Recently

A little late on this one, but I got around to it!

Reading

I got stuck on two books: books that I want to enjoy but can't get any momentum on. So my reading "stats" are suffering and this is a light year for books so far. But I switched gears to read Glass Century by Ross Barkan, whose newsletter is my primary news source for local political intrigue. It's great so far.

As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book.

Dan Sinker's Who Cares Era is great writing and a message that I believe in in my bones. Caring a lot kind of comes naturally to me, and nihilism of all kinds my natural enemy.

Speaking of which: if you're in New York, there's an election coming up. Please care about it, vote, and don't rank Cuomo. It really matters.

...I quoted Hannah Arendt’s observation that the Germans who refused to participate in Nazi atrocities were those who possessed “the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking.” To engage in that “silent dialogue,” you need to be capable of thinking alone — or not precisely alone, but in solitude. Because as Arendt notes elsewhere, in The Human Condition: “To be in solitude means to be with one’s self, and thinking, therefore though it may be the most solitary of all activities, it is never altogether without a partner and without company.”

From you'll never think alone by Ned Resnikoff. Not to brag, but even as I've become a more social person, my comfort with solitude has stayed the same. When I rode from Brooklyn to Brewster, I did so alone, with no music, no podcasts, few breaks. It felt good: I've done the same before, and I like it, the silence is comfortable. Thinking in solitude is the default state. But I can see how it isn't for everyone, how consulting a chatbot for personal questions is where people end up. It's just sad, though.

I think there’s a role for AI in generating marketing assets. In Buzz, you can generate images and you can write text. What I have not seen yet is a world where the models can generate content that a brand team would be really proud of. Maybe that’s coming, but it seems further away than you might expect.

I was kind of impressed by this interview with Dylan Field, Figma co-founder, on their new AI-flavored tools. For the CEO role, there's only one accepted stance toward AI and it is wild-eyed enthusiasm. Even hedging a little bit, like he does here, is unusual and good.

Listening

What a banner month for albums!

The biggest hit was Slow Mass's On Foot. It's such a solid album. Almost every track has 5 stars in my Swinsian library.

I saw Nils Frahm perform at Kings Theatre and instantly became a fan. His albums are so handcrafted and lovely.

And then it dropped that Forth Wanderers are returning with another album. I started to listen to them right around the time that they took a very long break in 2018, and about seven years later they're back. A lot like Slow Mass, they're just a great combination of instrument and voice, and they really capture a mood.

Finally, I really like this Julian Cubillos track, which I found via Hearing Things.

Technology Optimism Hour: Fediverse edition

Last week I got the idea to write an update of my Technology Optimism Hour from 2022. What's the cool new stuff in the technology industry that's sprouted up since then? And then I hit some writers block, or rather I couldn't think of much.

So I asked around on Mastodon and got some interesting answers! Refer over there for some good ideas from the folks on the 'fediverse.' A lot of the technologies listed are technically pre-2022, but are hitting their stride now. A few of the answers:

• 3D printing
• Contactless payments
• CSS improvements
• jujutsu
• uv
• DuckDB
• Apple Silicon and other ARM chips

Good answers! There's a bit of overlap with my last writing and a lot of these are pre-2022, but the path of technology is complicated and it's very true that something like 3D printing has had a lot of eras and every new step toward mainstreaming is exciting.

I'm probably not buying a 3D printer though, for reasons of Brooklyn apartment sizes, so the main thing on this list that I need to dive into is jj. A lot of smart people love it and I trust that it's great.

Elsewhere

I wrote quite a lot of micro posts this month, on chatbots, New York elections, Blog micro-optimization, LeaderKey, expertise, and a ThinkUp clone that I built on Val Town.

Also I wrote a little AMA app on Val Town too, so you can ask something, don't be weird. I do have a slight addendum to my answer to one thing to change the world. I think it's Direct File. Direct File - the free tax-filing service that has been a longtime dream of good politicians and enemy of horrifying monopolies and bad politicians: that's it. The slow, hard work of building government services that work. Not carelessly thrown-together code that doesn't work and only aims to achieve a vacuous libertarian budget-cutting ideology. I don't believe in "one weird trick" anymore, if I ever did. I want the expansive vision of city owned grocery stores and functioning government services.

Journalism

This month one of my new music ideas came from Hearing Things, an independent music publication that I recently subscribed to. It's worker owned and consistently high-quality. What else is like this?

In New York, you have to subscribe to Hell Gate and donate to The City, both of which are doing awesome work. The aforementioned Political Currents by Ross Barkan is an invaluable source for understanding the finer points of city politics, like where the Working Families Party fits alongside New York's Democrats.

404 media does amazing coverage on technology-adjacent topics: it's great to listen to their podcast and hear folks with more than enough knowledge to get the technical specifics right, as well as really high standards for validating information.

Colossal is great independent art writing. My friend David writes an extremely good newsletter about the alcohol industry as well as a local outlet for Richmond, VA.