Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

  • #42: When I got started

    I recently rewatched Wilson Miner’s eye-opening talk from the 2011 Build Conference called “When We Build.”

    I remember when this first came out, I was at a really important moment in my career. I was just coming out of college, working odd jobs for a while here and there, and had started in the communications department at Sesame Workshop. The web had been important to me for so many years, but it was increasingly becoming part of my day to day work.

    It was also around that time that there were conversations happening around responsive design, and the viral internet, and glut in advertising, and the influence of marketing to millennials, and so very many things all swirling around that was basically just the culture of the day (I feel like some of this all culminated into a single day in February when two llama’s escaped from a zoo and we got “The Dress,” which had a real end of history feel like everything was this big liberal post-culture paradise and then 2016 happened (and I’m not the only one with this theory – there are others), but anyway I digress).

    What I remember from that time was a real sense of hope. I think Miner’s talk kicked off a whole genre of conference talks that were personal and broad and optimistic. They ran for years.

    And we all got so focused on where we were headed we forgot to take a look around at were we were at. Instead of making a web that was more universal and accessible, we loaded it with glut and gunk until it became virtually unusable. Instead of creating dynamic tools to help us shape a new web, we chased after front-end trends, one after another, bloating the web and doing not much else. Instead of finding community we locked people up in walled echo chambers. And on and on. Everyone building the web made these decisions. Little by little. We did it in the aggregate. A tracking script here. A shortcut there. Death by a thousand cuts.

    It’s all coming back around these days. I can see people casting off a decade of descent down a slippery slope and coming back around to hope. To the kind of hope that Miner, and so many others, pointed us too. I hope we get it right this time.

    Ruth Allen on the different kinds of time:


    Time is so diverse, and experienced so differently between subjects in the present, that any prolonged effort to constrain what time is falls apart. There is the time of insects who live no more than a day, and the time of tortoises that outstrip our own. There is the time that for me is saved, but for you wasted. There is the time that can never be equal in an unequal world, where you can relax and I have to work or vice versa. There is the time we experience in chronological order (or chronos) but there is also the qualitative experience of “everything in its own time” time in the moment (or kairos)

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  • #41: Why React?

    I think I could quote this whole video: What is React.js via Haydon Pickering.

    I’ll stick with two pullquotes though.

    The React logotype, depicting an atom, evokes the infamous Manhattan Project, wherein a number of very clever people created some extremely dubious technology just to prove they could.

    See? It’s funny cause it’s true!

    This one too:

    An important feature of React is the virtual DOM. As the state of a complex and “realtime” interface changes, React may need to make multiple and concurrent updates to the DOM. Since these changes are costly, it maintains a lightweight version of the DOM and makes changes to this instead. Since this virtual DOM does not itself represent any kind of user interface, the same changes must be made to the real DOM as well.

    This doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t have to.

    Nowhere is the frivolousness of the virtual DOM more on display than in React’s sudden hard pivot to server side rendering, which introduces a handful of ways to create an overly complicated, dependency riddled application that does more or less what PHP does.

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  • #40: Rules of the Bus

    This week was my oldest first week at Kindergarten. It’s also his first time taking a bus, which was formative for me. I have a lot of memories of the bus. All of my friends, up until high school, were kids I was on the bus with. I had one kid chase me off the bus to beat me up on my front lawn. But most of the time, it was pretty cool. You spend a lot of time there.

    I was wondering at one point the rules of the bus start to become a thing. At some point, who gets to sit where becomes an unwritten rule. Usually, older kids in the back. More leeway for bad shit the further you get back. My son’s on a bus with kindergarteners, first graders, and second graders. I figured for the most part, the rules don’t apply.

    Well, I was wrong.

    His third day back he said that his friend told him that older kids sit in the back. The second graders, I guess. One second grader apparently refuses to. He sits in the front. According to my son, he’s breaking the rules. I’m not sure how his friend got the rules, but they’re already spreading.

    Fortunately, he likes sitting in the front. He really likes following the rules too. Just one more way he’s exactly like my wife.

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  • #39: Transitions

    I heard some good advice once. Never waste a transition.

    Life is full of transitions, big and small. So some, just naturally, are going to pass you by. But I have a big one coming up. My oldest is starting Kindergarten. And there’s a lot that’s about to change. The butterfly effect of his now slightly altered schedule and transition to the bus is going to basically change up my entire routine.

    And that can be a bummer, if I let it be. But I’m not going to let it be. It’s going to be a chance for me to have some 1 on 1 time with him, which is something I don’t get enough of. It’s going to be a chance for him to try some independence. And for me, it’s going to let me move things around in my day so that I can have longer hours of being productive.

    Here I am, putting it out into the universe. A transition is coming, and I’m going to embrace it.

    Kierkegaard on the nature of regret


    If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This… is the sum of all practical wisdom.

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    Full episode of Never Waste a Transition:

    This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today’s tip is to never waste a transition. When there is a change happening in your life, consider whether there are any other changes you’d like.

    To bundle with it. So I heard this story about advice given to a couple preparing for marriage. They were anticipating several moves in the early years of their life together. Rather than wasting these transitions, they were advised to be intentional about how they wanted to shape their life together

    by reflecting on their norms and routines with each move. I think that is great advice, not just for newlyweds, but in lots of contexts. Transitions create fresh starts, and that makes it easier to start new habits. For instance,

    the start of a new school year or the first day of a new job can both be great times to take on a new morning routine. Maybe you’re getting up at a different time now and the morning is already ordered differently, so it might not be quite so strange to add five minutes of yoga to the mix. Transitions also create natural opportunities for ending routines or breaking

    habits that aren’t serving you any more. Maybe a weekly coffee shop date with your aunt was life giving when your daughter was a new born, but feels stressful now that your daughter is an active toddler. If you’re moving to a new apartment in a different neighborhood, this could be a natural time to find a new way to

    connect with your aunt. Or perhaps this snooze button has been an ingrained habit for years, even if you know it doesn’t do you much good. The transition to a new job, with its new morning routines could create a great occasion to swear off the snooze button too. In addition to being great times to start, stop, or change habits,

    transitions create ideal occasions for reflection. What do you want your life to be like? What are your hopes and goals? Maybe when you start going into an office three days a week, you become more intentional about taking breaks with colleagues in order to build in social time because you

    have reflected on the importance of professional relationships. The truth is, transitions don’t even need to be huge to nudge some sort of changes. If you buy a new kitchen tape that can be a reason to rethink your family dinner routine.

    So try to recognize any sort of transition when it is happening, then decide not to waste it. Anything can be an occasion for building good habits or changing something that isn’t working. Making the most of transitions can help us build the lives we want In the meantime, This

  • #38: On Birthdays

    We just celebrated my older son’s birthday this weekend, with about a standard a party as you can throw. He had a blast. His friends had a blast. It was so much fun. My birthday is coming up soon and I am becoming a much less exciting age.

    I think that birthdays, and birthday parties, are for kids. It’s kind of a core ideology of mine.

    That makes me a bit of a curmudgeon. But I think it’s for good reason. When your young, and I’m perfectly happy to accept that this extends into young adulthood, there are years that are true milestones. You are so rapidly advancing through life that to come together with friends and have a good time can be a really genuine celebration of something momentous. There’s a real burst of energy in kids parties that represents this that I just don’t think you see with adults.

