I was just enjoying Simon Willison’s predictions and, heck, why not. 1: The web becomes adversarial to AI The history of search engines is sort of an arms race between websites and search engines. Back in the early 2000s, juicing your ranking on search engines was pretty easy - you could put a bunch of junk in your meta description tags or put...
Happy end-of-2024! It’s been a pretty good year overall. I’m thankful. There’s no way that I’ll be able to remember and carve out the time around New Years to write this, so here’s some end-of-year roundup, ahead of schedule! Running This was my biggest year for running on record: 687 miles as of today. I think the biggest difference with this...
I still use Bandcamp almost exclusively to buy music, and keep a big library of MP3s. The downside is that this marks me as a weirdo, but otherwise it’s great and has been working well for me. Since I last wrote about it, Bandcamp was acquired by Epic games (?) and then acquired from them by Songtradr, and its employees are trying to get...
I haven’t been posting much to the ‘main blog’ recently, but I have been keeping the micro blog updates humming. If you want more content in your RSS reader, you can subscribe to those posts, which are shorter, more scattered, and even less copyedited. It feels bad to have multiple “Recently” headings in the blog listing, so I’ll give them short...
Reading I don’t think you should focus on the failure of others, or even the success of others. What you do need to do—and what is surprisingly hard—is to define success for your own part of the world, and work towards that. Non-monetary success, because again, money lags. I’ve always loved Paul Ford’s writing, and recently learned that he’s...
Some light reverse-engineering of websites has been a source of entertainment and knowledge for me. I’ll poke around in the Chrome DevTools and figure out the basics of how popular websites work. Sure, it’s common to compress JavaScript and other resources, and the HTML source of webpages no longer give many hints for technology – long gone are...
Prefer video? You can also watch an intro video that I recorded for this on YouTube. Obsidian Freeform is an extremely small Obsidian plugin that enables totally custom JavaScript-powered frames alongside your notes. I created it because I use Obsidian as my note-taking application, and I found myself wanting to create charts for certain...
At the beginning of 2023, I released a Figma plugin called Placemark, which lets you create vector maps in Figma, the graphic design tool. Since then I’ve been maintaining that plugin for fun, and introduced another one, Placemark Globe. They’ve been somewhat successful! The Placemark plugin has 11.3k users, according to Figma’s community site,...