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Frankly, I think everyone is so focused on comparing Vision Pro to the Quest 3 that they’re missing the point of what the Vision Pro really is: it’s going to disrupt the TV and projection screens industry. Why would anyone spend $3,000 on a cutting-edge TV when the Vision Pro will give you a resizable screen that’s also portable and can easily display all of your content?

Raymond Wong gets it.

I’m not a huge VR booster, but for the last two decades I’ve consumed Apple products while they’ve disrupted consumer electronics and consumer computing again and again. The Vision Pro is not something I yearn to use every day — unless it obsoletes the main screens in my life. I still haven’t bought that second monitor, and the only person in the house that wants to upsize our OLED TV is me.

I think there’s a real possibility the Vision Pro is the OLED TV upgrade excuse I’ve been waiting for, and it’s pitch over the competition is very, very Apple: if you’re just buying for yourself, the Vision Pro is the simplest way to get a huge OLED TV. You don’t have to compare specs. You don’t have to measure distance from the couch, or be concerned about windows and glare. You don’t need a stud finder or to hire an installation service.

It still comes down to absolutely nailing viewing comfort and immersiveness, and any doubts I may have harbored about a VR headset not getting there soon may be fading if I keep reading accounts such as Raymond’s above.

It started with this deal on stickers last year. $29 / roll of 100, die cut stickers. The kids were 1.5 and 4. I had to:

Then there was the $14 t-shirt one off which is perfect timing for getting a sense of the wife’s specialty cut flower business:

And this week they drop this “stand up pouches” at a deep discount just in time for one of J’s best artworks yet:

So yeah StickerMule is a lot of fun and possibly habit forming, but bringing meaningful-to-me images into the world makes me feel good.

just because you want to be studio boy with logic pro doesn’t mean you take your eye off the ball: batch processing a bunch of stem-based audio projects from a digital mixer (zoom livetrak, tascam models, etc) into something you can listen to for quick reference.

that’s the goal i wanted to achieve.

that’s not a job for logic pro, that’s a job for a robot. a software robot. and you write software robot things and can figure out how to do stuff, but these days you have chatgpt.

just look what me and the robot made in like 30 minutes.

look at what my virtual robot music wife now does for me:

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wow! look — i could have coded something that does this but python is not my first language, nor second nor third, so it would have taken time. i did this just by typing for the length of a friends rerun (with commercials). while high.

this is a gosh darn tootin' excellent deployment of technology, if you ask me.

but the copyrights

to say this takes away a task from an audio engineer or even one who can script logic pro (I assume you can, maybe you can’t) is stupid because i was never going to pay someone to do this. maybe i’d just find time to scrub through some wav files, totally manually.

this really unlocks a level of DIY audio workstation tooling for anyone, and substitute “audio” for whatever digital ingredients you feel like feeding the robots. when you work with these machines intentionally to generate something specific to your needs — and if you succeed in extracting value from the work — what you’re engaging in is so far refined from its source material (the training dataset), to call any part of it copyright infringement is kinda insane. sorry.

it’s probably icky and legally dubious what the openAIs of the world do, but genie out of the bottle etc etc, and i could just as easily have generated the above with some heirloom variety, ethically-raised LLM running locally on my mac studio.

go ahead and use the robots. please don’t be evil (like you’ve been doing all along right?).

if people want to make the internet more like the 90s / 00s, let’s do it and let’s do it right this time. Your gonna have to pay a little bit for it. That’s okay. Because this the kind of stuff that you, yes you, actually love about the internet:

The internet is good things. For me, it’s things I love, like Keyboard Cat and Double Rainbow. It’s personal blogs and LiveJournals; it’s AIM away messages and MySpace top 8s. It’s the distracted-­girlfriend meme and a subreddit for “What is this bug?” It is a famous thread on a bodybuilding forum where meatheads argue about how many days are in a week. For others, it’s Call of Duty memes and the mindless entertainment of YouTubers like Mr. Beast, or a place to find the highly specific kind of ASMR video they never knew they wanted. It’s an anonymous supportive community for abuse victims, or laughing at Black Twitter’s memes about the Montgomery boat brawl, or trying new makeup techniques you learned on TikTok.

