onfocus

I really enjoyed this conversation between Jeff Veen and Mike Monteiro discussing Ruined by Design. There's nothing like hearing from two Internet Olds™ who watched the Web appear and had their idealism about it crushed in many ways. (And I say that affectionately as an Internet Old who has had crushed idealism.) They also discussed Chris Wetherell's remorse about automating retweets. There has been a lot of regret floating around lately. Tim Carmody called it The Builder's Remorse:

"This is the builder’s remorse. Not that you invented a thing, not that the consequences were unforeseen. It’s that you gave the thing to a power structure where things were overwhelmingly likely to end in ruin."

Web development as punk rock was a lot of fun for certain segments of the population. Now it's time to nurse our hangovers, clean up the garbage, and turn it into a profession. Mike Monteiro says it much better than that though which is why you should get his book if you haven't yet.

This is a great idea: move grunt work from a checklist to an automation environment because you'll be more likely to automate any pieces as you can.

It’s heartening to hear these Ogilvy employees push back against their company’s work for CBP. Wayfair employees walked out last month to protest border contracts. And today Microsoft announced it would temporarily suspend its PAC giving because of internal pressure. I’m not sure if these are anomalies that businesses will adapt to or a more lasting movement that will get companies to act on their stated values.

Matt Levine has a good summary of the fine Facebook negotiated over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But his analysis of why legislation doesn’t happen in the wake of scandals feels right on to me:

"...Americans are biased toward thinking of bad things as being already illegal, always illegal, illegal by definition and by nature and in themselves. If the thing that Facebook did was so bad, then it must have been illegal, so there is no need for a new law against it."

Our laws are not equipped for our current media age and we’re biased against thinking laws could be out of date.

This is a great story about some amateur radio folks who acquired a block of IP addresses in the early internet days and recently sold them to Amazon for millions of dollars. Their plan:

"It is our intention to grant funds across all reaches of the educational, research, and development spectrum, with awards being made to support qualified organizations whose programs could well serve to advance the art of digital communication, with special emphasis on that which would benefit Amateur Radio."

Om Malik tapped into a current of mistrust around smart device features sponsored by the big services after he wrote about his hesitation: Hello HomePod. So Long Sonos & Bose. Even my first generation Sonos speakers attempt to phone home frequently (for use stats?) and I block that with pi-hole. When I wanted to add a speaker recently I purchased a used first gen on eBay because I don’t want yet another always-on microphone in my home. I mean, have you seen the headlines?

Darius Kazemi describes running a modified Mastodon instance for 50 friends. This is my kind of heresy:

"I'd like to advance the notion that software does not have to scale, and in fact software can be better if it is not built to scale."

I think his vision of thousands of small communities that federate would be a better future for social media.

This resonates:

"Invest 80% of your learning time in fundamentals. Leave 20% for frameworks, libraries and tools."

I think it's good to step back and be mindful about where you're putting your energy. This idea reminds me of Stewart Brand's pace layering metaphor. We need all the layers for a healthy ecosystem. This article is a good reminder that we shouldn't focus so intently on the twists and turns of the outside layer that we exclude the others.

Field Notes really knocked this National Parks edition out of the, um, recreation enclosure. If you don't already have stacks of these nicely designed notebooks this edition would be a good place to start.

Fascinated by this report that the recent earthquakes in California disrupted the atmosphere 13 hours before the quake. It’s the first I’ve heard of ionospheric anomalies before earthquakes.

I really enjoyed this history lesson / manifesto / questioning. (lesfesquesto?) As the author says, "I find that both building and designing is a constant cycle of having a question and trying to find the answer." This offers some interesting questions including: what potentially important ideas have we forgotten and how can we use computers to iterate faster?

I was nodding along so much with this talk I hurt my neck. It's often hard to think about the forest of maintenance when you're in the trees of development, but it's critical because: "Humans have a finite amount of capacity for sweating details."