    As you get older, those milestones fade. Our process for advancing becomes something we need to actually work on, not something that just comes with time. And then that phase in life hits, I think it’s time to put away the parties and celebrate those milestones in another way.

    But hey, that’s just me.

    John Gardner on the process of self-renewal

    Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. The purpose is to grow and develop in the dimensions that distinguish humankind at its best.

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  • #37: A Historical Turn

    I can’t help but think of history.

    Is it the mid-60’s, when violence in this country erupted and eventually led to change at some unimaginable costs?

    Is it the comparison that people like to jump to almost immediately at any opportunity? Is it the 1930’s in Germany, when a virtually unknown party found power amidst growing uncertainty in the future and discontent with the state of things, which they wielded into fascism and atrocity?

    Is 1789 France, when our modern definitions of left and right where first created, and radical elements on both sides used fervor and panic to exert control (and when one person was so motivated by doomsday invective in the press that she attempted an assassination on a populist totalitarian)?

    Or are we at the end? As Gibbon said of Rome, that “all that is human must retrograde if it does not advance,” and we have simply lost the ability to advance?

    Joseph Brodsky on the importance of boredom

    Boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it.

    […]

    Boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those flecks! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that’s why they look so small.

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  • The art of blocking a scene

    In film, blocking describes the movement and staging of characters in relation to the camera. it is the art of directing the eye around the actors to create emotion and better convey a story. it is where you place the actors inside of the frame.

    Blocking is something unique to film, even if it borrows some techniques from the theater. It is not simply about how the actors interact with one another but how they move and position themselves in relation, juxtaposition and in tension with the camera itself.

    A good storyteller uses blocking to reveal something about the internal state of its characters. A great storyteller uses it to illuminate and intensify conflict between characters.

    There are some great examples of really complex blocking in film history, of elaborate storyboards and scenes that choreographed for weeks because so many different actors have to move together and precisely the right time to properly capture a sequence. There is the legend of Hitchock, who often claimed that he was bored while filming his movies, because he had already carefully planned the blocking his head.

    There is the subtle art of Kurosawa who used camera movements and actor positioning to convey emotion and the relationship of one character to another. Or the elaborate blocking of Max Ophuls, who had characters come in and out of frame in a sort of chaotic dance that was nothing short of spectacle. And any of the early comedy legends, Chaplin and Jaques Tati come to mind, paid careful attention to staging.

    Modern film uses many of the same blocking techniques, of course. But some of the most incredible examples these days come from TV and music videos. For instance, Amy and Dan Palladino consistently block their scenes in such a way that give consistency and depth to the world around their characters. This started even with Gilmore Girls where they walked around the neighborhood as people came in and out, giving a sense of the world beyond their conversation. But it was, of course, damn near perfect with Marvelous Ms Maisel, which smashed together fast-paced dialogue and movement that reflected the turmoil and emotion of its central characters.

    If there is a modern master of blocking, it could very well be Hiro Murai. Murai got his start directing music videos for bands like Block Party, St. Vincent, Gym Class Heroes, and eventually Childish Gambino. It’s this latter connection that led him to develop Atlanta alongside Donald Glover.

    Murai directed a lot of the early episodes of Atlanta, borrowing from the mechanics and staging of music videos to create a world that’s only slightly out of phase with our own. A normal, everyday kind of life painted with a subtle brush of the absurd.

    In an interview with Deadline, Murai made it pretty clear why he considers blocking important.

    I really enjoy blocking and staging. I think most of visual storytelling is camera placement, and how to stage action around the camera.

    In the last few years, Murai has taken his unique visual language to some standout episodes of Barry, before collaborating on creating The Bear, where showrunner and directory Christopher Storer has clearly picked up the blocking mantle to create something where camera and actor movement is almost like a character itself.

    In other words, blocking isn’t simply a way to frame a story, it is part of telling the story itself. And that’s a point of view that has been really important for how The Bear is filmed. It’s often claustrophobic and chaotic, but there is always a clear rhythm to how characters move and interact with one another that bounces actors in and out of the frame

    There are episodes where that’s really on display. Obviously in the first scene, “Review” will be memorable because of how well it does the one take. And Season Two has its finale, which uses blocking to create a divide between the front of house and the back of house for most of the episode, before those two are collapsed together, unified by a final five minutes of chaos.

    Anyway, I watched “Fishes” from Season 2 again. It’s an acting master class. I mean everybody in that episode is an incredible actor, with nuanced and tight performances. It’s written so well that it can carry the entire season on its own.

    But on a rewatch I was really struck by the blocking. When characters get up, and when they sit down. When they enter a room and leave it. When Carmy brings Michael his present, there is much about their relationship communicated through how they choose to move around each other. And, of course, the perfect staging of a car blowing through the house.

    It’s an incredible episode in terms of performance and writing, but I think I’ll always remember it for its blocking, descended on down from Murai.

  • #36: Utterly Hopeless

    I had some friends visit us this weekend. It was really rejuvenating, and it gave me an opportunity to share how meaningful my family is with people that I don’t often see, but feel very close to. I felt very lucky for that.

    As tends to happen we stayed up a bit just to kind of catch up. Time flows just as quick when you’re older as it does when you’re younger. But the intervals between periods of actual free time get much longer. Incidentally, there’s a lot to catch up on.

    And after getting through some of the basics and talking about the good old days we got to the same subject I find myself returning to over and over these past few weeks. Things feel utterly hopeless.

    It’s a combination of the SCOTUS kingmaking, the awkward collapse of the Democratic party, the impending plan to turn our country into a Christian theocracy and just a general feeling like it’s harder to get by day to day, despite everyone telling us that everything is ok.

    Also, it’s so much more. It’s everything else. It’s the climate crisis we are literally pouring gasoline on with AI. It’s the hostile posture of our own government against transgender folks, people of color, and women in general. It’s the folks at the top clinging to power at any cost even as they suck every last resource from the country and from my entire generation. It’s a layer cake of epic failures that have been following me around my entire life.

    I’m hearing from lots of people, mostly from the generations before me, that we should have greater faith in our institutions. That things often aren’t as bad as we think they are going to be. But I don’t have any empirical evidence to back that up. Every time I’ve been told that things were going to be fine, that’s been wrong.

    As I’ve been talking to people from my generation, the dreaded millennials, the big common theme is that it’s just time to fucking give up. We came of age with promises of the end of history and unfettered progress. And since then it’s been nothing but decline and desiccation of every major value and institution we were taught to trust.

    It all continues to descend. I don’t see how Trump doesn’t win, this time more prepared than ever. But it’s more than one man, it’s a general collapse of everything that I care about. And I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it but simply wait it out. In the meantime a lot of bad shit is going to happen and our norms of what’s allowable in this country will shift. Tim Kreider wrote about that recently.

     It’s a failure of imagination, an admission of defeat in the face of the hopeless mess of the present; the author can’t see any way to get there from here. But, although there will certainly be cataclysms as climate change accelerates in the decades to come, the worst thing about a fascist coup in America wouldn’t be that the world will come to an end, but that it won’t. There’ll be the nightmare of election night, and the horror of waking up the next day and realizing it’s actually real, but then we’ll also have to wake up the day after that—just another Thursday—and that day after that one, and get through them all, still going to work and running errands and deciding what to have for dinner. As my girlfriend reminded me, people endured Franco, and Pinochet, and life was unbearable under those monstrous regimes—a lot of people were abducted and tortured and murdered—and yet they bore it. And opposed and undermined it in what ways they could. And eventually those regimes ended. 

