There’s a number of sites that have stripped down version that—turns out!—are both easier to read and load considerably faster. NPR has a text only version of their site that admirably basic. There’s no header tags even, they replaced them with <p> tags, which is…bold (and inaccessible): Text-Only NPR.org.
Publishers could sell simple display ads (think a static image that is linked to a unique URL) on these refreshingly calm versions of their sites, but the trust between publisher, reader, and advertiser is so misaligned that I’m going to guess they won’t try.
Imagine if, generally speaking, the reader knew that: the ads on the site were relevant to the site, definitely didn’t include tracking scripts, and didn’t measurably slow down the site they were trying to visit. If that was the case, I bet fewer people would be running ad blockers.
You could still track an ad’s effectiveness with unique URL’s supplied to the publisher, but there’s no way the ad network would trust that those wouldn’t get abused.
And the publisher has so much else to think about, so why not just outsource the pixels to an ad network and get a check every now and then?
All that combines to bring us to where we are today. Since no one trusts each other we rely on analytics to “prove” that everything is working, which then ushers in a race to the bottom for who can manipulate the data quickest to get their stats up higher, which then creates a market for more and more tracking, which is how we got to here.
Sounds like Dahlmann got their money back. @erich mentions they also paid taxes on the property and I’m sure there was other upkeep involved. While I’m fairly certain the company generated revenue from when it was a parking lot it likely is a net negative for them in terms of an investment.Edit: my memory was incorrect. No, it wasn’t a parking lot while Dahlmann owned it. It was before and I’d compressed the timeline! Thanks to Peter for the correction!
Honestly, after all this, I think that’s a fair enough settlement and am glad that Ann Arbor is not in for years of protracted litigation. It’s a complicated situation that was further complicated by campaign contributions and cliques within council. Couple that with a long history over what the heck that lot should be and it was bound to get thorny.
I’m anxious to see what ends up happening there. Ann Arbor needs more housing of all types and ANYTHING (even luxury condos) is better than an empty lot. There’s just not enough places for people who want to live in town and easing demand anywhere will help. Of course, I’d love it to be workforce and affordable housing. Not sure that will happen, but I’m glad it’s being floated as an idea.
Paris and London
The Salzmans are going to Europe! We’re headed overseas for the first time as a family (and first time for me and the toddler!). We’ll be staying with family who are living in Paris and then doing a few days in London.
Do you have recommendations for what to while over there? I’ll also take any and all advice about traveling internationally with a toddler.
The Open Plan
I really liked this piece from Bogost on where open plans in houses came from and the architectural response to what they took away from us (read: an additional kitchen called the “messy kitchen”):
Our kitchen flows into our living room and on paper that sounds like a brilliant idea. Everyone can hang out together all the time! In practice it means that we’re never quite totally cleaned up. There’s a lot of chore-heavy area concentrated together such that you’re always in view of something else you should be doing (I’m looking at you, dishes). We’re also more likely to default to eating in front of the TV because it’s nearby everything else. It’s not all bad, it is nice having everyone all clumped together, but it can be oddly stressful. We’re looking at rearranging to create better separation between rooms/activities.
Sharrows with Less Snark
I made some snarky comments about sharrows in the past week and learned I was being overly down on them. They do have their uses!
I’ve since observed that they do help guide traffic. Mea culpa.
The absolute ideal is a full separate bike lane that doesn’t have to do double duty as anything else (see: idling cars that have “pulled over” for “just a minute”). It’s safer for bikers and sends a crystal clear signal to cars about where bikers are going to be. Sharrows are, in fact, are better than nothing. I withdraw my snark although will continue to advocate for better bike infrastructure everywhere.
Pickles
I only recently learned from a coworker about Indian Pickles and it’s a life-changing condiment discovery. We bought jars of Garlic Pickle and Lime Pickle and have been enjoying them a lot. You can find them at your local Indian Grocer (shoutout to Bombay Grocers!). If you’re a fan of flavor just go buy everything with “Pickle” at the end and try it out.
