Links, April 25, 2025

§Other People’s Music / Flavors of Space

I try to avoid algorithmic recommendation playlists for many reasons, and generally favor human curation. Musician Ether Diver runs a series of weekly curated music links from across the musical spectrum and I usually find at least one thing I like each week. This week’s selection includes a mention of my album Lies in Reach

A slow burn of ambient atmosphere, IDM sound design and unusual melodic and harmonic constructions. These nine tracks are all deliberately paced, minimal, and quietly cinematic.

§Why I Cannot Be Technical

A lengthy and difficult but worthwhile read about the social aspect of software that people who champion “social coding” don’t want to talk about:

The paradoxes of software engineering haunt me. Tech is intensely hierarchical and demands performance of flat culture. Tech is immensely global in its activity and so fanatically geo-located in its employment that even the most senior and most unquestionably Technical people worry about moving away from 2-3 certain US cities. Tech sets out a vision of changing the world and cannot change the demographics of its own engineering function.

and also:

It is therefore not very difficult for me in this system to understand why software looks at me and gets surprised when I know what code is, and then gets angry when I don’t care about code all that much and instead care about the people so much more. Caring about the code is supposed to be what you do to earn being here and I refuse that.

§Getting Answers

I hang out in several programmer related chats and forums and I see a lot of people having trouble getting answers. They get no answers, poor answers, or absorb a lot of verbal abuse. As a person asking questions, there are some simple things you can do to help your chances of getting good answers. This guide will show you ten easy things you can do to ensure your questions are answered quickly and well.

A lot of great advice on the topic of asking questions on the internet, with examples of good and bad questions. I wish I had had this 20+ years ago.

§We Were Right to Side-Eye Everything: The Gen X Origin of Cynicism

We’re the eye-rollers. The side-eyers. The ones who grew up shrugging at sincerity and flinching at authority. We’ve been called detached, ironic, even apathetic. Like mistrust was some kind of personality flaw.

But what if it wasn’t?

What if the cynicism we carry wasn’t a glitch?

What if it was a defense mechanism?

Not a failure to connect. A refusal to be fooled.

While I am considered on the tail end of Gen X, and my partner among the early Millennials, we both consider ourselves Xennials, or members of the Oregon Trail generation. This piece hits home rather uncomfortably.

§Website Manifesto

I want to be in dialogue with my website, my work, and the people who find it. Not have it be just a space where I publish posts and art, but a living work itself.

§Open Source is kind of broken

One thing I’ve been mindful of as I work through this project is how very broken and exploitative the open source ecosystem is, both as a maintainer of and consumer of open source projects.

I want to explore this a bit more, and offer some thoughts. Let’s dig in!

This sort of reckoning is just in its early stages.

§KDL: a cuddly document language

KDL is a small, pleasant document language with XML-like node semantics that looks like you’re invoking a bunch of CLI commands! It’s meant to be used both as a serialization format and a configuration language, much like JSON, YAML, or XML.

Neither JSON nor XML are human-friendly. YAML is easy to write, provided you’re aware of its quirks, because those quirks will bite you hard. I’m using this on a config-heavy project where previously I would have tried yaml and invariably switched to JSON. It’s good.

§Cell Phone Bans and the Stories We Tell

Local journalist Emmett O’Connell has been pounding on this topic for a while, and this is a great introduction to the topic of teenage cellphone use – something I’ll have to deal with sooner than later. One thing I’ve taken to heart is that kids are constantly figuring out what they should be doing by watching the people around them, especially for parents; and so if I’m stuck on my phone doomscrolling, why would I expect my kid to want to do any differently?

Remaining focused in class is not equivalent to feeling mentally well. It’s not surprising that schools (and the stories told about them) struggle to distinguish between the two. There is a difference between keeping your head down and working and being happy and engaged.

§Going Out With a Bang

Of course, we might as well “enjoy a few more nice years on earth”, because the 70-year-old Schmidt (and I) will be dead long before 2100. Our grandchildren will just have to figure something out. In the meantime we need to make as much money as possible so the grandchildren can afford their bunkers.

The rich are on-board with killing ourselves to achieve “AGI”, for some watered-down version of “intelligence”. Who needs killer robots when the power & cooling requirements alone will do us in?