— Going forward, the Twitter API offers two tiers: One is free, write-only and allows bots to post 1,500 times each month. The other costs $100 per month allowing you to send up to 50,000 tweets, capped at 3,000 per user, and to read 10,000 tweets.
These tiers are aimed at preventing third-party Twitter clients, like Twitterific or Tweetbot, from re-emerging. Musk wants you to read Twitter only in official clients so he can control what tweets and ads you see. But contrary to what I wrote before,
The move kills every Twitter bot there is unless their maintainers pay, including those posting links to frequently updated sites, like kottke.org and Daring Fireball,
bots of personal sites shouldn’t be affected by the new pricing. 1,500 tweets per month amount to about 30 tweets per day, which is a lot less than what even the most frequently updated blogs are churning out. If you have more than 30 posts per day on your site you might want to be a little more selective about what you post.
— This was one of the strangest games of football I’ve seen. The game wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either. Australia scored early and then focussed on defending. Ecuador was the better team, with better individual players; they created many chances and either missed the goal or were denied by Gauci, Australia’s promising keeper.
The game took place at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium, a modern and soul-less arena built primarily for Cricket and AFL games. A football pitch is much smaller than one for Cricket, so anywhere in the stadium, you’re at least 30 meters away from the action. The stadium was only half full and the roof was closed to reduce noise outside the ground. It felt like you’re sitting in the main hall of a big convention centre on a Friday of a big conference when half of the attendees are already on their way home. The atmosphere was eerie, disconnected from the game; most people were chatting to their friends instead of watching.
International Friendly. Marvel Stadium, 28 March 2023 7:30. Attendance: 27,103. Goals: 1-0 Brandon Borrello (16’), 1-1 Pervis Estupiñán (51’, P), 1-2 William Pacho (64’).
— The Podcast Standards Project is a new initiative to promote the use of open standards, as in RSS, as the backbone for podcasting-content delivery. The project is created at a time when big VC-backed companies are piggy-backing onto the current podcasting hype to lock listeners into their platforms.
The environment out of which The Podcast Standards Project sprang is not unlike the environment from which The Web Standards Project (WaSP), a similar consortium established to protect the open nature of the web, emerged in its early years:
“When The Web Standards Project (WaSP) formed in 1998, the web was the battleground in an ever-escalating war between two browser makers—Netscape and Microsoft—who were each taking turns ‘advancing’ HTML to the point of collapse. You see, in an effort to one-up each other, the two browsers introduced new elements and new ways of manipulating web documents; this escalated to the point where their respective 4.0 versions were largely incompatible.” (source)
This bears a strong resemblance to podcasting today. Without the establishment of PSP and the support of its allies, podcasting risks becoming a closed environment held captive by only a handful of dominant players who may have competing, commercially-defined priorities that drive disjoined, proprietary visions of podcasting’s future.
I’m not huge on podcasts, but any effort to keep a part of the Web open and accessible, despite big corporations’ worst intentions to wall it off, is a worthwhile effort.
— Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s new film, has been advertised on Apple TV+ for a while, but it will be shown in theatres first before streaming on Apple TV+. I went to see The Irishman in the theatre, despite it being available on Netflix. And it was worth it. Big movies deserve the big screen, so I will likely make an effort to see Killers of the Flower Moon in cinema too.
What a band: Some of the members have played with Marc Ronson, Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones, or Charles Bradley; they are members of the infamous Menahan Street Band who are also behind many releases at Daptone Records. And Freddie Gibbs is a wildly underrated MC.
Montague Street Bridge in Melbourne has only 3m clearance, one of the lowest bridges in the city. Naturally, it is regularly struck by trucks. The site tracks how many days have passed since the last incident. The current streak is 127 days, one of the longest since the site began tracking incidents.
Update 29 March 2023: Montague Street Bridge has been hit again on 28 March. Looks like I jinxed it.
Spitalfields In Kodachrome is a collection of photographs of the East-London Neighbourhood from a different time. The photos are forty years old, showing how much the area has changed: Working class then, today hotspot for Lonely-Planet tourists and Saturday destination for drunk Essex lads. Naranjan House in the picture above is now an Ottolenghi restaurant.
— Making money at the expense of others is so deeply rooted in the American identity that anyone who raises the slightest concern against the idea, who argues for a fairer distribution of wealth, is immediately ousted as a socialist or, worse, a communist. As if wanting your peers to be able to eat, live in a house and see a doctor—to live a life in dignity—is a bad thing. Whenever a US government attempts to implement measures that would redistribute some wealth from the top to those who have a lot less, some old bloke who hasn’t worked a proper job in years, maybe never, goes onto Fox News and screams, “Socialists! I earned it, so it’s mine.”
