_Design
39. https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2023-03-14-how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/#post-not-over-how-can-i-save-my-job
40. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
41. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response
42. https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/2/23622836/cnet-eic-takes-red-ventures-ai-content-job-connie-guglielmo
43. https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2023-03-14-how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/#in-conclusion
44. https://cdn-blog.testdouble.com/img/how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/chat-gpt-1.be7ef1f6a65dabe7f2ee88e296ff404980183879a0a79f88537affe6a44f17e3.png
45. https://cdn-blog.testdouble.com/img/how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/chat-gpt-2.ccd08019b5f629691f6f09f5e4118186dc3d3001d712449034804f9a8ffde7c3.png
46. https://blog.testdouble.com/authors/justin-searls/
47. https://twitter.com/searls
48. https://mastodon.social/@searls
49. https://github.com/searls
50. https://linkedin.com/in/searls
51. https://justin.searls.co/
52. https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2021-07-07-policy-update-were-still-remote/
53. https://blog.testdouble.com/authors/todd-kaufman/
54. https://blog.testdouble.com/categories/our-company
55. https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2021-06-01-celebrating-agent-0100-milestone/
56. https://blog.testdouble.com/authors/todd-kaufman/
57. https://blog.testdouble.com/categories/our-company
58. https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2020-10-22-5-for-5000-find-your-leading-indicators/
59. https://blog.testdouble.com/authors/justin-searls/
60. https://blog.testdouble.com/categories/our-company
61. https://link.testdouble.com/blog-cta-sales
62. https://testdouble.com/
63. https://testdouble.com/agency
64. https://testdouble.com/services
65. https://testdouble.com/careers
66. https://blog.testdouble.com/
67. https://testdouble.com/contact
68. https://mastodon.world/@testdouble
69. https://github.com/testdouble
70. https://www.linkedin.com/company/testdouble
71. https://twitter.com/testdouble
72. tel:+16143494279
73. mailto:hello@testdouble.com
74. https://testdouble.com/privacy-policy
75. https://testdouble.com/

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A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web
This Page is Designed to Last
By [1]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
[2]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
[3]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 [4]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 [5]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 [6]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. [7]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 [8]reduce the size of your images without losing
quality. And once [9]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 [10]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
[11]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 [12]irchiver, our project
for a personal archive of the web pages you visit, please [13]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 [14]Hacker News and [15]reddit /r/programming
Also in this series
[16]Behind the scenes: the struggle for each paper to get published
[17]Illustrative notes for obsessing over publishing aesthetics
Other articles I've written
[18]My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file
[19]The Coronavirus pandemic has changed our sleep behavior
[20]Extracting data from tracking devices by going to the cloud
[21]CS Faculty Composition and Hiring Trends
[22]Bias in Computer Science Rankings
[23]Who Wins CS Best Paper Awards?
[24]Verified Computer Science Ph.D. Stipends
This page is [25]designed to last.
References
1. https://jeffhuang.com/
2. https://gomakethings.com/the-web-is-not-dying/
3. https://archivebox.io/
4. https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/25315/hotlinking-what-is-it-and-why-shouldnt-people-do-it
5. https://goaccess.io/
6. https://systemfontstack.com/
7. https://victorzhou.com/blog/minify-svgs/
8. https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/images-done-right-web-graphics-good-to-the-last-byte-optimization-techniques
9. https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp
10. https://uptimerobot.com/
11. https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/Python-Tutor-scalable-sustainable-research-software_UIST-2021.pdf
12. https://irchiver.com/
13. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeTCgnwF1gjrc1O8mfJ_5TmT_TLowFQ2DUhsollmqPG84pAFQ/viewform?usp=pp_url&entry.1299571007=Irchiver:+browser+history+search&entry.1760653896=designed_to_last
14. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840140
15. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ed88ra/this_page_is_designed_to_last_a_manifesto_for/
16. https://jeffhuang.com/struggle_for_each_paper/
17. https://jeffhuang.com/illustrative-notes-for-publishing-aesthetics/
18. https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/
19. https://jeffhuang.com/covid_sleep/
20. https://jeffhuang.com/extracting_data_from_tracking_devices/
21. https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#cs-faculty-composition-and-hiring-trends
22. https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#bias-in-computer-science-rankings
23. https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#who-wins-cs-best-paper-awards
24. https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#verified-computer-science-phd-stipends
25. http://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

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#[1]Viget Articles
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Featured
Read the Article: AI in Recruiting
Newsletter
AI in Recruiting
Read the Article: The Enduring Point of Pointless Corp
Article
The Enduring Point of Pointless Corp
The Enduring Point of Pointless Corp
[22]Brian Williams
[23]Brian Williams, Co-Founder & CEO
Article Categories: [24]#News & Culture, [25]#Employee Engagement
Posted on March 24, 2023
* Share
* Share
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Pointless Corp. is the innovation lab at Viget, where we step away from
client work to make fun and useful things for everyone
“Neither pointless, nor a corporation” is how we describe Pointless
Corp. here at Viget. We founded Viget – an actual company – in 1999
during the original dot com bubble to build web products for clients.
Serving clients has always been our purpose or … point, if you will.