    I’m so angry. Angry at this country for sleepwalking into our own descent. At our collective lack of imagination. At our abandonment of our values as an entire nation. About our stubborn insistence on the status quo and refusal to shake things up.

    When I get to conversations like the one I shared with my friends this past weekend, it keeps coming to the same place. The walls feel like they’re closing in. Our lives are not better. We all have different ideas about how it happened and what should be done. But mostly, we can’t do anything but shrug our shoulders. It’s just hopeless, inevitable, and enraging.

    Albert Camus on what it means to fight for the future.

    This insane generosity is the generosity of rebellion, which unhesitatingly gives the strength of its love and without a moment’s delay refuses injustice. Its merit lies in making no calculations, distributing everything it possesses to life and to living men. It is thus that it is prodigal in its gifts to men to come. Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

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  • #35: FODMAPs

    I learned what FODMAPs are recently. I need to go through all of the proper medical channels, but it personally seems like the research at Monash University seems applicable to me.

    FODMAPs are interesting because they contain foods you might not necessarily consider something that can cause stomach issues. The biggest stand outs are garlic and onion, because they seem to have an effect even in small doses, and are the hardest to avoid. But there are some fruits and vegetables on the average low FODMAP list that are pretty surprising.

    In the coming weeks I’m going to be trying a low FODMAP diet in an attempt to put a lid on some symptoms I have, and then trying some reintroduction to see if I can get a better sense of what bothers me. For instance, I know I have a problem with lactose, but I expect that there are other groups that I have a problem with.

    Some resources I’m finding helpful as I map that out.

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  • #34: Outlining

    I followed a link in a newsletter to an article about how to build anything extremely quickly, which felt like bs at first, but is actually just a very simple technique the author calls “outline speedrunning”. It starts with two steps.

    1. Make an outline of the project
    2. For each item in the outline, make an outline. Do this recursively until the items are small

    The remaining steps are how to actually build the project, which is to say by speedrunning through the build as well. Then there are some examples. But what I really like are those first two steps.

    I admire people that can take a look at a project and outline its steps in detail. It requires patience and foresight, and I’m impressed when I see people on our team do it. I tend to operate a little more chaotically, feeling my way around a project as I go. It’s worked out well, but not all projects fit that way.

    So the speedrunning part of outlining was appealing because it’s a way to do it without getting in my own head about it. Just sit down and do it. As a first round I did a bit of outline speedrunning for a new project I’m working on.

    I think it was kind of helpful. I kind of like this outlining speedrunning.

    Donald Hall on the essential third thing in love.

    most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.

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  • #33: Collections

    I’ve got my mind on collections this week.

    Collections in the second brain sense of the word. Big blogs of knowledge that I have that are scattered across thoughts, bits of paper, digital notes and various bookmarks. I’m a little bit obsessed with collections because I think, taken as a whole, they basically describe who I am and all of the things rattling around on my pages.

    So right here on this site I want to try to create a series of collection pages which combine:

    • Notes and bookmarks I keep on this blog
    • Highlights collected in Raindrop
    • Pieces from other sites I write on
    • A general blob of content that can serve as an introduction / organizational piece

    That seems doable. Going to experiment with it a bit in WordPress.

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  • #32: Google’s Decay

    A call and response, between Casey Newton and Mike Masnick, with plenty of others that have commented lately.

    First, Newton on Google’s turn into AI, and it’s rather predictable and yet still somehow inevitable results that make everything a little worse. As Google drives people to scraped information without attributing a source, people won’t click anymore. And that’s what Google wants.

    Still, as the first day of I/O wound down, it was hard to escape the feeling that the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline. Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself.

    There’s an argument that Google will still have an incentive to drive people to actual websites, because that’s how Adsense makes money and Adsense is a cash cow. I’m skeptical of that argument. Ads are on a steep decline, and I don’t think Google has ever really cared much about cannibalizing their own business. Anything for progress.

    Mike Misnick thinks the solution lies outside of Google anyway, and I agree. He points to decentralized systems. Not because they are better, necessarily, but simply because they are more difficult to contorl.

    And it’s one of the reasons I am still hoping that people will spend more time thinking about solutions that involve decentralization. Not necessarily because of “search” (which tends to be more of a centralized tool by necessity), but because the world of decentralized social media could offer an alternative to the world in which all the information we consume is intermediated by a single centralized player, whether it’s a search engine like Google, or a social media service like Meta.

    It’s the decay of a once great service that’s interesting. It’s easy that Google is an institution. But Google was invented in 1997. It didn’t have dominance like it does until about 15 years ago. It very well can somewhere and very well may go straight into the dumpster if they keep pumping out crap.

    And it’s hard to think the world wouldn’t be a better place for it at this point.

    George Sauders on living life without regret:

    So what is stopping me from stepping outside my habitual crap? 

    My mind, my limited mind. 

    The story of life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways.

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  • #31: Momentum

    This week’s challenge has been momentum. How to find it. How to keep it. How to sustain it.

    I say it because my week was bookended by watching the kids, made necessary by some day care closings and shuffling around. Rewarding days, and one’s that I try not to take for granted. But trying to slide back and forth between dad mode and work mode all the time like that makes momentum very hard.

    The ideal state would be something like flow, where I could build up a bit of inertia and really dig into this thing or that, at home or with work. Flow was easier in my 20’s. These days it’s more about strategies that help me move around and stay productive.

    Breaking things up helps. Blocks of time help (I’ve gotten pretty good at writing in 30 minute chunks). But the most important part is prioritizing everything. I have to make sure that when I get a bit of time, and I sit down and do something, I’m not falling into a trap of making incremental progress on something meaningless.

    I once saw this called procastgress

    Progress is better than perfection, but it’s important to not fall into the trap of what I call procrastgress – little bits of progress that are not getting any closer to done, and in fact are just a form of procrastination. Procrastgress

    One thing I do is keep a list of all of the projects that I’m chipping away at.

    I call it my Incremental Progress List.

    It’s a big list of all of the things I can’t just finish as a simple task. In the larger productivity world, it’s probably something more like a habit, but I find that they have an end. Larger documentation handbooks or internal tools I’m working on at work. Organizing the garage, cleaning out the shed.

    I’ve added a progress bar under each project on the list. Every time I do a bit more, I tick the progress bar up. It’s a manual thing, based on more or less where I think I am. But it helps me to feel like I’m working towards something.

    Sometimes I have a spare 30 minutes, and when I do, I don’t want to have to think about what to do. So I check the Incremental Progress list, grab something doable, and chip away at another 30 minutes.

    The hardest part is getting that list in front of myself at the right time. It sounds a little bit silly, but I need to turn it into a habit that I mechanically reach for. It’s too easy for my brain to get distracted by actual procrastination otherwise. So that’s what’s next for me.

    Marcus Aurelius on choosing kindness.

    Try living the life of a good man* and see how it too suits you — a man who’s gratified by the lot he’s been assigned by the universe and satisfied with the justice of his acts and the kindness of his character.

    Notes

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    Notes Block – hello from the saved content!

