Tutorials on how to properly center a div.
There's no King in No Kings When did we get so fucking polite? Today, I find myself reading Letter From a Birmingham Jail in the hope of finding some familiarity. The essay by Dr. Martin Luther King doesn't deal much in metaphor, unlike his speeches. Instead, I get a grounded look into the practice and purpose of protest. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a…
The Computational Web and the Old AI Switcharoo For two grand I can buy a laptop with unfathomable levels of computational power. Stock, that laptop comes with silicon made of resistors so impossibly tiny, it operates under different laws of physics . For just a few hundred dollars more, I get a hard drive that stores more documents than I can write if I wrote 24 hours a day for the rest of my…
Slop is Everywhere For Those With Eyes to See The size of your plate can influence how much food you eat. The absence of a clock on a casino wall can keep you gambling through the early morning. On social media, our For You Pages give us the illusion of infinite content. How our environments are designed influences how we consume. And wouldn't you know it, everything around us is designed for…
Hank Green And The Fantastical Tales of God AIs AI Doomerism is a Decoy : Yet the supposed AI apocalypse remains science fiction. “A fantastical, adrenalizing ghost story is being used to hijack attention around what is the problem that regulation needs to solve,” Meredith Whittaker, a co-founder of the AI Now Institute and the president of Signal, told me. Savannah, Georgia—In the old lacquered…
The bliss of good enough— an ode to my moka pot It's early and unpleasant, and I am woefully uncaffinated. I brave my way through my small apartment towards the kitchen. My back and my left hip ache. I am getting older; crankier . The steady march of time is steadily kicking my ass, a situation I am most keenly aware of in the early mornings. I spoon coffee grounds into the aluminum filter,…
The future of social media Imagine a world, in the not-so-distant future, where anyone can launch a fully functional social media platform with a few clicks and a credit card. From a menu of options, you choose the primary media type (video, microblog, photos, etc.) and basic functionality. You can upload your logo and choose your color palette. There's a marketplace for algorithms, recommendation…
OpenAI's “Operator” is Facebook's “like” button Remember when Facebook convinced us that our websites needed a "like" button in the late aughts? Few, if any, of us at the time knew what Facebook was up to. We all sort of just obliged, and by 2010, tens of millions of websites installed the bit of JavaScript that enabled users to "like" the webpage they were on. Then Cambridge Analytica happened ,…
The Computational Web This note is a placeholder for a potentially longer, more in-depth essay I hope to publish in the future. Decentralized social media, like blockchain and crypto, promises to topple old power structures and hand the Internet back to the people. But the Internet runs on a stack of technologies, and if you venture just a few layers down, you'll see some familiar faces. The…
Bluesky may have the juice, but we don't have to drink the Kool-Aid Any marketing guru with a Substack and a Udemy course will tell you that your brand should have a mission and an enemy; make your customer the hero, and you play the role of sherpa. I know this not only because I'm a marketer (derogatory) but also because I live and breathe. We humans are drawn to the good vs evil narrative. It's…
Meta's Toaster Problem Meta has a toaster problem in that Meta does not sell toasters. Remember the guy who tried to build a toaster by sourcing all its raw materials? His name was Thomas Thwaites, and by his own account , the project was a spectacular failure. It turns out it's very hard to build a toaster from scratch. Who knew? Thawaites' failed venture into kitchen appliance manufacturing is…
Data Piggy Dear Internet, It has come to my attention that people are calling Venture Capitalists "data piggies,” and I for one am appalled. Sure, the definition of a data piggy is a tech sector Venture Capitalist who stuffs their little piggy faces on people's private information until their little piggy overall buttons pop off their engorged, little piggy bodies. But, just because this is the…
Raw dog the open web! Monoculture is winning. The Fortune 500 has shrink-wrapped our zeitgeist and we are suffocating culturally. But, we can fight back by bookmarking a web page or sharing a piece of art unsanctioned by our For Your Page. To do that we must get out there and raw dog that open web. In our current digital landscape, where a corporate algorithm tells us what to read, watch, drink,…
FireChat was a tool for revolution. Then it disappeared. For years, FireChat helped people circumvent their internet gatekeepers— the authoritarian governments and spineless corporations that control our every move through a network of proprietary data centers and deep-sea cables. In Iran, forty thousand people downloaded the app when their government blocked internet access. Over one hundred…
Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something Somewhere between the death of our favorite aggregator websites and the world surviving a pandemic, the modern internet was reduced to four companies in a trench coat. On the breast pocket of that trenchcoat is a name tag that reads “ The Cloud .” Under that name tag is an older name tag that reads “ The Internet .” And under that…
Where have all the websites gone? It’s Tuesday morning. The year is 2009. You’re just waking up after a long and boozy New Year’s Eve with friends. Your head rings, and your mouth is the type of dry that makes you question your adulthood. You feel something scratch against your arm. Did you take a lover last night? Sort of. It’s a pizza box. Meat lovers. You reach for your phone. There’s no TikTok…
