Ignorance is a necessary condition for an adventure and often essential to its success.
- Sam Toperoff, In the Land of the Very Old
You do not have to understand what the children are doing! Children have fundamentally different priorities than you, and you can simply be bemused by whatever they are up to. Maybe you can think a little bit about what you were doing at that age and chuckle to yourself.
- Elizabeth Lopatto, The Verge
The more of a firehose you have spraying in your face, the less time and attention you have to focus on what any of it actually means and how it all fits together.
- Pete Brown, Read less news, be more informed
I keep finding myself nodding my head while reading Pete’s blog. This post was no exception.
It never ceases to amaze me that tech bros want to build worlds created in dystopian novels and expect a different outcome. […] It’s exhausting to go through hype cycles of how yet another new technology built based on a dystopian novel is rolling out regardless of the harms or bias that it might trigger. It’s painful to think about how much capital is spent chasing pyramid schemes and illusions rather than solving actual problems.
- Dana Boyd, Still Trying to Ignore the Metaverse
(This article was originally linked by Adam Tinworth @adders, a journalist you should follow.)
“Why would you use that site? Don’t you know it’s financed by someone evil?" Yeah well, I made my own websites and you all stopped going to websites so I have to use the evil ones you like instead of my own.
See also: everyone who thinks RSS is “complicated” and complains that they would loooooove to follow somebody if only they were on instagram, mastodon, tumblr, bluesky, substack, webtoon, cohost, etc.
Start with a relatively small number of people to follow, see who they’re linking to, try following some of those people, and keep branching out from there. And always pruning and maintaining.
- Pete Brown, Exploding Comma
A tried and true recipe for discovering, and keeping, people you enjoy reading. My decades old RSS subscriptions and bookmarks are as reliable as the day I added them because I didn’t offload them to aggregators, feeds, or apps.
In spite of great leaps forward, hardware is becoming faster more slowly than software is becoming slower.
- Niklaus Wirth, creator of Pascal (1934-2024)
It’s always sad when someone so wise leaves this world.
I make things because I enjoy making them. I share them when I have a sense that those things are exactly the sort that would inspire me had I not made them myself. This is not the way to build a large audience, to achieve fame, or to amass wealth. But it is the way to be seen (a very different thing from being validated) that also creates a way for someone else.
The best thing that could happen when I share something online is for someone else to experience it and think, “If he can do that, then I can.”
Hat-tip to @Annie for finding this wonderful essay.
A filmmaker who prefers ideas to images will never advance above the second rank because he is fighting the nature of his art. The printed word is ideal for ideas; film is made for images, and images are best when they are free to evoke many associations and are not linked to narrowly defined purposes.
The reason Tesla hasn’t “worked all bugs out yet” is that the company is run by people who hold established best practice in ideological contempt, and is defined by a tech-industry culture that fetishizes innovation and regards product quality as a third-order concern. There simply isn’t as much investment money and credulous tech-media adulation to suck up in the promise of iterating on what already works.
We witnessed a change from OpenAI to CommercialAI. It’s not about robot Gods, humanity and openness. It’s about making money.
- Oliver Reichenstein, No Feature
The development of generative AI will proceed along a healthier, more socially productive path if we distrust the companies and individuals who are developing it.
When we erase how bad the past was, that’s one of the ways we make people think there was no progress.
It is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.”
- Clay Shirky
In one sense, we are now fully immersed in an environment where we cannot be certain of the authenticity of anything.
Then again, Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster sightings are on a real decline.
Nick Heer, Pixel Envy
“Spend it all. Shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. […] Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Things that are familiar and everyday are also related to something beyond, something you cannot catch.
Ilse Bing, 1939
How many more novels, TV shows, and movies do we need exploring yet another flavor of badness, charting yet another journey of self-destruction, physical or moral or both? It’s like … yeah, I get it! This kind of work might have been revelatory once; that time has passed. Too often the creative cover story that goes “I’m interested in these deeply flawed characters … I like writing about broken people” is simply an excuse to revel in depictions of violence — physical or moral or both.
Robin Sloan, writing what’s in my heart.
Google has convinced everyone that it is this incredibly sincere and earnest company - that it’s just a bunch of goofballs making cool things. […] But the truth is, it is an utterly ruthless advertising company that is very, very, very successful at delivering results to its clients.
Nilay Patel, Google’s legacy and its future on its 25th anniversary
Remodeling is the attempt to find “the one best way” with our physical spaces; wellness culture is “the one best way” with our bodies; productivity culture is “the one best way” with our work lives. And like all quests for optimization, they’re sinkholes.
Anne Helen The Optimization Sinkhole
To this list, I would add publishing workflows for “the one best way” with our blogs.