Good shit, @katienotopoulos.bsky.social.

The Bear s2e6 is a pivotal episode of television. I think it was canonized in the McLuhan days that TV is a close-up medium? “Fishes” exemplifies this. There’s a close up on Donna — Jamie Lee Curtis — where she makes this frown and her face looks almost skeletal… so much remorse. That was the frame that really caught my attention to the extremely intentional cinematography of the episode.

The whole season has more tight framed close ups of meaningful fascial expressions than I remember seeing in any TV show of recent memory. We still haven’t finished it, but I’m assuming it’s going to be my favorite season of TV for 2023. Of course, tragically, the earliest we’d hope to get resolution is probably… 2025?

2 eps into The Bear S2… just a goddamn masterpiece of a piece of media we can’t talk about as a collective because of fragmented media viewing habits.

it has everything we need to be discussing in america right now:

• how running a small business that does something real is too expensive
• wanting to do something life-fulfilling that doesn’t involve making oodles of money, which everyone seems to want you to do
• real structural problems, as in the environment we live and work, covered in maintenance band-aids over the years that is finally in need of real repair
• the true cost of trying to improve your station, or someone else’s, in life
• how do we even have fun? there’s so much work to be done
• good t shirts somehow cost $75

Make it Great Again, but This Time It’ll Be Different. It will be better than it used to be, but it used to be a lot better. What didn’t work then won’t work now, but also what did work then also is not working now. So here’s Change You Can Believe in, but if you vote for it we’ll make sure the status quo remains intact.

i figured out safari tab groups. their purpose, how they’re supposed to be used.

scenario: you open a bunch of tabs loosely tied to the first tab, set A. you’re done with set A and now you do something that would start set B in a new tab, but its completely unrelated.

this is where you save set A as a tab group with a meaningful name and close that shit. its there if you need it again.

tab groups manilla folders full of semi-related bits of hypermedia in an infinite filing cabinet. you still have to open the drawer to find it and it maybe gets worse if you let it get too full, but extremely helpful when the need arises to look things up again.

the goal is to not end the day in multi-tab, multi-window hell.

its an anti- “just google it” approach, because doing that over and over for the same information throughout your life is insane. its also better than bookmarks because you’re not browsing one website, you’re engaging with a collection of living media. its your focus in tabs, captured as a group. get it?

ok the UX is atrocious, for sure. its barely discoverable and thus seemingly has minimal utility.

i think a fun way to do tab groups would be to show 5 placeholder indicators for browser tabs in the toolbar, such as semi-opaque dots in a row. once you fill those 5, reveal a “create tab group” button with a one-time popover explainer. ‘Untitled’ has to go away — use ML to just name the group for me.

Hypothesis: all difficulties in professional relationships stem from a communication imbalance. Not enough questions were asked, or politics prevents a certain kind of communication flow, or someone important didn’t have email for 12 hours.

In the era of multimodal business comms, where inter-party convos happen across all available channels — in meetings (IRL/virtual), phone calls, emails, SMS, chat apps — what all digitally-connected comms channels have in common is the ability to control notifications: how and how quickly one receives a digital bloop that something might need your attention. Let’s include calendar events here as well.

I do what works for me: zero email notifications, almost no red badges, and everything else kind of makes its way in, at least to my desktop during work hours.

But other than the one or two colleagues I may have discussed notifications with, I really can only assume what notifications others receive, and that’s probably not great.

Notifications are an important part of communicating asynchronously, but we’ve sort of left it up to the individual to decide their own notification hygiene. In the last 15orso years, I don’t recall reading anything influential about notification management on the scale of, for instance, Inbox Zero, bullet journaling or todo list workflows.

