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[1]Tom MacWright
tom@macwright.com
[2]Tom MacWright
• [3]Writing⇠
• [4]Reading
• [5]Photos
• [6]Projects
• [7]Drawings
• [8]Micro
• [9]About
Recently
I skipped Recently last month. This one’s even more of a grab-bag than usual!
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The <video> element and browser abstractions
I was reading [10]Iván Sánchez Ortega’s thoughts on maps4html (at the time of
writing, his website is down, so that’s an archive.org link). The post is about
a theoretical HTML element that embeds a map on a webpage - something that Iván
is skeptical of and [11]I am as well. But this section really got me thinking:
The user experience for video back in the day, both for the user (“I have
to download what and install it where?”) and the web developer (user agent
sniffing plus an <object> inside an <embed> with a MJPG fallback in the
form of a <img>) was quite abismal (sic). A <video> element back then made
sense.
So let’s fast-forward ten years, and see what <video> has really brought
us. For me, three things spring to mind:
1. Chunked video
2. DRM (in the form of EME).
3. Consistent UI, then inconsistent UI back again.
This is clear in hindsight but I had never really connected the pieces – the
rise of standardized streaming video has also enabled DRM to be so commonplace.
I can no longer take screenshots of Netflix, which was something that I used to
[12]love to do. There are good tools for [13]downloading YouTube videos, but
the same won’t exist for Hulu or HBO Max, and once a TV show declines to renew
its streaming license, it’ll be inaccessible.
I think this is a really interesting point: the standardization of the element
meant that video decoding and UI would be part of the browser rather than the
application, which allowed for strong copy-protection to be standard, and
shifted power away from users. It makes me think twice about standardizing more
elements of the web.
Maps are what the [14]maps4html project wants to standardize, but argument is
basically the same for cryptocurrency boosters (those who remain). They argue
that the web was missing a “payments primitive” and it should be implemented at
a protocol level. I don’t even agree with their goals (this current level of
capitalist dystopia is enough, thank you very much, we don’t need to
financialize any more stuff, please), but I also don’t feel great about the
means of accomplishing those goals - embedding an opinionated currency and
transaction system into standard technology.
Part of the same thought bubble: is the web as a low-level abstraction of basic
HTML elements and raw JavaScript on which the developer brings their own
higher-level abstractions (web frameworks, or previously, Flash?), more
egalitarian or free than a web with higher-level abstractions that are dictated
by browsers and operating systems?
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Leverage
Historically, a key way to turn mediocre investments into good investments
has been to apply leverage. That’s not a recommendation; that’s a
historical analysis, and it comes with survivorship bias.
This [15]blog post from Lyn Alden is a compelling and risqué unified theory of
investing. She claims that real estate, stock, and bond investments are all
pretty bad in the long run, and that taking leverage is actually a historically
winning strategy because it shorts your fiat currency and amplifies your
exposure to the other thing.
Within the context of the fiat currency system, it has been both
quantifiably workable and socially acceptable to own real estate with
5-to-1 or even 10-to-1 leverage. People who are not professional investors
will routinely put 20% down and borrow 80% of the value of a home, with
various options to increase that to 10/90 in some cases, because we set up
our financial system around this being a normal thing to do.
This is a good point that I never stop mentioning – mortgages are complicated
and risky investments. Sometimes not as risky for the borrower but [16]always
risky).
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BeOS & Haiku
I love the BeOS and Haiku icons and designs? They really are something. I’ve
always had a love for the [17]Mac OS 8 look, but [18]BeOS is just beautiful: it
has some of the strong colors of Windows, but used in a different way. And the
icons…
BeOS icons
From [19]guidebookgallery.org. By the way: did you know about the [20]
image-rendering: pixelated CSS option?
And then look at [21]the icons from Haiku, the successor to BeOS:
HaikuOS icons
I’m not going to go as far as actually running these operating systems, but
man, it all reminds me of a day when computers felt so much more focused and
personal.
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Bikes are electric now
I’ve been biking more recently, and getting ready for a small Labor Day bike
trip through Long Island. Eventually, when I have time (ha!) I want to do some
much longer trips. I’ve been spending a bit more time getting reacquainted with
the state of bicycles. In my lifetime, there have been a bunch of big changes
for high-end bikes:
• Disc brakes replaced V-brakes, even for some road bikes
• Tubeless tires replaced tires with tubes for most bikes
• Wheels got bigger and most mountain bikes are 29ers or above
I’ve mostly been on board with these things - the bigger wheels were obviously
an upgrade from day one, especially.
The weird new thing is electronic shifting, which is apparently becoming the
norm. It’s a pretty odd turn, if you ask me: your bike as a little wireless
electronic network in which the shifter on the handlebars connects to a motor
in the derailleur.
It’s nice to see though, from some ‘bike influencers’, a [22]pushback and some
people even going back to [23]non-indexed shifters so they can use any kind of
mech drivetrain.
I think that when I get a midlife-crisis bike, there’s a decent chance it’ll be
electric, partly because it allows for fewer cables to route, which would make
mounting [24]bikepacking bags a little easier. But ‘running out of power’ in
the middle of the woods, or just having ‘firmware’ installed on my bicycle
creeps me out.
