apple juice

Fitting choice for the Oxford English word of the year. From The Guardian:

If you want to witness the last vestiges of human intellect swirling down the drain, hold your nose and type the words “skibidi toilet” into YouTube. The 11-second video features an animated human head protruding from a toilet bowl while singing the nonsensical lyrics “skibidi dop dop dop yes yes”. The clip has been viewed more than 215m times, and spawned hundreds of millions of references on TikTok and other social media.

Source: Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore | Siân Boyle | The Guardian

The collective action required to solve this problem is massive.

I wonder about this prediction, Writes, and Write-Nots. AI has had an enormous impact on student and professional lives already, and it is only likely to get more pervasive as it becomes more integrated into all the tools you are already using. Pretty soon, people will need to consciously choose tools that don’t include AI generation by default. Once it gets to that point we just accept that it is part of our lives and move on. Rarely do we consciously add the friction, the hard work back in.

“I’m usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won’t be many people who can write.”

I could certainly benefit from writing more, I actually do enjoy the process of writing, trying to explain my thoughts, but rarely find the focused time to do it.

Great title, scary article. Is this happening out there in the real world?

How to survive the broligarchy

Uff dah, as we say up here.

I’ve resisted posting anything about the election because I’m not sure I have organized my thoughts in any particular way that makes sense. I read and liked this piece though, and I hope to see more thinking, writing, planning, and action like this proposal from Matthew Yglesias.

I don’t know that I agree with all of it, but I want to amplify the point: The democrats need to rebuild the platform and also learn how to talk about it again.

A Common Sense Democrat manifesto – by Matthew Yglesias:

Nine principles for Common Sense Democrats

My goal here is to write these principles down at an adequate level of abstraction such that they don’t become a policy laundry list. They’re also not supposed to be a straitjacket. Different people have different views and different priorities, and principles need to be loose enough to accommodate some differences.

Anyway, it’s worth a read.

For the past couple years maybe, we’ve been exiting this particular highway, turning east, and driving towards our neighborhood. Out of the corner of our eyes, depending on who was driving, or who was staring out the window, not looking at their phone, someone would notice something on the sound barrier wall.

“Someone has put climbing holds on that wall!”, my wife was sure of it every time she caught a glimpse.

“There’s no way they could get away with that, it must be some acoustic panels or something,” I’d respond. The kids would crane their necks, but the brief moment where the angle was correct for looking back meant we could never get a close look.

Last week we drove to a different mountain bike trailhead and had a rare drive without the kids. My wife said, “could we go have a look at that wall?”

We exited off the highway, doubled back along the frontage road and parked the car. Walking up towards the wall, we both let out a big laugh.

It was not climbing holds, or sound panels, or anything of that nature. A guerrilla art installation, performance art, I guess you’d call it?

There were hundreds of phones mounted to back of this sound wall.

And located down on the wall, was this box:

Opening it up we found another phone, waiting to be hung up:

The instructions made me laugh out loud as well.

I’m having a hard time parting ways with all of this old tech that we have around the house and at school. Most of the time, it still works, maybe needs a new battery, but definitely still performs the functions it was designed to perform. This exhibit of phones, probably mostly working when they went up there, connecting us to “no one” was pretty poignant.

Days later, I’m still thinking about this. I recently watched Cabel Sasser’s presentation at the XOXO conference, and the message, “go down every rabbit hole” really struck me. We could have kept driving past this location for years, and might not have ever seen it if we hadn’t interrupted our typical route to go have a look. It was such an unexpected moment of joy to find this out in the world.

Cabel references his earlier talk from 2013, and I took a few minutes to view that one as well. It’s a personal story of how he worked through a difficult time leading the company that he co-founded. The thing I took away from that talk though was the very real humans that are behind the software and hardware that we use every day. I feel like, at least in the Mac community, (whatever that means anymore) that I’ve been using software, made by real people for decades now. Often times the same software over many different versions and operating systems.

I’m not sure we as a society ever think about the actual people who make software and hardware. Artists, authors, musicians are fairly present and inextricable to the work they produce. When you go to a concert, the musicians are right there. We know there is a person behind the book that you’re reading. Their name is right there on the front. After a bit of research there is, in fact, a human behind the phone wall we found. (In their case, I think the anonymity is a bit of a feature but who’s sense of humor I would probably very much enjoy.)

I hope you’ll stop and go down those rabbit holes out there in the world, and also, open up that About… menu in that app you’re using, have a look at the names and learn a bit about them.

I’m going to go ahead and say I was ahead of the curve on this one…

I got curious about the phenomenon, which clearly has charmed one of society’s more frazzled groups: parents of young children. According to one observer, this has been a steadily growing “quiet movement” for many years.

From ‘This is not a blip’: A quiet movement grows on San Francisco’s streets

We bought our cargo bike in 2013, and in 2012 I was test riding a few. We bought ours without e-assist, which was… a lot of work.

We added the e-assist in 2016, which was a game changer. But, the kids got older, and I couldn’t justify keeping it in the garage. We sold it in 2021 and I sill miss riding it around loaded with kids, dogs, groceries or whatever.

It’s an amazing option for anyone with a reasonable “bike score” who’s looking for a car replacement. Highly recommend it for everything the article talks about.

Letters from an American, January 19, 2024

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