Posts from May 2023

5PM — Web Roulette is a new web browser app for iOS, but it only lets you access a random page from a customisable list of pages. You swipe left to access a new site, and if you’ve swiped enough you can shake your device to access a random site that isn’t on your list. I can see that this is fun and useful. Instead remembering hundreds of sites you want to visit occasionally, you can have Web Roulette take care of the hard work to remember those sites. The more sites you have selected the better. But I also worry that Web Roulette will have a terrible impact on my already terrible productivity. (via)

11AM — Madlib is playing a rare Australia DJ set in Melbourne next week on 17 June.

5PM

Fantastic explanation of the inner workings of the Linotype machine, a typesetting machine that was used for typesetting until the 1980s when it was replaced by phototypesetting and digital technologies. (via)

5PM — With Arc Brower’s updated Boosts feature, you can customise any website by changing colours, fonts, or text size. By far the most useful feature is Zap, which removes content from a website by merely clicking on the element. It’s a great, intuitive tool to de-clutter enshittified websites like Twitter or Youtube.

5PM — Today I learned, Facebook had (still has?) an in-house letterpress and screen print workshop.

4PM — Wonderful profile of Bellerby, maker of bespoke, handmade globes; explaining the intricate process:

globemakers work with gores, which pose a unique set of challenges. These long, thin, oval-shaped pieces of pre-printed paper must be carefully cut by hand and painted with a translucent wash of watercolour that lets the coastlines and place names show through. It’s a process that can take five to ten days, says Isis Linguanotto, head painter and a globemaker for ten years, who sits at a wooden workbench cluttered with jam jars of ink-coloured water, brushes and well-used paint palettes. A row of half-painted gores has been laid out flat to dry. Linguanotto will build up the thin layers of paint to shade and define borders and landforms – details as important for readability as aesthetics.

Once the painters have finished the first stage of their work, each gore is dipped in water, making it pliable (and very fragile) so that it can be stretched and carefully pasted to the fibreglass sphere. Most globes use 12 gores – larger ones may need 18 – and each must align perfectly with its neighbour, without overlapping, to ensure that every map line meets in the right spot. Overwork the paper and it will deteriorate and tear.

Just in case you were wondering why these things are so expensive.

8AM — Blur have announced a new album: The Ballad of Darren will be released on 21 July.

I always had a soft spot for the band and Damon Albarns work (well, with the exception of Gorillaz, which never clicked for me)—so, yeah, I’m looking forward to this.

7PM — Doubleclick were one of the first companies to sell ads online, on a large scale. In the early 2000s, selling ad space became the de-facto way to fund your online business , which fed the bubble that eventually led to the 2001 financial crisis:

Companies were flush with cash from wave after wave of seed investment. So naturally, they had plenty of money to buy ads, usually in other Internet companies. Startups bought ads and published them on the sites of other startups. Doing so inflated everyone’s value.

And of course, Doubleclick also birthed the idea of using cookies to track online behaviour, what ads we see and what ads we click.

By shifting the source of the cookies to a single domain under their control, in this case the DoubleClick servers, data between sites could be aggregated and distributed, as long as each site agreed to install a snippet of code that gave DoubleClick partial access to their data.

So here we are, more than twenty years later, and it’s as if nothing has changed.

8AM

6PM — ECHO, a New-York-focussed online social network, has been running for 34 years, and today has 43 active users.

9PM — Former Wikimedia chief executive Katherine Maher received a severance package worth more than $600,000 when she stepped down from the role in 2021. I thought severance packages are only paid to laid-off workers.

3PM

Killer Mike, EI-P – Don’t Let The Devil ft. thankugoodsir

3PM — The Blog Era, a new podcast series, explores the world of hip-hop blogs, which shaped the whole industry and media coverage during the form’s hey day from about 2007 until its beginning demise around 2012.

5PM — Recipes for medieval English ales.

5PM — Tech journalist Casey Newton asked his readers how they want from coverage of developments in Artificial Intelligence. What people want is clear-headed journalism. Knowledgeable reporting of facts and current state of affairs and the people making decisions, and less punditry and little speculation.

8AM — Aboard is a new bookmark service helping you and your friends to organise and collaborate on content collections.

It lets you build your own corner of the Internet—solo or with friends. It organizes web pages and your own thoughts into Stacks of Cards and gives you tools to sort them.

Very similar to Are.na, but giving off strong “we’re looking for VC funding and an exit” vibes.

6PM — What I Want From the Internet, by Christopher Butler:

It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the old, “smaller” internet. You can, today, still go back to the can-to-can structure that a personal website, an RSS feed, and a browser provide. It’s not perfect. It leaves an enormous amount of signal unheard. It requires more work to find things, and to be found.

Big-tech platforms limit us in different ways. The algorithms prefer certain content, so content is created to fit the preference. They limit how our content is presented. They limit what you can see. The old, smaller internet is more work, yes. But the effort is worth it if you want to experience an interesting, diverse, surprising web. (via)

9AM — Vice Media has filed for bankruptcy. When Vice started almost ten years ago, it appealed to the time’s zeitgeist. Vice published stories that did well on social media, stories that were unconventional in what was reported and how it was reported. Reporters went to war zone and other extreme locations delivering stories that fared well with the you-won’t-believe-what-happens-next-audience. Some called in Gonzo journalism but that, frankly, an offence to Hunter S Thompson. And just how Buzzfeed‘s answer-these-five-questions-and-we’ll-tell-where-you-should-live clickbait got boring, audiences grew out of Vice‘s semi shocking reporting. Because the world got a lot scarier near our cozy middle-class homes and because we got older. In the same way going to bars and clubs became irrelevant, Vice became irrelevant.

