We all know that our data floating in the cloud is being kept, monitored, analyzed, and sold. Tell Alexa your hopes and dreams, how perhaps you are having trouble sleeping, and he'll blab to Jeff Bezos about it. Maybe Jeff uses that gossip to sell you a better mattress.

Google Assistant and Cortana (RIP) are both blabbermouths, too. It's not unreasonable to think Siri rolls with the same crowds. But I'm not so sure. Most of what you tell Siri never leaves your phone. Even for processing your voice, it's all done on your iDevice.

Listen, I get it. We live in a capitalist world with faceless shareholders and petulant billionaires. Why would Apple be any different? Part of me knows that enough time passes and my foot will eventually reach my mouth. But right now, based on the information available, it's clear that Apple is killing the cloud as we know it. And it's doing so in favor of on-device computing and storage.

Anything that floats in the air is encrypted and out of Tim Cook's reach. That's an incredible feat. It shows a path for tech companies to profit without soaking themselves in our data. Will Amazon or Google ever give up their data addiction? Likely not. But start-ups sprout every day.

Over the last few years, Apple has favored on-device computing and encryption:

1. Siri processes on-device
2. So does dictation
3. And the Neural Network
4. Our files live on our devices first
5. All our stuff in iCloud is encrypted

Plus, iPhones increase storage every year like clockwork. We can get 2TB mobile devices. That's wild. I mean, it's overpriced like hell, but it's still amazing.

iCloud has essentially become a traffic guard that directs our digital lives from one iDevice to the next. And it never asks, “How's your day, hot shot?” That seems like a good thing.

Note: This post is mainly rushed thoughts. I'll keep adding and polishing.

Type: #Note Re: #Apple #Technology

Link to post here.

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has taken a wishy-washy stance on news and its roll on the Threads platform. He's mentioned “over promising” and “under delivering” at least a couple of times. Whatever the hell that means, I don't buy it.

Meta does not like posts that take you off its app, like ones with URLs. Like news. They never have. That's really the crux of this news situation.

Facebook learned that bullying news outlets into publishing natively on Instant Articles does not work. If it did work, and Threads could keep everyone on the app while offering breaking news coverage, the folks at Meta would be singing a different tune.

Mosseri says he won't “amplify” news. He has yet to, as far as I'm aware, define what “news” is and isn't. He has not announced what “amplify” means, or if the opposite of that means “suppress.”

This whole news thing is a convenient problem for Meta because now they can flag all URLs as “news” and suppressed it in their algorithm. Are cooking blogs considered news? Who knows.

Anyway, let's all be good little users and creators who exist only to amplify Fortune 500 companies and produce content for Meta's large language models.

Type: #Note Re: #Meta #SocialMedia

By all accounts from great designers, this aesthete view of design is a misguided dogma.

Design can absolutely be a work of art. But unlike, say, a painting, a logo design derives its beauty from function.

Art may live without any justification. It is art, and its purpose is simply to exist.

Design, however, must prove it is worthy of existence by demonstrating a functional ability. If design fails to meet this threshold, it is neither art nor design. It is noise.

Type: #Note Re: #Design

Every Noise Ever wonder what genre an artist belongs to? In an effort to categorize music and personalize playlists, Spotify “invented” a bunch of sub genres. Every Noise lets you enter an artist name and reveal the associated sub genres.

First iPhone Impressions Noted Apple blogger and Markdown inventor John Gruber writes about his experience with the first ever iPhone in 2007.

Autonomy Online A Case For The IndieWeb Name says it all. Good write up.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey tweets his love for the stock Notes app on iOS (2018) Nothing wrong with using notes but, I never felt the urge to evangelize Apple's most neglected bloatware. Jack seems to love it. Good for him. Maybe he can write an apology in it for selling twitter to a child.

Publishing to 11ty with iA Writer and Micropub I am this close to building a custom blog. I've done a ton of research to find a good static blog framework and 11ty seems to be a favorite among bespoke bloggers. Here's what appears to be a great tutorial (haven't done it yet) that explains how to set up an 11ty-powered blog and post directly from iA Writer. It's exactly what I want to do so I'm excited to try it.

Type: #Note Re: #Finds

Admittedly, I'm a bit of a fanatic with writing apps. I see a new one, and I must try it. And I've tried them all. Fifteen or so over the past decade. So I bounce around a lot, sue me.

