It’s as much of an age-old question as anything of the internet age is, but I think about it every few years. Slapping up a web page full of personal thoughts in 1999 didn’t carry the same weight that it does in 2024; employers, even ones literally in the internet space, didn’t necessarily do a web search on your...

There’s been plenty of words written already explaining why calling Trump, J. D. Vance, and the rest of the MAGA branch of the Republican Party—which is to say, the Republican Party—weirdos seems so effective. These conservatives have spent years, so the thought goes, asserting their worldview is the standard, the...

Two years ago, I moved back to Florida for family reasons; a year in, I mused on the changes, both good and bad, that the move brought. Now two years in, the most obvious life change is, (probably) unfortunately, employment. The executives at the company I’d been working at for over five years, remote full-time for...

In which I fall down a rabbit hole with a purported “AI novel writer,” and wonder what the result tells us about generative AI’s future. I spent nearly six years as a technical writer at an AI company, and it was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. I worked with some brilliant people, several of whom have gone on to...

There’s a maxim I see a lot among tech reviewers, which goes something like this: Buy a product for what it does now, not for what you hope it will do later. The product may never get a major new update at all, and it certainly might not get the update that you want. The iPad, for instance, can do many things, and...

About a year ago, I moved away from the San Francisco Bay Area, back to Tampa Bay, Florida, where I’d lived for (mostly) all my previous life. Florida is not the same place it was when I left. The metros feel more urban, more alive, than I remember. Some of that is undoubtedly on me, on my failure to explore them...

Those of you not plugged into the Mastodon community may not be aware of the predominant reaction to Instagram Threads. This started when it was merely rumored, reaching a crescendo with reports that Meta had been talking to a few of the larger Mastodon instances under NDA, presumably to encourage them not to...

So I’ve been seeing arguments for why, no, you should really stay on Twitter, because of the problems with anything vying to replace it. Most circle around what tech people might dub failure modes in terms of both engineering and policy. Make no mistake, many of these are solid arguments. Twitter has, as much as we...

I. I wasn’t born in California. I wasn’t born in Florida, either, even though it was, until 2002, the only place I ever remembered living, the place I would say I was from. I was born in Dallas, but only lived there maybe six months. I think the next place we moved was Albany, New York; I know that’s where we were...

When TextMate burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s, it didn’t take aim at Emacs and Vim as much as BBEdit, a Mac-only editor around more than a decade at that point. TextMate offered radically easy ways to create sophisticated new language modules and plugins compared to most editors of the day. Mostly, though,...

Update, April 2024: While this was all true when I wrote it in mid-2021, Nova has continued progressing, and I’ve actually ended up using it a lot more for web development than I expected to, chiefly because of its integrated workflow/task system—it turns out to be great for static site systems. Beyond that, though,...

So, what is it? Music mixed in Dolby Atmos. So, like, surround sound? Yes, with an asterisk we’ll come back to. Most surround systems use multiple channels: the original Dolby Surround used four (left, right, center, and rear), then moved to five (splitting the rear into left rear and right rear), and a few Even...