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Running
The 5k season continues. So far this summer: 21:00, 21:01, 20:27, 21:26. My
goal is sub-20, which should be achievable (I’ve run it before in previous
seasons), but mostly the weather hasn’t been cooperating. Last night’s race
(21:26) was in 83°F, 68% humidity. Shoutout to singlets for helping me survive
the heat. I picked up a [25]Bakline one and have been impressed. I see [26]
Tracksmith gear constantly, and it’s good too, but I fear that some of these
running brands are getting a ‘fashion brand’ markup.
It’s hard to compete with DC and San Francisco as running cities. The DC region
is [27]the ‘fittest’ in the country there are great trails in Rock Creek Park
and super wide sidewalks in some neighborhoods. San Francisco has [28]
spectacular hills and trails that can convince you that you’re really in the
wild. New York’s sidewalks have far fewer cars parked on them than San
Francisco’s, but you always need to look where you’re going. The sights are
better, in my opinion: while SF’s hills look cool in the distance, there’s
nothing like seeing the skyscrapers of Manhattan or running across the Brooklyn
Bridge.
New York’s running culture is great. There are tons of running clubs, and there
are so many races to pick from. San Francisco had a [29]free weekly 5k called
Park Run (part of a global network of events), but it was cancelled in 2020.
Brooklyn doesn’t have a Park Run, but it has the [30]Al Goldstein race series,
which is about $15, competitive, and well-run.
CityStrides
I’ve competed 10.24% of Brooklyn so far on [31]CityStrides: progress has
stalled because I’ve been just running Prospect Park loops over and over again
to get in shape for 5ks.
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Listening
[32]Jessie Mae Hemphill by Jessie Mae Hemphill
I started listening to brat but was disappointed. The biggest find of the last
few months has been [33]Jessie Mae Hemphill, who I embarrassingly discovered
because her song ‘Tell Me You Love Me’ came on the rotation in a Chipotle.
Reading
Oh man, [34]The World Beyond Your Head was such a read. It’s hard to summarize.
In hindsight, I’m not even sure what it was about the book that hooked me -
there were a few loosely-connected topics, each of which was really compelling.
It made me think a lot. Hell of a book.
Watching
[35]Kinds of Kindness was great: I’ve now watched [36]29% of Yorgos Lanthimos
films and love his style.
August 1, 2024  [37]Tom MacWright ([38]@tmcw, [39]@tmcw@mastodon.social)
References:
[1] https://macwright.com/
[2] https://macwright.com/
[3] https://macwright.com/writing/
[4] https://macwright.com/reading/
[5] https://macwright.com/photos/
[6] https://macwright.com/projects/
[7] https://macwright.com/drawings/
[8] https://macwright.com/micro/
[9] https://macwright.com/about/
[10] https://web.archive.org/web/20230205201150/https://ivan.sanchezortega.es/politics/2020/09/01/mapml-essay-part4-thumbs-up-for-document-accesibility.html
[11] https://gist.github.com/tmcw/c17eec41deaec8f8f7b3d8bd38420a27
[12] https://www.are.na/tom-macwright/subtitles-1528478762
[13] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl
[14] https://github.com/Maps4HTML
[15] https://www.lynalden.com/most-investments-are-bad/
[16] https://byrnehobart.medium.com/the-30-year-mortgage-is-an-intrinsically-toxic-product-200c901746a
[17] https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos80
[18] https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/beos5
[19] https://guidebookgallery.org/guis/beos
[20] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-rendering
[21] https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/post-your-haiku-screenshot/3064?page=4
[22] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAV9XvzB0eQ
[23] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqMyvObJqnk
[24] https://bikepacking.com/
[25] https://www.bakline.nyc/
[26] https://www.tracksmith.com/
[27] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/07/25/arlington-dc-fittest-cities/
[28] https://macwright.com/hills/
[29] https://www.parkrun.us/crissyfield/
[30] https://runsignup.com/Race/NY/Brooklyn/AlGoldsteinSummerSpeedSeries
[31] https://citystrides.com/
[32] https://mississippirecords.bandcamp.com/album/jessie-mae-hemphill
[33] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessie_Mae_Hemphill
[34] https://macwright.com/2024/07/07/world-beyond-your-head
[35] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinds_of_Kindness
[36] https://letterboxd.com/director/yorgos-lanthimos/
[37] https://macwright.com/about/
[38] https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name=tmcw&user_id=1458271
[39] https://mastodon.social/@tmcw

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[1]Tom MacWright
tom@macwright.com
[2]Tom MacWright
• [3]Writing
• [4]Reading⇠
• [5]Photos
• [6]Projects
• [7]Drawings
• [8]Micro
• [9]About
I read The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford on July 7, 2024
Review
This book sat on my digital bookshelf for months. I had forgotten what prompted
me to buy it, and the title made me think that it would be a
pop-psych-economics book that repeats the title in every paragraph, like [10]
many [11]others I had [12]come across.
Crawford is definitely floating around the topic of distraction: that’s the
hook that makes this book relevant and marketable.
