Rahul GaitondeThe USA abolitionst Frederick Douglass used rhetoric effectively to lionise his contemporary John Brown:
“His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light, his was as the burning sun. Mine was bounded by time. His stretched away to the silent shores of eternity. I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave. I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for the slave.”
A few weeks ago I created a custom, ‘paper size’ to print PDFs of articles on the web. The paper had the dimensions of a mobile screen instead of an A4 sheet.
The results are striking. The same article appears very differently on each paper size. Left is A4, right is my custom size.
Here’s how I calculated the dimensions of the paper in cm based on screen size in pixels.
And here’s how I select the custom paper size when printing
It’s one of those things I should have done years ago.
The biggest lesson for me among all this was–and this may sound ‘woo-woo’: seeing a structured day, a quiet cup of coffee, or a workout not as a task but as something to relish.
Reminds me of my own experience with watering my plants I wrote of over three years ago:
But it’s the daily maintenance — watering, rotating, trimming, spraying — that takes up most of my time. I scheduled this during my mornings, multitasking while getting ready for the work day…
.. Because I was distracted and hurried, I poured water from a tumbler into my pots instead of sprinkling it, causing the characteristic depression you see around stems.
… I quickly asked myself if tending to my plants was something I liked doing, or if it was the end result, healthy balcony gardens, that I was interested in. If it was the latter, I’d be better off delegating daily maintenance to someone. But I did like the process. More than the outcome, in fact….
… Doing this consciously [now] has changed not just the plants’ health but my relationship with them. The garden is exactly the same but it is now a small source of joy and curiosity, instead of of irritation and anxiety.
The slightly more troubling answer is that even though the world is not fundamentally in worse shape in 2023 than in 1993, we know so much more about it, and see so much more of its irredeemable ugliness, it just takes a lot more work to maintain worldly-yet-carefree attitude…
The third and most troubling answer is that the world has _actually _slipped out of our grasp and into an ungovernable downward trajectory. That it’s not just that we hear more of the bad news, but that there _is _more bad news. And our growing collective agency is no longer staying comfortably ahead of our growing collective problems.
If humour is one lens though which we see our world more clearly, the corrective power required of that lens seems to have grown substantially over this last generation.
Humans certainly are not feeling very incentivized to share. Look around you, and you can see creators are reevaluating how their content is used to train AI models. Whether it is Hollywood writers, comedians, or musicians — everyone is waking up to the idea of what can and should be put online. “Artists who feel their work was scraped by AI without credit or compensation are seeking recourse.”
Where does fresh content come from in the future? Will we even be incentivized to create something new? Or all future AI refinements be based on erroneous pseudo-babble on social networks like Twitter and Reddit?
Google did end up indexing most of the web. But its search engine doesn’t keep people on Google properties; it (ostensibly) pushes them away to the websites in search results. Google search’s business model is aligned with the interest of people that give it its input. That’s why people want their sites to be indexed by Google, and why the SEO industry has been so long-lived.
Today’s generative AI tools give nothing back to the people whose information they’ve indexed and made available via their large language model. A ChatGPT conversation could pull info from dozens of website posts and articles and credit none of them.
That’ll need to be solved for new, fresh, innovative information to flow in for AIs to process.
Not all open source projects achieve the famed positive flywheel; it takes decades, and most will fail in the process. The ones that reach exit velocity, though, become part of the fabric of civilization. At that point, it makes more sense to build on top of them rather than recreate the wheel.
Open source projects are by their nature more resilient, long-lasting and neutral than closed ‘service’ centric software. The incentives that influence their roadmap are very different from more commercial software. The outcomes they optimise for are often more narrow and more long-term than those built by tech companies.
And so open source projects that cross some sort of threshold (longevity? contributors? users? I’m not sure) end up being embedded in the machinery of the internet.
The NYT in Jan this year on a niche trend of using digital cameras from the 2000s instead of one’s phone:
“When I look back at my digital photos” — from his actual camera — “I have very specific memories attached to them,” Mr. Sondhi said. “When I go through the camera roll on my phone, I sort of remember the moment and it’s not special.”
“People are realizing it’s fun to have something not attached to their phone,” said Mark Hunter, a photographer also known as the Cobrasnake. “You’re getting a different result than you’re used to. There’s a bit of delay in gratification.”
I’m sure you’ve noticed this too. Clicking pictures with one’s phone takes a few seconds each. But right after, you spend minutes editing every one and sharing them with the right caption. Not to mention reading and responding to notifications on those photos. It’s easy to lose the moment.
I’ve never had a high end DSLR camera, but on a trip to a national bird sanctuary a few months ago I broke out my old Sony HX-9V digital camera after several years. It had a much better optical zoom than my iPhone and conserved my phone’s battery:
Digital cameras are probably a sane middle ground between the film cameras of old and the connected phone cameras of today. I hope they stay.
