Tom Critchlow: Publishing documents to the web is a well-served use case but publishing small indexes, databases and collections to the web is still an incredibly frustrating and under-served use case. It’s easy enough to set up a blog and publish one’s thoughts chronologically, unfortunately there aren’t many tools that make it easy to set […]
The ghosts in the machine
Liz Pelly, writing for Harper’s Magazine, details how Spotify has quietly been swapping music by well-known artists from its playlists with tracks it commissioned from unknown artists: Before the year was out, the music writer David Turner had used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely been wiped of well-known artists […]
Don’t fuck with scroll
Sometimes practical examples work best to make a point.
Casual viewing
Will Tallinn, on Netflix’s original productions: High output alone can’t account for Netflix’s garbage quality. In the 1920s and ’30s, studios like Paramount and Warner Bros. put out as many as seventy movies per year. Around its peak in the ’90s, Miramax tried releasing a new film almost every week. The difference between Netflix and […]
Do cite Wikipedia
Ethan Zuckerman: For many years, teachers warned their students not to cite Wikipedia—the information found there didn’t come from institutional authorities, but could be written by anyone. In other words, it might be misinformation. But something odd has happened in the past decade: Wikipedia’s method of debating its way to consensus, allowing those with different […]
In the context of long context
Steven Johnson: Long context is also a boost for collective intelligence as well. If you assume the average corporate document—a press release, or marketing plan, or minutes from a board meeting—is a few thousand words long, then today’s models can simultaneously hold in their short-term memory close to a thousand documents. A state-of-the-art language model […]
A proposal for immersive video on the web
Pretty cool, with a lot of potential for educational content, explainers and tutorials. Imagine a media player that is not constrained to a small rectangle on the screen, but could instead adapt to its content: The problem with using video to inform is that, well, videos, by nature of the medium, are stuck in time. […]
Controlling the Apple Watch with hand gestures
New assistive technology by Apple that enables the Apple Watch to detect hand gestures, such as pinching and clenching. That means you can stop a timer or answer a call using just via gesticulation.
The secret life of machines
I recently came across this old BBC show by Tim Hunkin. Tim is a cartoonist, for fourteen years (starting back in 1973) he authored a weekly strip for the Observer titled ‘The Rudiments of Wisdom‘, in which he pored over facts on the inner workings of everything. He’s also an engineer and an artist. He’s […]
TabFS
Omar Rizwan’s browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as folders and files on your computer: This gives you a ton of power, because now you can apply all the existing tools on your computer that already know how to deal with files — terminal commands, scripting languages, point-and-click explorers, etc — and use them […]
The ideology of the user-friendly
Lori Emerson, back in 2013: My talk today is concerned with a decade in which we can track the shift from seeing a user-friendly computer as a tool that, through a graphical user interface (GUI), encourages understanding, tinkering, and creativity to seeing a user-friendly computer that uses a GUI to create an efficient work-station for […]
Past for iChat
A small app to open old iChat logs (.chat and .ichat files). When upgrading to Big Sur I realised the new Messages.app can’t open them anymore. Not that I need to frequently, or ever. Recently though I was tidying up my archive and found a folder with unreadable past conversations. This fixes it.
I tweaked Mail — viewing options, toolbar and so on — as Manuel suggests here and I got to a pretty happy place. I’m now thinking of all the time I wasted trying out clients redirecting my emails to an ever growing network of servers, when all I needed to do was change the settings of Mail.
Anyway. Still not as good as Sparrow.
The Scott Alexander saga
The New York Times: It was nominally a blog, written by a Bay Area psychiatrist who called himself Scott Alexander (a near anagram of Slate Star Codex). It was also the epicenter of a community called the Rationalists, a group that aimed to re-examine the world through cold and careful thought. In a style that […]
I recently repurposed an old Raspberry Pi 3 (model B+) I had laying around the house into a retro gaming machine, using RetroPie. I’m not into gaming — I haven’t owned a console since the Game Boy Advance — but I enjoy the music and visuals of old games, I find them relaxing. More specifically, I’ve been having much fun playing EarthBound.
(I have another Raspberry Pi in the house set up with Pi-hole, blocking any incoming ad at source. I rarely have issues with it except when I bought a Samsung TV: the T&Cs weren’t even loading. Serves me well for buying from a company which delivers ads in their users’ home screen).
More dragging, less drawing
Stuart Frisby: Both Sketch & Figma have support for using component libraries, but the experience of using them feels far less central to the design process than they need to be. Finding and using a component in a library is how I think 90% of design work should begin. Right now, the discoverability of components, […]
On newsletters
Robin Rendle: It bothers me that writers can’t create audiences on their own websites, with their own archives, and their own formats. And they certainly can’t get paid in the process. (Although yes, there are exceptions). This. I love the newsletters I’ve subscribed to — but I love them because of their content, not their […]
These are not freedom of speech issues
We frequently bring up the right of free speech where issues of amplification are concerned. All media is an exercise in prioritisation. We’ve seen again and again during these years that it’s possible for Facebook to tweak its algorithm to modify what bubbles through the newsfeed of its users: Typically, N.E.Q. (a ranking it assigns […]
dostoevskij.net
I made a new tiny website to keep track of what I’m reading and to annotate what I found to be interesting in those books. The domain is inherited from a tumblr I no longer update (because I do not enjoy tumblr the platform anymore). I built it with 11ty, currently my favourite static site […]