Things I Like
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It’s just too much. Too much plastic. Too much paper. Too much waste in a world that is already incredibly wasteful. I don’t need that. We don’t need that. I know, people love free stuff, but please. Stop it. I’ll buy my own tote bags, cables, pens, stickers, notepads, USB sticks, mugs, bottles, and all other things if I need them. Stop littering the world with useless crap. Most of the people won’t keep half of the items. I cringe when I think of all the raw materials that were used to make all of that.
I really love this piece. At my house this year we've become just as conscious of what comes in as what is going out. To prevent waste we are watching the stuff we bring into the house just as much as I'm aware of our garbage, recycling, etc. And the conference swag is usually all waste in the end. Earlier this year at a conference I refused the swag and the person behind the registration desk got upset. At the very least, let people politely decline without making it an issue.
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This is not Tierra del Fuego, you know. I get bored with the parochialness of the East Coast. They think that the news doesn't get out here and that people out here live in rustic ignorance of real life. It's embarrassing that people can be so ignorant as East Coast people tend to be of the West Coast-and the whole Midwest-and, of course, so contemptuous of the whole South. So sometimes I have written some rather resentful and snarky things about the urban Northeast-particularly in literature-the notion that nothing is worth writing about except the suburbs of large Eastern cities. Blech. That gets nowhere with me.
I've only read one book by Le Guin, but it is amazing. I have several more on my list. And this interview is amazing. I love the way she describes working with an editor, as a collaboration, which is exactly how I see it as well.
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If we want to build a web that is truly universal, then we must embrace its unpredictable nature. We must listen more closely to the full spectrum of our audience. We must see opportunities for optimization where we previously saw barriers to entry. And we must consider our fellow makers in this process by building tools that will help us navigate these challenges together.
I love this piece by Paul, along with his presentation on the same idea. He is thinking deeply about how we make things, how we work together, and how we move forward to make the web better.
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I see this in the world of front-end techniques and technology. We become obsessed with tools and methods, very rarely looking at how these relate to the fundamental basics of web standards, accessibility and progressive enhancement. We obsess about a right way to do things as if there was one right way rather than looking at the goal; how things fit into the broader philosophy of what we do on the web and how what we write contributes to us being better at what we do.
I had an interesting conversation today with coworkers about what it mean to be "offline" as I prepare for vacation. And we all have different things we struggle with, but I will admit, I struggle with the pithy ephemera of social media, so I tend to need long breaks for my own sanity. And it's interesting, because we aren't all the same in that regard.
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On a more personal level, I have long tried to curtail this overflow of information. I use few social networks (mainly due to their impropriety) and limit most of my activity to Twitter. I aim to keep the number of people I follow below 75 (Dunbar divided by two), and follow a stream composed mainly of friends and former colleagues. I find it surprising (and somewhat annoying) that given this number, ‘hot drama’ still manages to surface. The more I read about our growing reliance on social media, the more I’m given to thinking, that like most things, it’s best enjoyed in moderation.
I'm with Paul here, trying to slow down, focus on what matters to me, and leave the rest behind.
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I don’t think you do your cause any favours by jumping straight to the “you must do this” stage. I think that people are more amenable to hearing “hey, here’s something that worked for me; maybe it will work for you” rather than “everything you know is wrong and this is the future.” I certainly don’t think that it’s helpful to compare CSS to Neanderthals co-existing with JavaScript Homo Sapiens.
I listened to the podcast to which Jeremy is referring in this piece and his voice was the voice of calm reason to me, I was grateful for the balance. This goes back to the my age old complaint with so much on the web these days: what works for you works for you, but it is not the only way and stop saying it is when you write or talk about it.
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And I think: I don’t need this. I could make some principled, or “principled,” arguments against it — that there's no reason to pay more attention to this murder than any of the several dozen others that will happen in America today, that this is a classic illustration of the "society of the spectacle", that we should follow Augustine's example in denouncing curiositas — but my real problem is that it just makes me very sad and very tired, and I have too much to do to be sad and tired.
