Canned Dragons

I'm not sure what to think of this piece from Mere Orthodoxy on panic over the direction of Western civilization and its implications for Christians. For one thing, it sides mostly with Rod Dreher, someone with whom I am not usually in agreement. Dreher tends toward the Chicken Little end of the Christian spectrum, and his hand wringing often seems counterproductive. Things can surely get more difficult for Christians as societal mores shift, but the sky will not fall as long as God's creation stands, and we are part of that creation. Perhaps, despite the references used, the piece brings up important points about the protective effect of institutions for our emotional well-being.

Jake Meador, the author of the piece, and someone whom I do frequently enjoy reading, might consider me an orthodox Christian or perhaps somewhat heterodox in my beliefs. I tend to think he would come to the conclusion that I'm the latter. Wherever you place me on the continuum of belief, I am increasingly coming to the realization it is difficult to maintain a Christian position when taking sides in the culture wars. We are called as Christians not to be divided, and yet, with the diminishing role of faith institutions in society, we are just that. Divided in ways we have never been. I can't remember the last statistic I read about how many people think this country will be in a civil war in a few years, but the numbers who think that is a very real and imminent possibility are quite frightening.

The existential anxiety that seems to plague many Americans is both a cause and an effect of the breakdown of institutions and the rise of networks that exacerbate division. From the Meador piece:

(Edwin) Friedman discovered that one of the social functions that institutions play is to absorb anxiety. Humans create institutions to pass on wisdom, to collectively conquer challenges, to centralize critical knowledge. It is an accepted fact among political scientists that well-functioning and healthy institutions are the bedrock of peaceful and prosperous societies. Just think of the way that a well-functioning medical system can allay our fears over a health concern. However, with the devaluing and disappearance of institutions, individuals were left to absorb the culture’s anxiety. Anxiety then becomes a systemic phenomenon.

Meador then goes on to say, "This next part is critical."

By classifying anxiety as a personal issue rather than a systemic issue, we place an enormous burden on the individual, who then must modify their personal lives to alleviate the suffering that anxiety brings. Instead, Friedman taught leaders that they must understand that anxiety resides in networks of human relationships.

Is the rise in mental health problems commensurate with the fall of institutions? There is certainly correlation, but is there causation? Increasing distrust in institutions — sometimes, as we have seen with recent denominational and megachurch scandals, with good reason — is certainly a plausible explanation. When we withdraw from institutions, we can experience the loneliness and isolation that comes from the lack of a good support system. It makes sense, as Meador emphasizes, that shifting the cause of anxiety to the individual, rather than recognize the broader context, is ultimately detrimental to the effort to alleviate the issue. The rules and rituals that accompany membership in an institution — whether it is a church, a temple, a synagogue, a mosque, or the Freemasons — serve to add stability to our lives. It may be time to look harder at the extrinsic societal factors that play a role in pervasive uncertainty.

The rules and rituals that accompany membership in an institution — whether it is a church, a temple, a synagogue, a mosque, or the Freemasons — serve to add stability to our lives.

I won't go too in depth analyzing the opposite side of the coin — the networks that create or strengthen divisions. I've done a lot of that in the past, and will most likely continue to look at those networks from a technical and sociological perspective. It strikes me as fascinating that we are potentially leaving the institutions that have protective effects against emotional health issues to rot as we pour more of our time and energy into the networks that are detrimental to our mental well-being.

In a piece for the New Yorker, David Owen writes about the world of mechanical keyboard enthusiasts in the context of his own history and love of keyboards.

Typing is rhythmic, complicated, and soothing, and, when I’m doing it well, my conscious brain doesn’t seem to be involved. It’s as close as I’ll ever come to playing a musical instrument—a nontrivial attraction. My love of typing probably contributed to my decision to become a writer.

As someone who was happy with the chiclet keys on the Apple keyboard, I didn't think I'd ever go with a mechanical unit. After getting one, though, I can understand the cult fandom around these things — at least a bit. I'll never pay thousands of dollars for a set of key caps. I do enjoy typing on this thing, though, and that allows me to write more. As a school-trained touch typist, I can also type faster with my Keychron. The Magic Keyboard feels a bit strange to my fingertips now.

I took a brother typewriter to college with me. It feels good to bring back some of those typing sensations without having to worry about how difficult it is to correct mistakes.

If you look back at the music I've shared on this blog, you wouldn't doubt my devotion to nostalgic 80s retro-inspired sounds. Bring on the sports cars, sunglasses, synthesizers, and neon signs. Lately, though, I've been wishing for a 90s resurgence. Let's have some flannel and baby doll dresses. In that spirit, I wanted to share this dead-on, straight cover of "Cannonball" by the Breeders performed by Courtney Barnett. Barnett has been on my radar for a while, but now I have a reason to check out her stuff. She and her band nail this track. It's hard to believe that it is just the three of them because the sound feels so full.

"Cannonball" has always been a song to get you moving. If you find yourself in possession of a bass guitar, it's one of the first songs you have to learn. Its lurching, bouncing bassline is so much fun. The song has just the right amount of distortion and noise in the mix to make it feel at home in the era of grunge, but is lighthearted enough to transcend some of the period's tropes and still be relevant today.