  • #30: Folding a Project

    One of the reasons that Japanese katana’s are such strong blades is the technique used to make them called folding. A swordsmith will forge and hammer out a long blade, and then fold the steel onto itself, repeating the process dozens of time, if not more. This technique has an advantage. Each time the blade is folded some of the oxygen and impurities are removed, making it harder and stronger. It produces a sword that is durable and resistant to wear, and the folded blade has become the stuff of legends.

    Sometimes, working on a website can feel like that. Sometimes it’s unclear what a project is going to look like. You want to build something resilient and versatile, but you don’t quite know what it’s all going to look like.

    So you build out the project and cover as much ground as you can. You give it a broad, rough pass that takes into account as many of the requirements you have, and the corners you’re able to see around.

    And then, you fold it. Once you have the site all laid out, you can see where some of the impurities are. Where there are rough edges to the experience, and places where information is not immediately apparent, or the design starts to fall apart.

    And so you can go over it again, from the start, with new assumptions and fresh ideas. You’ll find the holes you missed the first time, and fill them. You’ll add details to pages you hadn’t even anticipated. You’ll add animations and transitions and see what it’s like when a design meets real content.

    Then, as a team, you’ll fold it again. And each time you rebuild you’ll get something more durable and more precise.

    Rebecca West (echoing Einstein’s temples of science quote) reflects on the need for those that inquire about the universe.

    If during the next million generations there is but one human being born in every generation who will not cease to inquire into the nature of his fate, even while it strips and bludgeons him, some day we shall read the riddle of our universe.

    Notes

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  • #29: I think I’m using AI wrong

    I think I’m using AI wrong.

    Not wrong, obviously. There’s no right way to use AI. In fact, there may not be an ideal use case and if there is we certainly haven’t found it yet. And, as Molly White pointed out, maybe we shouldn’t be using it all.

    What I mean is that I think I’m using it differently. When I compare notes against how other people are using it, I seem to be a bit off the mark. For instance, I see a lot of people that use it to help them think. They field questions against a chatbox, or use it to explain a chunk of code for them, or to connect disparate ideas together. Stuff like that.

    It makes sense, I guess. I can’t wrap my head around it. When I first started using AI a bit in my writing, I used it to revise and rewrite a few things, which is where I find I guess most stuck. But then everything spit out in that sing songy, hustle culture, corporate-speak-with-exclamation-points-on-every-sentence way and I just gave up.

    When I turn to it now, which is less and less, I use it to finish a thought. If I’m writing a bit of code, I’ll map out the structure and start to write a function name, then let Copilot fill in a first draft for me to look at. If I’m looking for a certain word or a turn of a phrase, maybe I’ll take that over to ChatGPT.

    When I have something on the tip of my tongue, I turn to AI. And I haven’t really found another way to use it.

    Notes

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  • #28: The Speed of Travel

    In East of Eden, Steinbeck comments on the way in which time has become compressed in the modern age.

    The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, “Oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?” But it isn’t silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.

    In the days of early industrialization, in the 18th and 19th centuries, traveling relatively far distances became something more broadly possible. By carriage or by train or by boat, you had the first lurches of globalization as vast empires spread across the globe.

    When I read about traveling in books, or from events of the time, I’m struck by how slow it all feels when compared to today. Travel time was mapped in days and weeks, not hours. Seconds mattered little.

    Along the way, you would need to stop. Pretty often actually. To rest, or to gather supplies, or to get some water and food, or change horses, or dozens of other things. Stories in these fictional universes visit distant relatives along the way—that they maybe have not seen for quite a long time, or ever at all—stopping in for a warm fire and a bit of company.

    Finding these connections along the way was an essential part of travel. You would have to rely on the kindness of strangers and relatives to make it anywhere. These serendipitous, and sometimes chance, encounters provided the backdrop for a lot of fiction written from this time.

    But then we became obsessed with the split second. The speed of travel. Trains, planes and automobiles.

    I went with the whole family to Pennsylvania this past weekend. It was so fun, we had a really, really good time. Honestly, the most fun we’ve had together since C was born. Just the best possibly family trip.

    The drive was about four hours, and we more or less drove through the whole way, stopping here and there. Along the way I passed about half a dozen old friends and relatives. A lot of them I haven’t seen in a while. But we drove on.

    Notes

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    • Monday: Chicken thighs and rice noodles
    • Tuesday (leftovers)
    • Wednesday Pork Tenderloin
    • Thursday: Pork Tenderloin tacos
    • Friday: Takeout

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  • #27: I’m just an inefficient sorting algorithm

    When we first bought our house, I remember that one of my cousins (still a teenager at time) told us that when he finally had enough money to buy us a housewarming present, they surely will have figured out how to make a washing machine and dryer that folds clothes by itself, so he would just get us that. I remember it because it was such an awesome idea, and we had a ton of fun imagining what it could look like. Of course, still no dryer that folds clothes and he’s now well into his twenties.

    Anyway sometimes, between putting away the dishes, throwing in some laundry, and organizing the toys in our playroom, it feels like I’m basically an extremely inefficient sorting algorithm fueled by pizza and audiobooks. I move from room to room, do a sorting pass on everything there. And then I wait for the disorder to come again so I can repeat the process, over and over, multiple times a day.

    And this does feel like the kind of place where technology should be stepping in. Automated, repeated tasks done over and over. Isn’t that where efficiencies come in? Instead we have machines burning forests on fire to make slide decks and parse web content and it just all feels so flat.

    Taken even further, when is AI going to move on from emails and chat interfaces to truly earth shattering things and deliver on its promise. I’m not so skeptical that I don’t think it can happen. But for now it feels like we can’t even move past a bot that writes emails. I can write a damn email, I don’t need ChatGPT to do that for me.

    Jon Stewart had a good line when he commented on AI’s supposedly huge promise being revealed in a Zuckerberg video to simply make him some toast.

    Are you out of your fucking mind? See, here’s the thing. Toast… I can make… I’ll tell you what, why don’t you get to work on curing the diseases and the climate change, and we’ll hold down the fort on toast.

    Technology isn’t going to solve this one. So for now, I’m just going to be an inefficient sorting algorithm.

    Speaking of inefficient algorithms, a quote from Beyond the Search Engine:

    Here’s how a well-intentioned search engine decays: First, a novel algorithm is developed. It’s effective at helping people find what they are looking for, so they begin to rely on it. Then, the owners of the websites that are being found notice the search engine sending them traffic. They investigate or otherwise toy with the algorithm to see if they can appear higher in the rankings. Those who are best at this gain power, influence, or money.

    Then, a cottage industry develops to help websites compete. The search engines adjust their algorithms to penalize bad actors that game the algorithm. Those bad actors become even more sophisticated. They scale their efforts, whether through automation or cheap labor. Finally, in order to be seen at all, good actors bend over backwards to cater to the algorithms, too. Participate or perish. Authenticity becomes not only silenced, but perverted.

    And hey, while I’m on this AI thing, Tim Bray is a man who knows things™ and he thinks that there’s going to be a money bubble, and here’s why.

    But he hammers the central point: What we’re seeing is FOMO-driven dumb money thrown at technology by people who have no hope of understanding it. Just because everybody else is and because the GPTs and image generators have cool demos

    Economics can be so stupid sometimes. Or at the very least, utterly and completely human. I know behavioral economics is designed to factor that in, but the psychology of economics is under-considered I think.

