The rearrangement of social and economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism and the creation of wage labor as the central form of human toil. Attention now exists as a commodity in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism. What had previously been regarded as human effort was converted into a commodity with a price.

If we want computers to be able to compute for us, then we have to accurately extract these models from our heads and record them. Writing Python isn’t the fundamental skill we need to teach people. Modeling systems is.

So I was thinking about this, looking for a metaphor. And I think Stardew Valley (etc) is it. You and your life are the whole village, not any individual within it. And there are a hundred different improvements you can make to the community: picking up litter off the beach, planting flowers, building a library, donating fossils to the museum, enlarging the coffee shop, decorating the houses, hiring street musicians, etc. But there’s no pressure to do them in any particular order, or to do all of them, and there’s no Final Boss Fight that it’s all in service of, the way there is in a quest-style game.

My particular talents aren’t exactly oriented towards promoting small things, or building usable small systems. My sense is rather that the question of scale, and smallness, in particular, hasn’t yet been posed fully or correctly. The critical discourses about computers–media theory, science and technology studies, game studies, and so on–have grown up theorizing a technology surround that was getting bigger all the time. It’s time to think well about how to get small.

In the last couple of years, though, I have started to more consciously embrace wintering for myself, and deliberately taking the time to slow down (and reflect more) over colder months. Like a hibernating bear, or a bird doing torpor (torporing? does one “do torpor”? Idk, and I can’t ask a bird right now). Part of me always secretly liked taking a slower pace, staying inside for longer, sleeping in a little more. Especially in the city, and being a generally active person, there is often a certain pressure to go out and DO STUFF and be productive (both in a work sense and a social sense). In most of my adulthood so far, I aggressively spent 120% of my time work-work-working to exhaustion partly because I actually like work for the sake of work (not necessarily a bad thing) and also because I believed that was what I was supposed to do in order to be a productive and valuable member of society (not necessarily a good thing).

I’ve got mixed feelings about this one. Gonna re-read it a few times. I don’t know much/anything about this philosopher, so I may also do some delving there.

But, I think the question posited by this statement is a productive one:

There does not seem to be much reason to suppose that phenomenology should wink out while a reasonably complex perceptual psychology persists…

A very opinionated guide for how to set up a new linux machine.

I mostly am tracking this because I like the way cage is used here.

At Spotify they call this the “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) program. Musicians who provide PFC tracks “must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative.”

Spotify apparently targeted genres where they could promote passive consumption. They identified situations in which listeners use playlists for background music. That’s why I noticed the fake artists problem first in my jazz listening.

Some useful notes on using and configuring the kitty terminal application.

If I want to see my terminal I need to either make my browser or code window smaller. I could use cmd+tab or the mouse to switch to my terminal but these options are annoying. cmd+tab always seems to go to the wrong app, and mission control involves reaching for the mouse or track pad which is often a nuisance.

A lightweight macOS window and app manager scriptable with JavaScript. You can also easily use languages which compile to JavaScript such as TypeScript. Phoenix aims for efficiency and a very small footprint. If you like the idea of scripting your own window or app management toolkit with JavaScript, Phoenix is probably going to give you the things you want. With Phoenix you can bind keyboard shortcuts and system events, and use these to interact with macOS.

This article contains the single greatest explanation of an entity component system I’ve ever seen. So simple. So clear.

Snakes of Wrath is an abstract tile-laying game with a simple ruleset and a wealth of strategy and tactics. Two players battle for dominance as a tangled tiled ouroboros grows into a handsome art piece on your table.

WASM? build of GNU APL for the browser

A big blog post all about the history of Rogue

In practice, the only thing that makes web experiences good is caring about the user experience — specifically, the experience of folks at the margins. Technologies come and go, but what always makes the difference is giving a toss about the user.

Shannon wondered: Was it possible to marry the physics of these two styles? Could you capture, in one motion, the fluidity of toss juggling and the efficiency of bounce juggling? In practical terms: If you were dangling by your feet, could you toss balls in the air, let gravity do the work of bringing the balls down to earth, and then catch them again? Both the inquiry and the method were vintage Shannon: whimsical, indifferent to practicalities, and originating in an activity that typical professors might have dubbed unserious, but which Shannon, a tenured member of the MIT faculty, found amusing enough to merit scholarly time and attention.

A tale of some weird timezones

dev tools browser APIs for inspection and what not – chrome has the best docs for them, but they seem to work about the same in other browsers, too.

A collection of useful procedures divided into modules for Racket.