I was reading my friend Adam's newsletter, Tendrils, and I came upon some quick thoughts about the movie mid90s in a collection of mini-reviews of A24 movies. While Adam enjoyed the movie because it brought back some skateboarding nostalgia, I hated it for much the same reason. It seems like every recent movie or documentary dealing with skateboarding, from mid90s to Minding the Gap, makes it seem like skateboarders are a bunch of lawless teenage punks who have trouble with school or work. I was big into skateboarding in the early 90s, and I didn't find the stereotype to be true. Some of my friends from that era became software development managers, architects, and worked at major record labels. I would rather not make it sound like a career is the only measurement of success, but these guys clearly didn't meet the stereotype you see of skateboarders in the media.

Just like more organized sports, I think skateboarding can be a great outlet, provided the skaters have a safe environment in which to practice. The kids on an Arizona Hopi reservation just got that in the form of a skatepark. One of the co-leads on the project, Quintin Nahsonhoya, talks about the positive effect of having a place designated and designed for skateboarding.

"Skateboarders aren't like how they're perceived in movies, as punks or like people who just want to get into trouble," he said. "It's just a hobby that we have… and the community understood that."

I'm glad to see more and more instances of towns and cities recognizing the potential of skateparks to channel kids' energy. I only wish that sort of mentality had been around when I was younger.

Moving Past Disruption

Paul Ford writes for Wired Magazine as the co-founder of a software company that is tired of the ubiquitous pursuit of disruption within the tech industry. He argues that disruption serves the bored and that boredom is a luxury we no longer have, even in the U.S. — particularly after January 6, 2021.

That type of progress definitely generates a ton of activity. But it also sits weird when you consider how many lives in the world, historically and currently, including American lives, are extremely disrupted—by toxic spills or the whims of royalty or the goats all swelling up and dying. Disruption is an ethos for the bored, for people who live in reasonable climates and don't have tanks in the street. But America has recently become way less boring.

Disruption was a big goal when things seemed to be stable. We wanted tools that upended the status quo. Now we've seen the effects of our efforts. Polarization, fragmentation, and decline seem to be the by-products of the disruption we once craved so heartily.

→ Forget Disruption. Tech Needs to Fetishize Stability

Metal Elizabethan Poetry

John Donne was an interesting guy. He was an inveterate womanizer and poet turned pious preacher. James Parker profiles Donne for The Atlantic and brings in a metal comparison.

Super-Infinite is the title of Katherine Rundell’s new biographical study of Donne. It sounds like an album by Monster Magnet. And indeed, Rundell responds to Donne in something of a heavy-metal, hyperbolizing register. Read the first stanza of “Love’s Growth,” she promises us, and “all the oxygen in a five-mile radius rushes to greet you.” Another poem, “The Comparison,” in which Donne contrasts the charms of his mistress with those of another woman, takes the tradition of poets praising female beauty “and knifes it in a dark alley.” And so on.

For all his hyperbole, I'm pretty sure Donne didn't write about acid trips like Monster Magnet. Parker never mentions it, but another metal comparison would be Metallica, as they took their song title "For Whom The Bell Tolls" from Donne's writing.

→ The Unlovable, Irresistible John Donne

Christian Anonymity Online

Patrick Miller writes for Mere Orthodoxy about Christian trolls hiding behind anonymity online. In the case he uses an example, having a female speaker at his church resulted in harassment for the speaker and for the church.

A different speech comparison sharpens the issue further: the difference obvious between anonymous and non-anonymous accounts. If I, as a non-anonymous citizen of the internet, post something erroneous or incendiary, I can expect to have friends, coworkers, pastors, and family confront me. Knowing that is a gift. It causes me to restrain my tongue and keeps me out of a lot of trouble. The wisdom of proverbs applies in the 21st century, “Those who guard their mouths and their tongues keep themselves from calamity” (Prov. 21:23).

Miller calls for personal accountability by way of being open about your identity in situations where you are critical. He debates calls from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt that we eliminate the ability to post on social media anonymously.

Even if we reject Haidt’s proposal to ban anonymity online, that doesn’t absolve individuals of their collective, social responsibilities to one another. On a moral level, he’s correct. No one wants to live in that neighborhood. This is especially true for Christians who care to follow Jesus’s second great commandment, love your neighbor as yourself. We are obliged by our king not to build digital neighborhoods where anonymous bullying is encouraged, much less become the verbal vandals within them.

It's obvious on its face that the interactions Miller describes are unchristian. He brings up many passages of scripture throughout the piece which prove the behavior in question to be out-of-line with how we as Christians are called to treat each other.

→ Speech Without Accountability: Reckoning With Anonymous Christian Trolls

Catching Up With TikTok

I wondered what happened when the deadline the U.S. government had given Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their respective app stores came and went. It turns out that other arrangement have been made. Sara Fischer has the details for Axios.

In June, after longstanding pressure from the U.S. government, TikTok said it had begun routing all its U.S. user data to Oracle's cloud infrastructure.

Apparently, TikTok has been working with Oracle since 2020 to lift some of the pressure that the former president was putting on them.