  • Hosting Easter

    This past weekend, we hosted Easter at our house. Almost 20 people, ranging from four years old to seventy. It went really well, but what a day! Anyway, this is the schedule I followed throughout the day.

    We wanted an early dinner, so the goal was to have everything out by about 4. After some wrangling, we were all eating by 4:30. My mother-in-law was nice enough to prepare the gravy (sauce) and meatballs the night before and bring that over.

    What I need:

    • 2 full baking sheets for the zucchini and potatoes
    • Stock pot and colander
    • Skillet
    • Oven Trays

    10:30 : Prep begins

    Remove the lamb, trim the fat off of it

    Prep the marinade (also, this video)

    • 1/4 cup olive oil
    • 1 – 2tbsp cut rosemary
    • 1 – 2tbsp parlsey
    • A little juice of the lemon
    • 4 tsp of garlic (or more)

    Cut the potatoes in half and throw them in some water

    Prep the potatoes seasoning

    • 2 tsp garlic powder
    • 2.5 tsp italian seasoning
    • 2 tsp paprika
    • 3 tbsp parmesean cheese
    • 1 tsp salt
    • Pinch of black pepper

    12:30: Get the lamb ready

    Pull the lamb from the fridge

    • Season it with 1tbsp of salt on each side, plus a bit of pepper
    • Add the herb marinade
    • Roll it, truss it, get it ready for the oven

    Preheat the oven to 425

    1:30: Lamb goes in the oven

    Lamb goes in at 425 for 20 minutes, then down to 325
    This thing is 6.7lbs. It could be anywhere from 2 to 2.5 hours, pull it when the internal temp hits 135

    • Note: It took around 2 hours to cook, with temperature at around 300

    2:30: Start on potatoes

    Dry, season and prep the potatoes

    • Add parchment paper to 2 baking sheets
    • Drizzle and spread oil on each
    • Sprinkle the potato seasoning on each pan
    • Place each potato face down
    • Preheat the second oven to 400

    Start on the zucchini

    • Halve and score the zucchinis
    • Snow salt on to cross hatched zucchini

    3:00: Sides

    Potatoes go in the oven

    Start warming the gravy on the stove

    3:30: Cook the Zucchini

    • Put the Zucchini into the skillet, a few minutes on each side
    • Move them to a plate as they get finished up
    • Add salt, pepper and a bit of italian seasoning and garlic to each

    3:30 – 4:00: Everything everything.

    Zucchinis in the oven

    • Raise heat to 450 in the second oven
    • Put zucchini in for 25 minutes or so

    Pull the lamb when it’s finished

    • Put Manicotti in when the lamb is finished

    Put the water for the spagetthi up

    • Throw the spaghetti in for a few minutes then transfer to the colander

    4:00 – 4:30: We eat!

    Notes

    Check Asana
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  • #25: Superhero movies were a blip

    Dune’s been on my mind. Not simply for the technical mastery on display, or for its commitment to theatrical spectacle, or even for its place in the larger cultural landscape of 2024.

    I’m just kind of impressed that its a bonafide modern franchise not tied to some sort of superhero source material. It’s not even all that original. Obviously, it’s adapted from a very popular sci-fi series, and it’s been tried before. But the (in some ways far too incessant) comparisons to Star Wars go beyond its thematic and stylistic similarities. It’s a generational blockbuster film franchise that’s self-contained, in its own world, sweeping through audiences. It’s big and epic and interesting and exciting in a way that we haven’t seen in a while.

    It does feel like this year we are starting to see some return to movies as they existed before the days of Marvel. There are summer blockbusters, and mega franchises. There are shots in the dark like Everything, Everywhere all at once. Kevin Costner is even making Westerns again.

    When I first met my now wife, we used to go to an indie theater every week and see whatever was out. There was always some indie rom-com (this was the era of 500 days of summer) or drama that was fun and stylistically original and had a nice self-contained story to it. Then movies got split into either mega blockbusters or super low budget, barely watched indies. All those middle of the road films disappeared.

    So it’s fun to see a movie like this about a woman who tries to reconnect with her boyfriend, who passed away, through connections through music. It’s exactly the kind of thing we would’ve went to the movie to see. Maybe those kinds of movies are coming back.

    And it’s possible that after all of this, superhero movies and never-ending, interconnected IP will be more of a blip of film history rather than a seismic and enduring paradigm shift.

    Maybe multiverses will be all too much.

    Maybe we’ll be able to just make movies again.

    Bookmarks & Notes

    When ChatGPT and it’s many, many competitors began flooding the market, I started to use it a bit in my writing. Mostly I would set it up with something I had written and ask for a revision, then pull some things here and there I liked. But over time, it’s for sure slipping out of use for me. I like this guide from the iA team, Writing with AI . It’s more pragmatic than a lot of other things that I’ve seen. It’s advice essentially boils down to turning to something like ChatGPT at times when you are stuck. Like a rubber duck, but for ideas. But this caution is so important for me:

    AI can and will ruin your voice and credibility if you lazily let it write in your place. As writers we can not allow AI to replace our own thinking. We should use it to simulate the thinking of a missing dialogue partner. To write better, we need to think more, not less.

    I was also feeling that AI was beginning to rob me of my voice. And without that, what else do I even have?

    We Need to Talk About the Front Web. As a generalist, that works with a lot of full stack developers, I have mixed feelings about the division between the front-end and it’s tradeoffs with back-end expertise. But I do understand the way that the intention and semantics of HTML is under attack, and in slow decay. And so I really do appreciate Angela Ricci’s point of view here. The whole thing is absolutely worth a read, I enjoyed every bit of it.

    That’s the web today: abstractions, intertwined dependencies, heavy tools, thirty-party libraries, client-side JavaScript frameworks… SPAs! — we simply broke the web with these.

    And man does the web feel broken sometimes.

    I don’t know if I see No Labels as a “dangerous” experiment, but after reading the profile on them in The Atlantic I’m left wondering, what is even the point of this (other than to placate the egos of it’s founders)?

    Kierkegaard on the root of despair

    The relation to himself is something a human being cannot be rid of, just as little as he can be rid of himself, which for that matter is one and the same thing, since the self is indeed the relation to oneself… With despair a fire takes hold in something that cannot burn, or cannot be burned up — the self… To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.

    Notes

    Prepping for Easter

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  • #24: Sunday Sauce

    I married into a very big Italian family, with roots in Sicily. So one of the things I learned pretty early on was how to make Sunday gravy (or Sunday sauce depending on your region of origin). I make it here and there, and it’s good for a couple of days worth of leftovers.

    I looked around at a few recipes, and this one felt the closest to the method that I know. Except I don’t use wine, and most of the time I’ll just use sugar instead of carrots, if anything.

    The most important parts of Sunday Gravy, as I understand it, is the long simmer, and the quality of the tomatoes.

    The beauty of it is that you can get going sometime in the morning and leave it to simmer all day, coming back to stir it from time to time. That’s how the tomatoes break apart, and the sauce thickens, and eventually the flavors of the meat combine with it. It’s meant to be cooked slow. That’s why it’s for Sundays.

    And for tomatoes, as the recipe I linked to mentions, you probably want to use the San Marzano variation of whatever can of tomatoes are at your local supermarket. You can really use whatever you want, and you can either buy whole peeled tomatoes and crush them yourself or just buy them crushed. But the quality of the sauce is more or less dependent on what you chose, so it’s probably worth a couple of extra bucks.

