March 4, 2022
Weak principles, strong tribes
One of the most compelling metaphors of the battle between emotion and reason is that of the elephant and the rider. I first encountered it in Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. It goes like this: “The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning...
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March 3, 2022
No RailsConf
2021 was an incredible year for Ruby on Rails. We started it off still celebrating the third major version of Ruby, and left it with the accomplishment of the seventh major version of Rails. Together, these releases sparked a renewed enthusiasm for building modern web applications with Ruby on Rails, unlike anything I can recall since ...
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March 2, 2022
Diversify your life
If your existence is all about work, and work goes to shit, then life goes to shit too. If you live for your hobby, and your hobby hits the wall, then your life crashes too. If everything else is waiting until you hang with your mates, and your mates fade away, then you fade too. Betting your drive to get up in the morning on a single ...
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February 28, 2022
The other side of social media
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is at once reaffirming all the ills of social media and showing its utterly unique capacity to give a direct voice to anyone around the world. And while the more unfortunate expressions of this being due to "blue eyes and blond hair", it is fostering a strong sense of fraternity here in Europe. This just...
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February 26, 2022
Dangerous conversations going private
I went on Jason Calacanis' podcast this week for the fourth time. We've had some explosive, illuminating, and contested conversations over the years, Jason and I. And I've loved everyone of them. Whether we were discussing venture capital, profitable businesses, and the definition of success or talking about big tech, education, health...
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February 25, 2022
Russell Brand is grand
While Joe Rogan has served as a magnet for all the wagging fingers of the world, Russell Brand has somehow so far managed to build a five-million strong channel pushing equally or more heretic views without much consternation. It can't be long before the fingers start pointing in his direction. But I can see how he's been able to slide...
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February 24, 2022
The advantages of large, long-running pull requests
My favorite part of doing code reviews is to see all the trade-offs, design decisions, and changes in context together. You can't easily do that if your feature has been chopped into itty bitty pieces as independent pull requests under pressure never to let them run longer than a week. So at Basecamp, we let pull requests run as long a...
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February 23, 2022
Equating blasphemy with violence legitimizes the inquisition
By far the most furiously pushback I've received for writing about the Canadian trucker protest has come from calling it "peaceful". Objections to this term has taken many forms. But they all seek to justify the opposite label of "violent", no matter the blind logical leaps required. Some claim that the background of certain organizers...
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February 22, 2022
Simulacra
I never did make it all the way through Jean Baudrillard's book Simulacra and Simulation before I lost my paperback copy on a trip. But it lodged several perspectives deep in my brain that I'm still trying to process. One of which was this: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.” It's a...
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February 21, 2022
I was wrong, we need crypto
To say I've been skeptical about Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto universe would be an understatement of epic proportions. Since the early 2010s, some of my most ferocious Twitter battles have been against the HODL army with the laser eyes. There's just so much to oppose: Bitcoin's grotesque energy consumption, the ridiculous transac...
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February 16, 2022
Gritting your teeth, biding your time
What's the goodwill of developers worth to a platform operator? It's a hard question, because it can't be answered by the traditional economic models used by bean counters to populate the balance sheet. And it's far more ephemeral than the goodwill of consumers. The relationship is more intertwined. We're not just engaging in transacti...
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February 15, 2022
This just wouldn't happen on Twitter
I'm slowly regaining my faith in debates again. You know, the ancient practice of listening, presenting arguments, accepting counterarguments, and progressing towards a deeper shared understanding. Even when the topics are hot. Even when the counterpart is a stranger. And it's giving me vintage internet vibes! Take this Canadian trucke...
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February 11, 2022
Introducing Propshaft
It's an exciting time in web development. After a decade's worth of front-end progress kept demanding ever more complicated setups, we're finally moving in the opposite direction. With simpler tools that are still able to hit those high-fidelity user interface notes, but at a sliver of the cost in complexity. The long expansion of enab...
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February 10, 2022
After two weeks with no covid restrictions in Denmark
It's been a couple of weeks now without any form of covid restrictions in Denmark. The daily infection numbers have remained as high as they were when the restrictions were dropped, and the positivity rate for tests is still a staggering 30%. And yet, Danish society has simply moved on. At our kids' school, it seems that virtually ever...
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February 9, 2022
Go truck yourself
The Canadian truckers have now for almost two weeks faced insults, threats, and slander to protest the country's new vaccine mandates. With a persistence that is driving some progressives both inside and outside of Canada absolutely batty. How dare these truckers continue to exercise their basic political rights to freedom of assembly,...
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February 5, 2022
How to mint a crypto fan
You couldn’t have planned a better advertising campaign for crypto than Gofundme’s ham-fisted cancelation of donations intended for the protesting Canadian truckers. Their first attempt would literally have re-routed donations for the truckers to “other charities”. That sounded so crazy when I first read it that I had to dig up multipl...
