As is inevitable in any contemporary discussion of electric vehicles, #China came up. While you wouldn’t know this to look at American streets, the country with the world’s largest automotive industry is not the U.S., Japan, or in Europe: it’s China, and has been for the past twenty years. China’s electric car industry is vast, with sales worldwide. Moreover, Chinese electric cars are now both cheaper and, arguably, better than American ones, and the American auto industry does not want the competition.
This is where we get to the quote of the day, from Andrew Hawkins, transportation editor at The Verge:
In so many ways, the automotive industry is a stand-in for our whole economy. We hold up the auto industry as being this kind of beacon which represents our innovativeness and our leadership on the global stage. And I think that we’ve ceded that leadership now to China.
China is now leading. They sell the most cars, they export the most cars, and they have the best technology. They’ve cracked the code on cheap EVs. I feel like America is always going to have an outsized reputation, but whether that reputation is actually earned anymore…is a very open question.
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The #Apple logo banner on apple.com has a distinctly Siri-esque shine to it today.
This being a Monday, I don’t have time to watch #WWDC, but I’ll be very curious to see if whatever Apple rolls out here fixes anything. #Siri is probably the most conspicuously underpowered product in Apple’s lineup right now, at a time when Apple is—supposedly—working on small wearable devices that do not have touchscreens and will, I assume, use Siri as their primary interface.
I have one such product already: a HomePod that I never use, mainly because I hate dealing with Siri. The fact that Apple is apparently upgrading Siri with a custom version of Gemini isn’t encouraging; we use #Gemini at work, and I haven’t found it to be nearly as capable as either #ChatGPT or #Claude. Still, Apple is not in a great place AI-wise right now, and the new #AI guy, Amar Subramanya, ran Gemini at Google, so I guess Gemini is the most obvious option.
It’s not even for all the Linuxy reasons that tech people prefer. It’s because I just want a user environment that isn’t overtly disrespectful: refusing to let me customize the UI, throwing ads and popups in my face every damned minute.
A good Wikipedia Category: page is my happy place. And I just found one: journalistic hoaxes.
Some are serious and legendary: Stephen Glass, of The New Republic fame; Jayson Blair (New York Times); Janet Cooke (Washington Post). You’ve probably heard of these.
Some aren’t as legendary, like Ruth Shalit, another New Republic alum. And I’d never heard about Jonah Lehrer, or Tom Kummer, or Scott Thomas Beauchamp, yet another New Republic writer (seriously, what was going on at TNR back then? Good grief.)
The weirdest ones are openly unbelievable enough that whether or not they’re actually hoaxes, so much as absurdist satire, is debatable:
The Global Warming Hoax of 1874. Apparently anthropogenic climate change has been a hoax for a lot longer than I realized, although in the late 1870s, it was caused by the transatlantic telegraph cable rather than fossil fuels.
My favorite isn’t even really a hoax: The Order of the Occult Hand, “…a secret society of American journalists who slip the meaningless and telltale phrase ‘It was as if some occult hand had…’ in print as an inside joke.”
Back in early 2018, I subscribed to a newsletter called Fresh Fonts, by Noemi Stauffer. Fresh Fonts highlighted new foundries and font releases, often including really good free/open-source ones. For paying subscribers, though, FF offered something even better: one free, high-quality font every month. These were commercial typefaces that Noemi was able to make available to subscribers through negotiations with the foundries. I got some of the best #fonts in my library from Fresh Fonts, including the one you’re looking at right now (MD Lórien).
Late last year, Fresh Fonts pivoted to something even more interesting: publishing their own fonts. They’ve released two so far, FRSH Monza and FRSH Clask. I’ve been experimenting with both. They’re lovely, Clask especially.
A few of my recent sketches with Monza are attached.
I’m starting to think that the best way to conceptualize #AI isn’t as vast, potentially malicious, hyper-advanced systems, but as vast, potentially malicious, hyper-advanced systems that power the most gullible, bumbling assistant you’ve ever worked with.
