Posts from December 2023

6PM

10AM — The internet isn’t fun anymore, writes Millenial Max Read, because Gen Z is now running the show. As someone who just about qualifies as a Millennial (it depends on who you ask), I have to say the internet hasn’t been much fun since about 2010. I experienced the same generational shift then, from personal websites and blogs to rapid-fire social media posting and superficial lifestyle internet celebrities.

4PM — Zuck is building an apocalypse bunker in Hawaii. As ridiculous as this is, it also exemplifies everything that is wrong with our capitalistic world:

Of all the problems that the existence of billionaires creates, the biggest is simply the fact that having that much money gives individuals too much power. Sure, you, the average person, might get drunk and dream about buying up an entire town’s worth of land to build your exclusive treehouse survivalist kingdom, but you don’t have the means to actually do it. And that is a good thing. When society allows people to get 10-figure net worths, all of the most idiotic fever dreams of the human mind begin springing into reality.

That is not progress. Capitalism’s tendency to grant godlike powers to the sort of people that are sociopathic and tasteless enough to accumulate billions of dollars is one of its most embarrassing flaws.

12PM — ‘Heat Islands’ Make Australia’s Summer Deadlier. Only mentioned as a side note, but Australian building standards play a huge role in how people cope with extreme heat. A wood frame is thinly cladded, every wall is plaster board, no insulation. Double glazed windows are luxury items. Ask any Australian and they’ll tell you that their houses are built for hot climates but these houses heat up just as fast in summer as they loose heat in winter. It’s almost as if Australians lack understanding of basic physics.

9AM — Paris builds four new metro lines, extending the network with 68 additional stations. See PTV, that’s how you build public transport infrastructure that has an impact. Unlike your “big build” to remove level crossings in the name of pedestrian safety. You don’t have to dig scores of station underground; a footbridge or subway with elevators for impaired humans will do the same. It would cost less and won’t disrupt trains for months. All it does is to remove obstacles for motorists so they don’t have to wait at boom barriers anymore. (via)

11AM — Om Malik on the implications of the failed Adobe-Figma deal:

If “big tech” and the next layer of technology companies (such as Adobe) can’t buy “startups,” the liquidity environment is going to change for the startup founders, and of course, the venture investors.

[…]

What about the startups? Well, if the outcomes are going to become scarce, then investor dollars are going to be focused on likely winners — ones that can probably go public.

In other words, the only options for a startup to get funding today is the potential of a big exit; a sale or an IPO. What happened to building sustainable businesses? Businesses that don’t loose millions every year and only survive because of billions of investor money funnelled into their accounts. Businesses that make enough money to pay their staff and bills. Businesses with reasonable but not excessive growth, that pay solid but not excessive dividends. Is that not worth supporting anymore?

5PM — A bloke in Melbourne made a hand-drawn world map featuring 1,642 animals. It took three years to complete and 2,600 hours went into the work.

5PM — The Wu Tang Clan are planning a Las-Vegas residency. Just four shows so far; a full Celine-Dion-like residency would break my heart.

7PM — How NASA brought back the iconic worm logo. Fantastic photos of the worm in action throughout the article.

7PM — A long list of arguably notable tweets. Besides that fact that this website is so big it’s an absolute abomination, what it shows is how mundane Twitter was most of the time.

1PM

Film maker Werner Herzog discusses skateboarding. “Space and sacrality and what you are doing is special bordering on the sacred.”

5PM

I find bonsai fascinating, although bending a living organism to your will with some skill and a lot of patience seems like a strange pastime. Some trees are works of art but nothing beats the perfect symmetry of this most perfectly manicured Elm tree, exhibited at the National Arboretum in Canberra.

4PM

OMA play MF DOOM instrumentals at the Hip Hop Chip Shop in Manchester. This band slaps.

12PM

Sleaford Mods cover West End Girls in the most Sleaford-Mods way possible. Barely change the music, Jason Williamson doing the talking, done. Brilliant.

8AM

The long anticipated trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI. No surprises here: We’re back in Vice City, there’s a female lead character, and the game looks very good. (Although game trailers always look very good.) The game’s release is vaguely scheduled as 2025. Yes, 2025. It gives you enough time to ask Santa for a new gaming console, because GTA VI will only be available on PS5 and Xbox S and X.

7PM — Micheal Stipe is working on a solo album. What a lovely portrait of the former R.E.M. singer. “Stipe had been invited downstairs to say hello and, finding Swift standing in the doorway, extended his hand and said: ‘You must be Taylor’ — an objectively cool thing to say to Taylor Swift.”

6PM — More new mindsets, fewer new technologies:

A tale as old as time, trying to fix current technology with more—and new—technology. As if technology is the problem and not the people who are using it. For blogging to form communities you just need some goodwill. All the tools are out there. HTTP is a perfectly fine protocol, email still works, RCS and Matrix are good-enough for chats and if those aren’t your jam you can pick one of the countless alternatives.

When all you’ve got is a hammer… It’s the problem that many discussions around the impact of technology and the problems they cause are led by technologists, who are often users but are rarely representative of the majority of users. And so, because they have been solving problems with technology for their whole life, they look to technology for every problem they encounter. If no-one is doing code reviews on time, maybe we need another notification system, because email and slack and verbal reminders don’t cut it. When our online communities are broken we look to replace the underlying protocol instead of changing our approach to applications that use the protocols. It creates the never-ending cycle of problem, technology solution, more problems, more technology. It’s what keeps us all in employment.

2PM — The 88x31 GIF Collection. Last year, I linked to a similar collection of nostalgic early-internet GIFs, but this one has over 4,000 images.

4PM — The new IA Writer 7 is here. Instead of jumping on the hype train, they reviewed how AI might change writing. Getting the first draft on paper is a hard and lengthy process. ChatGPT integrated into IA Writer could reduce the drafting process to mere minutes. Enter a prompt, refine it a few times, and voila, you’ve got your draft right there in IA Writer, ready to edit.

But IA decided to go a different route and didn’t include AI at all. Instead, they added a way to highlight text copied from elsewhere, so you know what needs editing. It’s so simple, yet so very effective. It’s that thoughtful approach to building software that makes IA Writer such an indispensable tool.