Internet

I’m not sure what lesson to take from the Frankenstein end state of the Facebook iOS app. Is it that mobile does not really scale? Or is it that you shouldn’t scale mobile in this way?

I read this thorough survey of monospace fonts by Tim Bray and found out in the end that I’ve already been using the fonts that he recommends (Jetbrains Mono and Inconsolata) for a while now.

The next bit of insanity has to do with the German Datenschutz nutters. This is a small but virulent group of people who have blown up privacy issues to the point where most of Germany is still afraid to use the internet.

Several online situations today where I think I’m going insane so I might as well document them.

Discord has been executing near perfectly and it looks like they’ve built-in most of the functionality of Discourse now. That’s an absolutely amazing complementary feature to the ephemerality of the chat stream.

Twitter will keep working in the same sense that people can use Jira.

Just to file this for my receipts here. Marina Weisband asks whether you would build a website for a small organization using Wix.

Being able to run Chrome in your terminal and watch YouTube videos there means the snake has fully eaten its tail.

A manifesto for 2023 by Robin Sloan to take nothing for granted and try out all kinds of new things. Everything old is new again and everything new is exciting.

Even a cursory dip into the subreddits and other social media posts, whitepapers, and other documentation and community discussions surrounding generative AI, makes it hard to miss the spite and negativity directed at human creativity. They are almost necessary preconditions to be part of the development community. Ironically, of course, the developers celebrate their own creativity in building these software tools, despite the fact that they implicitly rebuke the work and lives of everyone who creates or thinks meaning is confined to living things.

These days, “no one is taking any creative risk,”said Laura Mayer, a veteran podcast executive and producer who’s worked at several large publishers. “We’re seeing plenty of efforts to reverse-engineer what were successes in podcasting, and as a result, we get a lot of watered-down karaoke attempts at what worked out in the past.”

A very interesting article about how brands have moved on from lifestyle to be more community driven.

Any kind of workshop that you do virtually is going to be more difficult but in my experience a skilled facilitator and a motivated group can overcome these challenges.

I just watched and finished season 1 of Gibi which seems to have been enough of a success for them to quickly put out a second season. It’s a Turkish dark comedy show that you can watch online on Exxen. I already wrote it’s a bit like Seinfeld but with a very dark undercurrent.

I wrote before about how annoying it is if your Instagram username gets hacked and how difficult it is to get it back. I had to go to some lengths to get mine but nothing quite as much as this person.

Life is too short to use bad tools (Teams, Jira) and It’s good to see more and more people screening companies based on this criterium.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-tumblr-became-popular-for-being-obsolete

We’ve worked remotely like this ten years ago with Hubbub and had to come up with a lot of these tactics and tricks just to be able to get work done. In the meantime, it seems the tools have come a long way (imagine the things we could have done if we had a tool like this back then!) but people’s thinking is still stuck in the past.

I’ve discovered a hilarious new Turkish comedy show called “Gibi” (translated to As If). The episodes revolve around a group of friends who get embroiled in absurdist situations and have very nasty but eloquent arguments with each other.

Of course it still makes sense to defend yourself, but if you have any idea how software functions, it should be obvious that the number of known and unknown vulnerabilities in our devices number in the thousands and a lot of them are and remain exploited by all kinds of organizations.

I’ve had a number of amazing and unforgettable experiences with Couchsurfing mostly staying in Berlin way back in the day. This history of the site’s rise and fall fills in what happened after I lost track.

Hanging out on Clubhouse from the beginning made me realize how lacking my Turkish was. I got on the app when Germany came online and I think Turkey launched shortly after that and only then did it kick off in the Netherlands.

I need to keep track of how our bet on AWS AppSync is doing which is so small that it doesn’t show up in Stack Overflow’s official tags chart but here’s an off-label website that will give it to us.

An extremely damning account of the way Vice and also the NYT have treated Naomi Wu with some choice bad behaviour from people like Doctorow in part 2 as well.

I’m glad reality is catching up with the design fiction proposals we came up back in the day, like here the combination of video conferencing and Snapchat face filters.

