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Sat Apr 4 10:00:01 UTC 2026
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Slept from two to eight.
Rain and a chance of thunderstorms.
Highs in the mid 60s.
Southeast winds 10 to 15 mph, becoming southwest in the late afternoon.
Gusts up to 30 mph.
Chance of rain near 100 percent.
Read more of You Are Not A Gadget.
Wow.
It's striking to read something by somewhat who's thought so much about a lot of the same topics as me but has come to such misaligned conclusions.
Even making allowances for the age of the book, it's remarkable.
Lanier writes, for example, that Google sitting as an advertising monopoly in the middle of web search is at worst benign, and that anonymity is bad for the web.
There have long been discussions about online anonymity as the bane of civility, but (speaking as someone publishing on a domain name with my real full name) it's never been difficult to understand the vital necessities of anonymity.
(To be fair, Lanier doesn't seem to be making the civility argument.
He seems to be saying that anonymity or _pseudonymity_ divorces content from attribution to its creator, which is maybe a kind of intellectual property washing that enables unfair commercial misuse or or else the harm is general dehumanization.
Lanier throws this down in a vague aside, unfortunately, and he goes on to make the civility argument a few pages later.)
Apart from the odd ideas, Lanier's writing is imprecise.
For example, does he not understand Moore's Law or is he using it as a metaphor loose enough to be nearly indecipherable?
Is he saying that interoperability dependencies increase at a surprisingly rapid rate like the doubling of transistor density every two years?
...
No, after rereading the section, Lanier explicitly writes that increased computational power literally compounds non-optimal software designs, but doesn't explain how.
He goes on to knock Unix for (reader, take your pick) having a command-line interface or not having a realtime kernel or working with concrete rather than abstract ideas or not have responsive-enough buttons.
Where did I see the recommendation for this book?
Kottke?
Wikipedia says TIME maned Lanier as one of the top 100 public intellectuals.
Good grief!
I'll keep reading for a bit.
Ran Macbook backup.
While watching the intro to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (which I either haven't watched before or completely forgot): oh, shitty 3D computer animation, I hope the whole thing isn't computer generated.
(It's not.)
I recalled an article about the nostalgia the aesthetics of PS1 graphics, with which I feel some sympathy.
Is the 1994 lower poly-count, reflectionless aesthetic of the PS1 inherently more appealing, or have I just not had time to become nostalgic for the 2002 glossy 3d curves of the Stand Alone Complex intro.
Can nostalgia be manufactured?
Watched Tarantino's Death Proof.
Pacing a little slow and the some of it's ham-handed (the film grain filter) but the last thirty minutes are really fun.
Servings: grains 3/4, vegetables+fruit 1/5, dairy+meat 1/4, nuts+beans 0/0.5
Brunch: left-over fried rice
Afternoon snack: potato chips
Dinner:
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