Alex Danco: The Freud Moment - You could draw a line from all of America’s divisiveness and much of the culture wars down to ego vs. superego.
America’s egotistical bent doesn’t mean we lack a conscience: we carry around a ton of guilt, as part of the cost of letting egos run wild the way we do. The narrative of “the coastal elites want to tell you what to feel guilty about; we won’t let them” is effective for a reason: because we are collectively guilty of so many things, from climate change to police brutality and everything else. The Trump candidacy figured out how to exploit this better than anyone else: in a complex and interdependent world, everyone is basically guilty of everything. And when that’s true, no one can say “you should feel guilt” without sounding hypocritical. It’s a perfect judo move, because not only does it neutralize the superego’s ability to effectively level any criticism, it opens the door for the ego to go be as offensive as possible.
The Garden Of Forking Memes: How Digital Media Distorts Our Sense Of Time - grab a beverage, this one made me think of time in a whole other way and reframed our narrative-heavy, fact-light information situation:
The de-centralization of timekeeping brought about by digital media harkens back to a much older style of measuring time. Before the invention of the telegraph, there was no way to instantaneously synchronize timekeeping devices across long distances. No time zones, no universal standard against which clock towers could be evaluated for accuracy. Timekeeping was more an art than a science. Each village emitted its own time zone. Much like the townships of old, every internet community has its own “subjective time zone”.
The disruption of the old timekeeping regime created a void that’s being filled by new online communities, cliques, and cults. Whereas the industrial schedule provided a sense of structure and stability and continuity, D.I.Y. timekeeping often feels aimless and disorienting and uncertain. People are seeking out groups and ideologies that put them “back in time”, and many internet subcultures do exactly that.
Tom Armitage » Props and Prototypes - props for movies are like prototypes for building technology. A hero’s lightsaber exists as different props for stunts, close-up shots, costuming, plus a digital version for CG shots. Clickable mockups, short video demos, and working code all serve different phases of a project. See also: tools for thinking.
I finished the last season of The Clone Wars over the weekend. Recommended for all Star Wars fans. Hot take: the last four episode arc is a better Star War than Rise of Skywalker.
Oddisee’s new EP Odd Cure has skits, but they’re recorded phone calls keeping up with his family and friends. Kind of a perfect version of the interstitial skit for this moment in history.
Conceptual tools for thinking
Untools is a collection of mental models for thinking about problems, projects, and ideas. For example, the latest tool, the Cynefin framework is useful for assessing the kind of problem you face (complex, complicated, chaotic, or obvious) to determine what kind of strategy is appropriate for tackling it. Makes for a handy afternoon research dive.
There’s something interesting about Untools as website. Under the hood, there’s not much to it; you could implement it with a static site generator. By that measure, I might describe this as a “brochure” site. But the attention to design and organization makes it feel much more like a product. Delightfully, one that doesn’t seek a commercial transaction. More like flipping someone’s personal but well-organized notes on conceptual tools. Feels novel, in an obvious way.
Albums with acceptable skits between tracks:
- Three Feet High and Rising by De La Soul
- The Listening by Little Brother (TIL!)
That’s it, as far as I know. It’s exceedingly difficult to pull off skit tracks.
p.s. there may be an Outkast or Goodie Mob album with nearly acceptable skits?
How I Got My Attention Back - doing a residency and totally disconnecting is implausible for most people. But the idea is great and Craig Mod spins a great story every time I read him.
Writing Better, Type-safe Code with Sorbet. Hot take: gradual typing of large Rails codebases is going to make developers more productive than microservices, radical decoupling, and splitting out SPAs has. Combined.
How “Starship Troopers” Aligns with Our Moment of American Defeat
For most of “Starship Troopers,” humanity, in every possible facet, gets its ass kicked. A culture that reveres and communicates exclusively through violence—a culture very much like one that responds to peaceful protests with indiscriminate police brutality, or whose pandemic strategy is to “dominate” an unreasoning virus—keeps running up against its own self-imposed limitations.
Well that hits home.
Terrace Martin in heavy rotation this week: 808s and Sax Breaks and Dinner Party 👍👍 Robert Glasper, 9th Wonder, and Kamasi Washington mean you can’t lose!
Tips from HBO’s Watchmen on building an inclusive workplace:
The most valuable thing a showrunner—or any manager—can do to create an inclusive workplace is to listen carefully and respectfully to what their employees have to say, while checking their own defensiveness.
The overlap between showrunning and managing a team creating software continue to intrigue.
Periodic reminder that we are worse off for letting folks run Kathy Sierra off the social parts of the internet.
Peak Texas weather. The moment I step outside, I’m thoroughly warmed by the sun. A pleasant glow. For 5 seconds. Then it’s time to plan how I’m getting back to climate control. Rinse and repeat until mid-September.
I probably write this every summer because every summer I love it.
The pandemic that has dominated the past three months strikes a useful contrast with what’s happening now. Unlike coronavirus, racism and police violence are problems caused by humans. There’s a saying, “You aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic.” Similarly, the unrest occurring right now isn’t something that is happening to anyone, but a phenomenon that everyone is a part of, even if they haven’t left home or directly participated at all. Like traffic, the reason you’re surrounded by protests is partially because of you, regardless of your perceived level of involvement.
The project management corollary to Hofstadter's Law
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Corollary: It always takes more repetitions to tell people what you're doing, how you're going to do it, why you're doing it, how much progress you've made, that you finished doing it, etc. even when you take into account the corollary to Hofstadter's Law.
Towards smaller JavaScript
The JavaScript ecosystem’s gone to a strange place where dense frameworks and complex tooling are the status quo. But, there are data-points suggesting the pendulum could swing back sooner than later:
- Snowpack 2.0 - download all your deps, import them as modules. Snappy development experience ensues.
- lit-html - generate DOM without going through React/Vue/etc. intricacies
- Alpine.js - attach dynamic interactions to elements with data elements describing DOM manipulations
- htmx - attach dynamic networking to elements with data elements describing AJAX/Websocket/SSE events
Caveat: I haven't tried any of these. But, the trend-line is promising. JavaScript the language, while not perfect, is Pretty Good now. Perhaps the next few years will see the great ideas of the frameworks squeezed into more accessible, less sprawling expressions of those ideas.
