Notes
Today there was a cybertruck parked at the daycare where parents park to drop off their kids.
I’m wondering if I should put my tie on after drop-off because, like, how self-important do ties seem these days, right?
But then there’s a literal human person driving a cybertruck to drop off their kids.
Bluesky’s Trust & Safety decisions may not please everyone, but they’re clearly thinking them through in good faith.
While nothing is perfect, a primarily public data store subject to moderation by obfuscation (requiring API work to get at certain moderated data) strikes a thoughtful balance.
Can anyone make an argument that the VP should be anyone but Buttigieg?
And I mean an argument that would make sense to someone who doesn’t listen to the Politico Playbook Daily Briefing every morning.
He has: ✅ name recognition, ✅ policy chops, ✅ resume, ✅ sparring experience, and ✅ a thick skin.
Today, after a typical barrage of dad jokes during a break from playing with my kids, my niece told me I am saved in her phone as “Joe Ross Cringe Uncle.”
She even showed me the contact card to prove it.
She and my wife both thought I would, and should, take it as an insult.
I did not.
🤪
Oral Argument for Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive – CourtListener.com
This oral argument before the 2nd Circuit about the legality of Internet Archive’s controlled digital lending program is a great listen, regardless of what side you support.
Find all the litigation filings here.
Edit: for my convenience as well as yours, I’ve embedded the audio below. Let me know if you have trouble playing it.
Now that Spotify’s family plan costs $20/month I don’t have much incentive not to switch to YouTube Music, which comes with the YouTube Premium I’m already paying for. I’m also giving the Tidal 30-day trial a shot, but that would be $22/month for a family plan.
🪶 This is only my opinion, but it is one I strongly hold: Tom Bombadil is equal parts omnipotence and ADHD.
I wore transitions (™️?) lenses for a year and half in my late thirties and no one close to me loved me enough to punch me in the face and force me to replace them. I’m not saying I don’t take responsibility, or that I’m not loved at all, just maybe not enough.
Bilbo is, ever was, and ever shall be, my people.
“Back now to the Mountain!” cried Thorin. “We have little time to lose.” “And little food to use!” cried Bilbo, always practical on such points. – The Hobbit, Chapter 15, The Gathering of the Clouds, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The top seven free apps in the news category of the iOS App Store are a mix of proudly user-hostile mismanagement, fear mongering, hyperlocal hate, and Nazi monetization.
Stop turning awesome apps into internet noise machines
The news aggregating app Artifact is shutting down.
Jarrod Blundy wrote at his blog HeyDingus:
I do wonder if it would have had a brighter future without the ability to add comments. I never engaged with that social aspect of the service, and I expect it contributed massively to its complexity and moderation costs.
I think about this every time a good news or link aggregation app goes away. These apps are, fundamentally, trying to help you sort the signal from the noise in an overwhelming “media ecosystem” or whatever we’re supposed to call it these days.
As soon as they add their own social layer on top of the news and the links, they have betrayed their best use case and their most loyal users. It’s like buying a pair of earplugs, only to have them turn into in-ear headphones or hearing aides you don’t need and never asked for.
Engagement, which they thought would spike after going social, craters. Resources, which were optimized and sufficient and scalable with increasing revenue over time, are siphoned off, as Jarrod wrote, into moderation and increasingly complex development cycles.
It’s a kind of death spiral that most founders notice too late, so kudos, of a sort, to Artifact’s founders for knowing the telltale signs of a terminally ill app, and letting it die with some dignity.
There are already plenty of places to share links and half-baked hot takes. The real challenge, for Artifact’s founders and anyone else with the leadership, technical and fundraising skills to tackle it, is to build something extremely useful to individuals without draining all of its lifeblood into a push for “social” that ultimately just turns it into another internet noise machine.
iPhone as geek guardrails
Here’s a reply I posted to someone I follow on Mastodon who, on being issued an iPhone by their employer for work calls, was wondering why anyone chooses it over other options when, for example, it’s hard to sideload something as simple as a custom ringtone:
Look I need guardrails and I’ve known that ever since I was bopping around the command line on my HTC Evo 4G.
Some of us stopped headbanging not because the music left our hearts, but because if you feel something too deeply for too long it can destroy you.
That’s what was happening to me in the bowels of my root-and-rom addiction.
Now I pay 0.99 for a ringtone to Tim Apple and say thank you sir may I have another because I’m safe from sudo-ing on my phone.
Dear Lawyers Still Manually Numbering Paragraphs:
Stop it.
Here’s a tutorial:
- Place your cursor where you intend to begin the numbered section of your pleading.
- Click the numbered list button in your word processor.
- Repent, and feel your soul become lighter.
Yours, scoldingly,
Joe
⚠️ So I’m going to do a real blog post about this when I find the time, but today I discovered that my router’s admin panel is accessible via a combination of selecting the right IP and appending a string of numbers to the name of the HTML page that contains the admin panel. The string is the same across a nonzero number of individual routers, some of which can be located with the right Google search…
Sherlock Holmes giving serious Nardwuar vibes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle📚:
My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.
This particular quote, for nerds who know, is from adventure number seven, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.
⚖️ From a report at Law Dork by its proprietor, Chris Geidner:
Starr issued an “administrative stay” on Thursday that will last for 30 days while he considers the airline’s request for a stay of the order pending its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Judge Starr is having a good think about whether he’s willing to endure the near-certain reversal, and the more-likely-than-not searing bench slap that will accompany it…
So, 40 commits later, you can star my insomnia on GitHub. I should have been cleaning, or sleeping. Instead, I made a webpage. Then I made a second webpage, identical to the first, except links open in the same tab, for all the weirdos out there who like that sort of thing.
I saw The Toaster Museum linked to over at Hacker News and immediately thought of John Siracusa (@siracusa).
Here’s some great context for why I immediately thought of him, by his friend and Accidental Tech Podcast (@atp.fm) co-host Casey Liss (@caseyliss).
I have some more Bluesky invite codes.
But I’m 40 and married, so I don’t just hand a code to the first internet user that smiles at me.
Bluesky servers can use the invite tree in moderation decisions, so I do at least some vetting of folks before I send them a code. No hate/harassment/anti-vax etc.