It happens now, and it happened then, some seventy years ago, when Dalton Trumbo and nine other screenwriters and actors, the Hollywood 10, were blacklisted from working in Tinseltown because they wanted to live in a fairer country. Trumbo was forced to write under pseudonyms and leave his admittedly very decadent home. What comrade has a private pond? He continued to write bangers and won Oscars he couldn’t accept. Trumbo was later rehabilitated.
I liked Trumbo because I like period movies. But also because it tells an important story about one of humanity’s persistent flaws: That different voices need to be listened to even if you don’t like their sound.
(2015) Director: Jay Roach. Screenplay: John McNamara. Cast: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren, Louis C.K., Elle Fanning, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg.
— Here’s another example of amateur design critique: Elizabeth Lopatto raises questions to the Google Docs design team about the recent redesign. It’s the same knee-jerk reaction we see on Twitter and elsewhere whenever a popular product changes its appearance. In this case: Someone hates the round corners on some buttons, and look here, these buttons are square. It’s supposed to be satire, but satire only works if it’s aimed at something.
Google Docs’ functionality has stayed the same. It just looks a little different. If you think for a second, if you engage and look at which buttons are round and which are square, you’ll see there’s a system, as one comment sums up nicely:
CTA-buttons (typically “submit” buttons in forms) are rounded squares to differentiate them from smaller actions which can easily be changed, those actions are squared (Input fields, smaller actions like font size, bold etc.)
The toolbar placed in a rounded section is to make it clear that these actions are similar (a normal gestalt-principle). It follows the Material You-style that Google is using across their apps. It’s shape is a bit unusual, which can be a bit off putting at first - but it is a clear brand/marketing strategy - any screenshot of Google docs is clearly identified as a Google-product.
Stories about machines that learn or achieve something like intelligence serve to dress up what the machines can do, to make something as basic as what amounts to a very expensive autocomplete seem like toddlers preordained to become gods or dictators. So one way this story works is to inflate the value of the technology, something investors and technocrats have long been skilled at and are obviously incentivized towards. But there are other ways this story works too: fears about so-called AIs eventually exceeding their creators’ abilities and taking over the world function to obfuscate the very real harm these machines are doing right now, to people that are alive today.
And Twitter, going to great lengths to live up to its reputation, reacted:
“Graphic designer be like: 8k” — a TV Host/Sports reporter
“Beyond the questionable design, the wording also doesn’t make sense. Who is ‘we’?” — A technology writer.
“It looks like a senior school project from Pratt. There’s nothing aesthetically correct about it.” — a screenplay writer.
“Hopefully we didn’t pay more than $100 for this” — a literary agent and occasional poet.
“Beyond stupid?” — a Writer, Skewerer, Digital Therapist.
“If my 12-year old slapped this together for a school assignment, I would take away her phone for a week so it’s a no for me.” — a rural-mothers podcast host.
“Is this a joke” — the founder of a calendar start-up
“Hmm. A third grader could do better 🥴” — the founder of an obscure social-media startup.
“Is this mess real? It looks like it was done by someone who opened Photoshop for the first time.” — someone who hosts a show on Youtube.
As you can see, none of the comments I picked is from people working in a field adjacent to graphic design; I bet few have the knowledge to assess whether the designer selected an appropriate font, whether the balance is right, or whether the design delivers what the pitch promised. It’s a marketing design, for god’s sake; marketing is always 80% bullshit. I won’t affect anyone’s life. Yet people comment like some politician said they would introduce SUV-free roads when elected.
I love how everyone on the Internet has an opinion about everything all the time.
— I love this AI-powered clock from Matt Webb, which creates and displays a new time-related poem every minute. The only viable applications of large-language models seem to be fun side projects. Whether it’s this clock or for playing games where you prompt DALL·E 2 to create the most outrageous image.
In a professional context, generative AI is no more than a productivity tool and must be carefully applied. The models offer false information, turn against users, or become depressed. No output can be taken as is; everything you want to use needs to be cross-checked and verified.
Some software developers successfully supply the right prompts to create working code. While this does work surprisingly well, you still need to review the code for correctness and edge cases and refactor to match personal code-style preferences. Maybe using the AI produces results quicker, or the added work takes the same time as writing the code yourself—who knows?
There’s a notion in software project management whereby the teams that change often produce less stable software. Suppose maintainers only spend short amounts of time on a project; they will only understand small fractions of the overall system and they can never grasp the full impact of the changes they make. Now imagine a project contain large amounts of snippets produced by an AI, duct-taped together into a software system. How can developers build a complete understanding of that system if only 30% were created by humans? Does a mesh of AI-generated code have the same effect on a system’s stability as a team where developers constantly rotate in and out?
