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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.

Cabel Sasser’s XOXO 2024 talk

Posted on October 15, 2024

I just love Cabel Sasser’s XOXO talk. I’m not going to summarize it—that would spoil the fun—but it’s got everything I like: art, mystery, and investigation, driven by a fascination with the strange. Highly recommend it.

ACF WTF

Posted on October 14, 2024

This business with Matt Mullenweg basically stealing Advanced Custom Fields and ransoming it back to WP Engine is beyond belief.

I wasn’t inclined to sympathize with WP Engine to begin with, but Automattic lost whatever moral high ground they had the moment this started.

Keep it simple

Posted on October 2, 2024

An attitude I’m seeing a lot of, in the wake of the Mullenweg/WP Engine drama, is “ditch #WordPress and replace it with [whatever static site generator is currently trendy].”

So many folks in the tech community don’t seem to grasp that a lot of us—including those of us with tech skills—don’t want to be worrying about things like build processes, deployments, or command-line wrangling with Ruby or Node. We want to log in, do our work, and hit “Publish”.

Mailmanarchist

Posted on November 5, 2022

The local mailman is a somewhat wild-looking guy: heavily tattooed, long beard, hair buzzed on the sides and long on the top, which he’s pulled into a ponytail. I’ve never talked to him, I just see him around town. He apparently keeps his lunch in the large, green mailbox-shaped cabinet outside my building (I thought these were used to store mail, but my landlord, who thinks it’s unsightly, was complaining once that the mail guy just stores personal items in it).

I’ve always wondered about this guy: clearly a nonconformist, but he’s working one of the most regimented, straight-laced jobs there is. What’s his deal? Does he play in a punk band on weekends? Working his way through art school? Recovering from something?

That is some seriously subliminal, long-game product placement.

Ideal project

Posted on June 21, 2021

Ideal project: to be handed some really ugly UI, like RISC OS or Irix, and the brief is “you have complete freedom to fix this.”