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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)

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.

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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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.

• Monash has an official app which is $8 and really helpful. So that seems worth it
• Fun without FODMAPs has some pretty good recipes and explainers
• Ditto at A Little Bit Yummy
• Spoonful can help figure out which foods at the grocery have low FODMAPs

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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.

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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.

I find myself returning to the same bit of circular thinking that Simon Collison describes in his post This used to be our playground. The web was more fun when it began. There was more experimentation, a friendlier atmosphere and creative approaches to design. Things are more, well, boring now. But, of course, the web is the plumbing for every major opeartional necessity on the planet. Its infastructure now, not a playground. But, Collison seems to argue, it can be both.

In any case, I think this is an excellent summation of the direction that a personal site can go, and the way in which we can reclaim a bit of our personal expression. It also happens to be a great jumping off point to lots of fantastic and inspirational links.

So WordPress is getting into the low cost website game. Or maybe not, maybe they’re just referring those services out? It is a bit hard to say. But either way, this comment from Matt Mullenweg comes off as a bit disingenous. The issue with how the service is positioned — Built by WordPress.com — is a matter of branding.

The rest of the world outside of the WordPress community doesn’t decouple WordPress and WordPress.com, nor should they have to. So any service that Automattic launches into the ehter comes off as the official entry, so to enter a market with such slim margins and potentially crowd out the community doesn’t have a great feeling to it, even if the general point is well taken.

As I keep attempting to unravel the events of last week again and again, I find myself coming to it from so many different angles. Congresswoman Jayapal lends a brand new voice in a moving and stark interview with Rebecca Traister at The Cut.

She highlights some details I hadn’t previously known. They seemed to be aware of the threat, the representatives were given strict instructions and told to bring overnight bags. And there does appear to have been intentional oversights by law enforcement, the question is simply at what level and at what part of the system.

But even more so, Jayapal is rallying for hope. Not the hope of the Obama era, the boundless optimism of an egalatarian neoliberal future. Jayapal’s hope is with the people she represents. She believes that the voting public has put their faith in the government this one last time. And they better damn well do something with that chance.

There’s a lot I like about Anna Wiener’s look at Moxie Marlinspike and Signal, and she frames it in a modern context couched in the beliefs of Marlinspike, who has done some great things. There’s a lot of strong assertions about privacy which are needed. But I was struck by this passage, which is kind of mentioned in passing:

What we didn’t necessarily anticipate, when everyone was so optimistic, was how little it would change things. The dream was always that, if someone in the suburbs of St. Louis got killed by a cop, immediately everyone would know about it. At the time, it was a sort of foregone conclusion that that would be enough.” “Enough for what?” I asked. “To prevent that from happening,” he replied, flatly.

I recently had a chance to go back and read Jane Mayer’s incredible profile on David Addigton, Cheney’s right-hand man during the Bush years. She outlines the power-play that Cheney and Addington engaged in, pulling from a Reagan era playbook to expand the powers of the Presidency to extralegal judicial rulings and commissions, and even to spying on U.S. citizens. An incredible read.

Link

A fantastic distillation of the male ego, picked apart and dissected in a way that’s visceral and real. They really make you feel it, the arguments and the embarrassment, and the intimacy of the use of visuals and sounds adds to that.

Details

In reply to http://tantek.com/2019/171/t1/happy-14th-microformats-org.