October 2024

Collective Action

Posted on October 29, 2024

Nilay Patel frames The Verge’s endorsement of Kamala Harris around collective action problems: issues that require curbing the selfish behavior of individuals/companies for a greater good. Climate change, vaccines, school shootings, income inequality, tech/AI harms.

Curbing the selfish behavior of individuals/groups for a greater good is the underpinning of every human civilization there ever has been or will be. If you aren’t doing that, you don’t have a civilization.

Conservatives have always grappled with the relationship between regulation and civilization, to an extent that I’ve often wondered how different the Never Trump and Only Trump factions really were. The jaw-dropping number of high-level GOP folks endorsing Harris suggest that to some, at least, that connection is starting to become clear.

Balance

Posted on October 28, 2024

Hey, Watch This

Ghost Town

Posted on October 25, 2024

The term “pumpkin carver” definitely doesn’t do the Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival justice. You have to experience this for yourself.

You’re a ghost. Not a particularly scary ghost, admittedly. You roam a world comprised of a small town with a Halloween carnival, along with other ghosts: other people across the internet, not Ghost Town NPCs.

The online community aspect (the other people you encounter when you’re exploring here) only works in October–November. I found this between Halloweens last year, so I first explored it during the game’s off-season when no one else was there. The servers that manage the online community were offline, but the environment itself is part of the download, so you can play Ghost Town locally any time. There’s just nobody else there playing it with you.

I think the off-season has to be the eeriest way to experience the game. The feeling you get wandering a small, deserted town at night—just you and you alone, when no one else is around and the only sign of life is the occasional light behind a window: that, I’d say, is when the game comes closest to conveying what it’s really like to be a ghost.

Posted on October 24, 2024

Ran across an unreleased redesign of the BeOS UI. I hadn’t seen this before. It would have been a pretty drastic change to the UI, and I wonder how it would have been received.

I’ve always loved the original #BeOS user interface. For something that was apparently designed by engineers, it was notably clean and elegant. More, it was iconic, in a way that few 90s GUIs are. The simple yellow tabs are immediately identifiable. Nothing else looked like BeOS—it had a quirky but well-crafted distinctiveness that felt very Apple-y. (Unsurprising, given how many Be folks had worked at Apple.)

The new design introduces complexity: more shapes, more borders, more dimensionality. Sanders, the designer, says that this was intended to modernize the experience. I don’t doubt they had justifications for this, but it does make me wonder what thinking was taking shape at Be, and where the company would have gone if they’d made it past 2001.

Eco-music

Posted on October 22, 2024

I wonder if Honda sells hour-long audio tracks of the ethereal drones their electric vehicles make. I could see that being very relaxing.

Mobmen

Posted on October 21, 2024

I’ve been listening to Darknet Diaries for a while, and even by the show’s often surreal standards, this is an unusual episode: a confrontation between two hackers claiming authorship for a malware program that both were initially uneasy about taking credit for.

Jack Rhysider does a good job of moderating what turns out to be a pretty contentious exchange.

Save Everything

Posted on October 21, 2024

Just discovered Wayback Machine Downloader. This is turning out to be a fantastic tool in my archival arsenal.

Save everything. Don’t wait. If you find something you like on the web, save it now. Because later on, when you want it again, it will probably be gone. (And the Internet Archive, while they are doing the Lord’s work, is not infallible.)

Note: the original WMD has problems. Use this fork instead.

The policy of personality

Posted on October 20, 2024

“Elections shouldn’t be about personalities, they should be about policies.”

I disagree. Personality is policy.

X Blocks

Posted on October 18, 2024

I don’t pay much attention to #X these days, having abandoned it a while back, but things like basically gutting the “block” function make me wonder what the strategy is here, or if there is one. I don’t think this solves a real problem in a way that will make the service better for users.

That’s the problem. I can’t think of a single thing Elon Musk has done that actually improved #Twitter. Not one thing.

Lax moderation and a UX polluted with upsells and junk might get them more money short-term and make it more fun for right-wing trolls, but as far as practical-minded product decisions that took Twitter to the next level, everything Musk has done so far isn’t just off-putting, it’s weird. Bad products aren’t good long-term bets. Especially not a product that (1) already doesn’t make money, (2) has a deeply entrenched reputation for being bad, and (3) is facing an ever-broadening array of less-bad competitors.

There is no way he’s getting his $44 billion back with X in this shape.

Quad-bomb

Posted on October 17, 2024

If you’re watching Four Seasons on Netflix and you get to the part where they’re playing frisbee on the quad or whatever it’s supposed to be, that’s the shot I almost photobombed on the way to lunch today.