Just because something’s good doesn’t mean we don’t deserve other options, and just because something is good for most people doesn’t mean there aren’t people who would benefit from something else.

• Matt Birchler, An app that’s good enough for most people still benefits from competition

True fandom is sharing your love, not judging. It’s about expanding, growing, and learning. And if you’re not enjoying it, why are you a fan? I don’t see how you can call yourself a fan if you’re focused on being miserly just hoarding every scrap of knowledge, because then, when you die, it dies. You want this to go on, right?

• Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, The Verge interview

No matter what you’re doing, it can be something positive or negative, if you can’t say stop, bad things will happen. Try to go for a run, and don’t stop. Ever. Or try to drink water, and don’t stop. Ever.

• Manuel Moreale, Growth is a mind cancer

Constant growth is a human-created cult that continues to harm the world and the life attempting to thrive within it. Even trees and mountains know there’s a time to stop.

You can get into deep debates about the role of language in the human mind, but no one would suggest that it represents the totality of our experience. Humans obviously enjoy a rich sensorium — one that goes way beyond the “big five”, by the way. Our language draws on these sensations; vibrates against them.

We have a world to use language in, a world to compare language against.

• Robin Sloan, Are AI language Models in Hell?

“I’ve grown to think that keeping your desk clean is actually probably a sign that you’re not being effective.”

• Joel Spolsky, Set Your Priorities

Tiny excerpt from an excellent article @manton was kind enough to pass forward. I read it about three times already.

There’s a lot of overlap between AI Bros and People Mad About Women Ghostbusters.

• Daniel Kelly, bsky

When you turn up to take somebody’s picture, there’s a fundamental choice. You’re either taking a picture of your relationship with that person or you’re taking a picture of a human being having their picture taken. And the first one is much more interesting to me.

• Toby Amies, Documentarian, broadcaster, and photographer

The web is being littered with AI-generated content. Looking for a recipe? Advice on a medical issue? Perhaps you’re troubleshooting. You read a few paragraphs of the article before it hits you: a human definitely didn’t write this. The website you’re looking at is somehow worse than a recipe blog with a long story and ads, it’s an AI-generated recipe blog with a long story and ads.

Therefore, I believe it’s everyone’s imperative to genuinely invest in making websites again. For ourselves, for our businesses, for our interests.

• Louie Mantia, Make A Damn Website

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.

• drewtoothpaste

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.”

• Christipher Butler

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.

• Roger Ebert