    Anyway, this being less of a formal recipe, here are the steps I generally follow.

    1. In a large sauce or stock post, dice up a yellow or white onion and saute it in a healthy tablespoon or two of olive oil. Add a bit of salt while you do.
    2. When the onions are nice and tender, add in some tomato paste. Not quite the full thing of a whole small can. Maybe like 3/4 of it. Add a heap of garlic.
    3. After about a minute or so of moving that all around dump in two 28 oz cans of your tomatoes. Fill up one can with just water and dump that in too. Stir, cover and raise your heat.
    4. Once the sauce is boiling gently, take the heat back down and uncover. Add some more salt and pepper, a lot of fresh basil (pretty key that it’s fresh, imo) and a tablespoon or more of seasoning. You can add some grated carrots, or a healthy pinch of sugar, or a half a packet of Sweet N Low. All of those are just meant to balance out the acidity with some sweetness. You may not even need it.
    5. You can leave this going for a long time, several hours or more if you want. Stir every 20 minutes at least to keep the bottom from burning.
    6. Make your meatballs. I won’t go into all the details, but use a bit of fresh basil with those too. And you can soak some old bread in milk instead of breadcrumbs too.
    7. Once the meatballs are fried, add them to the sauce for at least an hour, until they are cooked through
    8. Continue seasoning as needed
    9. Serve it right away, or the next day, or both

    I enjoy making it, and it makes a fine meal. But I really like a food with such a clear tradition. It’s meant to be left on the stovetop as your kids and your grandkids scamper around the house. It’s meant to be tasted with a wooden spoon every so often. It’s meant for a lazy day inside when dinner can be served at anytime. It’s Sunday gravy (sauce).

    Bookmarks & Notes

    Cory Doctrow is really on to something with this whole enshittificaiton thing. At the beginning of this year, he posted a talk he gave about it to his blog. I like the way that Doctrow sums it up:

    It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

    And we’re seeing that happen to the platforms that we love, only slowly. And it’s going to drive people away from the web, which is a tragedy.

    Laws aren’t going to catch up to this kind of thing. And in the meantime, we’re just going to let artists have their entire careers sucked up by machines.

    Got to see Dune 2 on the big screen. Perhaps Villeneuve’s best work. Perhaps one of my favorite films of all time. Just an incredible, lived-in world that’s beautifully realized and consistent. It’s got all the right story beats, even when it missteps here and there, and it doesn’t beat you over the head with exposition in a way that feels very natural. But this is going to be remembered for its technical brilliance. For all the talk of a bland cinematographic palette, there is something incredibly precise about every aspect of the film’s audiovisual landscape. There is not a single moment that distract the eyes or the ears. Everything is exactly in its place.

    James Hollis on the transition into midlife

    Symptoms of midlife distress are in fact to be welcomed, for they represent not only an instinctually grounded self underneath the acquired personality but a powerful imperative for renewal… In effect, the person one has been is to be replaced by the person to be. The first must die… Such death and rebirth is not an end in itself; it is a passage. It is necessary to go through the Middle Passage to more clearly achieve one’s potential and to earn the vitality and wisdom of mature aging. Thus, the Middle Passage represents a summons from within to move from the provisional life to true adulthood, from the false self to authenticity.

    Notes

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  • #23: The React Rewrite

    I think about rewriting code a lot. If you’ve been at it for enough years, you’ll inevitably find yourself in many conversations about whether or not a team should be rewriting a codebase when faced with a project that is opaque, frustratingly slow and nonsensical. It can very quickly feel like a rewrite is the only option.

    Developers will often advocate for that solution, and I understand why. It can be liberating. It’s like clearing away an overgrown thicket to reveal a perfectly clear path ahead. If only the code was cleaner and more maintainable, the argument goes, we could deliver even more new features in half the time. We just need to refactor it first.

    But that is rooted in a flawed premise. Like anything, software tends to deteriorate over time and usually, it doesn’t necessitate drastic measures like a complete rewrite. Instead, what it often requires is simple, boring, regular old maintenance. I’d be willing to be that if you are considering a rewrite, it’s probably the wrong idea.

    A lot of the value that an agency like mine brings to a project is that perspective. When a client comes to us with an untenable codebase, we know how to maneuver through them, identify the most critical issues, and triage different parts for a more selective, focused refactoring that emphasizes incremental change. In other words, it’s our job to understand what we’re working with and identify the places where we can have the biggest impact.

    It’s a mark of a seasoned programmer to have the ability to do that and the willpower to resist the temptation of a rewrite.There’s a reason that Joel Splosky named it the single biggest strategic mistake you can make. The value that you add to a codebase is usually going to do little more than match the effort that’s already gone in. There are definitely cases when a rewrite is necessary, but they are very rare.

    And so we need to face the fact that the trajectory of the React project is at odds with what most experienced programmers can agree is a commonly accepted principle. Because React changes a lot. It’s very nature necessitates either pinning yourself to some obscure version, or being in a constant state of either preparing a code rewrite or just having completed one.

    It’s I think the most profound insight in Simon MacDonald’s removing React is just weakness leaving your codebase. React is not static but it doesn’t organically evolve. It unveils entirely new best practices and internal APIs every few years. And every time it does, we are forced to rewrite. And again, rewriting is typically a bad idea.

    By choosing React, we’ve signed up for a lot of unplanned work. Think of the value we could have produced for our users and company if we weren’t subject to the whims of whatever the cool kids were doing over in React.

    Stop signing up for breaking changes!

    Our code is filled with breaking changes. We don’t need our frameworks to add more.

    Bookmarks & Notes

    MacDonald also references the rule of least power, which I had never heard of.

    When designing computer systems, one is often faced with a choice between using a more or less powerful language for publishing information, for expressing constraints, or for solving some problem. This finding explores tradeoffs relating the choice of language to reusability of information. The “Rule of Least Power” suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

    W3C

    There is no moral imperative to be miserable, and nihilistic resignation is the most conservative affect of all.

    To be truly radical, James Greig suggests, you can try to take control of your own state of mind.

    Notes

    Maybe I could list out the focuses and the indiivdual tasks for a week and then do timeblocking / task management in the actual days? Something like that.

    Next week focus:

    • I’ve gotta finish taxes, call school
    • Post the changes to the sprint review meeting
    • Prep agenda for retreat
    • Spray for bugs
    • Clean nuggests
    • Put up cabinet
    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Review projects in Obsidian
    Add to collections in Obsidian
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #22: Taking the Long View

    I have been thinking about East of Eden since I finished it, not too long ago. And Lee, as a character and presumably a sort of surrogate for the author, is full of some really fascinating asides. He talks about how much he loves bookshops throughout the novel, and even leaves to go open his own (returning shortly after). When he mentions this to Adam, he lays out the rest of his life in front of him.

    I want to open a bookstore in Chinatown in San Francisco. I would live in the back, and my days would be full of discussions and arguments. I would like to have in stock some of those dragon-carved blocks of ink from the dynasty of Snug. The boxes are worm-bored, and the ink is made from fir smoke…

    …I would like to have my little bookshop at last. I would like to die there.