5PM — Tolstoy would get an F on today’s writing classes.

11AM — The show about nothing is about something after all. Maya Salam’s reading suggests Seinfeld is an antithetical stance on adulthood in the nineties, one where “they openly mocked the notion that professional success, marriage and parenthood were the cornerstones of existence.”

4PM — Old School Flyers posts flyers of early-day hip hop parties.

3PM — Liverpool artist Silent Bill questions the provenance of a Banksy artwork that fetched £250,000 in a TV auction. Whether or not the piece is a Banksy, Silent Bill is right about one thing:

The sale of the piece is everything that’s wrong within the art world, greedy rich people who can afford trophy art pieces as tax incentives.

Street art pieces are, as intended by its name, for the street. When Banksy comes to Liverpool and gifts the city a piece it’s for the people of the city, it’s not for concierge and lifestyle services to cut from walls.

7PM — Removing the screen as the primary user interface and integrating AI, like the device demonstrated by Humane’s Imran Chaudhri, is the logical next step for mobile technology. But it seems, we’re still a fair bit away from that future. The demo is obviously staged: When Chaudhri gets a statement translated to French, he doesn’t instruct the AI to do so. He presses a button and voila. It has to be mocked; unless, of course, that device can read Chaudhri’s mind. (via)

5PM — The Verge’s Nilay Patel boils down the effects of Google status as the default way to discover information on the Web:

Google’s grand promise was to organize the world’s information, but over the past quarter century, an enormous amount of the world’s information has been organized for Google — to rank in Google results. Almost everything you encounter on the web — every website, every article, every infobox — has been designed in ways that makes them easy for Google to understand. In many cases, the internet has become more parseable by search engines than it is by humans.

The piece is the first in a series of articles commemorating Google’s 25th birthday trying to better understand how Google works to shape the Web.

4PM — The CSS Zen Garden turns twenty. The site was, and still is, revolutionary. It demonstrated that separation of content and design are not only possible but also the right, future-proof way to build websites. Case in point: Most, if not all, designs on the site still work in today’s browsers.

6PM — An astonishing 382 kilograms of rock and soil have been collected from the moon. With Astromaterials 3D you can inspect 3D renditions of the samples and slice into their interiors—thanks to CT scans NASA made available.

11AM — Photos from the first Glastonbury Festival in 1971; from Paul Misso’s new book “In the Vale of Avalon Glastonbury 1971.”

6PM — diamond geezer is live-blogging Charles’ coronation.

07:35 Trafalgar Square is pretty nuts.

07:45 Enough of this madness.

08:30 Back home with a cup of tea, watching it on the telly.

6PM — Silicon Valley’s push to integrate AI into worker’s daily assignments is to increase worker efficiency and subsequently shareholder value; not to make the world better for everyone. And so fear about a future with AI is rooted in economic anxiety not worries that machines will take over and enslave us all. Terrific piece by Ted Chiang. (via)

5PM — TikTok parent ByteDance keeps lists of sensitive words it tracks across its social media platforms.

Hundreds of vocabulary lists housed in the company’s “detection tool” illustrate the range of political, social and cultural topics that the Chinese giant is monitoring or suppressing.

2PM — The Pudding examines dark user-interface patterns online platforms employ to prevent you from unsubscribing from their services; presented with the usual Pudding-esque playfulness.

9AM — Thirty years ago CERN put the technology that made the Web in public domain; one of the most important decisions during the early days of the Web and one of the reasons it rapidly became a world-wide success.

5PM — Mastodon announces an improved sign-up flow and new features in the future. Eugen Rochko’s posts reads like a direct reply to Erin Kissane’s critique from Sunday.

4PM — Ryan Broderick joined Bluesky, the latest greatest Twitter alternative, and recapitulates the events he witnessed within 24 hours of signing up:

Yesterday, in the span of a few hours, Bluesky had its first “main character” moment and its first high-profile bullying incident. Two big milestones for any social network. The “main character” moment came after users discovered that dril’s username was reserved on the app, which meant he couldn’t get an account. A sex worker on the app said she was happy dril couldn’t join Bluesky because he had backed the #BlockTheBlue campaign on Twitter, which she believed was hurting the livelihoods of sex workers, the logic being that sex workers needed Twitter Blue to promote their services. Everyone dunked on her for a while and then moved on. A few hours later, after dril and a bunch of other high-profile Twitter users like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had moved over to Bluesky, blogger Matthew Yglesias announced he had joined, as well. And then a bunch of users threatened to kill him with hammers until he announced he was taking a break from the app. User have not threatened to beat Jake Tapper to death, for what it’s worth.

Sounds fun. I think I will channel my age-appropriate inertia and wait this one out; sticking to blogs.

5PM — Erin Kissane dissects Mastodon’s shortcomings, in terms of user experience and openness to better the experience for diverse(r) group of people.

tl;dr

If we want more people to enjoy what we believe are the benefits of something like Mastodon, it’s on us to make it delicious and convenient and multi-textured and fun instead of trying to shame people into eating their soysage and unsalted soup.

I hope all of that is actually possible for Mastodon, because a lot of great people very much want it to become a more welcoming place. But the longer Mastodon stays in Linux-on-the-desktop mode, the more likely those people are to take their energy somewhere where it’s valued.