Welcome to the first Long Links of this so-far-pretty-lousy 2026. I can’t imagine that anyone will have time to
take in all of these, but there’s a good chance one or two might brighten your day.
Unclassified
Thomas Piketty is always right. For example,
Europe, a social-democratic
power.
Lying is wrong. Conservatives
do it all the time. To be fair,
that piece is about the capital-C flavor, as in the Canadian Tories. But still.
Clothing is open-source: “If you slice the different parts off with a seamripper, lay them all down, trace them on new
fabric, cut them out, and stitch them back together, you can effectively clone and fork
garments.” From
Devine Lu Linvega.
The Universe is weird. The Webb telescope keeps showing astronomers things that shouldn’t be there. For example,
An X-ray-emitting protocluster at z ≈ 5.7 reveals rapid structure
growth; ignore the title and read the Abstract and Main sections. With pretty pictures!
Music
One time in Vegas, I was giving a speech, something about cloud computing, and was surprised to find the venue an ornate
velvet-lined theater. I found out from the staff, and then relayed to the audience, that the last human before me to stand on this stage
in front of an audience had been Willie Nelson. I was tempted to fall to my knees and kiss the boards.
How Willie Nelson Sees America, from The
New Yorker, is subtitled “On the road with the musician, his band, and his family” but it ends up being the kernel of a
good biography of an interesting person. Bonus link; on YouTube,
Willie Nelson - Teatro, featuring Daniel Lanois & Emmylou Harris,
Directed by Wim Wenders. Strong stuff.
Speaking of recorded music, check out
Why
listening parties are everywhere right now. Huh? They are? As a deranged audiophile, sounds like my kind of thing. I’d go.
Somewhere to put worker bees
When I was working at AWS in downtown Vancouver back starting in 2015, a lot of our junior engineers lived in these
teeny-tiny little one-room-tbh apartments. It worked out pretty well for them, they were affordable and an easy walk from the
office and these people hadn’t built up enough of a life to need much more room.
For a while this trend of
so-called-“studio” flats was the new hotness in Vancouver and I guess around quite a bit of the developed world.
Us older types with families would look at the
condo market and tell each other “this is stupid”.
We were right. The
bottom is falling out and they’re sitting empty in their thousands. And not just the teeniest either, the whole
condo business is in the toilet. It didn’t help that for a few years all the prices went up every year (until they didn’t) and
you could make serious money flipping unbuilt condos, so lots of people did (until they didn’t).
Anyhow, here’s a nice write-up on the subject:
‘Somewhere to put worker bees’: Why Canada's micro-condos are losing
their appeal. (From the BBC, huh?)
AI AI AI
Sorry, I can’t not relay pro- and anti-GenAI posts, because that conversation is affecting all our lives just now. I am
actually getting ready to decloak my own conclusions, but for the moment I’m just sharing essays on the subject that strike me as
well-written and enjoyable for their own sake. Thus
‘AI' is a dick move, redux from Baldur
Bjarnason. Boy, is he mad.
Sam Ruby has been doing some
extremely weird shit, running Rails in the browser, as
in without even a network connection or a Ruby runtime. Yes, AI was involved in the construction.
Software
There’s this programming language called Ivy that is in the APL lineage; that acronym will leave young’uns blank but a few greying
eyebrows will have been raised. Anyhow,
Implementing the
transcendental functions in Ivy is delightfully geeky, diving deep with no awkwardness. By no less than Rob Pike.
Check out Mike Swanson’s
Backseat Software. That’s “backseat” as in “backseat driver”,
which today’s commercial software has now, annoyingly, become. This piece doesn’t make any points that I haven’t heard (or made
myself) elsewhere, but it pulls a lot of the important ones together in a well-written and compelling package. Recommended.
Old Googler Harry Glaser
reacts
with horror to the introduction of advertising by OpenAI, and makes gloomy predictions about how it will evolve. His predictions
are obviously correct.
The title says it:
Discovering a Digital
Photo Editing Workflow Beyond Adobe. It’d be a tough transition for me, but the relationship with Adobe gets harder and
harder to justify.
Indigenous reconciliation
Khelsilem is one of the loudest and clearest voices coming out of the Squamish nation, one of the larger and better-organized
Indigenous communities around here.