    When I look at my life, I feel as if I can barely see six months ahead. Maybe I have some plans for the next year. But even stretching out best laid plans a few years out in front of me feels blurry and unstable. Nevermind being able to succinctly describe what I’d like to die doing.

    I think that one of the knock-on effects of our collapsing attention spans is the inability to take the long view. There are a growing number of self-help books, and anti-self-help-books and don’t-call-it-self-help books that you can shell out $30 for so they can tell you as much. Embrace minimalism, find focus, and clear your mind of distractions to catch up with the pace of modernity.

    The knack—the trick at the center

    Which is the subject of a growing number of self-help books designed to embrace minimalism, and shed distractions, and find focus, and generally race to catch up with the pace of modernity.

    It is difficult to find the courage and clarity needed to just slow down. T ounderstand that you can’t get to everything you want and that a singula rpursuit informed by passion is far more satisifying than trying to do it all. And I appreciate Lee in East of Eden because I think he echoes the author, who, at another point in the novel finds his own diagnosis.

    The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, “Oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?” But it isn’t silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.

    How can I say goodbye to these small time units?

    In her newsletter, Molly White has been delivering a near-flawless streak of new entires over the last couple of months. One of those was about Chris Dixon’s hot of the presses Web3 book “Read Write Own.” Based on what I’ve seen, I don’t think the book is going to be worth my time, filled mostly with the hollow promises that characterize Web3 and crypto in general.

    One aspect of Web3 that always pisses me off is its overlooking of simple, reliable technologies that are already serving the needs of millions of people, because they lack the flashiness of whatever VC happens to be obsessed with. Which White points out:

    It’s profoundly weird to read RSS’s obituary as a person who checks her very-much-still-alive feed reader several times a day to get everything from cryptocurrency news to dinner ideas, and who rarely encounters a website that doesn’t provide a functional feed.a And does Dixon somehow not know that much of the thriving podcasting industry is built on RSS, or that many other apps and websites build features on top of RSS without their users ever even knowing it?

    But of course, RSS is unlikely to attract billions in investment. After all, it’s pretty much done. There’s no room for lofty pretensions of what it almost definitely will not become.

    Lisa Barrett on how emotions are made:

    Emotions do not shine forth from the face nor from the maelstrom of your body’s inner core. They don’t issue from a specific part of the brain. No scientific innovation will miraculously reveal a biological fingerprint of any emotion. That’s because our emotions aren’t built-in, waiting to be revealed. They are made. By us. We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own emotional experiences, and our perceptions of others’ emotions, on the spot, as needed, through a complex interplay of systems. Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience.

    Notes

    Active Proejcts:

    • Taxes
    • Visual Regression
    • Async Retreat (Plan agenda, set time)
    • Organize and Declutter (cabinet / move things aorund)
    • History of the Web new design (launch)
    • Hemmings kickoff
    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Review projects in Obsidian
    Add to collections in Obsidian
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • Using Full Site Editing as a Developer

    I’m cooking up something new for History of the Web which will take it in a slightly different direction (though a lot of it, of course, will mostly be the same and it likely feels bigger for me than it will be for anybody that visits the site). In any case, this new directions has me experimenting with Full Site Editing.

    In my professional work at Reaktiv, I’m often building various elements for the WordPress block editor within a full site editing environment. But I haven’t had much experience using it as a site editor and user. Doing that work has had me re-evaluating the way that I build websites, particularly because I prefer having granular control over every pixel, a luxury that standard block based themes may not offer.

    Using the WordPress Full Site Editor

    My disclaimer on the above is, the limitations of the editor are a feature, not a bug. They present a system of components for use on a site, meaning you don’t skew too far from your core design. But sometimes I do want to bust out and

    I tend to agree with what I think is a popular sentiment, that when full site editing functions smoothly, it’s something akin to magic. However, when it feels clunky and cumbersome, it can bring your work to a grinding halt. Thankfully, my experience has been more of the former than the latter.

    But there are frustrating moments. Especially when you are trying to move things around, drag blocks from one place to another and experiment. You end up fighting against the editor, tweaking groups within columns within groups to make sure everything is aligned and arranged correctly. And then sometimes you have to just scrap it and start again.

    Need to edit the typography for the site? Pop open the styles panel on the right. Oh, did you mean the overall styles on a different template? Now you’ve got to toggle back to the navigation on the left side. Trying to drag blocks around? Better open the Document Overview to make that a bit easier. But then you’ve got to pop open the blocks sidebar to get a little more control over each block. And round and round we go.

    But on the flip side, there is so much I don’t have to do. Comments look great. Posts look great. I can edit a font or a color directly in the editor, and it instantly applies everywhere. I can create responsive columns with a simple drag and drop. At times, I sail through a layout, realizing that I’ve achieved it with minimal effort.

    Working with the editor is both sides of this coin.

    Finding Block Themes

    One of the first questions I had was where even to start. I could build a theme from scratch but for a lot of personal projects I think that’s going to be a mistake. For me, at least, I found that using a theme as a starting point, and then customizing from there, was a lot better.

    Themes have opinions. At least, the good ones too. So I’d say the biggest trick is finding a theme that has an opinion that resonates with you, and then going for it.

    You could build a theme from scratch, but for a lot of projects I think that’s going to be a mistake. Far better, I think, to find a theme that you like and then customize it how you want. A lot of themes have a sort of opinion to them, and if you like that opinion, then you might as well go with it.

    As a reference, here’s a few places I found some high quality themes:

    1. Anders Norén has some fantastic themes. They are definitely opinionated, but beautiful
    2. Auttomattic also has some good block based themes. The theme on this blog (Bitácora) is one of those.
    3. Twenty Twenty Four is incredibly good

    I think that starting with Twenty Twenty Four is a solid move. It’s got a theme.json file that’s far more complete than a lot of other themes, and it’s a useful guide for the kinds of things that you might want to customize.

    It’s a bit plain, and that’s certainly by design, but if you mix together it’s variations and patterns you have a really good starting point. I think the core team did a great job building it, and if you’re not sure what to turn to for your theme, that’s where I would go.

    For me, I turned to a couple of themes that had more of a classic blog feel. My only complaint about Twenty Twenty Four is that it is relatively stark and empty. It has plain typography and clearly wants images to do the heavy lifting. If you’ve checked out my work you know that I like to use a lot of words. So it didn’t really fit for me. Instead, I turned to Bitacora, which has less features to it, but has an opinion on its design that I quite life.

    The Secret Sauce is… A few custom blocks

    So what’s the difference maker? I’ve adopted an approach that I hardly consider novel or new, but might help other developers with some WordPress coding experience who are looking to ease into Full Site Editing. So here it is:

    Create your own blocks.

    Small ones. Utility ones. Blocks that cover specific designs you can’t quite fit into the editor. Blocks that pull content from places the query loop can’t quite pull from.

    The create-block script is really good. It generates all of the scaffolding you need, and then a lot of code goes into the edit.js file and the render.php file.

    The thing about my blocks is I really just need them to do a specific thing. So, there are not many options. In the editor, Sometimes, I might even just put a placeholder inside of edit.js that tells me what it is, and I leave all the rendering to the template.

    Would I do this if I was building this out for clients or other people? No, absolutely not. But sometimes I just need a bit of CSS, HTML and JavaScript to weave together something really particular that I want that dragging blocks around just can’t provide.