I just read a few reviews on Goodreads before writing this, breaking my rule of
never reading book reviews before reading and reviewing books. People seem to
be annoyed at how he doesn’t stick to the topic, and they’re divided on whether
the “hard philosophy” in this book is too hard or too soft. I wish I hadn’t
read the reviews.
The summary: I loved this book. Its little discussions of things like the
importance of real-world difficulty in teaching us that we are physical,
limited creatures who do not have all-powerful wills. The take on
individuality: Crawford writes about the modern impulse to always prove
ourselves as competent, competitive, and entrepreneurial, and how this differs
from the older ideas of simply having a job, a role in society, and being
judged mainly on whether you’re a morally good person, not whether you’re a
genius or a hero.
I thought that the interludes into philosophy were perfect: they included
enough depth to get a handle on what the great thinkers were saying, but didn’t
presume that the reader had a grasp on Kant or Kierkegaard already. I
occasionally read philosophy now and read some of the classics in college
(especially loved Kant and Spinoza), but I’m not prepared to judge whether
Crawford is right or wrong in his points.
Quite apart from the business appeal of MOOCs for universities (payroll is
a lamentable thing), mechanizing instruction is appealing also because it
fits with our ideal of epistemic self-responsibility.
The discussion of education and “epistemic responsibility” was fantastic. It
connects so much to the idea of “unschooling” which is really popular with one
of my social circles. (for the new-to-it, [13]unschooling is an informal
learning style in which students are expected to learn from natural life
including play, and there are often teachers present but there is no set
curriculum. Unschooling has a foothold in technology because of books like [14]
Mindstorms and the idea that kids can self-educate with computers. It also has
a strong relationship with libertarianism in the sense that freedom is a common
value, and schools are described as coercive, and also that an education system
based on unschooling would require fewer institutions, especially those of the
government-run variety. I am emphatically not a libertarian and view those
overlaps as a major reason to be skeptical.)
Crawford argues that enlightenment-era thinking as well as the particularly
American Emerson/Thoreau-era philosophers think that only self-attained
knowledge really counts, and they undervalue culture and social bonds in
general, but especially those between teachers and pupils.
That is what computer games seem to do for our quasi-autistic cohort of
young men; it is what machine gambling does for those who have gone down
that particular path. Perhaps such pursuits help us manage the anxiety and
depression that come when experiences of genuine agency are scarce, and at
the same time we live under a cultural imperative of being autonomous.
There’s also a really solid discussion of gambling and its role in society.
I’ve been thinking about gambling a lot recently. I don’t gamble, and have no
intent or inclination to ever gamble. But I’ve seen gambling dynamics appear in
a lot of unexpected places.
For example - there’s a fintech called [15]Yotta that recently failed and has
potentially lost its customers money. It was a [16]“lottery-based savings
account”, which is a series of words I’d never expect together. This is a whole
category called [17]prize-linked savings accounts. It’s crazy.
The power of gambling is scary to understand, but I think that this book makes
a very strong argument that all of the psychic energy that flows into gambling
comes from the lack of genuine agency, opportunity, and certainty in the rest
of society.
Sidenote: this book uses autism as a metaphor or descriptor for behaviors and
thoughts, quite a lot. I didn’t find this very inappropriate or incorrect, but
if you don’t want to read a book that talks about that, proceed with caution.
The question that hovers over your character is no longer that of how good
you are, but of how capable you are, where capacity is measured in
something like kilowatt hours—the raw capacity to make things happen. With
this shift comes a new pathology. The affliction of guilt has given way to
weariness—weariness with the vague and unending project of having to become
one’s fullest self. We call this depression.
This idea of the cause of depression - the weariness of having to prove oneself
capable - resonated hard with me. Maybe there’s something true and vital here,
or maybe he and I have the same kind of sad, who is to say!
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This is a book about a bunch of different topics that float around the modern
condition, capitalism, attention, and individuality. The whole thing was really
engaging for me, and extremely thought provoking. I found myself reconsidering
my conception of myself, work, friends, and values. It might do the same for
you!
Or it might not! I was in the right head space for this read, and was happy to
follow the sometimes-meandering trails. At times, this book can read like an
Adam Curtis documentary - tying together big ideas and statements about modern
times that seem a little too cute to be true.
But it’s on a short list of books that I finished and immediately thought about
re-reading in a few months.
Details
• The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford
• ISBN13: [18]9780374535919
• Published: 2015
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
References:
[1] https://macwright.com/
[2] https://macwright.com/
[3] https://macwright.com/writing/
[4] https://macwright.com/reading/
[5] https://macwright.com/photos/
[6] https://macwright.com/projects/
[7] https://macwright.com/drawings/
[8] https://macwright.com/micro/
[9] https://macwright.com/about/
[10] https://macwright.com/2018/10/02/against-charity
[11] https://macwright.com/2022/02/09/laziness-does-not-exist
[12] https://macwright.com/2022/08/01/against-creativity
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book)
[15] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/21/synapse-collapse-nearly-109m-in-yotta-customer-deposits-vanish.html
[16] https://moneywise.com/banking/banking-reviews/yotta-review
[17] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/prize-linked-sweepstakes-savings-accounts
[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources?isbn=9780374535919