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A reminder about how much of politics really is personal
I was talking with someone yesterday about local politics when the topic of one of our legislators at the federal level came up. As it turns out, person I was talking with (who shares my political affiliation) absolutely cannot stand this legislator (who…
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More choices v. better things
I have probably told this story before, but a friend of mine once said—while we stood in the pen and pencil aisle at an office supply big-box store, looking at the wall of hundreds of different pens and pencils—"I don't want more choices, I want better…
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More e-bikes!
I will admit that I have some misgivings and conflicted feelings about the increasing prevalence of e-bikes. I am not going to go into any of those misgivings or concerns here because I don’t think anyone really needs another complainer piece on the…
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Not everyone shares your priorities.
There’s a nifty rhetorical jujutsu I have noticed among the set of tech-types who like to shout online about their pet causes. It goes something like this… Anyone who isn’t as outraged about their pet cause as they are is naïve and stupid. But if you…
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Figuring out how to get people to pay you for the thing you make it hard.
🔗 Why Is Your News Site Going Out of Business? - TPM – Talking Points Memo: This chart which I just made shows the exact dollar amounts TPM brought in over the previous eight years through programmatic or “third party” advertising. As I think is pretty…
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Science fiction and the myth of technological progress
I was thinking the other day about a few science fiction books that I finished recently. They were pretty good, although they all fall more toward the “hard SF” end of the spectrum than most of the stuff I tend to read. That got me thinking about the…
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Writing about a topic is a tool for structuring my thinking about and understanding of that topic.
Over on one of my other blogs, I write—albeit it in an on-and-off-again fashion—about local politics and municipal policy here in my small western Massachusetts town. We are heading into budget season for the next few months, when all of the various…
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Doing the the thing v. talking about doing the thing v. talking about the technique for doing the thing
🔗 The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise - Marc's Blog: Kit and tools are another imperfect signal for expertise. Clearly, in our field, there’s a significant benefit to knowing a set of tools well, and being able to use these tools as an extension of…
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LinkedIn is awful, Part MCMXXLIV
A person I generally like and respect shared a thing on LinkedIn recently about how "organizational health" is important to long- term company performance. That sounds great! Then I noticed that it was a report from McKinsey and could not help but to…
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🔗 The Carry-On Baggage Bubble Is About To Pop - The Atlantic: “Maybe we don’t need carry-ons at all,” Young went on. He was whispering, almost, as if his secret made him sound bananas, which it somewhat did. “Someone needs to step out and say, ‘We’re not…
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It’s annoying when technology doesn’t work.
I'm reading a thread just now on Mastodon with a bunch of people complaining about timelines being slow to update because of various bottlenecks in the architecture. It reminds me of the regular Micro.blog discussions of cross-posting and timeline…
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Watching old kaiju movies with the kids
I just finished a back-to-back birthday movie marathon of Godzilla (1954), Rodan (1956), and Ghidora, the Three-Headed Monster (1965). For my birthday last year, we went to see a movie at the theater and I had been hoping to do that again this year.…
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Trying to replicate Gibberish’s workflow, rather unsuccessfully
I have been spending some time the last few weeks trying to replicate in my Drafts workflow the things that I really like about Gibberish. It’s not that I dislike Gibberish—I really like it!—but rather that I’m trying to better understand just what it is…
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The new Sovereign album is good (plus a Voivod tangent)
I was checking out this new Sovereign album Altered Realities. I hadn't listened to any of their stuff before, but it's pretty good and I found that it put me in mind of Voivod, kind of prog/thrash-inflected death metal. That thought then sent me along to…
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Watching Alien with the kid
The 13yo and I sat down to watch Alien last weekend. He's been asking to see it for a few months now and we finally found a block of a few hours when nothing else was going on and his younger brother was not around. While it was his first time seeing the…
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Laying people off sucks.
A few times now, I have watched that video the woman recorded of herself getting laid off by Cloudflare over Zoom (or whatever). I have a variety of conflicting feelings about it and I am still trying to make sense of them. I have gone through this same…
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I suspect the report of the critic's death are an exaggeration.
I've seen a bunch of posts and pieces the last few days reflecting upon and lamenting "the death of the critic." Most—but not all—of them begin with GQ's effective shutdown of Pitchfork or the news that most of the staff at Sports Illustrated is being…
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Needing a story arc to tie it all together
As I mentioned earlier, I watched The Return Of Godzilla and am now moving on to Godzilla Vs. Biollante. The latter film is a direct follow-up to the first one, kicking off directly after its conclusion and existing within the same continuity. From what I…
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Ikarie XB 1 (1963)
I just straight-up had never heard of this movie until I ran across it in the "International Classics" section on Criterion yesterday. Before Alien, you say? Before 2001? Before Solaris? Alright, I'm in! In the 22nd century, the starship Ikarie and its…
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Are teams *really* that autonomous?
Cat Hicks: "A thing I wrote in a recent dr…" - Mastodon: A thing I wrote in a recent draft: "...on the team side, the reality of team practices that claim to be autonomous at large organizations is that supposed independence of action is frequently…