Reads

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Read - Reading: Design for Cognitive Bias by David Dylan Thomas (A Book Apart)
We humans are messy, illogical creatures who like to imagine we’re in control—but we blithely let our biases lead us astray. In Design for Cognitive Bias, David Dylan Thomas lays bare the irrational forces that shape our everyday decisions and, inevitably, inform the experiences we craft. Once we grasp the logic powering these forces, we stand a fighting chance of confronting them, tempering them, and even harnessing them for good. Come along on a whirlwind tour of the cognitive biases that encroach on our lives and our work, and learn to start designing more consciously.
Finished chapter 2: User Bias

  • 37.7%
Read - Reading: The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer (The Great Courses)
Lecture 36: Conclusions and Provocations
Conclude the course by reviewing the major themes and approaches you've covered and bringing together some of the details of the historical sweep of the preceding lectures. As Professor Lerer stresses, to know the history of our language is to know ourselves.
A great philosophical recap of what he’s covered.

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Read - Finished Reading: The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer (The Great Courses)
Sixteen centuries ago a wave of settlers from northern Europe came to the British Isles speaking a mix of Germanic dialects thick with consonants and complex grammatical forms. Today we call that dialect Old English, the ancestor of the language nearly one in five people in the world speaks every day.

How did this ancient tongue evolve into the elegant idiom of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Twain, Melville, and other great writers? What features of modern English spelling and vocabulary link it to its Old English roots? How did English grammar become so streamlined? Why did its pronunciation undergo such drastic changes? How do we even know what English sounded like in the distant past? And how does English continue to develop to the present day?
rating:
Definitely worth multiple listens. There’s a lot of depth and nuance here and Lerer does a great job of not only relaying the history and events, but ties it together in broader themes while still showing the art of the multiple subjects he’s covering.
Read FedEx Bandwidth (what-if.xkcd.com)

If you want to transfer a few hundred gigabytes of data, it’s generally faster to FedEx a hard drive than to send the files over the internet. This isn’t a new idea—it’s often dubbed SneakerNet—and it’s how Google transfers large amounts of data internally.

But will it always be faster?

Cisco estimates that total internet traffic currently averages 167 terabits per second. FedEx has a fleet of 654 aircraft with a lift capacity of 26.5 million pounds daily. A solid-state laptop drive weighs about 78 grams and can hold up to a terabyte.

That means FedEx is capable of transferring 150 exabytes of data per day, or 14 petabits per second—almost a hundred times the current throughput of the internet.

Read - Reading: The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer (The Great Courses)

Lecture 35: Linguistics and Politics in Language Study
Get a compelling introduction to Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern linguistics, and to the social, cognitive, and philosophical implications of his work. The legacy of Chomskyan linguistics, you'll discover, goes far beyond the technical terms of the discipline to embrace a politics of language study itself.

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Noam Chomsky 1950’s & 60’s:

  • Deductive instead of inductive approach
  • Deep/surface structures
  • Transformational generative grammar (theory about language)

Saussure: langue and parole

Chomsky used competence and performance

Aspect over tense

Read I was building a new website for Post Apathy - until the petulant CEO of Ghost.org deleted my website (web.archive.org)
In July, I promised to begin a trial for fortnightly newsletters, as opposed to the monthly schedule from previously. Today was meant to be the day where the next newsletter was meant to be sent out, but I decided to delay it as I had been busy building a website via Ghost.org and I wanted to start posting there as soon as it was built, so there was minimum interruption in your access to Post Apathy content.
Read Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You by Steve Yegge (Medium)
God dammit, I didn’t want to blog again. I have so much stuff to do. Blogging takes time and energy and creativity that I could be putting…

Backwards compatibility keeps systems alive and relevant for decades. ❧

Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 10:50AM

In the Emacs world (and in many other domains, some of which we’ll explore below), when they make an API obsolete, they are basically saying: “You really shouldn’t use this approach, because even though it works, it suffers from various deficiencies which we enumerate here. But in the end it’s your call.” ❧

Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 10:57AM

Successful long-lived open systems owe their success to building decades-long micro-communities around extensions/plugins, also known as a marketplace. ❧

This could be said of most early web standards like HTML as well…
Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 10:58AM

It’s a sure sign, when there are four or five different coexisting subsystems for doing literally the same thing, that underlying it all is a commitment to backwards compatibility. Which in the Platforms world, is synonymous with commitment to your customers, and to your marketplace. ❧

This same sort of thing applies to WordPress for its backwards compatibility. Sometimes it’s annoying, but their adherence to backwards compatibility has kept them strong. They also have multiple ways of doing things, which is nice.

I wonder if there were some larger breaking changes in Drupal 7 and 8 that removed their backwards compatibility and thereby lost them some older websites?
Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 11:03AM

So let’s say Apple pulls a Guido and breaks compatibility. What do you think will happen? Well, maybe 80–90% of the developers will rewrite their software, if they’re lucky. Which is the same thing as saying, they’re going to lose 10–20% of their user base to some competing language, e.g. Flutter.Do that a few times, and you’ve lost half your user base. And like in sports, momentum in the programming world is everything. Anyone who shows up on the charts as “lost half their users in the past 5 years” is being flagged as a Big Fat Loser. You don’t want to be trending down in the Platforms world. But that’s exactly where deprecation — the “removing APIs” kind, not the “warning but permitting” kind — will get you, over time: Trending down. Because every time you shake loose some of your developers, you’ve (a) lost them for good, because they are angry at you for breaking your contract, and (b) given them to your competitors. ❧

Twitter is a good example of this, and they’ve just created a shiny new API in an apparent attempt to bring developers back…

Wonder if it’s going to be backwards compatible? (Probably not…)
Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 11:10AM

I’ve alluded to the deeply philosophical nature of this problem; in a sense, it’s politicized within the software communities. Some folks believe that platform developers should shoulder the costs of compatibility, and others believe that platform users (developers themselves) should bear the costs. It’s really that simple. And isn’t politics always about who has to shoulder costs for shared problems?So it’s political. And there will be angry responses to this rant. ❧

This idea/philosophy cuts across so many different disciplines. Is there a way to fix it? Mitigate it? An equation for maximizing it?
Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 11:14AM

Read [Notes] Timeful texts, Matuschak & Nielsen by Peter Hartree (Google Docs)
“To be transformed by a book, readers must do more than absorb information: they must bathe in the book’s ideas, relate those ideas to experiences in their lives over weeks and months, try on the book’s mental models like a new hat. Unfortunately, readers must drive that process for themselves. A...

I would like to have a one-click subscribe podcast feed that contains interviews with people I follow on Twitter — new releases and periodic highlights from the past. That’d be quite easy to build on top of the ListenNotes API. Anything to shift away from the “latest episodes” feed as the default, argh. Has someone done this? Breaker? ❧

You might be able to cobble something like this together with huffduffer.com using tags and some clever searches.

Annotated on August 15, 2020 at 11:04PM

Read This website is killing the planet (Steve Messer)
For a while I’ve been intending to make my website more sustainable, but I succumbed, as I often do, to the human trait of sloth. But this morning after reading Gerry McGovern’s post on webwaste, I thought I’d procrastinated long enough. So I ran a web page performance test and got some grim r...
Interesting piece about what one can do. It’s nice to advertise this sort of thing to bring awareness not only to this aspect, but to the larger problem. Be aware though that there are many more effective things one can do to help fix the problem than this particular approach.
Read Pluralistic: 12 Aug 2020 by Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)

Today's links

I didn’t know Cory had a separate linkblog like this, but should have suspected that he would have.
Read Introducing aboutfeeds.com, a Getting Started guide for web feeds and RSS by Matt WebbMatt Webb (interconnected.org)

Introducing About Feeds

aboutfeeds.com is a single page website, for linking wherever you keep your web feed.

I’m still a fan of Julien Genestoux‘s SubToMe.com for related functionality and ease of use with RSS. If only more people used it or it was built into browsers.

I think it’d also be cool if this sort of simple UI were also easier to use with some of the newer IndieWeb social readers that are making it easier to follow websites and interact with them.

Read Introducing aboutfeeds.com, a Getting Started guide for web feeds and RSS by Matt Webb (interconnected.org)

There’s a better way to read websites and it’s called web feeds a.k.a RSS. But web feeds are hard to get into for new users, so I decided to do something about it.

I posted about suggested improvements to RSS the other day and top of my list was onboarding: If you don’t know what RSS is, it’s really hard to start using it. This is because, unlike a social media platform, it doesn’t have a homepage. Nobody owns it. It’s nobody’s job to explain it. I’d like to see a website … which explains RSS, feeds, and readers for a general audience.

So because it’s no-one’s job, and in the spirit of do-ocracy:

I built that website.

Or to slightly abuse a phrase, Be the change that you wish to see in the world wide web.