On the indecision of quitting one’s job:
That was the paralyzing thing for me, just like in the toxic romantic relationships I found myself stuck in years ago. It was the familiarity of that pain, stress, and sadness that I wanted to hold onto. There’s a certain kind of masochism when you stick around in a shitty job or a shitty relationship, there’s this belief that you don’t _deserve_ any better than what you’ve got.
Been here, more than once. If you identify with this, the right answer is to leave.
In our current era the term quit has been given a bad reputation, and it’s challenging but necessary to look past this.
Because if you spend enough time in an unsatisfying situation at work, and it bleeds into the rest of your life, you’ll find it difficult to even imagine a more fulfilling life even as you scroll and watch and read about people living those very lives. Your mind dissociates that kind of life from your current existence, as though they are two parallel realities with no possible connection between them.
And that is no way to live.
When I saw this photo from the 2023 WWDC it struck me that Apple now has a balanced Everyday and Professional Mac lineup, for the first time in a long time.
Regardless of the arrangement of the machines above,
Everyday Macs:
Professional Macs:
I hope Apple keeps this balance going for a few years. This does seem like a good set of choices. In some ways it harks back to Steve Jobs’ simple 2 x 2 chart of ‘consumer’ and ‘pro’ Mac lines in the late 1990s:
I wrote this as a Twitter thread on the 1st of June 2023:
Reddit, like Twitter, is poised to become a one-app service. Great apps like Apollo will shut down at the end of the month. Here’s the tragedy of our online experiences, with Reddit as the current, ongoing example:
In 2023 ads remain the only way to mass-monetise online content. This means Reddit needs to own the entire customer experience even if apps are not core to its business.
1/
Because of this we’re seeing excellent apps like @tweetbot and, soon, @apolloreddit die because Twitter and Reddit can’t find a way to monetise users through these apps.
A vital part of the Internet is lost, and in small ways we go collectively backwards.
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This is not just a failure to find other ways to make money off people on the Internet. This is also an example of great being the enemy of good:
Reddit is rumoured to be going public, and needs to show they have maximised the monetisation potential of their user base
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It’s almost certain that the most engaged users of a service like Reddit will use third party apps that optimise for them.
Someone at Twitter recently claimed that 3rd party apps made up 17% of engagement.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-tweetbot-developers-fighting-twitter/
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It’s vital for Reddit to demonstrate that this user segment can be monetised. They must be forced to use the “main” app.
Twitter did this by simply turning off access to apps like Tweetbot. Reddit seems to be pricing this access prohibitively high. The result is the same.
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As the post by the Apollo creator says, Reddit could keep access open without denting revenue much.
One could argue it’s a net +ve because these users publish so much.
But it’s hard to directly link this content to added revenue from “regular” users & chart it in a deck.
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If ads are the only way to monetise & investors need to see every single user directly monetised, all social media will follow this path:
encourage 3rd party apps, attract power users to supercharge engagement, shut off access, corall all eyeballs into the standard app
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By shutting off differentiated experiences Reddit will now optimise for the mainstream.
Understandable for a social media co that’s going public because it’s, well, mainstream.
But like with Twitter, the most creative stuff came from those on the fringes. That’ll be lost.
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So there’s a good chance not only will we lose these delightful apps themselves, we’ll lose the essence of that social media itself.
Twitter doesn’t have interested automations, has limited parody accounts, no auto publishing from WordPress, no @IFTTT recipes – all gone.
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How do we prevent this from repeating?
I don’t think we can, not with today’s “centralised” social media model.
Facebook, Google+ RIP, Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok.
They all either never had third party apps & automations or they did & severely limited/shut them.
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But consider RSS feeds. No one company controls it; it’s a format not a site.
In fact after becoming the most popular RSS app, Google Reader was shut down 10 years ago.
This is notable: Google didn’t shut down 3rd party apps, it shut down its own app and got out of RSS
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Many thought Reader shutting down would kill RSS, but instead there are several great RSS reader apps – it’s a fabulous ecosystem.
Reader shutting down is what allowed these apps to bloom.
The Best RSS Feed Readers (Because the Internet Is a Mess)
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Newsletters are similar. You can use any email app you like to read your newsletters.
You can change the email address at which you receive them.
You can use whatever service you like to publish a newsletter.
There’s no Newsletter, Inc like there is a Reddit/Twitter.
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But, you say, these aren’t a set of groups/forums. Where is the decentralised Reddit?
Well, IRC still exists!
No one owns it. There’s no official IRC app – in fact there are many great ones today.
We can use IRC again. Or enhance it. It’s up to us.
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Our online experiences today are fragile.
They can be diminished, shut down because of a company’s priorities.
This thread is to remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Different, welcoming, resilient experiences exist even today. We should use them more often.
N/ ★