Over the decades, we’ve done just that, completing thousands of
projects for hundreds of clients. Never forgetting that we exist to
serve our clients has been key in our longevity.
About a decade in, we felt the urge to build and launch our own
projects. [26]Pointless Corp became the internal [27]brand we adopted
to remind ourselves that these projects can be fun and useful but don’t
replace the primary point of Viget. A line from Harry Nilsson’s The
Point! referencing the Pointless Man serves as inspiration: “a point in
every direction is the same as no point at all.” We wanted the freedom
to experiment in every direction.
So we did. Ideas and teams formed fairly randomly, and Pointless
Projects began to fill the gaps between our client work. Projects like
[28]HeyCraig (2009), which sent you an email alert based on your
Craigslist search (before Craigslist shut us down and added the
feature). Or [29]Tincan’d (2011), a simple video call platform before
Zoom or Google Meet. Or [30]BabyBookie, the baby due date office pool
app over 500,000 people have used since launch in 2012.
These projects allow our teams to work without the input (including,
ahem, revenue) of clients, so we’re more free to experiment, wear
different hats, and learn … a lot. We apply what we learn back into our
client work. Along the way, we get to know each other better, scratch
our entrepreneurial itches, and hopefully put some fun and/or useful
things out in the world for others to enjoy.
For many years, we organized an annual optional Pointless Weekend. We’d
kick off hackathon-style on a Thursday evening and wrap on a Saturday
evening with a functional product out in the wild, as I described
[31]back in 2012. It’s [32]always been an intense, enjoyable, but
rather exhausting 48 hours. Photos from [33]2011, [34]2014, and
[35]2016 bring back some great memories.
Photos of Pointless Weekend 2014
Pointless Weekend 2014 spanned three Viget offices
A couple of years ago, we shifted the schedule to start on Wednesday
and wrap on Friday. This made participation easier, allowing parents
and others with weekend commitments to join. It also allowed projects
to wrap up just in time for our Friday staff meeting. We awkwardly
called it “Pointless Week” even though it was still only two days.
New for 2023: Pointless Palooza
Two things I like: alliteration and lollapalooza (specifically circa
1992, but that’s a story for another day). So Pointless Palooza was an
obvious choice for what to call our little two day adventure. In
addition to a new name, we’re trying a few other changes this year:
Pointless Executives. Nothing injects new energy like new leadership.
We handed over the Pointless reins to two trusty execs: [36]Andrew (day
job: developer) is our Pointless CEO and [37]Aimee (day job: project
manager) is our Pointless COO. They’ve done a phenomenal job setting a
vision, planning, and leading the activities. Their enthusiasm helped
inspire more than half the company to participate with a record number
of projects and great results.
Pitching & Team Formation. Previously, project ideas were “pitched”
with a single slide and a tight 1-2 minute segment at a staff meeting.
These were fun and lighthearted, but didn’t always capture the full
vision, and teams often formed and morphed during the kickoff night.
This year, project ideas were shared more gradually via collaboration
in Slack and Notion. Project teams formed with more structure in
advance, and team members had some time before the kickoff to marinate
on the idea and get excited to build.
Even More Remote Friendly. There’s something magical about
kickoff-pizza, launch day donuts, and [38]in-person collaboration. But
there’s something even more magical about collaborating with dozens of
teammates around the country (especially when it’s supplemented by
[39]sweet swag boxes and Divvy credits for remote treats). Hybrid teams
work. We still had fun in-office connections, but most of our Pointless
Projects this year are being worked on with distributed teams, much
like our client work.
Photo of Pointless Branded Stuff 2023
Pointless Branded Stuff 2023 including a t-shirt and sticker pack --
very corporate
Some things haven’t changed from prior years. Team members are still
swapping roles – PMs writing code, designers running projects, the list
goes on – which means steep and rapid [40]learning curves. We’re still
trying out new technologies and approaches to our work, which means
unexpected blockers and great insights to share. New connections are
being formed, especially since more than half of this year’s
participants are in their first year at Viget and experiencing their
first Pointless event. Forming authentic co-worker connections isn’t
easy, and our culture is stronger today than it was at the start of the
week.
So what projects will launch? I won’t steal their thunder, but we just
wrapped the presentation portion of six Pointless Project teams at our
weekly staff meeting and it was the most we’ve laughed, cheered, and
been inspired in a long time. I expect articles will be written and
shared in the days and weeks ahead outlining the thrills (and mishaps)
of the teams this year.
Photos of Pointless Palooza 2023
Pointless Palooza 2023 was a blast!
Pointless Corp. is more than an annual palooza. We work on projects
throughout the year in the gaps between client work, weaving the
teamwork, learning, and teaching values of Viget into all that we do.
If this is the kind of work and culture you might enjoy, learn more
about [41]our culture and job openings – perhaps you’ll be able to join
next year’s Pointless Palooza. After all, inspiring people to join us
is unapologetically part of the point.
[42]Brian Williams
[43]Brian is Viget's co-founder and CEO. He does everything from
advising our clients to building our conference tables with his bare
hands in our Falls Church, VA, HQ.
[44]More articles by Brian
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