This was a heartening read. It’s hard to come into a profession when you didn’t formally study it. It can create the worst of imposter syndrome and Goldfuss does an excellent job of breaking down why, which helps get past it.
Shorter and “late” (you may have your money back) this week. Lots going on personally and professionally and my normal slot I reserved for writing got subsumed by other tasks. Better late than never though. Writing newsletters serves as a great way to think longer-than-social-media thoughts each week; an invaluable exercise in these trying times.
I had modest traffic goals in mind before launch. Due to some timely retweets it ended up seeing about double my goal of “wouldn’t it be cool if 100 people saw it?!”. With any creative work there’s always the worry that it comes out and fails silently, but people said nice things and seemed to enjoy it!
I did many things wrong with promotions though and will hopefully explore all of that in a separate blog post about the whole thing. For now? Go read it!
Biking
I’ve been biking more than driving this past week and really love gliding past the very long line of cars on Packard in the evening. Our route in and home is mostly bike lanes except for a few small sections where it becomes “sharrows”, which is a word I just learned that I find to be a bewildering answer to bike infrastructure.
Sam generously loaned me his cargo bike to try out with the toddler. We tried it for a few trips and while it’s not quite right for us, it is an incredible piece of purpose-built machinery. The question of “how do I move more than just me on a bike?” has resulted in all sorts of neat contraptions I’m only just becoming aware of.
We were talking about a get-together for families who bike to show off their setups and let others try them out. A decent setup for biking with a kid can quickly blow past the hundreds of dollars range and go into the thousands. If you’re commited to replacing a second car with biking it can be hard to know which of many viable options is best for you. Getting a chance to try it out is key.
If a meetup like that would be of interest to you, contact me! Or, if there’s a group in town already doing something like that, tell me about it!
Menevado
Steve published a new song called Unknown Radius last week. I like it a lot and am flattered that he used a picture of our cat, Susu, as the cover:
He’s been doing a song a month this year and they’re all quite good. Go listen to Menevado on Spotify.
Landscaping
One part of home ownership I vastly underestimated the time cost of is landscaping. I finally mowed the lawn yesterday and wished I’d done it a week earlier. The previous owner liked to garden and plan small spaces around the yard and I’m very thankful she did. These are very cool and we’re slowly learning what we need to do to maintain them—or which ones we want to redo. I’ve resigned myself to the lawn being a 5 year project to get to “yeah, that’s about what we want”.
I have the gmail address for my first initial and last name. This is really easy to remember, easy to tell people about, and for some reason every other C Salzman in the world uses it when they sign up for stuff. The latest was getting Clay’s travel itinerary:
I’ve gotten a lot of receipts for various things over the years. At one point I was getting emails in Spanish being sent to Carlos, who is apparently a businessperson of some sort. One time I got biopsy results for someone that I hastily replied back that they weren’t for me and deleted without looking at.
If you have a similar situation I’d love to hear about it. Emails you have received but really shouldn’t are my favorite genre of weird emails stories.
There was a study floating around this past week about how using two periods after spaces was actually correct because they did a Science about it. Unfortunately, the study was about some specific circumstances where it might be true and then the “reporting” morphed that into “Always use two now!”
“Most notably, the test subjects read paragraphs in Courier New, a fixed-width font similar to the old typewriters, and rarely used on modern computers.”
Practicaltypography.com has a great overview of all the other issues with drawing some vast conclusion on who is RIGHT forever and ever from this study:
“True, the researchers found that putting two spaces after a period delivered a “small” but “statistically … detectable” improvement in reading speed—about 3%—but curiously, only for those readers who already type with two spaces. For habitual one-spacers, there was no benefit at all.”
I agree with them that studies like this are important to do. They often don’t surface new information that typographers don’t already know, but sometimes they do!
More broadly: typography should always be about legibility first. Once that it satisfied we can have a number of fun discussions and arguments about the design of it. It’s gotta be readable though. I personally think that modern variable width fonts are very good at handling spacing issues automatically for you though.