    I’m a tinkerer and a coder and I like to find a balance between a website that does a lot of what I need and granular control. I like Full Site Editing. I plan to keep experimenting with it. But every time I bump up against it, I bring that flexibility back with a block or two.

    I recognize that maybe it’s not for everyone. But maybe, it’ll work for you.

  • #21: The art of letting go

    This week’s post is brought to you by the letter L. It’s all about letting go.

    My wife and I did a weekend project (including not one, but two trips to IKEA) to straighten up and declutter our playroom. Years of accumulated toys, junk, and forgotten happy meal trinkets had piled up and it was time for a much-needed purge.

    Right away, I needed to let go. First I needed to let go of things on behalf of my two sons. As I sifted through the piles of clutter, I had to make a decision about what goes in the donate pile, with very little input from my two sons. Letting go, on behalf of another, is a pretty unfamiliar feeling.

    But there was a different kind of letting go, of my own need for control and order. My wife’s method of quick and decisive action sometimes clashes with my own much slower and methodical nature. Both have their advantages for different kinds of projects but it’s clear that a quick burst directed at decluttering was going to be far more effective. So we did it her way and it was pretty successful.

    So in a lot of ways I spent much of the weekend letting things wash over for me. But it can be terrifying to cede control to others and let nature take its course. Of course the only alternative is to gather everything around you until it suffocates you into submission.

    In my life, I have found that I am a collector of digital debris. My computer is a mix of assorted notes, workflows, lists and various stashes of makeshift junk drawers in this application or that. I don’t know why I do it or who it’s for. But if I think too hard about it I’m forced to confront my own mortality and think about where it will all go when I’m gong. So mostly I just kind of avoid thinking about it at all.

    But learning to let go is a good thing. And that’s why I like this blog. It provides a bit of finality to an idea or a loop in my head. Writing helps me think it out. And these words hold more meaning than the hundreds of forgotten notes I have stored away. Writing helps me make sense of the debris. It helps me to let go.

    I saw this tweet from Dan Brooks recently

    Which was a banger. And so that got me to read the linked article, a profile of billionaire Bill Ackman and his descent into social media fueled mania and paranoia over the last six months to a year.

    Look, Ackman isn’t especially stupid. Some of his ideas, particularly about the insular and single-mindedness of elite liberal arts institutions, are not without merit. But he’s also not especially smart. And he more or less got to where he is coasting on waves of luck and opportunity funded by generational wealth.

    When he was confronted by a new generation of people who had different ideas than the ones he built his fortune and empire—people who simply did not give a shit who he was, mind you—he snapped.

    The writings of John Michael Greer are, well, complicated. He is obviously prolific and has very strong, important ideas. But he can also be such a frustrating read for me because he is so beholden to his own fatalistic view of the future (which he has proved to be right about, on occasion).

    But I was really impressed by a recent article called The Three Stigmata of J.R.R. Tolkien. It describes how modern political events are viewed through the lens of intentionally binary and contrived fiction, and therefore leads to fallacies in our understandings about the world.

    The Great Fiction of AI. I first saw this Verge article mentioned by Dave in a dozen thoughts about AI.

    There’s a lot to say about this article, which was fantastic. It highlights the issues created by the tech industry’s over-dependence on scale and algorithms. But now it’s the tech industry, again, that are selling the “solution” to that problem (the one they created) by pushing AI downstream to every other industry.

    So they follow readers to the microgenres into which Amazon’s algorithms classify their tastes, niches like “mermaid young adult fantasy” or “time-travel romance,” and keep them engaged by writing in series, each installment teasing the next, which already has a title and set release date, all while producing a steady stream of newsletters, tweets, and videos

    Platforms like AMazon and social media have been prioritizing frequency over quality for years. It compelled writers to create at a more rapid clip. Now, AI enters the picture, promising to expedite the writing process but paradoxically feeding off the creativity of the writers themselves. Now we have a swirling mass of uninspired content generated by AI which is, in essence, consuming itself.

    That is, they’re using it not because they have something to say but because they need to say something in order to “maintain relevance” — a phrase that I heard from AI-using novelists as well — on platforms already so flooded with writing that algorithms are required to sort it. It raises the prospect of a dizzying spiral of content generated by AI to win the favor of AI, all of it derived from existing content rather than rooted in fact or experience, which wouldn’t be so different from the internet we have now.

    I wonder what snake oil the tech industry will have for us in another decade as a solution to a web polluted by algorithmically generated Markov chains disguised as AI content.

    Notes

    • Bluffs update
    • Pick out glasses ahead of time
    • Respond to the FW: WalkMe/Intercom Integration email
    • Follow up on SilverRock requesting a change to the auto-increment
    • Renew Salesforce API key
    • Approve Thomas’ time off
    • I like the format of this for links on the history of the web blog: https://tomcritchlow.com/2024/02/16/narrative-strategy/
    • March 6 – 1PM ET VIP
    • Should I use Kagi? https://kagi.com/pricing
    • With Kagi I could use the universal summarizer with my Raindrop reading mode thing https://kagi.com/summarizer/api.html
    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Review projects in Obsidian
    Add to collections in Obsidian
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #20: The analog, human web

    I read Casey Netwon’s timely How platforms killed Pitchfork, which has a number of incisive and realistically cynical insights in it, all of which are relevant in the modern fractured and declining digital era. But one thing that’s kind of sticking with me is this passing observation:

    On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with.

    This isn’t the most original thought, but a lack of genuine and human-centered discovery does seem to be a significant void in today’s web. Ironically, as we construct algorithmically fortified communities designed to guide us towards our preferences, we become so much like automatons ourselves, steered only towards what we’ve already pre-established as our likes and dislikes. In its most extreme form, this leads to the creation of echo chambers. But it has other knock-on effects as well.

    In response, efforts to reclaim a smaller and more personal web are actually attempts to redefine discovery through the lens of human insights and curation. It’s the same impulse that’s leading some to reclaim the word and spirit of the Luddites. But as both sides dig in their trenches, the web divides more.

    Which is maybe ok. But it’s instigated a thought. Do we need two words to define these two very different ways.

    I’ve been thinking over a term for all of this, one that’s somewhat like the way ‘analog’ is to ‘digital,’ that can help differentiate the web crafted by a human touch from the one build by (and sometimes, for) robots. The term ‘analog’ was initially used to depict how electrical signals are transmitted via devices like telephones and record players, in stark contrast to a digital signal, which is encoded and subsequently decoded. But it has slowly gathered into an entire culture.

    What we need is a term—an ‘analog’ equivalent—that encapsulates the essence of the human web. The small web. The personalized web that’s an intentions reflection of our human imperfections laid bare for others to see and explore, and maybe, to discover. I’m going to do a bit of thinking on this one.

    A recent episode of ‘Why is this Happening’ with Chris Hayes featured Robinson Meyer discussing climate change. Somewhere in the middle was this intriguing tidbit

    the number one predictor of whether you have solar panels on your roof is whether your neighbor has them.

    Network effects abound.

    Thich Nhat Hanh on the meaning of true love:


    Loving-kindness is not only the desire to make someone happy, to bring joy to a beloved person; it is the ability to bring joy and happiness to the person you love, because even if your intention is to love this person, your love might make him or her suffer.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Review projects in Obsidian
    Add to collections in Obsidian
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote