Now
I’m in Berlin, Germany. I just finished my Bristol to Budapest bike trip and will stay here until December. My current read is Regenesis by George Monbiot.
Here
There
Notes
To self, to you, to whomever. What’s been on my mind. RSS
Sidelines
Select items, served on the side.
Ephemera
ephemera.dannywhite.netYou know those scraps of paper and receipts that clog up your wallet and pockets? This is a living, digital archive of that.
Ongoing
Pi Frame
github.comPrint your own changing picture frame using an e-ink display and Raspberry Pi.
2022–2023
68
68.netlify.appKevin Kelly's 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice, one at a time.
2021
Brown Pages
brownpages.orgYour local guide to composting, wherever you are.
Ongoing
Trove
What I’ve found interesting lately from around the web.
Quit Your Job
“You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility.”
palladiummag.comCalculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500
calculatingempires.netDesign ain’t a democracy
robinrendle.comGoogle - The Web Can Do What!?
thewebshowcase.withgoogle.com- underconsideration.com
Globe Explorer
A better way to index and digest information?
explorer.globe.engineerA history of moquette | London Transport Museum
ltmuseum.co.uk- itsnicethat.com
Career Advice
“...simply observe the older people working there. They are the future you.”
moxie.orgInvisible Details of Interaction Design
A nice write-up on interaction/motion design thinking.
rauno.meA Deep Dive Into SVG Path Commands
An interactive guide to understanding SVG paths and path commands.
nan.fyiAmbient Co-presence
What if our experiences on the web were akin to those in physical public spaces?
maggieappleton.comThe Social Life of Forests
“Such reciprocity does not necessitate universal harmony, but it does undermine the dogma of individualism and temper the view of competition as the primary engine of evolution.”
nytimes.comPoor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
I’m less interested in the content and more in the presentation. How could we have this sort of experience on a Kobo?
stripe.pressClimate change: Mapping in 3D where the earth will become uninhabitable
An even better piece of visual, data, storytelling.
interaktiv.morgenpost.deUnbundling AI — Benedict Evans
“...[LLMs] generate prose that is grammatically and linguistically correct, and the fact that the prose is perfect tends to hide the weakness in what the prose is expressing.”
ben-evans.comWhole Earth Index
“Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002.”
wholeearth.infoHistorical Trails
“…very few interfaces do a brilliant job of the third need: showing me where I've been and how I got here… Patterns like breadcrumbs help us navigate through website or wiki with lots of subpages, but those don't scale well beyond ~7 steps.”
maggieappleton.comCraft
“The constant tension of shipping faster versus shipping better. Falling into a cycle of "Ship, then iterate" is a trap. It ends up being more shiterate. Things happen and that "fast-follow" V1.1 release or V2.0 you had imagined probably won't.”
paulstamatiou.com- vogue.com
Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster
“We live in a mega-scale corporate capitalist economy, and in such a setting technology is never used to save time. It’s used to speed up production and consumption in order to expand the system. The basic rule is this: technology doesn't make our lives easier. It makes them faster and more crammed with stuff...Believing that AI will save time is like being a person in the late 1800s seeing their first car and thinking “oh how easy it’ll be to get to the meadow now!” People back then didn’t imagine that by the 1960s we’d be stuck in traffic jams for hours in mega-cities. Now apply this to AI.”
brettscott.substack.comDon’t waste food
A masterclass in visual storytelling.
reuters.comA Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft
“Software engineers, as a species, love automation. Inevitably, the best of them build tools that make other kinds of work obsolete. This very instinct explained why we were so well taken care of: code had immense leverage. One piece of software could affect the work of millions of people. Naturally, this sometimes displaced programmers themselves.”
newyorker.com- underconsideration.com
- underconsideration.com
- underconsideration.com
a portrait of Tenochtitlan
tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl- underconsideration.com
Generative AI exists because of the transformer
A beautiful piece of visual storytelling.
ig.ft.comThe American Revolution Bicentennial Guidelines
standardsmanual.com