Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

Tag: Web Future

  • #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

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Film List
    Comics List
    Add to Books
    Revolutions
    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

  • #14: Holidays and the nature of conflict

    Here at the holidays for, let’s say, reasons, I am thinking about the nature of conflict, and specifically personal conflict and standing at either end of one. There’s this great post by Adam Mastroianni about conversations. Good ones and bad ones.

    On the nature of conflict, Mastroianni boils it down to the miscues of givers and takers transforming conversation into a zero sum game:

    Neither givers nor takers have it 100% correct, and their conflicts often come from both sides’ insistence that the other side must convert or die. Rather than mounting a Inquisition on our interlocutors, we ought to focus on perfecting our own technique.

    The solution is what he calls doorknobs. Mastroianni’s thesis is that good conversationalists offer affordances in conversations for others to jump in, which is what he refers to as doorknobs, places in a discussion for others to enter. Those doorknobs need to match your personal style. There are givers and takers in a conversation, and takers must present doorknobs with potentially oppositional statements, while givers can invite others with questions.

    Blogging in a Vacuum

    There’s a lot to love about Henrik Karlsson’s A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox, starting with the name. It’s an in-depth analysis of the way in which ideas move around in the web, not through self-contained circle but outward like a large river system, collecting different branches along the way. Karlsson has a lot to say about the function of a blog, not as a niche source of viral content, but as a way of producing clarity in thinking.

    He also has some advice. Some very good advice:

    You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.

    This is a blog that not many people other than myself read. And that’s okay, because it’s some of the most clear thinking I do all week putting posts like this together.

    Wasn’t this supposed to be fun?

    I’ve been catching up on some of those that have written or spoken about the general decline of quality on the web. And there is a lot to say about unfettered algorithms, viscous echo chambers and wanton neglect from custodians of the webs largest traffic sources.

    But also it is very much true that things just aren’t as fun anymore. Writing in the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka sums it up pretty well:

    The precipitous decline of X is the bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be. Remember having fun online? It meant stumbling onto a Web site you’d never imagined existed, receiving a meme you hadn’t already seen regurgitated a dozen times, and maybe even playing a little video game in your browser. These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago.

    Fun, or even discovery, isn’t the primary goal of the web or any source of information on it. It can, rather, be a very serious place just as the world outside the screen can be.

    But there is this idea that I think a lot of people had of the web. That if you connect a bunch of people from all over the world and get them talking, shouldn’t that be at least a little fun? And eye opening and engaging and nuanced and filled wall to wall with the thrill of discovery of new voices and perspectives.

    The walled gardens have closed us in, and now it sometimes feels like there’s no escape.

    Transparency in team communication

    A couple of articles I read were about how to communicate better on a dev team. There’s the practical guide: How To Create Compound Efficiencies In Engineering. A list of a few best practices to bring some efficiency to a team over time. My favorite tidbit was adding tags to PRs that indicate the estimated time to review, and the risk level, which gives team members better context on how much time they’ll need to set aside.

    Pairs well with Paul Robert Lloyd’s talk on Design Histories and recording the history of a project through decisions made. It is essentially a public blog devoted to a project with a focused hiearchy. Not all that dissimilar to what Automattic has been doing with its internal P2s for the better part of 20 years. But design histories have an added benefit of focusing strictly on the types of changes and decisions that have shaped a project, thus giving you a full view.

    A design history looks both forwards and backwards.

    New posts show the team where a service is going, older posts tell the story of how they got to where they are now.

    James Baldwin on Shakespeare:

    The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.

    Notes

    New projects to add:

    Projects to complete:

    • Atlassian trello migration
    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote