Commonplace

This is just a brilliantly simple idea: create a folder on your computer that’s excluded from Time Machine/Backblaze/Dropbox/Sync/whatever and use that whenever you need to temporarily store something you would never want to be backed up.

The example in the podcast is plain-text files of all your passwords. It might not seem like this sort of thing would crop up often, but it also seems like exactly the sort of thing that’s worth spending five minutes on now to save yourself a bunch of time, faff and potential unbacking-up later.

Anecdotally, more and more people are having a hard time deciding how to build their site on WordPress.

This was one of the main reasons I started looking for WordPress alternatives. I couldn’t be sure that the way I’d build a site today would be the ‘right’ way to build a site in a year or two: important for maintainability and futureproofing a client site.

I suspect this confusion over building is a shared experience for amateurs and pros alike:

• Clients constantly report that Full Site Editing is a suboptimal experience, something borne out by installs of the Classic Editor and Classic Widgets plugins
• Pros still rely heavily on third-party tools like Advanced Custom Fields, which arguably should have been bought into WordPress core.

Whatever the reason, it’s interesting to see the market share dip for the first time.

In the first quarter of 2022, Apple’s internal data shows that Search Ads had a 62.1% average conversion rate for iOS 15 users with Personalized Ads turned on versus 62.5% for iOS 15 users with Personalized Ads turned off across all countries and regions where Search Ads are available.

Incredible both that the numbers are so close and that personalised ads actually perform worse.

Arguing about the future of Twitter is a loser’s game; a dead end. The platform’s only conclusion can be abandonment: an overdue MySpace-ification.

Facebook announced various audio efforts last April during a hot market for podcasting and audio in general. But the company’s interest has waned, Bloomberg News reported last month, and it’s now focused on other initiatives, disappointing some providers.

Another example of how relying on platforms – whose desires seemingly sway in the wind – can leave businesses in the lurch.

While there are some problems with ad-supported media, they’re completely separate from the problems of surveillance – and the problems of surveillance are much worse than the problems of ads. That’s why we should ban surveillance ads.

Wait, I hear you saying. Doesn’t Europe ban surveillance ads already, through the GDPR? Well, yes, technically, they do. The process of getting consent for surveillance ads under the GDPR is deliberately so cumbersome that it is effectively impossible to run a surveillance ad industry.

So how is it that Google and Facebook and other ad-tech companies operate in Europe? Simple: they break the law. They – and many other companies – claim that they don’t need your consent to spy on you, because they can use the “legitimate interest” clause of the GDPR that allows them to process your data without asking you. This is a lie, and it’s only a lack of enforcement that allows the tech giants to get away with it (it’s possible that the new Digital Services Act will finally spur enforcement).

One of the challenges of Mastodon adoption is the onboarding process, because it’s not enough to capture a person’s desired username and e-mail and let them create an account, which is what people are used to from major websites; instead, you need to first choose a Mastodon server where you will make the account (comparable to e.g. choosing an e-mail provider). The implications of choosing the server are primarily in who is the entity responsible for the server, what moderation policies they enforce, what language and jurisdiction they operate in, and which domain name will be part of your username.

I’ve always found the server part of signing up to Mastodon a little odd. Why do we have to choose one? Why should we choose one over the other?

The comparison to email makes sense in my mind and the screenshots from this onboarding seem to make this a lot clearer.

Not a bad description of NFTs:

What Wikipedia mentions but I’d like to emphasize is that buying an NFT does not buy you the art in question, nor the right to do what you will with it. It’s like walking into a bookstore, choosing a book that looks interesting, paying for a copy, and then leaving with only the receipt, proud of your brand new Book NFT, while the book itself remains in the store and anyone who wants to can come in and perfectly replicate and take a copy of the real thing for free. Yes, you do own….something. But the thing you own isn’t the art.

On web3 more generally:

Web 3, including Blockchain and NFTs, makes the argument that everything can and should be monetized. Each interaction has a value that can be measured in financial terms, each retweet or compliment or Kickstarter backing or Amazon review should help monetary value accrue to the tweeter or complimenter or backer or reviewer. The entire world could be Wall Street, and the fabric of our choices and online lives should rise or fall in financial value.

That is the terrifying promise, or ominous threat, of the new internet that Web3 folks are trying to usher in. It’s so deeply transactional, so exactly the opposite of the concept of mutual aid, community, and human caring.

I want to live in a world where joy exists, where things like inspiration, creation, education, and friendship are not monetized, because their value is greater and more than money can or should contain.

To me, this is one of the most understated downsides of web3.

I heard Jacob Silverman talk about this on a podcast: web3 would have everyone thinking constantly about money. Paid in Bitcoin? You’ll be forever wondering what that’s worth, if that will cover your rent, etc – a total nightmare.

On top of that, unlike traditional markets, these currencies fluctuate in value 24/7. They can be high when you go to bed and crash by the time you wake up. That’s a fundamental difference to other forms of investment and trading, especially if a significant portion of our [online] lives were to shift to transaction-based interactions.

I’m not sure it’s possible to mitigate the impact of introducing perpetual uncertainty and worry on top of already-stressful lives.

