I was actually thinking about going to Dragonsteel Nexus, even though it doesn’t make any sense to travel to Salt Lake City for a book release. Luckily the event sold out right away, no need to decide. I should take all that money I just saved and throw it away on an iPad that I don’t need! 🤪
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TikTok lawsuit against the United States seems weak on first glance. This argument that they can’t move the source code to a new owner is hard to take seriously:
TikTok lawsuit against the United States seems weak on first glance. This argument that they can’t move the source code to a new owner is hard to take seriously:
…precipitously moving all TikTok source code development from ByteDance to a new TikTok owner would be impossible as a technological matter. The platform consists of millions of lines of software code that have been painstakingly developed by thousands of engineers over multiple years.
…precipitously moving all TikTok source code development from ByteDance to a new TikTok owner would be impossible as a technological matter. The platform consists of millions of lines of software code that have been painstakingly developed by thousands of engineers over multiple years.
Sure, it would be some work to sift out what is TikTok and what is ByteDance. Better start the refactor now. From the text of the court filing.
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Busy morning, so only just now catching up on all iPad announcements. The Verge as usual has a good overview. I’ve fallen out of using iPads, but tempted again by the new pencil.
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Broke the corner of my old Apple Watch screen, not badly, but enough that it was time to upgrade after several years. New one is a tiny bit bigger and noticeably faster.
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Helpful blog post from @matt17r about the steps he used to migrate a blog between accounts on Micro.blog. Hope to make this even smoother in the future.
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Not sick of me singing the praises of OpenAI yet? Their batch API is incredible. An elegant design, if you can say that about an API, and very powerful.
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Another advantage to having a blog as the center of all things is that when I’m busy, I can just temporarily disable cross-posting to other services. I can also tune down the Micro.blog timeline settings to see fewer replies to other people. The writing process is the same, just fewer distractions.
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Finished reading: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. It didn’t quite work for me, lots of interesting characters but very little story. Still enjoyed it, just not as much as her recent novellas. 📚
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It’s hard to tell when a blog post is first published if it’s any good. A few days later, a year later, then you know.
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Sort of spontaneously went to see The Fall Guy. Really fun movie. 🍿
Good trouble
In college in the 1990s, I joined the socialist student organization. I saw every issue in stark contrast — a measure of fairness and justice. If I was young on campus today, I might be protesting the war in Gaza. But even in college, truthfully I wasn’t a great activist. I remember our organization leader calling me about a protest for workers’ rights and I was too lazy that day to go.
I’m still for peace and equality today, but now I know that the world is fucking complicated. I’m less certain about things I felt so strongly about before.
Seeing everything in black and white is a mixed blessing. Seeing only the extremes leads to passion and action. But it can also blind us to more nuanced arguments. It can make us more susceptible to manipulation, caught up with TikToks and retweets that reinforce what we already believe.
Taking a step back from the protests specifically, liberals advocate for the less fortunate. We want people of all backgrounds to be treated with respect. We push back against laws that further redistribute wealth to those who don’t need it.
I think this instinct has run into problems in Gaza. War is terrible. More humanitarian aid is needed, and more military restraint. Palestinians have been struggling for decades, now they’ve been forced from their homes, children have died in bombings, and there’s a risk of famine. We want to side with them because we always default to supporting the people who most need support.
And yet polarization has twisted everything. On social media, we use the worst words possible. No words on any topic seem to go far enough, because everyone is angry about everything. Innocent people dying in war — it just doesn’t sound terrible enough for our outrage. So we reach for even more extreme words, calling to mind atrocities that have rightly been judged by history as indefensible.
Pick a side, protest, use all the hashtags, get angry, go viral. In a social bubble, everything is amplified.
I’m going to be honest, the brutality of the Hamas attack on October 7th changed my opinion on the Middle East, possibly forever. Hamas cannot stay in power. But how to remove Hamas without risking innocent life and creating a new generation of terrorists is an impossible challenge that I don’t have a solution for.
Peaceful protests are an important part of a democracy. Most of the protests have been peaceful. Unfortunately some of the protesters at a few campuses like Columbia University and UCLA have lost the plot, seeing injustice everywhere, creating chaos, justifying vandalism. I hope we haven’t become so tribal that we support that.
There is a bit of hope in the news. Earlier this week, Antony Blinken said:
Hamas has before it a proposal that is extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel. And at the moment, the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a cease-fire is Hamas.
I hope Hamas accepts it. The hostages need to be released and even a temporary ceasefire will make it easier to ramp up more aid.
Amplified by social media outrage, it has become difficult to see the war clearly. I’m not sure how as a society we get through this. All I know for sure is that it’s going to take a long time, and we need social platforms that don’t feed on division.
✌️
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I’m still doing this because the world is flooded with overpriced, crappy, subpar software. It hurts people and it hurts the economy.
Reminds me of when 37signals would redesign popular sites like FedEx. Part of it was a way to get attention for what they could do, but I bet it was also because Jason couldn’t stand how bad some websites were.
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New episode of Core Intuition about this week’s tweaks to the CTF, plus a discussion of how Micro.blog is using AI. We talk about my decision to have a global AI setting and how some customers feel very strongly that AI use should be limited.
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Finally checked out the Carpenter Hotel’s coffee shop yesterday. Nice place. Had a little break from the rain outside.
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Great teardown video from iFixit on the Rabbit and Humane devices. The closing line also highlights why these need to be standalone devices:
Both at best should’ve been an app. But that might have more to do with the restrictions on Apple and Android’s app stores than anything else.
Easy to access, simple hardware is not only fun but also the only way to really push anything forward at the moment. We wouldn’t say that because the iPhone can run games the Nintendo Switch shouldn’t exist.
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Recorded another very short video for YouTube about how we’re starting to use the auto-generated photo descriptions in the new post screen. As you can see in the video, it’s still a little clunky. I’ll improve the timing and UI flow as we use it more.
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I’ve been working on a Gaza-related blog post off and on for months, mostly threw it out and rewrote it this week. Sometimes I draft a post and it feels good to write it down, so I never actually post it. Other times I can’t let a topic go until it’s published.