So while I assume everyone with me on Teams gets Teams notifications, it seems that sometimes follow-up emails are necessary. Was that a notification problem or something else?

Additionally, I’d like to occasionally send an email at 7pm without worrying that someone on my team thinks its urgent; I’ll never send an urgent email at 7pm and expect a response right away. I probably just had something on my mind I want to get out there. I personally assume emails to be non-urgent all of the time. Having realtime notifications for email always seemed kind of maddening to me.

Lack of notification hygiene can also lead to too many bloops, obviously, and I think having an awareness of notification management — especially disabling as many red badges as you can get away with — can lead to greater mental health. For a newly installed app, assuming that the options are either “receive notifications” or “receive no notifications” could cause the over-notified to simply disable all new notification requests by default, which is fine until it isn’t.

At the moment, having a team meeting to discuss notification standards seems like a woo-woo silicon valley-inspired business practice, but I’ve really never heard of such a thing. I’d like to hear about it though. Having a set of notification expectations seems very reasonable in 2023.

the problem is, we don’t need a lot of smart connected things. we each want one or two smart connected things.

but we each want different connected things.

that makes for a very large market of connected things. but there aren’t enough manufacturers to make them well, and they all generate knock-on effects that are unique to the user.

so there’s just a lot of really bad digital crap out there and most of it is disappointing.

If I were to start a new web app in 2023, I’d use whatever full-stack server-side framework I prefer and host it on the service that will get it standing up on a public IP address quickly. That’s my sole criteria.

Use bare metal JS for as long as you can stand. Dip into htmx or the hotwire stack when you need to get a little more fancy.

Write your own reusable components. You can even call them partials and they can even work outside of a single file. Datepickers are native now so how complex is that widget you need really?

Add icons and other assets directly to your app, like a gentleman of yore.

Just go as long as possible without having to npm install.

It’s been interesting to see how much folks have come out against the JS Framework-Driven-Development practices of the last 5-7 years, and they have some good reasons. Some of them are just telling on themselves or blaming trends for their bad decision making; I’ve made some mistakes in the name of hype myself. I don’t think React or Angular or any framework is inherently A Bad Way to Do Websites, but it’s been very frustrating for the thought leaders to only recently be waking up to the benefits of server-side generated pages — as if this is a newly discovered performance breakthrough and not the way the web worked forfucking ever.

For the most part, most web developers aren’t out there trying to move fast and break things all the time. In that environment, new dependencies that immediately solve an issue in a brittle environment are appealing, and a package manager to manage that stack of dependencies even more so. You’ve got lots of new hires to onboard and don’t have time to walk each one of them through homespun code, so why not use as many open source packages as you can.

No… most web developers are out there trying to make websites that just work, and the more senior ones remember when websites really did just work, and they know the reason was because they weren’t layered with so much shit.

When you build websites that work and are easy to reason about, and where a little more time and consideration was spent working on code instead of just splat importing functions to make the CI pipeline go brrrr, you’re building durable software. You want to be able to throw a baseball at the reinforced glass window of your code and watch it bounce back, surface unmarred.

Build something that works, make it sustainable. If you want to grow it, being able to honestly pitch durability in your code is a value-add you can tout to the right investors. Know how everything in your code works. Know where every line of code comes from (mostly your repo). Know that the modern browser environment is no longer a hellscape. Sleep soundly knowing that there are no vulnerabilities down your dependency graph that will break half your packages when you try to move hosting providers.

It’s 2023. Code like it’s 2013.

Lately, when a website gives me guff, I just do not engage with the site. I’m glad I’m not the only one.

Go further than just reading on the web. I have no tolerance for slow checkouts that want me to sign up for a website to order a cool t-shirt. Blame it on Shopfiy.

I think that whenever a dumb website script is asking you to do something, or you become physiologically agitated by the performance of a digital experience, it’s important to take a step back and assess what value its actually providing to you. Does your attention (or your wallet) deserve better?