A couple of online things I’ve been enjoying lately:
❦ My friend Tim Brown’s latest project, Deep Hush. Deep Hush is a collection of thoughts, notes, and links about rebalancing one’s sense of perspective and finding a quieter space.
On a side note, I love the “status” posts with the pixel illustrations. Such a cool way of doing this.
I’ve always had a thing for text-based user interfaces—in particular those that mimic GUI windowing systems, like Microsoft’s DOS Shell or Borland’s Turbo Vision. Kevin’s site reminds me of the wilder designs from the more experimental days of the web: k10k, or those Flash-based sites1 that adopted a futuristic starship-dashboard aesthetic.
Iverson’s work centers on ideas for apps that don’t exist, and features for apps that do. These are (mostly) not good ideas; they’re ingeniously bad ones, concepts so creepy and dystopian that someone in the Bay Area will probably attempt them. The obvious comparison is Black Mirror, but to me, I’m reminded more of the Far Side for product design: one-panel jokes and commentary from a not-so-far future where every human need and impulse has been monetized, enshittified, and automated to a degree that is both blatantly ludicrous and still makes a diabolical kind of sense.
Iverson’s unfortunately gone silent, but I hope he gets back to these someday. (One has to wonder if this project landed him a job at Amazon, X, or one of those other companies that’s more likely to interpret these ideas as a portfolio rather than a satire. He’d be great at it. I hope for the sake of humanity that he turned them down.)
Yes, I know what we all think of Flash. A lot of those designs were still cool, though. ↩
I have the impression that I worry more about the Supreme Court than most people do. At least, I’ve been worried about it longer. And I’ve also believed, for the past fifteen years or so, that a lot of Americans don’t share that worry nearly enough.
I recall the day Anthony Kennedy stepped down the way people remember terrorist attacks or presidential assassinations, because that moment, a comparatively unappreciated event, was just as significant as the far more violent ones that would follow. The writing had been on the wall for years: things were going to change, sharply and for the worse. And they did.
It’s simple enough math. Presidents are gone in 4–8 years. By contrast, a single Supreme Court justice can influence national—and, by extension, global—affairs for generations. But while the current #SCOTUS’s excesses have become common conversation these days, there was a time when the prevailing opinion was that some matters, like Roe v. Wade, had been settled for good. No rational court, no matter how partisan, was going to tamper with that. It would shatter the sense of trust in the institution, the respect for precedent that everyone assumed was sacrosanct. American voters just wouldn’t stand for it.
This is why, for years now, my ears always prick up whenever someone raises the possibility of court packing.
Court packing—forcibly modifying the composition of the Supreme Court—is a radical, nakedly partisan move. There is no way to do this without looking like you are rigging the system, because that is literally what you are doing. Understandably, court packing is a measure that a lot of people involved in politics, or writing about it, did not want to admit they were seriously considering.
Until recently. Mainly because there may not be any other options. Quoting Millhiser, “That price might be worth paying if the Supreme Court is so hostile to voting rights and to the Democratic Party that Democrats risk being shut out of power forever unless they change the makeup of the Court.”
The consequences of going down this road are not imaginary. Of course conservatives are going to respond by repacking the court, first chance they get. Of course conservative-dominated states are going to regard a packed court as illegitimate. Of course some of them are going to engage in terrorism.
What’s key here is that these outcomes are not hypotheticals that can be warded off by example-setting and good behavior. It couldn’t be clearer at this point that Republicans do not have one iota of compunction about doing all of those things anyway (and that’s assuming you don’t consider the current court to have already been packed. I do). This is no longer a question of whether or not to rig the system. It’s already rigged, just in favor of people who want to do bad things instead of good ones.
That is the problem when one half of a political system decides they are no longer part of that system. The transactional logic that governs civilization no longer applies. You can’t say “We need to obey the rules, because if we don’t, the other guys are going to disobey them worse.” Unabashed political breakdown is a radical binary; an event horizon at which tit-for-tat game theory ceases to matter.
If you’re still playing by the rulebook, and the other team is playing Calvinball, you are categorically losing.
Absolute gold from John Gruber, who coined the term dickover for something we have to see every day: popup modals.