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February 4, 2022
Apple reveals road map to tax any business with an app at 27%
In response to getting fined €5 million by the Dutch competition authorities, Apple has revealed an even more draconian, invasive, and frankly, terrifying scheme to collect their App Store tax from dating-app developers operating in The Netherlands. One that grants themselves the right to audit the books of any developer who dares refu...
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February 3, 2022
The second-hand stress of social media
I'd been an active combatant in the arena of social media for so long that I thought the baseline stress it produced was mainly due to the direct involvement. Over the past ten-plus years, rarely did I go a week without getting into some sort of heated argument with strangers online. But since retiring from the back-and-forth, it's cle...
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February 2, 2022
The infuriating ease of Rogan's popularity
For Rogan's own sake, and for all of our sakes, I hope we'll soon move on from picking apart every facet of his popular podcast. But before we do, just one more thing. Really 😂 In this whole saga, I must admit to a guilty pleasure of chuckling at all the folks infuriated by the fact that Rogan commands such popularity from his off-the-...
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February 2, 2022
Work unites what politics divide
Is there a more powerful, communal force than making stuff together? It pulls the shared humanity right out of people when they collaborate on making something greater than what they could make themselves. It intersects all the major sources of meaning by combining human connections, pursuits of mastery, and a shared purpose. It's quit...
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January 31, 2022
There are no all-knowing, all-seeing oracles
Moderating content on the basis of "truth" is an impossible task at all but the dullest edges of discourse. Because the vanguard of truth is always in dispute. Out there on the edge, truth is a process, and it emerges faster when opposing inquiries are pursued simultaneously. This is the bedrock of science. Rarely has this principle be...
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January 29, 2022
Spotify's completely reasonable healthcare content policy
Here's what you can't say on a podcast hosted by Spotify about Covid, per the company's internal moderation policy: “Content that promotes dangerous false or deceptive content about healthcare that may cause offline harm and/or pose a direct threat to public health such as: Denying the existence of AIDS or COVID-19 Encouraging the deli...
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January 28, 2022
Spotify must be afraid of canceling Rogan, right? Right?!
What's stood out most to me about the latest Rogan round over Neil Young's ultimatum is the iron-clad assumption that Spotify surely must – MUST! – agree with the underlying premise. That Rogan is a menace to society because he host guests with divergent views on covid, and because he shares his unsanctioned opinion on the matter. Ther...
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January 28, 2022
We can't thrive without friction
Social media platforms have been on relentless quest since their inception to remove all friction from all acts of engagement. The distance from emotion to reaction has been whittled away one A/B test at the time, and there's barely any left. You don't even have to portray any original sentiment today, just like or retweet that of some...
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January 26, 2022
A pandemic dispatch from Denmark
Next week, virtually all pandemic restrictions will be gone from Danish society. No mask mandates, no vaccine passports, no distancing, no limitations on bars, restaurants, or night clubs. This follows a determination by the government's pandemic council that the virus is no longer threat to the functioning of society, and thus no long...
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January 25, 2022
Just the cost of doing business [crimes]
The Dutch competition authorities just slapped Apple with a five million euro fine for refusing to comply with the country's new requirements on App Store policies. These new requirements are somewhat oddly contained to just dating apps, as they came as a consequence of a specific complaint from a specific provider, but even with that ...
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January 21, 2022
The Mac proves Apple can safely open the iPhone
The Mac is such an inconvenient platform for Apple. It prevents the company from making any credible claim of an impending security catastrophe, if lawmakers force the iPhone to allow installation of apps without the App Store. With the Mac, we have almost forty years of proof that computers don't need an App Store to be safe. Made by ...
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January 20, 2022
Free is never forever
Google gave away free email on custom domains for years. This unsurprisingly lured lots of people into switching to Gmail. But now the party is over, and what used to be free will now easily cost $500/year or more (if you have 10 users on a custom domain). Yikes. Unsurprisingly, I'm not actually against Google charging for email. The l...
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January 19, 2022
Apple turns the legislative contempt up to 11
In North Dakota, Apple sent Erik Neuenschwander, a chief privacy engineer, to make its case that opening up the App Store to free and fair competition on payment processing would be bad for privacy. He focused in a relatively sober tone on the sanctity of Apple's integration and curation as arguments for why they deserved their monopol...
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January 17, 2022
Case study in motivated reasoning
A few days ago, an anonymous Twitter user claiming to be an employee at a Big Tech company wrote a thread about work that went viral (since deleted, possibly partly by Twitter). Hazard Harrington's thread depicted a company drowning in woke excesses, so of course it sent the internet to the trenches. "This is EXACTLY what we suspected!...
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