Fingerprinting has become a popular method of user tracking due to its ability to connect multiple different browsing sessions even if the user clears browsing history and data. Given there are companies selling fingerprinting as a service, if you want to really protect yourself from fingerprinting, you should use Tor Browser or Firefox with resistFingerprinting=true.
— I’m currently reading Dan Charnas’ excellent Dilla Time, a biography of acclaimed Hip Hop producer J Dilla and his music. In the book, Charnas makes extensive references to a vast number of songs—songs that influenced J Dilla’s work, songs that he sampled, and songs that were influenced by J Dilla.
The book’s experience is better when you listen to the tracks while reading. I started keeping a list of all the songs and put them in a playlist in Spotify for my reference and your pleasure. The list contains 83 tracks (so far, I’m still reading so it continues to grow), lasting 5 hours and 30 minutes.
It’s an astonishing body of music spanning different musical eras and genres, and containing many classics but also obscure tracks. Remember, at Dilla’s time, hip hop tracks were produced by sampling snippets from records, actual vinyl records—and now imagine that record collection!
— Donald Glover famously wanted to create a Twin Peaks but with Rappers, and with Atlanta, it’s fair to say he succeeded. The show initially follows Paperboi, an aspiring Hip Hop MC, and his cousin Earn, also Paperboi’s manager, on their way to commercial success.
But the coherent storyline vanishes in the later seasons. Sure, the characters are mostly the same, but the episodes are only loosely connected. Atlanta isn’t a novel; it’s a collection of short stories interlinked only by reoccurring protagonists and places. It’s a weird show, often funny, strange, and very, very uncomfortable—all at the same time. Atlanta is unpredictable, which is what makes the show great. It’s a breath of fresh air in a sea of TV series released on streaming services that all look and feel the same.
Series 1-4 (2016-2022). Creator: Donald Glover. Cast: Donald Glover, Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz.
— I always thought this was true; you convert unused office space into housing and solve several problems at once:
There’s an appealing simplicity to the idea of converting office buildings into housing. The premise suggests cities could solve two problems — an office glut and a housing shortage — at once. In the process, they could limit the waste of demolition, create new homes with minimal opposition, and renew neighborhoods without radically changing how they look from the sidewalk.
As it turns out, it’s difficult. Pre-war office buildings are easier to convert than newer steel-and-glass boxes with massive floor plans enabled by air conditioning and bright lighting. Emily Badger and Larry Buchanan explore how office buildings from different eras are converted into apartments.
Friday, 17 March 2023
— Alex Hollender, who led Wikipedia’s recent redesign, summarises the work, its context, approach and result.
The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn’t found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple’s founders, or the way it set the stage for the company’s multi-billion-dollar future. Instead, as historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. Not to hack, but to play. Not to code, but to calculate. Not to program, but to print. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers—it’s about the rise of everyday users.
— indieblog.page lets you discover blog posts from independent publishers. You can randomly access individual posts or subscribe to an RSS feed that regularly provides links.
The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.
How different the Web is today from that original philosophy.
— Let’s get one thing out of the way. Dating a seventeen-year-old is wrong. Dating a seventeen-year-old when you’re forty-two is even worse. A movie like Manhattan would not be made today, especially since the whole dating-an-underaged issue is not addressed in the movie at all. Not one of Isaac’s friends finds the relationship shocking or points out that he might want to date a woman older than thirty.
I re-watched Manhattan after reading Khoi Vinh’s love letter to the film. Its cinematography is superb; the composition of scenes and the use of space seemingly putting actors on the sidelines of the screen is such an interesting way to shoot a movie. If you’re getting into filming or photography and looking for inspiration on composition, then watch Manhattan over and over again.
— It was in late 2001 or 2002 that I first came across Kottke.org. I had just started university, and it was the first time in my life that I had a reliable internet connection via my uni’s computer science lab. It was fast, and my sister wouldn’t come in asking whether she could use the computer. And so I would sit there late afternoons and read blogs.
It’s hard to overstate the influence Jason Kottke had on the form. He introduced permalinks, the idea that each post should have a separate, linkable page with a URL that will always stay the same. Kottke did tumble logging before Tumblr was a thing, creating small posts often without titles, links with short commentary—a form that I love and prefer myself.
His web design was often ahead of its time. If you look back at Kottke.org from 2002 and compare that to the design of other influentialsites from the same era—Kottke’s work stands out. It’s clean, puts the site’s content first and would still work today. It defined what a blog should look like.
I can’t claim to have read Kottke.org consistently over the last 20+ years. But the site is one of the few from the early-internet era that is still going and never slipped off my radar. It consistently provides exciting content, often surprising, challenging or just entertaining. I hope Jason continues to write for at least another ten or fifteen years.