Taken from the title of Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin’s 2008 book, “the dark forest”region of the web is becoming increasingly important as a space of online communication for users of all ages and political persuasions. In part, this is because it is less sociologically stressful than the clearnet zone, where one is subject to peer, employer, and state exposure. It also now includes Discord servers, paid newsletters (e.g., Substack), encrypted group messaging (via Telegram, etc.), gaming communities, podcasts, and other off-clearnet message board forums and social media. One forages for content or shares in what others in the community have retrieved rather than accepting whatever the platform algorithms happen to match to your data profile. Additionally, dark forest spaces are both minimally and straightforwardly commercial. There is typically a small charge for entry, but once you are in, you are free to act and speak without the platform nudging your behavior or extracting further value. It is also interesting to keep in mind that the dark forest shares the same cables and satellite arrays as clearnet channels, is accessed via the same devices, and essentially all of its denizens continue to simultaneously participate in clearnet spaces (as contemporary professional protocol demands). It is therefore not analogous to legacy countercultural notions of going off-grid or “dropping out.”

A strong hint about the real future of virtual reality and a callback to the MUD era which I had a lot of trouble understanding. Seeing it on Tiktok makes it a lot more tangible in a bunch of ways.

[Cryptoart is] a crime against humanity.

This is an interesting Instagram scam.

It’s nice that these startups guys take a public schooling so well. It would be nice if we could see more of that on Clubhouse instead of the endless rows of bad panels.

When I still did photography, I read everything I could find about how cameras work and this is the mental model I built up back then.

“This is all to say that Paul Graham is an effective marketer and practitioner, but a profoundly unserious public intellectual. His attempts to grapple with the major issues of the present, especially as they intersect with his personal legacy, are so mired in intuition and incuriosity that they’re at best a distraction, and worst a real obstacle to understanding our paths forward.”

I’m just thinking of moving away from Chrome but for somebody who’s as heavy a tab user as I am, this looks useful and also scarily confronting.

I am immensely happy to see two friends launch Branch, a magazine about creating a sustainable internet. The way they put the magazine together mirrors the best practices of the future we should live in right now.

It sounds like a great idea here by Albert Wenger to force all major web properties to provide full read and write access to their APIs and in doing so promote the much needed competition.

How Taiwan’s Unlikely Digital Minister Hacked the Pandemic

After having been locked out of my Instagram account for months because of wrongful reports, I have just gotten back access to the account for a week or so and I already get the first people reporting me again.

I thought I had problems with my Instagram account. Turns out it can be a lot worse than that.

So the Instagram handle that I thought I had lost was returned to me suddenly last week (thanks to a friend). Not sure whether I’ll get to keep it this time round, but let’s try.

Looking at some Discord first organizations this describes how they could play out and how much potential is there if you want to put some effort in it.

An interesting story about the interaction between loving the outdoors and Instagram culture.

This look into QAnon by a game designer goes deeper and is a lot more disturbing.

I thought I knew how big a deal TikTok was a year ago already but I feel sorry for not diving in back then because it is much bigger a deal than I had thought.

I have my first name as my user name in a bunch of places. I’ve had my Twitter account (Twitter.com/alper) for a very long time but my Instagram account (Instagram.com/alper) got a lot more attention after Instagram got really big. A couple of weeks ago I lost that account.

I can’t say I’ve read a lot of Beyond the Beyond nor been much of a happy Wired consumer in any case, but it’s passing still marks the end of an era. I remember Bruce Sterling’s closing speeches at SxSWi as one of the highlights of the conference (me being too late an arrival to attend his house parties).

A very long but quite inspired series of conceptual visual spatializations of the internet.

I know more about TikTok than almost everybody around me and still I hardly know anything about TikTok.

Away is a good example of how Slack can get totally out of hand if your company culture is toxic.

Venkat keeps churning out these legendary and broadly valid pieces. This one is about why everything online is on fire all the time. Strap in.

I have nothing but immense respect for these people who built a Slack client for Windows 3.1, turning retro computing into retro programming.