Some meta-commentary on reading: I’ve been trying to read through my enormous queue of articles saved on Instapaper. In general I love reading stuff from the internet but refuse to do it with a computer or a phone: I don’t want all my stuff to glow!
So, this led me to an abortive trial of the Boox Go 7, an eReader that runs a full Android operating system. Rendering Android interfaces with e-ink was pretty bad, and even though it was possible to run the Instapaper Android app, highlighting text didn’t work and the whole fit & finish was off. I love that most e-ink tablets are really purpose-built computers: this didn’t give me that impression.
So, this month I bought a Kobo Libra Color. Kobo and Instapaper recently announced a partnership and first-class support for Instapaper on the devices.
Overall: it’s better than the Boox experience and definitely better than sending articles to one of my Kindles. My notes so far are:
Overall: I think my biggest gripe (no highlighting) will get worked out and this’ll be the perfect internet-reading-without-a-computer device.
Anyway, what’s been good this month?
In Greece, a homeowner traded ther property development rights to a builder and kept equity in place by receiving finished apartments in the resulting building, often one for themselves and one or more additional units for rental income or adult children, rather than a one-time cash payout. Applied to the U.S., that becomes, swap a house for an apartment (or three), in the same location, with special exemptions to the tax for the home sale.
From Millenial American Dream love a good scheme to fix the housing crisis and densify cities. Definitely seems like a net-positive, but like all other schemes that require big changes to tax codes, would take a miracle to actually implement.
In Zitron’s analysis, it’s always bad. It’s bad when they raise too little money because they’ll run out. It’s bad when they raise too much money because it means they need it.
David Crespo’s critique of Ed Zitron is really strong. Honestly Zitron’s writing, though needed in a certain sense, never hits home for me. In fact a lot of AI critique seems overblown. Maybe I’m warming to it a little.
This Martin Fowler article about how ‘if it hurts, do it more often,’ was good. Summarizes some well-tested wisdom.
I had really mixed feelings about ‘The Autistic Half-Century’ by Byrne Hobart. I probably have some personal stake in this - every test I’ve taken puts me on the spectrum and I have some of the classic features, but like Hobart I’ve never been interested in identifying as autistic. But my discomfort with the subject is all knotted-together and hard to summarize.
One facet I can pick out is my feeling that this era is ending, maybe getting replaced with the ADHD half-century. But the internet I grew up on was pseudonomous, text-oriented, and for me, a calm place. The last ten years have been a slow drift toward real names, and then photograph avatars, and now more and more information being delivered by some person talking into the camera, and that feels really bad, man. Heck, not to drill down on ‘classic traits’, but the number of TikTok videos in which, for some reason the person doing the talking is also eating at the same time, close to the phone, the mouth-sounds? Like, for a long time it was possible to convey information without thinking about whether you were good-looking or were having a good hair day, and that era is ending because everything is becoming oral culture.
If you believed that Trump winning would mean that everyone who supported him was right to have done so, because they had picked the winner; that the mega-rich AI industry buying its way into all corners of American society would mean that critics of the technology and of using it to displace human labors were not just defeated but meaningfully wrong in their criticisms; that some celebrity getting richer from a crypto rug-pull that ripped off hundreds of thousands of less-rich people would actually vindicate the celebrity’s choice to participate in it, because of how much richer it made them. Imagine holding this as an authentic understanding of how the world works: that the simple binary outcome of a contest had the power to reach back through time and adjust the ethical and moral weight of the contestants’ choices along the way. Maybe, in that case, you would feel differently about what to the rest of us looks like straight-up shit eating.
Defector (here, Albert Burneko) is doing some really good work. See also their article on Hailey Welch and ‘bag culture’.
Altman’s claim of a “Cambrian explosion” rings hollow because any tool built on the perverse incentives of social media is not truly designed with creativity in mind, but addiction. Sora may spark a new wave of digital expression, but it’s just as likely to entrench the same attention economy that has warped our online lives already.
From Parmy Olsen writing about OpenAI Sora in Bloomberg. I think this is a really good article: technology is rightfully judged based on what it actually does, not what it could do or is meant to do, and if AI continues to be used for things that make the world worse, it will earn itself a bad reputation.
Watching Night On Earth was such a joy. It was tender, laugh-out-loud funny, beautiful.
Youth had me crying the whole time, but I’d still recommend it. Got me into Sun Kil Moon from just a few minutes of Mark Kozelek being onscreen as the guitarist at the fancy hotel.
My old friends at BRNDA have a hit album on their hands. Kind of punk, kind of Sonic Youth, sort of indescribable, lots of good rock flute on this one.
More good ambient-adjacent instrumental rock.
This album feels next door to some Hop Along tracks. It’s a tie between highlighting this track or Holding On which also has a ton of hit quality.
Elsewhere: in September I did a huge bike trip and posted photos of it over in /photos. Might do a full writeup eventually: we rode the Great Allegheny Passage and the C&O canal in four days of pretty hard riding. Everyone survived, we had an amazing time, and I’m extremely glad that we were all able to make the time to do it. It made me feel so zen for about a week after getting back - I have to do that more often!