Documenting Life

“That’s what I think this is all about, this reflexive insistence that 2020 is the distant past, that really it wasn’t that big of a deal – if you acknowledge that there was this big political moment, that you and all your friends believed in it, that you yelled and marched and beat a drum for it, and then that moment failed according to its own outsized demands, well, then maybe you’ve been owned. Maybe you’ve been made to look foolish. Maybe you don’t actually exist at a permanent remove from ordinary human frustration and disappointment. Maybe you can fail, can be hurt, can be gotten to. And we can’t have that. So you look at the excess and failure of a passionate moment, when you allowed yourself to get carried away, and you say oh, well, hey. That was so long ago, and it wasn’t a really big deal”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/it-seems-like-the-reckoning-has-become

“That is to say, she is suggesting a comparison (traditional publishing houses vs self-publishing) when she has no numbers with which to make the comparison. There’s no big self-publishing merger that produced lots of public data to crunch. Against the hard numbers that make publishing look bad, she can only pitch broad waves to conditions in self-publishing. That’s because we simply don’t have the necessary information. But it is a certainty that self-publishing follows a Pareto distribution as well. There is no doubt that the vast majority of people trying to make it in self-publishing are failing. There is no doubt that the vast majority working on newsletters will not have the success Griffin has had. Success in creative fields is hard to come by no matter what the model. That’s always been true of the arts! There’s no halcyon days when most artists made a living, and every reason to believe that creators of all types face”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/publishing-is-designed-to-make-most

“As the day went on, assorted commentators dusted off their “whisper it, but Susan Hall could win” takes – not necessarily because they believed them, but simply because they didn’t want to be the one who’d laughed off the possibility if it happened. That evening the BBC political editor herself tweeted that, “No votes have been counted yet… but it is clear tonight that the race is much much closer than some polls had suggested…” How any such thing could be clear when no votes had been counted was an open question. All that was clear was that a lot of people were saying the race was much closer than some polls had suggested.

And the moment we started to see any actual vote numbers, the narrative collapsed”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/what-just-happened

“Logitech committed a bunch of sins with this mouse driver. First, it just seems ridiculous to add an AI prompt feature to a mouse driver. Second, no matter what the feature, it’s wrong to add a top-level folder to a user’s home directory — and it’s especially wrong to give such a folder a dumb name like “ai_overlay_tmp”

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/06/hackett-logitech-mouse-driver

One is that, in contrast to cuisines from many of the world’s other countries, you’re not likely to run into a “British restaurant” anywhere else in the world. The other is that a lot of Americans on social media periodically enjoy taunting the inhabitants of Airstrip One about our terrible, bland food. it doesn’t matter how often anyone points out that tourists are disproportionately likely to end up in tourist traps, that the national dish is curry, or that you can, in most British cities, now find decent food from any one of a dozen major cuisines: no American in history has encountered a single flavour anywhere upon the island of Great Britain, and the entire population of the UK is confidently believed to be so terrified of spices that we all shrivel up, slug like, in the presence of even half a pinch of salt.

https://jonn.substack.com/p/questions-of-appetite