There has been a steady drumbeat of Indigenous litigation going on for decades as a
consequence of the fact that the British colonialists who seized the territory in what we now call British Columbia didn’t
bother to sign treaties with the people who were already there, they just assumed ownership. The Indigenous people have been
winning a lot of court cases, which makes people nervous.
Anyhow, Khelsilem’s
The Real Source of Canada's Reconciliation Panic
covers the ground. I’m pretty sure British Columbians should read this, and suspect that anyone in a jurisdiction undergoing similar
processes should too.
Resonant computing, Black and Blue sky
There’s this thing called the
Resonant Computing Manifesto, whose authors and signatories include names you’d
probably recognize. Not mine; the first of its Five Principles begins with “In the era of AI…” Also, it is entirely oblivious to
the force driving the enshittification of social-media platforms: Monopoly ownership and the pathologies of late-stage
capitalism.
Having said that, the vision it paints is attractive. And having said that, it’s now featured on the flags waved by
the proponents of ATProto, which is to say Bluesky. See Mike Masnick’s
ATproto:
The Enshittification Killswitch That Enables Resonant Computing (Mike is on Bluesky Corp’s Board). That piece is OK but, in
the comments, Masnick quickly gets snotty about the Fediverse and Mastodon, in a way that I find really off-putting. And once
again, says nothing about the underlying economic realities that poison today’s platforms.
I want to like Bluesky, but I’m just too paranoid and cynical about money. It is entirely unclear who is funding the people
and infrastructure behind Bluesky, which matters, because if Bluesky Corp goes belly-up, so does the allegedly-decentralized service.
On the other hand,
Blacksky is interesting. They are trying to prove that ATProto really can be made
decentralized in fact not just in theory.
Their ideas and their people are stimulating, and their
finances are transparent. I’ll be
moving my ATProto presence to Blacksky
when I get some cycles and the process has become a little more automated.
Good crypto
The cryptography community is working hard on the problem of what happens should quantum computers ever become real products as
opposed to over-invested fever dreams. Because if they ever work, they can probably crack the algorithms that we’ve been using
to provide basic Web privacy.
The problem is technically
hard — there are good solutions though — and also politically fraught,
because maybe the designers or standards orgs are corrupt or incompetent. It’s reasonable to worry about this stuff and people
do. They probably don’t need to: Sophie Schmieg dives deep in
ML-KEM Mythbusting.
Books
Here’s one of the most heartwarming things I’ve read in months:
A Community-Curated Nancy Drew
Collection. Reminder: The Internet can still be great.
John Lanchester’s
For Every Winner a Loser,
ostensibly a review of two books about famous financiers, is in fact an extended howl of
(extremely instructive) rage against the
financialization of everything and the unrelenting increase in inequality. What we need to do is to take the ill-gotten gains
away from these people and put it to a use — any use — that improves
human lives.
I talk a lot about late-stage capitalism. But Sven Beckert published a
1,300-page monster entitled Capitalism;
the link is to a NYT review and makes me want to read it..
Charlie Stross, the sci-fi author, likes webtoons and
recommends a bunch. Be careful, do
not follow those links if you’re already short of time. Semi- or fully-retired? Go ahead!
I have history with dictionaries. For several years of my life in the late Eighties, I was the research project manager for
the
New Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of
Waterloo. Dictionaries are a fascinating topic and, for much of the history of the publishing industry, were big money-makers;
they dominate any short list of the biggest-selling books in history. Then came the Internet.
Anyhow, Louis Menand’s
Is
the Dictionary Done For? starts with a review of a book by Stefan Fatsis entitled Unabridged: The Thrill of (and
Threat to) the Modern Dictionary which I haven’t read and probably won’t, but oh boy, Menand’s piece is big and rich and
polished and just a fantastic read. If, that is, you care about words and languages. I understand there are those who don’t, which is
weird. I’ll close with a quote from Menand:
“The dictionary projects permanence,” Fatsis concludes, “but the language is Jell-O, slippery and mutable and
forever collapsing on itself.” He’s right, of course. Language is our fishbowl. We created it and now we’re forever trapped
inside it.