Bloktoberfest— Some anticlimactic thoughts on blocking Note: this post is what I consider a note — some light musing that may or may not have a conclusion and may or may not turn into an essay one day. Oh, Elon Musk. You’re like the Trump of the tech world. Not so much because you both have a thing for divorced white supremacists (you do), but because you both say the quiet part out loud. Some…
How do we stop Meta in 2024? We fix the information loop Discursive dominance is “the ultimate emergence of one discourse as dominant among competing ones in their struggle for dominance.” Once discursive dominance is secured, objectives are easier to achieve. It’s why lobbyists exist. It’s why we’ve experienced so much synthetic chatter on Mastodon in the last year. To win discursive dominance,…
Copy, Acquire, Kill— How Meta could pull off the most extraordinary pivot in tech history Meta's sudden interest in ActivityPub and Mastodon doesn't make much sense. There are a few impossibly consistent talking points floating through the Fediverse. Each tries to explain away the oddity of Meta's presence. I don't buy any of it . This is a plan years in the making. And we're watching Meta's…
Posts critical of Threads and Meta missing on Mammoth app There were big chunks of posts missing under the threads hashtag feed. Some are still missing. Many of these posts were critical to the Threads / Mastodon interpolation. I’ve observed this behavior only on the third party Mammoth app for Mastodon. I'm asking everyone who already uses the Mammoth app to share if you have seen anything…
The medium is the message— Threads isn't a win for the Fediverse Meta needs the Fediverse more than the Fediverse needs Meta. I say this in the sense that the Fediverse never needed Meta at all. In fact, the Threads / Mastodon interoperation is a net negative for "federated social media” and the "open web.” In the end, Meta will have fundamentally changed what those two terms mean. And the…
I got my first blue bubble scam text the other day and I think I know why Beeper Mini is a new Android app that gives Android users a blue bubble when they text iPhone users. According to some folks on the internet, Beeper Mini tricks iMessage into thinking the sender is using an iDevice: I’ve been using it for a while and it’s a really big deal. TL;DR This doesn’t use a macOS bridge VM on some…
Why it feels like AIs are coming for the artists Each week, a new AI thing goes viral. It's always something artistic-adjacent. Either it's a GPT-illustrated kids' book, an AI pop singer, or a chatbot promising to write the next blockbuster movie. And it's always from some guy whose profile pic looks like he's a Buffalo Wild Wings DJ. It's driving me mad. Not just DJ Drumstick but this aggressive…
The Village Effect of the Greater Web The internet is a vast and open plain. It represents the best account we have of the human condition (it's also really fun and interesting once you know your way around). So why does it feel so cramped in here? Why are so many of us confined to a handful of apps? I turned to M. Night Shyamalan's The Village for some answers. Why? Because we're having fun!…
A Frantic Friday Massacre Update: The Verge is reporting that Altman is in talks with the board to come back as CEO, is "ambivalent" about retuning without governing changes to the company. Lmao . What an embarrassing fiasco this all is. It's not even Monday yet. From Axios : Sam Altman's firing as OpenAI CEO was not the result of "malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business,…
My precious From Atlantic Staff Writer Charlie Warzel (via Threads ): One thing in the OpenAI stuff that feels consistent (based on some internal convos I've had) is that a group of people that are laser focused on the doomer elements of AI and the more abstract principle of AGI for the betterment of humanity might also be the same people who do not fully think through the more human/money…
App defaults Just last night I stumbled on The Small Website Discoverability Crisis post while scrolling Hacker News. And here I am tonight, writing a post based on a viral trend with over 150 personal sites participating so far. The internet finds a way (goldblum.gif). There's another digital world out there; one buried under the Google SERP and Meta algorithm. But, once you find it, nothing else…
You likely already own the first big AI wearable It's AirPods. The world's most ubiquitous earbuds just so happens to have a computer chip and a voice assistant. The opening is right there . I'll eat my hat if Apple's first foray into the LLM market doesn't unfold like this: AirPods version-whatever is announced. Maybe it's the pro line, but let's have some fun while we're speculating and say…
New technology same old people Humane, an AI hardware start-up whose name choice is as transparent as glass, has a "trust" section front-and-center on its website . It reads : At Humane, we believe you deserve the ability to own your data from the outset. That personal information should be protected. And, that having transparency as a value isn’t radical. As a privacy-first company, we build…
Madonna in the 80s? AI already tainting our history This Reddit post , an ode to early Madonna, has 505 upvotes at the time of writing this note. But, the seemingly innocuous collection of Madonna photos from the late 70s and early 80s feels off . Particularly photos 7 and 8, where Madonna's face gives an almost uncanny valley feel. Maybe it's the extra arm coming from Madonna's torso in pic 8.…
How to properly peel a pomegranate Pomegranates are delicious, but can be tricky to rip open. In this guide I'll show you how to expose that sweet, sweet flesh and get away with it. Step 1: beat it over then head with a wooden spoon. Keep doing it until blee— uh, leaks. Step 2: Rip open the pomegranate's body, exposing its insides. Step 3: Dump its guts into a bowl. Step 4: Don't forget to hide…