The ones I remember

A list of writing apps I've used a non-trivial amount. App Store only. In no particular order.

1. Ulysses
2. iA Writer
3. Day One Journal
4. Vesper (RIP)
5. Google Docs
6. Apple Notes
7. Notion
8. Evernote
9. Notability
10. OneNote
11. Final Draft
12. Writer Duet
13. Write.as
14. Bear
15. Untitled
16. Drafts 1.0

I've settled down in my old age, though. I've used Ulysses for three years because it's a great writing tool.

My main beef with Ulysses is it doesn't save my writing in .txt files in my iCloud folder by default. It still uses my storage, of course, housing my files that take up space on my hard drive. But they hide the folder from me and manage my writing files in the Ulysses proprietary format.

I know using proprietary file formats is a common practice, but it's particularly infuriating when text editors do it. It's text. Virtually plain text at that. Dump it all uncategorized in a single folder, I don't care. Keep your fancy file extensions if you have practical uses for it, I don't care. Just don't obstruct my ability to leave you.

But Jason, Ulysses has an export button that allows you to save in multiple open formats in any folder you wish!

Yes. And to be fair, I'm also now aware of the external folder feature. It took me three years of writing before discovering it, but I guess that's better than nothing. My problem is that these features are passive with a manual process. Ulysses' archival method is still hidden and proprietary. When I download a writing app, it's a tool for writing, not a method of obstructive storage (I pay Apple for that privilege.)

In other words, my writing shouldn't be a function of the writing tool. The tool is a function of my writing. I could write in a text file for the rest of my life and be happy. And I'll do it, man. I can quit all these writing apps whenever I want, man.

Listen, painters don't keep their art inside the house of the dude who sold them the canvas. And that canvas isn't in a proprietary— I could beat this metaphor into glue.

I blame the SaaS model

Is software as a service (SaaS) a better model for those who can't afford a large lump sum? Tech companies often make this claim in defense of their rent-to-never-own software. Of course, that's not the reason everything is subscription-based these days.

The claim that SaaS makes the tools we need more accessible is valid in the sense that it lowers the barrier to entry. But it's not better for anyone except the companies who enjoy perpetual monthly fees. For the consumer, it means we pay more in the long term. We can then cancel and leave with nothing, or we can pay until we die.

It's the boots theory in full effect.

From Men at Arms (1993):

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

A “poor man” will spend more in his lifetime for a worse pair of boots than someone who can afford the upfront expense of premium footwear. SaaS models produce similar outcomes. We pay a smaller monthly fee for the implied promise of long-term, iterative software improvements. But subscription models don't incentivize companies to make better “boots,” just deeper moats that keep us trapped inside the service.

When it's time to cancel, because we can't afford the fees, or we found a better service, we first have to cross the moat. Whether having to find a hidden cancelation process, or exporting our work one file at a time, the resulting effort feels a lot like wet feet. Ulysses has a straightforward canceling process because I subscribe via Apple's App Store, but the migration process is more cumbersome than it needs to be.

SaaS models also demand perpetual growth, which means specialized tools slowly morph into “everything apps.” In my opinion, this is what's happening with Ulysses. Developers keep adding new features that move further from the Markdown-powered, distraction-free writing experience I value in a text editor. For example, Ulysses started hosting images in the file, requiring a proprietary file format. It's a feature aimed at new writers who are uncomfortable with Markdown, presumably. So as a monthly subscriber, it doesn't feel like I'm paying for the tool as much as I'm funding the company's future and continued growth.

Conclusion

I don't know the answer here. Indie developers need stable revenue streams, I get that. But the subscription model isn't in users' best interests, no matter how hard companies try to sell us on it.

I moved to iA Writer for two reasons:

1. I already owned the apps, both iPhone and iPad. I paid in full in 2012 and then in 2017. When the time comes, I'll pay again. Offering a one-time payment option removes the temptation to keep me locked into a subscription.
2. iA Writer respects my writings. They save my files in .txt in a folder where I have full access.

Writing is a personal experience for me. And yeah, a lot of it is just shitty drivel. But it's my shitty drivel. My writings are an account of my experiences. They're records of my existence. All I ask from my writing app is to store them without obstruction, automatically and by default. Not tucked behind an app with a shiny interface. I don't think that's asking for too much.