Some genuinely useful macOS system tips in here. Worth watching in full, but here are the ones I want to remember:

1. Prevent Safari auto-opening downloaded files: Safari > Preferences > General > Uncheck “Open ‘safe’ files after downloading”
2. After selecting multiple files, they can be merged into a PDF from the right-click context menu
3. Switch audio inputs by holding [Option] when selecting Sound from the menu bar
4. In Spotlight, press [Command] + [r] to open the folder of a file rather than the file itself
5. Double clicking on a window causes inconsistent resizing by default, change this to always minimize: System Preferences > Dock & Menu Bar > Minimize windows using [minimize]
6. Delete an entire word at a time by holding [Option].
7. Delete an entire line by holding [Command].
8. [Option] + left or right key lets you skip words.
9. When taking a screenshot, hold [Option] to resize capture area, hold [Space] to move the box and press [Esc] to cancel the screenshot.

I only started using Spotlight to open apps last year and that’s been a gamechanger: it reduces the use of my mouse, makes opening/finding apps much quicker and declutters my dock. Many of these tips seem like they could be daily time savers, too. Perhaps I should keep up with this stuff…

Dan Olson, who recently brought us the spectacular two-hour deepdive into web3, recently appeared on The Ezra Klein Show. The whole thing is worth a listen, but this dissection of the ‘diamond hands’ phenomenon – not limited to the crypto world – is absolutely spot on:

So diamond hands — the logic under there and the way that that gets weaponized is that there’s not enough liquidity in these ecosystems. There’s not enough liquidity in crypto, as a whole, for the whales to do what they need to do. But then that disparity between how much cash is actually floating around and these absolutely absurd valuations that get tossed around is vast. And as a result, it’s very, very bad if people try to cash out in waves.

So as a protective measure, as like an immune-system response, the culture has developed diamond hands as a virtue, that someone who is willing to bear incoherence, that someone who is willing to bear instability, who is willing to just look past the volatility and the warning signs and just keep holding — you are a spiritually better person if you are a diamond hands who is willing to just get a grip on your Bored Ape and never sell it. So you have this Bored Ape, and it has this fictional price, whatever it’s at right now — $60,000, $120,000, $250,000, $2 million. Whatever the theoretical price of this thing is can only be realized if you sell. But selling is quitting. And quitting is spiritually bad. It means that you have given up. It means you don’t believe in the theoretical future value of that Ape.

So it’s trying to play both sides at the same time. It’s trying to make you think that it’s like, you have this asset. You are rich now, because you have this Bored Ape, and it has this value. But you’re actually cash poor, because you don’t have the money from that Ape. You can only get that money if you sell it. But selling it would be a bad thing to do. It would make you a bad person. It would make you a coward. You would be balking in the face of the future.

This insightful talk covers the evolution of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and how this side project became a full-time gig. The retrospective is interesting, starting with the intentionality of making it work, but also the various turning points in the road to make it a success.

It’s always fascinating to hear how creators make their work pay and sustain itself long-term. What’s particularly interesting in this case is a model – for a solo creator – that is advertising based without resorting to the tracking and privacy abuses that underpin much of the ad-tech industry.

Worth a watch if only for the quip about hair pieces and freelance graphic design work.

As for what’s happened to all those precious NFTs, well, for all intents and purposes they no longer exist. It’s worth noting the developers are attempting to compensate owners of those now-worthless NFTs with replacement tokens for one of the company’s other blockchain-based racing games. Affected players can be compensated in various ways, including Replacement Cars, or a “Race Pass”, or “Proxy Assets”, which “will be used in the future to obtain NFTs to products across the REVV Motorsport ecosystem.” In other words, you get a token for your token. A perfectly secure investment!

Indeed, while Animoca’s gesture might seem like a company doing right by its customers, the whole point of an NFT is that it is supposed to convey security and permanence to a digital object. It’s supposed to say “this thing exists with a uniquely attributable value”. Hence, for Animoca to turn around and say to their customers “Oh no, these NFTs are entirely replaceable” makes a mockery of the whole endeavour.

This beautifully answers some Questions I Had about privacy, the blockchain and rights for data to be erased.

Well worth watching.

The belief that the world will be fairer if the rules are enshrined in code enforced by computers, and made extremely difficult to change or circumvent is laughable. It’s not merely naive but ahistoric.

Once again, I’m reminded of Nicole Perlroth’s book: there’s a story about cyber security experts being wildly overoptimistic about how many lines of code they could guarantee would be hack-free.

Feels like there are parallels here.

This talk is full of gems. It’s nearly ten years old, but it all still rings true today:

If you align your strategies to what everyone else is doing, be sure a single business bullet will take you all down.

I get a lot of people coming to me for mid-life crises, career crises, business ventures, startups, and I always ask them to do the same two things. And, interestingly, these two things are the same whether you’re a person who’s lost their way or a business who’s lost their way:

1. Identify what it is that you absolutely love doing, that you’re passionate about
2. Identify the conditions under which you most love doing it

I believe the future of business is about doing good and making money simultaneously. And not in the old world order way that most companies currently do it which goes: we make money ‘here’ and then we do good by writing cheques to causes to clear our conscience over ‘here’. But the new world order way that we make money because we do good.

The vast majority of purchasers in every product sector are women. The vast majority of influencers of purchasers in every product sector are women. Women form the majority of users of social media. These days, women are the majority of gamers. Women are the majority of people who express themselves as digital personas online.

The majority of people creating the advertising communication that targets those women are men. In the US, only 3% of all advertising agency creative directors are female – 97% are male. The majority of people deciding whether that communications and advertising are the gold standard of creativity and effectiveness in our industry are men.

Women challenge the status quo because we are never it.