Shorter one today because we spent the weekend out in the sun at Camp Pendalouan celebrating my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s wedding. We had our wedding there 6 years ago and it was lovely to be back without needing to also do all the extremely fun and draining things one needs to do on their wedding weekend.
If you want to see a lot of pictures from this past weekend you can check out instagram feed. Lots of my cute kid AND a video of a tiny turtle in there if you need enticing.
Other Newsletters
Ed’s Vaccuum Newsletter – Ed reminds everyone that the Cobblestone Farm Market starts back up this month. I’m a nice evening stroll away from that and looking forward to it!
Patti’s Newsletter: Newsletter for May 6, 2018 – Hanging Out with Teacher Patti – I liked this tidbit “Best burn of 1898 comes from the Ann Arbor Argus who says that the fifth graders in Grass Lake have several ways to spell the word “icicle”, including “icesickles”, “icycycles” and “icecickles.” Concludes the paper–“that’s pretty good spelling for Grass Lake.” [ed. note: Grass Lake needed some ice after that sick burn!]”
CivCity’s Newsletter: Time to Vote Local! – if you’re at all civically minded and in Ann Arbor you should subscribe to this! It’s a great overview of what’s happening in the city including the upcoming May 8th vote!
This is great! I wish it was 500 affordable condos instead, but am happy to see SOMETHING done with that land. Lowertown has had two huge pockets of undeveloped and fenced off land since we moved here 9 years ago. Between the riverfront development and the project going in at Plymouth and Maiden Lane (1140 Broadway project) it’ll be a nice change to that area.
Vote Tomorrow, May 8th!
Please vote! Like, come on, this is the least you can do.
I’m guessing turnout will be low at this one because for most of the city it’s “just” about a tax thing. AnnArborVotes.org has more info on it:
There was a study floating around this past week about how using two periods after spaces was actually correct because they did a Science about it. Unfortunately, the study was about some specific circumstances where it might be true and then the “reporting” morphed that into “Always use two now!”
“Most notably, the test subjects read paragraphs in Courier New, a fixed-width font similar to the old typewriters, and rarely used on modern computers.”
Practicaltypography.com has a great overview of all the other issues with drawing some vast conclusion on who is RIGHT forever and ever from this study:
“True, the researchers found that putting two spaces after a period delivered a “small” but “statistically … detectable” improvement in reading speed—about 3%—but curiously, only for those readers who already type with two spaces. For habitual one-spacers, there was no benefit at all.”
I agree with them that studies like this are important to do. They often don’t surface new information that typographers don’t already know, but sometimes they do!
More broadly: typography should always be about legibility first. Once that it satisfied we can have a number of fun discussions and arguments about the design of it. It’s gotta be readable though. I personally think that modern variable width fonts are very good at handling spacing issues automatically for you though.
After CATACA died one of our main concerns was how her sister, Susu, would handle the transition. She’s mellowed out considerably, which was a surprise. It seems that in an attempt to assert who was alpha cat they were attacking each other more than we thought. They, sadly, never got a chance to really figure it out.
We were gone this weekend at a wedding and when we got back Susu greeted us more affectionately than I’ve ever seen her. We collapsed and watched TV the rest of the night and she was on top of one of us the entire time.
The Curse of Getting a Good Gmail Address
I have the gmail address for my first initial and last name. This is really easy to remember, easy to tell people about, and for some reason every other C Salzman in the world uses it when they sign up for stuff. The latest was getting Clay’s travel itinerary:
I’ve gotten a lot of receipts for various things over the years. At one point I was getting emails in Spanish being sent to Carlos, who is apparently a businessperson of some sort. One time I got biopsy results for someone that I hastily replied back that they weren’t for me and deleted without looking at.
If you have a similar situation I’d love to hear about it. Emails you have received but really shouldn’t are my favorite genre of weird emails stories.
Rewarding Rage
This thread about how algorithms reward anger and outrage is worth reading:
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how if you get angry, the internet rewards you. And how algorithms have undoubtedly been tuned to heighten this in ways we’ll never fully know. And even if we did know…
Next time you fire up twitter take a look at how many tweets being shown to you are based around anger, outrage, and/or fear. Yes, the world is bad, but goodness, what the Algorithm shows us is something to behold.
Everyone would do well to have that place on the internet they can put the thing. I’m a broken record, but twitter and facebook are not that place if you want it to exist in perpetuity (for certain values of perpetuity).
My favorite parts of the internet are the far away places. The clear passion project niches. Take this site for example:
Welcome to the one-stop destination for images and information about Action Transfers and Instant Pictures, and the home of SPLAT (the Society for the Preservation of Letraset Action Transfers).
You don’t know you need this site until you need it.
It also doesn’t map well to a series of facebook posts, tweets, or an instagram story. It likely doesn’t map well to most CMSes either. Yet the care that went into organizing it means that it can exist as a resource and a delightful thing to stumble on.
For the Ypsi-Arbor D&D Gazette I needed to match the fonts on the original D&D boxes (yes, needed). Kirith.com has already done the legwork here and has a fantastically compiled list of links for it:
”Couple of interesting facts. The site has averaged 120 unique visitors a day. ~1200 portraits were submitted to the Baldur’s Gate image gallery.”
Number of visitors is all relative. Some people would be thrilled with 120 visitors a day. Others would be panicked at how low the number that is. Your reach and your success is something you get to define. There’s a blog post on my website that I don’t care if anyone ever visits, but I’ve used it a few times while standing in Home Depot and found it extremely important:
Having a URL for the paint colors for our house that I can call up on any device with an internet connection is an amazing ability. I think more people should have the ability to do that without getting flummoxed by technical jargon.
Ed’s Vacuum Newsletter for 2018-W17 – lots on local politics, which these days is basically all about the building (or “not building”) of places for people to live. Also, he talks about how to subscribe to the newsletter and the problems therein.
Patti Smith has a newsletter too! Newsletter 4/29/18 – Ann Arbor Archives – She has a great roundup of what local breweries are up to and some fun stories from Ann Arbor’s history. I liked this a lot, “Michigan Argus, April 29, 1864 – E. Ketchum of Ypsilanti would send you a small treatise on Ice Cream & the Philosophy of its Manufacture if you just send him your address.”
Are you writing a newsletter? Let me know about it so I can include it! csalzman@gmail.com
Ypsi-Arbor D&D Gazette Update
Technically my self-imposed deadline ends at the end of the day and the zine is ready to go, but I’m going to take a few more days to add some polish. Shooting for closer to the end of the week. Layout was mostly roughed in yesterday and then I had a Thought™ and started over. I’m happier with the switch and how it’s coming together. There were 6 or so submissions plus a few other things I wanted to include. Shorter than I’d envisioned, but still quite fun. In retrospect, I wish I’d set my “release schedule” to earlier in the month to maintain momentum from when submissions came in. Oh well!
The absolute best way to hear about when it comes out is to sign up here:
If this is the first you’re hearing about it you can read more about it here:
Two of the other newsletters this week mention a problem that anyone who creates anything runs into: how do you make sure that everyone who should see it actually sees it? Marketing at its best is essentially finding an answer to this. A market for whatever niche content you’re producing exists. Finding the market and delivering the content to it constitutes a very hairy problem.
A poorly timed tweet or Facebook post means it vanishes in a sea of inattention. For example, I posted a link to last week’s newsletter on Facebook and almost nothing came of it. My first tweet about it garnered some interest, but as I remarked:
11am-ish on a Monday seems to be the perfect time to bury a tweet so it doesn’t get seen that well. Let’s see how 4:40 does.
4:40pm did a lot better.
The thing of it is though, that could just be for my followers, yours are different and might LOVE an 11am reminder. Chances are you need to do multiple nudges though due to the way that social media works right now.
This’ll be my sixth newsletter when it’s published. How many of you knew there were 5 others? I’m guessing some, but not all. And I’m also guessing at least one of the others would have been interesting to you (even if this one is not).
This is why despite the annoyances of it email is still very good at getting you a direct line to your tribe (in the Seth Godin sense). It’s one of the last places where we demand that it work as close to our mental model as possible. We don’t want the computer making every decisions about what to surface up at the top or remove from the list. From there, everyone crafts their own workflow for email to make sure they see what they want to.
Strongly linked to this is RSS. An RSS feed makes email marketing easier. This blog has an RSS feed and as of today I’m using mailchimp to send out new post updates over email. This should have been setup forever ago, but everything takes time!
Sign up in the sidebar if you’d like to get future updates! I’ll report back in a few weeks about which method is “working” in terms of making sure people who want to read this are able to read this.
Biking
We moved into a house last summer that is farther away from work and daycare than our apartment was. I love the location; however, we used to bus and bike and walk almost every day. Due to the location of daycare in relation to the bus routes we’ve ended up driving essentially every day since we moved. I’m committed to figuring out how to make that not our reality so this past week I biked the kid into daycare and myself over to Workantile. My wife biked in one of those days too and then we caravaned back home down Washtenaw. It was delightful and we went almost 24 hours without using a car on a workday for the first time in about 8 months.
Time from our front door, to dropping the toddler off, to sitting at my desk ended up being about the same amount of time as driving, parking, and walking from the parking spot to my desk. Add in the fact that they’re doing construction around daycare that is causing parking issues and I could see it saving time on certain days.
I wasn’t expecting that at all. Without optimizing anything about our route, or bike setup, there wasn’t a giant measurable time cost and, frankly, I ended up getting to my desk in a great frame of mind to start the day. Whenever I bike I end up smiling. Whenever I drive I don’t.
Sam is going to let me try out his cargo bike to see how that goes. My thought right now is that an electric assist bike could cut the commute down a few minutes while making the hills slightly easier to take on. Getting in shape will help too.
Who should own a website?
Everyone.
Everyone would do well to have that place on the internet they can put the thing. I’m a broken record, but twitter and facebook are not that place if you want it to exist in perpetuity (for certain values of perpetuity).
My favorite parts of the internet are the far away places. The clear passion project niches. Take this site for example:
Welcome to the one-stop destination for images and information about Action Transfers and Instant Pictures, and the home of SPLAT (the Society for the Preservation of Letraset Action Transfers).
You don’t know you need this site until you need it.
It also doesn’t map well to a series of facebook posts, tweets, or an instagram story. It likely doesn’t map well to most CMSes either. Yet the care that went into organizing it means that it can exist as a resource and a delightful thing to stumble on.
For the Ypsi-Arbor D&D Gazette I needed to match the fonts on the original D&D boxes (yes, needed). Kirith.com has already done the legwork here and has a fantastically compiled list of links for it:
”Couple of interesting facts. The site has averaged 120 unique visitors a day. ~1200 portraits were submitted to the Baldur’s Gate image gallery.”
Number of visitors is all relative. Some people would be thrilled with 120 visitors a day. Others would be panicked at how low the number that is. Your reach and your success is something you get to define. There’s a blog post on my website that I don’t care if anyone ever visits, but I’ve used it a few times while standing in Home Depot and found it extremely important:
Having a URL for the paint colors for our house that I can call up on any device with an internet connection is an amazing ability. I think more people should have the ability to do that without getting flummoxed by technical jargon.
Colophon
This week’s newsletter was written at Workantile and Sweetwaters in Kerrytown. Drafted in Bear and published using Hugo.
Two of the other newsletters this week mention a problem that anyone who creates anything runs into: how do you make sure that everyone who should see it actually sees it? Marketing at its best is essentially finding an answer to this. A market for whatever niche content you’re producing exists. Finding the market and delivering the content to it constitutes a very hairy problem.
A poorly timed tweet or Facebook post means it vanishes in a sea of inattention. For example, I posted a link to last week’s newsletter on Facebook and almost nothing came of it. My first tweet about it garnered some interest, but as I remarked:
11am-ish on a Monday seems to be the perfect time to bury a tweet so it doesn’t get seen that well. Let’s see how 4:40 does.
4:40pm did a lot better.
The thing of it is though, that could just be for my followers, yours are different and might LOVE an 11am reminder. Chances are you need to do multiple nudges though due to the way that social media works right now.
This’ll be my sixth newsletter when it’s published. How many of you knew there were 5 others? I’m guessing some, but not all. And I’m also guessing at least one of the others would have been interesting to you (even if this one is not).
This is why despite the annoyances of it email is still very good at getting you a direct line to your tribe (in the Seth Godin sense). It’s one of the last places where we demand that it work as close to our mental model as possible. We don’t want the computer making every decisions about what to surface up at the top or remove from the list. From there, everyone crafts their own workflow for email to make sure they see what they want to.
Strongly linked to this is RSS. An RSS feed makes email marketing easier. This blog has an RSS feed and as of today I’m using mailchimp to send out new post updates over email. This should have been setup forever ago, but everything takes time!
Sign up in the sidebar if you’d like to get future updates! I’ll report back in a few weeks about which method is “working” in terms of making sure people who want to read this are able to read this.
Ed’s Vacuum/2018-W16.md is another good one (of course!). Read up on the Y lot vote happening this week, which, woof…it’s acrimonious.
Ed also recounts the story of a lost dog that was eventually found via NextDoor. A few months ago we helped get a lost dog back to its owner and the thing that finally did it was just posting my phone number on NextDoor. Someone called within 20 minutes to collect.
NextDoor is sometimes derisively called “Twitter for Old People”. At its best it’s a fantastic way to quickly reconnect a dog to its owner and to get rid of that random thing in the garage you don’t need anymore. Beyond those amazing uses I’m not sure it’s that useful.
CATACA’s Death
This newsletter last week got sidelined by the death of one of my cats. It was very sudden. You can read a eulogy I wrote for her. Go hug your cats.
My friend, Kate (who is very wise) told us the exact thing I needed to hear “grief is not linear”:
“Something that helped me last year was reminding myself that grief isn’t linear; the five stages aren’t just cycled through, they’re random dice rolls at random intervals. May you always find space to let your emotions be what they are; may you eventually, incrementally, encounter more acceptance.”
This past week has definitely felt like that. I’ve alternated between every one of the stages in no seeming order. It’s been at times fairly brutal. On the Monday after I walked around downtown listlessly unable to make a decision on food. I knew intellectually I needed to eat, but just couldn’t figure it out, which looking back on it feels very strange, and very appropriate.
It is odd how much a small being can get intertwined in your life. Our other cat, Susu, is definitely out of sorts and is trying to figure out what life is now, although as a cat there’s no chance she can articulate that.
There have also been good remembrances of CATACA already. I know it’ll be fond memories.
An Idealized Internet Home
Continuing with some thoughts on how to make the internet a better place I’ve started compiling a quasi-manifesto of what our tools for creation should be:
The distance between thought and published work on the internet needs to be as short as possible. Social media gets this correct: fill in the textarea and click submit and you are done.
The activation energy required to go from no website to a website should be as small as possible. WordPress’ installation process can famously be done in 5 minutes. I think we should try to get it down to 5 seconds.
The features available to you on your personal site should exceed the best of a social network’s features. Social networks should have to fear or integrate open source projects because the open source project is better than what the social network can offer.
Network effects shouldn’t be constrained to a service that monopolizes the most users. We need disintermediated tools that allow for network effects to exist on top of everyone’s federated sites. RSS is one channel, there should probably others.
Companies should make money by selling these tools, support or services, not on the advertising that can be placed on them.
More as this percolates.
Coffee with Andrew
I had coffee with Andrew Sardone a few weeks ago to talk more about the indie web. Since I’ve started talking about this in the open I’ve heard from other nerds lamenting our current content hegemony. I’d like to hear from more. Email me and let’s talk: csalzman@gmail.com
Here’s some buzzing thoughts that came out of coffee with Andrew:
Despite reports to the contrary: RSS is not dead. He uses Feedbin to manage his feeds.
People don’t necessarily care about ownership on the web. They assume they own their FB or Twitter presence.
Whatever the alternative is to using FB it has to have feature parity+. This is very smart on Andrew’s part. If you’re on FB because of the groups (that’s me) then the thing you go to has to meet or exceed FB’s ability to handle group communication.
The activation energy to get a site and get it online is huge even for nerds mostly due to time. If you have a job and kids you’re unlikely to also want to do database administration at night.
Federation and Network Effect are two very important problems to solve. Posting something on your blog is great. Then there’s a secondary step of sharing/marketing. For me I’m trusting RSS and a quick tweet to do the meat of that marketing for me. However, it does mean that posting is less easy than it should be to do.
Desktop publishing allowed so many people to do the impossible: lay out a document in an interesting and quick way that it revolutionized design by making it much much easier. Having access to fonts, sizing, colors, etc. was quite a bit different than using a typewriter. We do not have the same ease of use for websites right now.
Thinking in terms of a garden: the startup costs are huge, and you can likely buy better produce from elsewhere, yet there is something compelling about having your own garden. It appeals to our ego and sense of order in the world. We want to tend to a thing and make it our own.
He pointed out micro.blog, which is trying to solve these problems. I really really like what they’re doing.
Algorithmic Feeds Trend to Homogeneity
The medium is the message and our mediums are shaping the messages we’re willing to share.
The allure of the algorithmic feed is that it shows more relevant information to individual users. However, it maps very poorly with how people WANT the services to act. For example, I want to see everything my wife posts on any of the services we’re both on. This is important because they are often about her, our daughter, or our family in general. As far as Content I’d Like to Consume this ranks up so so so high on the list that it’s shocking to me whenever the Algorithm doesn’t surface this content. Surely with all of that Big Data they could make that connection that, yeah, these two people enjoy each other’s company.
When you trust the algorithm you start to use the only signals you have from the service to inform that algorithm. If those are based on things like likes and retweets…well…guess what’s not going to show up as often? A tweet that is perhaps highly relevant, but didn’t get enough engagement to push it over the edge to appear in your feed.
Most of my followers and people I follow are (by design) people with sub-1000 numbers. They are likely to never see a tweet go viral and most tweets might go by “unliked”. Then they get suppressed and likely don’t want to tweet similar things again. Imagine a twitter that had more controls over what you see. Imagine if you could go back to a chronological timeline!
Generating Art
Something I truly appreciate about programmers is when they encounter art and design they ask probing questions about the rules that went into the creation of that art. This is useful because it helps the artist/designer think through the decisions they thought they couldn’t fully explain. It’s useful to the programmers too because at some point they usually figure out, huh, there’s a lot to this!
Design is always a bit of a fungible thing, you can absolutely start with a bunch of rules, but then you’ll find that they need to be broken here and there or that, yeah, there’s actually a few other rules that we haven’t appropriately expressed. By the time you figure out a way to replicate the thought process perfectly you should have just had the designer do it and move on. Or it ends in programmer frustration because there’s no way to really synthesize meta-trends in patterns, textures, and colors. Sometimes you need to have someone there who just knows when it’s right or wrong. Sometimes you need to try a wild idea.
Anyway this thread is an amazing breakdown of reverse engineering an artist’s work to make it repeatable. It in turn results in art and that’s a worthy pursuit:
Meilleur spends time explaining each step in the process, where he went wrong, and how he solved it. Like all good programming stories showing your work is half the fun. And the result is, wow, I really like the resulting artwork he was able to produce is phenomenal.
“I’m not a believer in heaven, but I appreciate the notion of places where other forms of reality become tangible, where past and present interlace. This place is certainly one, helped by the apparent merging of this ancient human structure with the woodland crowding close.”