Sources of inspiration

Choose Boring Technology

Write in Plain Text Files

Type: #Note Re: #Apps #Writing

Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk's purchase approaches, the identity of the sender remains unknown.

The article Collins refers to was published by an ex-Trump staffer and texted to Elon Musk before his Twitter purchase. It outlines a strategy wishlist for destroying the platform. Such items include blaming the ADL when advertisers flee, purging the “blue checks” and deplatforming prominent accounts, which, the article text predicted, would be a “battle.”

Ben Collins provides the details via video on TwitterX. In it, he asks for help revealing the person who texted Elon the article link, which is currently redacted.

A friend and I often debate whether Elons actions are a deliberate attempt to kill the bird app. My friend, more reasonable than I, reminds me not to blame malice for stupidity. And he's right. Even with Collins' reporting, how do we prove intent? But man, it's hard not to draw conclusions. Elon is like Jack Donaghy with none of the charm, and Tucker Carlson's Twitter show is God Cop.

https://youtu.be/clPlucoobUg?si=eQsIDoKndI19-vt7

Type: #Note Re: #Twitter

Meta also did not use private chats on its messaging services as training data for the model and took steps to filter private details from public datasets used for training, said Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, speaking on the sidelines of the company's annual Connect conference this week.

Emphasis mine.

This is a neat little trick. A reasonable reader, or someone not completely cynical, may think the term “private chat” just means chats, which are private in nature.

But Facebook / Meta doesn't believe chats are inherently private. Privacy is an opt-in feature on Messenger. You must explicitly switch on the end-to-end encryption. Only then will Meta agree to keep out of your user data.

From Facebook's help center:

A secret conversation in Messenger is encrypted end to end, which means the messages are intended just for you and the other person – not anyone else, including us.

So, when Nick Clegg, Meta's President of Global Affairs, goes on record to say the company's AI doesn't train on “private chats,” it reads like a benign statement. But, it's impossible to decipher how Clegg is using the term— as an adjective, or part of a noun with a precise technical meaning.

It's possible that the term belongs to Reuters, as “private chat” isn't directly quoted. But I find that to be a weird liberty for a journalist to take in a published interview.

Okay, I know it sounds like I'm splitting hairs but, in five years when an exposé breaks, and Zuck is invited to another congressional hearing over privacy concerns, that phrasing gives him an out.

Zuck can be like “we didn't mean private, we meant Private™. Then some congressperson with a hundred grand in Meta stock can throw up their hands and be like “who's to say, case closed.”

I know of at least one other situation where this type of wordplay occurs.

Ever been pulled over by a cop and they ask “mind if I search your car?” They specifically ask like this because you're likely to respond with “yes” or “no.” And because of the way the question is phrased, both potential answers can imply consent to search.

“Mind if I search your car?” “No.”

You may've meant “no you can't search my car,” but a cop can argue to a judge that they thought you meant “no, I don't mind.” The reverse is true with the answer yes. “Yes I mind” and “yes I give you consent” are both plausible interpretations.

It's a neat little trick.

Type: #Note Re: #Meta #Privacy #Technology

A credible threat to (and from) commercial social network silos/1 Case against Facebook joining the Fediverse (ActivityPub). I like this essay because it touches on the concept of Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish, a tactic Microsoft used in the 90s to kill open source technology.

King of the Hill Animation Style Guide A detailed best practices for animators of the show. A fascinating peek into all the work that goes into animating a classic tv show.

The Website Obesity Crisis I can never get enough manifestos against what I like to call “flash and trash” web design.

Designers Against Monoculture Fight against corporate design sensibilities. Even has a badge you can display on your website.

Taco Bell Programming Interesting and succinct philosophy.

Type: #Note Re: #Finds #Manifesto

From How a startup full of ex-iPhone talent is trying to make phones obsolete:

Humane is trying to realize the promise of “ambient computing” — an artificial intelligence-driven computing experience that’s personal and contextual — by building a software platform and hardware line that doesn’t rely on screens.

Go on...

Humane was founded by Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, ex-Apple employees who played major roles in the creation of both the iPhone and iPad.

Two ex-Apple employees who want to make a (presumably) better AI assistant than Siri? Okay, I'm listening...

At Humane, their stated goal is building technology that's “familiar, natural, and human,” betters the human experience, and is “born from good intentions.” The company believes “we all deserve more from technology,”

Here it comes...