Each year, I pull back both from social media a bit and from thinking about and being online in the time I'm not working. And it has been good for me. Right now I plan to make 2016 the year of me without the web in some fashion. I'll still work on the web for a living, but when I'm not working I'm thinking of staying away from the web and immersing myself in other things.
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He was tracing an arc on the table with his fingers and speaking with such deliberation and care. “I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died.... And it was just me and Mom for a long time,” he said. “And by her example am I not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.” Maybe, he said, she had to be that for him. He has said this before—that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son.
This interview is so full of interesting and thoughtful things I had a really hard time picking what to quote. It is well worth your time to read the whole thing. I had read bits and pieces about Colbert's life, but his honesty here is startling and beautiful.
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Money is an attempt to buy time, but it rarely is able to buy any of the above. When we don’t have time we use money to try to get us to the secret door on time, or we use it avoid needing to know the real prices, or we use money to have someone explain to us what is really going on. Money can get us close, but not all the way.
Agree 100%. We have started to take longer vacations and slower vacations, letting ourselves explore, get to know a place, and be there. I would also add: making them offline vacations has been wonderful.
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That’s why the implied-contract theory is invalid: people aren’t agreeing to write a blank check and give up reasonable expectations of privacy by clicking a link. They can’t even know what the cost of visiting a page will be until they’ve already visited it and paid the price.
I work on the web, so I understand all that is happening when a web page is loaded. But for most people, all they know is that their page is slow and that it's quite strange that the shoes they were just looking at on Zappos are now showing up in ads as they read a story on the New York Times. And that's what worries me about this trend. We are making people pay with their privacy, their data plans they pay for, and their time.
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The time not spent on me'ing has freed up mental space for me to do other things. You know, crazy shit like spending time with my family and friends. Wow, progressive thinking. The less I blog or market myself, the more time I can spend on my hobbies that wont interest anyone but myself, like infusing oils. Mind-blowing.
I've found the exact same thing to be true this summer. I've spent my time away from work not thinking about work at all and just doing the things I enjoy to relax.
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As long as we continue to think of the Internet as the place where you can creates sites and services that make other people laugh, argue forever, and encounter ideas they’d never have imagined, then the Internet stays true to the values its architecture embodies.
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We are all joined together globally in ways we have never been joined before, so if we fail, we all fail together: we have “just one chance to get it right.” This is not the way we will inevitably go, says he, though it is the way we will inevitably go unless we choose to invent and follow some less hazardous road.
I'm becoming more and more pessimistic about our ability to make any changes and prevent catastrophe due to climate change. We need to have a collective coming together, and not just by one country or a few countries, but by the entire world, to make this change happen. And I don't see the wealthy of any nation admitting this is even necessary. So while I try and do my bit, it feels quite hopeless, as so many around me aren't doing their part, or even thinking about it.
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It may indeed be a false dichotomy that “either you can have a performant website or you have a business model based on advertising” but it is also a truth that advertisers demand more and more for their dollar. They want to know what page you read, how long you looked at it, where on the web you went next, and a thousand other invasive things that make thoughtful people everywhere uncomfortable—but are the price we currently pay to access the earth’s largest library.
I really enjoy Jeffrey's perspective here. This is a really hard issue. We want an open web, we want information to be accessible, but that information, writing, and more have to be paid for somehow. We live in a society where people need to earn. While I'm starting to hate a lot about capitalism, it's what we've got right now.
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For such a young, supposedly-innovative industry, I’m often amazed at what people choose to treat as immovable, unchangeable, carved-in-stone issues. Bloated, invasive ad tracking isn’t a law of nature. It’s a choice. We can choose to change.;
Jeremy's piece made me think of my own thoughts on performance where I thought about how it is more than just the developers making things better, but a fundamental culture change that must occur at an organization to make it happen. And what Nilay Patel says about The Verge and so many other websites illustrates perfectly the issues that developers and anyone who cares about performance are facing. Sites need to earn money and that seems to be very much at odds with performance, unfortunately.