ongoing by Tim Bray, podcast version

I’ve just finished setting up a new Mac (14" MBP, M2 Pro, 32G, 4T). It dawned on me that most of my really intense interactions with this thing involve looking at “monospace” (i.e. fixed-width) text; in Emacs where I write this blog, in my IDE, and in my terminal. The ones that came with the machine by default are, well, OK, but maybe we can do better. So I got on Mastodon and asked: “Dear LazyWeb: Setting up a new Mac, what are some groovy new monospace fonts for terminals and IDEs?”...

Like many geeks, I hoard a few dozen domain names, and currently they include the .com/.org/.net triple for “classreductionist”. “Class Reductionist” is considered an insult by many progressives and as far as I know, there’s no organized faction claiming the label. And while I wouldn’t either, I’m pretty sure I’d support the key policy goals that a hypothetical Class Reductionist would...

Here’s how to get into a lot of trouble:
Suppose you (like me) love the intellectual wealth found in free-form text on the Internet.
And (like me) are a reasonably competent programmer.
And (like me) have derived value and pleasure searching Twitter.
And (like me) you look at this nifty new Fediverse thing and see that it has nice Web APIs so you could build an app to vacuum up all the stories and laments and cheers and dunks and love letters and index ’em and let everyone search ’em and find wonderful things! So you lurch into the Mastodon conversation, all excited, and blurt out “Hey folks, I’m gonna index all this stuff and let the world in!”
That’s when you get your face torn off...

The big story occupying space in my mind (and on this blog) is the #TwitterMigration. As Twitter grows troubled and troubling, “Fediverse” technologies in general and Mastodon in particular are successfully attracting many users and providing a pleasant experience. Everyone is wondering out loud whether Mastodon can take the strain and whether it can provide cool new features. What we haven’t been discussing are two ethical questions: First, is it OK to bail out of Twitter? And if bailing out, is Mastodon a acceptable place to land?...

I hope everyone’s winter (or summer, depending) is going well. I find myself much busier recently, but still the browser tabs add up. Herewith another curation of long-form pieces that few will have time for all of, but a subset of them may be enriching for a subset of you...

I hate to write a piece just saying Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. But Reid Blackman’s The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs (in the NYTimes, forsooth) is not just wrong but dangerously misleading. I haven’t seen a compact explainer on why, so here goes...

[Update: As of Jan 1, 2023 this is fixed! Thanks to Danny Sullivan and John Mueller of Google for figuring out what was going on. Yay!]
I think Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web. I think I can prove it. Google’s competition is doing better. [Update, Feb. 2022: It’s still happening.]...

I write this on December 16, 2022, as the landscape shifts convulsively, as Twitter becomes the main character on Twitter. It’s reasonable to wonder what comes next...

Over on Mastodon, there are many people who enjoy not being in the grip of software like Facebook or Twitter that single-mindedly tries to maximize “engagement”, which means the amount of time you stare at the screen so they can show you ads. These algorithms don’t care what they’re showing you and if it turns out that showing you exclusively stories vilifying or praising Donald Trump (depending) maximizes engagement, then that’s what you’ll see. So the chant over there is “No algorithms on Mastodon!” This chant is wrong, and the discussion around it teaches us that we need clarity on what algorithms are, what moral weight they can carry, and whether they can be avoided. (Spoiler: They can’t.)...

Today I’m leaving Twitter, because I don’t like making unpaid contributions to a for-profit publisher whose proprietor is an alt-right troll. But also because it’s probably going to break down. Read on for details...