Chaudhri also stresses that Humane is focused on “trust and privacy from day zero.” You should have control over what your technology knows, “your data should be owned by you and only you.”

Oh, fuck off lol.

I'm so tired of the “better tomorrow” promise from snazzy tech start-ups. These “privacy from day zero” promises cannot be kept in the longterm. Not if they want VC funding. Not if they want to go public. Not if they build their empire on techno-capitalism.

But please, continue.

the company is building screen-free ambient computing hardware, and a platform for it to run on, possibly with Android as a starting point...

El Em Motherfucking Aye Oh.

Emphasis mine.

Type: #Note Re: #Privacy #Siri #Technology

And boy, did I find some stuff.

The old web is alive and, well, its alive at least. I have a bucket-full of bookmarks I have to sort through but, I'd like to post them here soon, under some undecided context.

Update: this is now a growing list of sites from the old web.

Various sites from the old web

Some of these sites haven't been updated in decades, some are still updated regularly.

1. There was Tigerden's Big Page of Furry Links, which delivers exactly what it promises (I wouldn't click on the links in that list, though. The site is twenty years old, who knows where those URLs go to now).

2. There's the Project Xanadu page from the folks who invented the concept of hyperlinks (jump-links to them). They're snarky and stubborn in their philosophy. I love it. Here's a 1995 article from Wired about their story titled The Curse of Xanadu. Good read.

3. Stinkymeat— A well documented three week prank.

4. Internet Explorer is Evil— haven't read the entire site but I vibe with its premise. Wonder though if sites like this were a precursor to the Bill Gates micro-chip conspiracy theories?

5. The Internet Pizza Server is a charming little oddity. Here's the pizza I ordered with pepperoni, green peppers, and fingers.

6. A forum discussing 9/11 as it was happening. Eerie and surreal stuff. “I was on the “E” Train, which heads straight into the WTC, only seconds before the crash, when I decided to switch to the “R” Train (which avoids the WTC). I would probably still be stuck on the train now, and for hours afterwards.”

7. The LoserUsers— I can't make heads or tails on what this site is in reference to.

Special Interests

1. Lost Parks— a page dedicated to all of Florida's lost tourist attractions. Started in 1997 and was updated as recent as 2015 from what I can tell

2. A brief history of Psychological Operations from a Desert Storm Vet. A fascinating read. I couldn't find any mention of the internet as an effective medium for PSYOPs, to give you an idea how old the site is.

3. “Weird Al” Yankovic Homepage

Guides & Tutorials

Detailed instructions for accomplishing something.

1. DIY Cellphone is a guide that literally shows you how to make your own cellphone, by a couple of MIT folks.

2. An old HTML Tutorial from Stanford with a fun writing voice. “...we'll share what we've learned over the months in the School of Hard Knocks. Of course, everything we tried worked...NOT!!“

3. Cold Water Reactor

4. The SECRET Guide to Computers

Digital Repositories, Collections, & Archives

Writings, graphics, gifs, and other things made of 1s and 0s from the old web.

1. Iconology

2. Hacked Sites

3. Complete Review— A Literary Saloon and Site Review

4. Ascii Art Dictionary from Andreas Freise

5. Lies, Damn Lies & ICQ Messages

Vintage Digital Gardens

Personal homepages from the old internet dedicated to documenting their lives, experiences, and interests.

1. Dennis M. Ritchie

2. Julia A. Ziring's Home Page

3. Ziring MicroWeb Homepage

4. Paul Burgess

5. Blaisdell's Little Corner of the Web

6. Sprott's Gateway

7. Phil Reynolds' Home Page

8. Ivy's Domain

9. Phillip Helbig

Contact me about this list

How to reach me.

If a listing is harmful: While I always poke around, I haven't thoroughly reviewed all of the sites listed. If you see something listed you think is harmful, please contact me so I can remove it.

If you have an addition: I can't promise I'll add everything submitted, but I welcome contributions!

If you want your site removed: If your site is listed and you want it removed, let me know. I'll be happy to remove it.

If a link is broken: If you come across a broken link, let me know.

• Categories
  • Type: #Note
  • Re: #OldWeb #DigitalGarden #Collection
• Dates
  • Created: 10/01/2023
  • Last Edited: 10/01/2023