Robin on AI. “I want real things by real people.” Yes, exactly.
Anastasia Bizyayeva on how every online map of China is wrong, in the sense that the satellite images don’t line up with the street map vectors. Fascinating.
Marco Giancotti suggests you don’t have time to read books that won’t change your life. A high bar, but quality clearly matters far more than quantity, and perhaps there’s something to keeping the bar this high. I’m not quite this strict about my reading, but who knows, might be worth trying.
The Psmiths review Jonathan Sumption’s The Albigensian Crusade and Dennis C. Rasmussen’s Fears of a Setting Sun. Love these reviews, and the books they’re reviewing are super interesting, too.
Sean Voisen on Wendell Berry writing without a computer. This stood out to me, particularly the part about writing by hand for a more embodied process.
Greg Neville’s blog on Penguin book cover designs. Fun. I’ve enjoyed the posts on the Marber grid and the Penguin classics and the classics (again).
Alice Vincent on Coralie Bickford-Smith’s Clothbound Classics cover designs for Penguin. Loved this. The accompanying video is also good.
Ted Chiang on why AI isn’t going to make art, with his main argument being that art involves lots of choices. Agreed. (Truth be told, I haven’t been giving AI much thought lately. I know there are new developments — OpenAI’s o1-previews reasoning model, for example — but none of it is terribly interesting to me anymore.)
Christopher Bonanos interviews Robert Caro about The Power Broker. Also, the ebook will at long last be available (for real this time!). It goes on sale tomorrow on the Kindle store. Great book.
Jim Nielsen on sanding UI. I do this too, and clicking around a ton really is key.
Hamilton Nolan on taxing billionaires 100% over $1 billion. I’m not an economist and don’t know what ramifications this might have, but on the face of it I really like the idea.
Matthias Endler on moving slow and fixing things and the harmfulness of the Paul Graham VC mentality. “As it turns out, I’ve always been drawn to the exact opposite: sustainable growth, robust solutions, and a long-term mindset. That’s why I’ve been contributing to open source for 15 years, why I only run small, bootstrapped businesses or non-profits, and why I focus on writing and knowledge sharing.
Matt Webb on not privatizing essential parts of the economy. Yes, this. I wish this were already true.
Adam Mastroianni’s blog extravaganza winners, with several interesting linked blog posts.
Alex Tabarrok quotes Vaclav Smil on how many workers it might have taken to build the Great Pyramid of Giza. Fewer than I expected.
Adrian Roselli’s semiannual reminder to learn and hire for web standards, wherein he quotes Alex Russell: “Never, ever hire for JavaScript framework skills. Instead, interview and hire only for fundamentals like web standards, accessibility, modern CSS, semantic HTML, and Web Components. This is doubly important if your system uses a framework.”
Mark Simonson’s Type Design Like It’s 1987 demo. I’ve only watched little parts of this so far, but it’s fascinating.
New hymn day! “Amazing Grace,” “This Is the Christ,” “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need,” and “Come, Lord Jesus,” among others.
After a decently long stint with Literata as the font on this site, I’ve switched to EBC Garamond. It’s my personal fork of the 8 pt size of EB Garamond — I like thicker fonts that don’t feel quite so digital, and the 8 pt version has that. I’ve fixed some glyph collisions (in the small caps), modified some of the glyphs I wasn’t happy with (widening the /p/, for example), turned off some default ligatures, and fine-tuned the kerning. This is still very much a work in progress and there are still changes I want to make, but it feels ready enough for use here.
A note on process: I opened the original SFDs from the repo in FontForge and exported UFOs. I’m using Fontra (which I’m quite liking, by the way) to edit the glyphs, and I hand-edit the OpenType feature definitions in Vim. I use fontmake to generate OTFs and pyftsubset to convert them to WOFF2. And I have a little testbed HTML file that I use to check in-browser whether I’m happy with the changes. It’s a decent dev experience.
And goodness, this is fun. I’m having a blast.
Victoria Gill on the reservoir of liquid water found on Mars. Exciting!
Benj Edwards on researchers crafting lifelike robotic skin from living human skin cells. This is weird and kind of disturbing in a few different ways. (I’m over here imagining a fleshy Roomba whose skin starts decomposing after a software update fails. Zombie robots, anyone?)
Victor Tangermann on scientists creating a robot controlled by a blob of human brain cells. And hey, another disturbing step forward. Ha. Part of me wonders, by the way, how far advances like these will get before global climate change regressions become a blocker to progress.
Ted Gioia on doctors raising a patient from a deathlike state with ultrasound electronic music. Fascinating.
Sara Hendren on sending kids to college. “This is the first of many parenting presuppositions that make up the cultural water we’re swimming in and therefore can’t see. We imagine our children as maybe-slightly-immature but essentially fully-formed selves. Our job is framed as clearing the obstacles only; we’re tasked with whatever passive supports will help our children optimize themselves on their own terms.” Which is how I’ve seen it. Her point here, though, is that this isn’t enough, and that these kids still need to be formed. “But formation is in short supply everywhere! I don’t get very far, even among fellow professors, when I bring this up. The autonomy-led, buffet-style, platform-burnishing model for higher education is thoroughly internalized in most places. You have to look pretty far and wide to find a strong sense of mission for forming young people into their free future selves.” Interesting throughout.
Teenage Engineering’s medieval EP-1320. Ha. Love this.
Tanner Greer on Patrick Collison’s canonical Silicon Valley reading list. While I’ve admittedly soured a fair bit on SV technologists in general and I have zero interest in becoming more like them, the books on this list that I’ve already read (The Power Broker, Dealers of Lightning, The Dream Machine) were good, and I suspect there are a few others here worth reading. (I’ve long wanted to read A Pattern Language, for example, and Seeing Like a State and Titan and The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt are on my list as well.)
C. D. Cunningham on the CES Letter not actually being the sincere questions of an honest truth-seeker. Not a huge surprise.
Eleanor Konik on themed logs being more useful than daily ones. Agreed.
Steven Luu on using enums instead of booleans. A good point.