I don’t need to go into why dickovers are gross. If you’ve seen one, you already know. The reasons are self-evident. But the core of why this junk isn’t just annoying but offensive—at least to me—lies in the mindset behind them. The people who deface their websites with dickovers are demanding something they have not earned yet: My desire to keep hearing from them.
Imagine meeting someone in real life and within ten seconds of small talk, they literally interrupt you mid-sentence to bluntly demand your contact information. You’re not going to promptly hand it over, excited at the possibility of long, meaningful conversations with your wonderful new friend. You’re going to stare at this person, awkwardly excuse yourself, and walk away thinking, Well, that was creepy.
I have never, once, joined a newsletter because of a popup ad (and yes, “plz join my mailing list” boxes qualify as ads). Why would I? I don’t know yet if this is someone I want to keep hearing from, and now they’ve given me a pretty powerful push in the opposite direction.
And when I do sign up for a newsletter—which I do, constantly—it’s because, after having taken a good long look at whatever is there, I find the work genuinely interesting. Often, like if someone posts about an ongoing personal project that sounds useful, I’ll go to their site with the existing intention of signing up. If I want your newsletter, I’ll find it. A static box at the end of an article, or placed in a footer, is fine.
And if I don’t want your newsletter, getting pushy about it is not going to shift things in your favor. Let’s be clear: A dickover is, fundamentally, an attempt at cheating. You’re trying to hustle a process that can’t be rushed, fast-tracking a connection with me not because you actually did something to deserve it, but just because you got in my face and demanded it.
Marketing ghouls who deal in terms like “growth hacking” will point to numbers that justify this approach. 1 Normal humans don’t care about your spreadsheets. They care about how you treat them, and they think entitled, pushy behavior is gross.
That’s another reason why I would advise anyone enamored with dickovers to reconsider that approach. Dickovers give the rest of us an impression of you—you personally—that does not reflect well on you. Impressions matter, and not just the ones in Google Analytics.
I’ve always believed that the things we create are inexorable reflections of who we are. How could they not be? The work we do, especially for ourselves, is unavoidably infused with our values, decisions, and personality; our psychological DNA.
Dickovers, like the popup-window ads you might remember from yesterday’s web, are a shabby, tasteless hack that indicates something about the decision-maker who chose to implement them. You’re knowingly giving your visitors—people who provide you with attention, patronage, and possibly even friendship/employment—a decidedly disrespectful experience, for your own benefit. That’s not cool.
Dickover apologists will engage in some hair-splitting at this point, trying to quantify—i.e. minimize or justify—the “bad experience” aspect vs. the revenue/benefits from juiced subscription stats. Again, they’re missing the point, in a way that only someone who understands data but not people will do. If someone spits in your face, you don’t care that it’s a small amount and wipes off easily enough. What you care about is that they spat in your face.
I lose respect (and, frankly, trust) for people and organizations who resort to things like that, and I’m a lot less interested in continuing to hear from someone who I have reason to not respect. Moreover, I’m also uninterested in having any kind of relationship, even a superficial one-way one, with someone who doesn’t respect me.
Gruber:
It’s a goddamn privilege for anyone to bestow your article, story, or product page with their attention. The gall, to deliberately interrupt them while they are in the middle of actively reading, to present them with a dickover. It is no different from snatching a physical copy of a book or magazine out of a reader’s hands in order to badger them for something other than the attention they were already granting your work, except that the physical act of snatching a publication from a reader’s hands would subject you to being punched in the face.
If people habitually treated each other the way websites habitually treat us, there would be fistfights.
Numbers which may not actually justify that approach as much as you think. Gruber points out that stats can’t accurately convey the subsequent consumer hostility that results from overtly disrespectful behavior: “They don’t have analytics that measure that I now consider their website an antagonist to avoid at all costs.” ↩
Saw this sticker on the back of a car when I was out and about today. The design I saw was a little different; dark blue symbols instead of colored. I recreated it and made it more colorful, but it’s not my idea. I don’t know who came up with this design. I like it, though.