My Indie Web list Note 12/10/2023: I am in thr process of revamping my bookmarks and curation. if you came here hoping for a big list of cool sites, you'll want to come back in a couple days. Id say Monday. I have some fun stuff I'm finishing up. For now, most of my lists are disabled. At night before bed, I'll bounce around the indie web for a couple hours. I used to spend that time on TikTok,…
This event was shot on iPhone and edited on Mac Just finished watching Apple's Scary Fast Event[^1]. Cook & Co. announced a new MacBook Pro, updated iMac, and the M3 chip family (M3, Pro, Ultra). Pretty standard stuff, if not a little light on substance. I'm not complaining. They can't all have " one more thing " energy. But there was something at the end I hadn't noticed before in previous…
Interesting finds: Design articles I still think about This post is officially my first on my newly designed custom blog (if you don't count the colophon ). I figured I should share a few articles that have impacted my approach to design. As I write this, I realize the three articles below are a decade or more old. I've had them bookmarked all this time and still revisit them often. 1. Invincible…
Meta doesn't hate news, just anything that moves us off the app Meta's vision for social media is a billion lobotomized users engaging with The Hamburglar's new value meal. To realize that vision, the conglomerate is downgrading "news" on its platforms. Link to post here . Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has taken a wishy-washy stance on news and its roll on the Threads platform. He's mentioned "over…
Design & art There's a fundamental misunderstanding of what design sets to accomplish. Scrolling design-focused forums, you get the sense that design and art are viewed as interchangeable ideologies. We've somehow formed the belief that design, like art, can exist for its own sake without any consideration for function or purpose. By all accounts from great designers, this aesthete view of design…
Interesting finds, October 10, 2023 A few things I stumbled upon last week. No theme. Just some cool stuff. Every Noise Ever wonder what genre an artist belongs to? In an effort to categorize music and personalize playlists, Spotify "invented" a bunch of sub genres. Every Noise lets you enter an artist name and reveal the associated sub genres. First iPhone Impressions Noted Apple blogger and…
I guess I'll just pay til I die? Why I'm switching from Ulysses to iA Writer I'm switching to iA Writer from Ulysses as my primary writing tool. The process has left me with some big feelings about Software as a Service (SaaS), particularly with writing apps. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a fanatic with writing apps. I see a new one, and I must try it. And I've tried them all. Fifteen or so over the…
Apple is killing the cloud as we know it Hello. A technology novice may know that iCloud syncs their documents across all their devices— iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Someone a little more tech-savvy may understand that the cloud, as a general concept, is also used to offload computing burdens like speech-to-text and virtual assistants. We all know that our data floating in the cloud is being kept,…
Interesting finds, Oct 2, 2023 Things I stumbled upon on the internet last week. I've been into guides and manifestos lately, so here's a few I loved. A credible threat to (and from) commercial social network silos/1 Case against Facebook joining the Fediverse (ActivityPub). I like this essay because it touches on the concept of Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish , a tactic Microsoft used in the 90s to…
Elon received playbook to kill Twitter From Ben Collins for NBC : Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk's purchase approaches, the…
Mind if I search your car Reuters reporting on Meta's AI chatbot and the dataset the company used to train it: Meta also did not use private chats on its messaging services as training data for the model and took steps to filter private details from public datasets used for training, said Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, speaking on the sidelines of the company's annual Connect…
When exactly is Email Forgiveness Day? I remember it being April 30th. In fact, I'm sure of it . But, Gimlet Media, the company that produced the podcast where the holiday was invented says Email Forgiveness Day is September 30th. Today. Gimlet is the first on the search results for the phrase "Email Forgiveness Day." The second is this website that has what appears to be a direct quote from Alex…
On the old web I stayed up late last night searching for the "old web"— personal homepages, digital gardens, manifestos, guides— the type of stuff FAANG buried under algorithms and shiny interfaces. And boy, did I find some stuff. The old web is alive and, well, its alive at least. I have a bucket-full of bookmarks I have to sort through but, I'd like to post them here soon, under some undecided…
On digital gardening When I stumbled on the concept of digital gardens, it lit up my brain [1] . It gave me a framework for something I've long tried (and failed) to accomplish with my previous blogs. My failures weren't always related to technical limitations. Though, I see now how chronological order blogs can stifle creative exploration. The phrase "digital garden" is a metaphor for thinking…
Just one more technology bro I promise bro just one more technology and the world will be a better place, bro, for you and for me, bro. From How a startup full of ex-iPhone talent is trying to make phones obsolete : Humane is trying to realize the promise of “ambient computing” — an artificial intelligence-driven computing experience that’s personal and contextual — by building a software platform…
He killed something beautiful You know how when you push down on your feed, it refreshes? Twitter's design team invented that feature. They invented it; something so ubiquitous and elegant you don't even think about it. Twitter was one of the first social media companies to brand user interactions within the platform— tweets, retweets, hashtags— that was all Twitter's wildly inventive dev team.…