— Remember the social location app Gowalla? It’s back, ready to go SoLoMo. So far, it does very little; you can check in to places, there’s a map where you can see where your friends are, and your friends can see where you are.
I started using Swarm again this year to keep track of the places I visit, but I don’t see why I should use Gowalla instead. Nothing about the app stands out or hints towards a worthwhile future. The Twitter thread offers a lot of marketing words but very little substance. And there’s no API.
— What does it take to create a blog with minimal technical knowledge? Manuel Moreale explores the idea in Minimum viable blog.
His argument misses important aspects that make hosting a blog difficult for novices. Once you bought a domain and have a couple of HTML pages that link to each other, how do you get the pages to a computer connected to the internet so people can read your words? And how do you point the domain to that place? Creating a page is the easy part. What makes hosting websites hard is all the things that Manuel didn’t cover.
— The Quiet Girl is the opposite of today’s movie zeitgeist: It’s quiet, it’s slow, it has no special effects, and it doesn’t try to create a vibe. It’s a great movie.
— Channel your inner hipster and write a poem or short story on this fun typewriter simulator by Marcin Wichary, author of Shift Happens.
Thursday, 09 March 2023
— Seth MacFarlane, you know, creator of Family Guy and American Dad, director and producer of Ted, now also sings hooks for hip hop tracks. Like in Self Medication by Logic:
As long as we rely on social-media sites to curate what we read, we allow them to control what we read, and their interests are not our interests. Fortunately, there already exists a long-standing alternative that provides users with what social media does not deliver: RSS.
Wednesday, 08 March 2023
— Lander is another simple but very addictive browser game. [via]
You’ve got absolute legends on stage: De La Soul, Common, Large Professor, Queen Latifah, the Jungle Brothers. But the crowd looks like they’re watching André Rieu. Either we’ve all grown really old, and having a good time now means chilling and soaking it all in. Or—looking at the number of phones in the air, not hands—somehow, a bunch of TikTokers and YouTubers scored all the tickets.
— After an encounter with the police, a teenage rivalry ending in a death, misunderstood by their elders, three teenagers retreat to an abandoned mansion. The rival clique shows up to revenge their friend’s death, and then… To be honest, I don’t know how it ends. It watched this on a plane and fell asleep.
24-year-old James Dean, who looks 35, plays a confused teenager. Although some of them were still teenagers, the actors all look like they could be the parents of their characters. It’s all a bit surreal.
(1955) Director: Nicholas Ray. Screenplay: Stewart Stern Irving Shulman. Cast: James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo.
I have no use for an AI that can write for me. If I add anything to our knowledge base, it will directly stem from my specific expertise around the product, our processes, or my own experience. If a bot can write for me, what is the point of me writing in the first place?
The web is becoming a miserable experience because some salesbro who is trying to meet his KPIs is doing stuff to marginally increase the number of paying customers. (And you know, the hell with the rest of us!) The more each site tries to create its own little walled garden, the less valuable the open web becomes.
This wasn’t always the case; the web used to be different, less commercial, and more fun.
I remember when people just made stuff for fun — as a gift to other people. It seems like there’s less and less of that spirit remaining, and it’s why the internet sucks now.
I disagree. There is still good stuff out there, but it’s less visible in the sea of rubbish on the web today. There are thousands of blogs, for example, but the means to access blogs, or indie websites, generally, has stayed the same for twenty years. It’s still as cumbersome to follow a blog as it was in 2003. Compare that to the ease with which you’re fed content on any social media platform, and you know why everybody wants your email.
Robin is both an excellent writer and tech-savvy. He only posts roughly twice a month. His posts are full of interesting thoughts and links that haven’t been published in other blogs before. The last instalment features an opinion on modern web design, a new app for following websites, a proposal to extend RSS, thoughts on the dreaded newsletter-signup popups that are everywhere now, and obligatory words on the hottest of contemporary trends: AI.
I’m always looking forward to the day when Robin posts. On those days, my to-read queue is longer than on most other days.
— “Tech Is Allowing Businesses to Overcharge You in Tips.” As a European, tipping in the US was always different. You don’t tip for good service; you tip because that’s how people in the service industry make a living. But during a recent trip to the US, I noticed tipping is now expected everywhere, even in a bottle shop, where I took a pack of beer from the shelf, carried it to the till and walked out after paying. And at one lunch place, the staff member even selected a tip instead of me doing it.
Another related convenience with electronic payments quickly turns into an annoyance: You provide your email to receive an electronic receipt and automatically subscribe to the shop’s marketing emails. I now receive countless emails from coffee shops, lunch spots and restaurants.