→ Scoop: Oracle Begins Auditing TikTok's Algorithms

There’s A Middle

The deceased theologian Karl Barth (who once said to preach with the newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other) is held in high regard by many modern Christians. Vika Pechersky has a piece for Mere Orthodoxy about Barth's warnings for evangelical theology speak to veering too far to the right or the left.

This brings me to my final point. Is it true that the modern man no longer poses any threat to contemporary theology or the Church at large, as Barth has suggested? The reaction of many Christians today, throwing themselves into the sea of culture wars with such vigor, indicates the opposite. Christians still feel threatened by the current iteration of the modern man—a self-defining and fluid human being. At the same time, a full embrace of this version of the modern man by the current liberal (and postliberal) side, proves once again that Christians of all stripes and colors are still reacting to the contemporary age, while offering no significant alternative to its dominant ideas or visions of the human life, saying even less about the God who revealed himself in the man Jesus Christ.

Stooping to align with or against cultural or political trends obscures the timelessness of the gospel. It also threatens to eradicate Christian distinctiveness.

→ Karl Barth’s Warning for Evangelical Theology

From the blog

Engaging Your Readers

How do you get readers to pay for your writing online?

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

Minimal Mac

I was texting with an old friend the other day, and he was documenting his progress in getting three monitors set up. Since he has an M1 Mac Mini, like I do, he could only easily support two monitors. He turned to Universal Control with a MacBook Air to get

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

I was texting with an old friend the other day, and he was documenting his progress in getting three monitors set up. Since he has an M1 Mac Mini, like I do, he could only easily support two monitors. He turned to Universal Control with a MacBook Air to get three displays going. He was trying monitor stacking and side by side setups. I told him I just preferred a simple iMac and no external monitors, which is why I only have one monitor that my work MacBook Pro and Mac Mini share.

The conversation started me thinking about how I like to keep things minimal. When I asked if my friend if he needed a command center so he could launch a space shuttle, he replied that at least he'd like to be able to. I have no desire to launch a space shuttle. My ambitions are much more modest. I want to edit photos, take notes, write blog posts and email people. I don't need three monitors to do that. In fact, I'm bothered by how many windows I have open. I am tempted to try something Marcelo Marfil describes in this blog post.

Multitasking is bullshit. I can’t help but roll my eyes whenever someone comes with a fancy talk around the necessity of having multiple displays or app windows opened at the same time and all the time.

His solution is to use an app called Hides and Apple Shortcuts to get windows out of the way and center the ones he wants to focus on. With less clutter, you can properly direct your attention. I'm hoping that Stage Manager will serve this same function (at least on the Mac — I've read that it's not great on the iPad).

I think this is one reason — though I sometimes get frustrated with the company — that I gravitate towards Apple. They get minimalism. You can see this in their designs. Steve Jobs got this. Jonny Ives gets this. Patrick Rhone gets this (I took the title of this post from his old blog).

There's something about removing the excess — trimming the fat — that's intrinsically appealing to me. It's like carving a beautiful statue out of a marble slab. It's finding the sublime in the art of subtraction. It's about taking as little as possible and living within those constraints. This can apply to physical goods or even to data. CJ Chilvers ruminates on this in a post about minimalism.

It’s been my experience that every minimalist dreams of passing down a thumb drive or password, giving their families access to 90%+ of their multi-generational trash and treasure. Then, they want their remains cremated and scattered to the wind, as to leave no trace.

What I appreciate about Chilvers' examination of minimalism is his focus on what we leave behind. If we live our lives adhering to a minimalist philosophy, we should find that we have burdened our loved ones with very little possessions to manage when we are gone.

One of the co-creators of the latest official D&D adventure, Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, Ajit George, compares the setting of the book to solarpunk. I wrote about solarpunk in issue no. 8 of the newsletter. Wikipedia defines it this way:

Solarpunk is a genre and art movement that envisions how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability, climate change and pollution.

In D&D, of course, we are not dealing with climate change or sustainability (typically), but there is a sort of bright, organic aesthetic that comes along with solarpunk. It has kind of the opposite energy of grimdark. A definition of grimdark (again, Wikipedia):

Grimdark is a subgenre of speculative fiction with a tone, style, or setting that is particularly dystopian, amoral, and violent.

If your experience with tabletop role-playing games and specifically Dungeon & Dragons or Warhammer 40,000 goes back a ways, you will remember when grimdark was the main, if not only, aesthetic involved with those types of games. The introduction of a more positive vibe in Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is a nice change. I can still remember when D&D adventures were hack n' slash dungeon crawlers. More of an emphasis on cooperation and thoughtful strategy still takes adjustment, but is welcome.

Another focus of this adventure module that breaks from tradition is the emphasis on multiculturalism. In addition to the inclusion of typical fantasy character races such as dwarves and elves, the human population is made up of different ethnicities. Some of those ethnicities bear resemblance to those in our world that have traditionally been underrepresented in fantasy worlds. The module brings their traditions into the D&D world. It's refreshing to see this representation in the playgrounds of our imagination.

Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is out now and should be available at your favorite game store.

Last week, I published a micro post about my thoughts after reading Matt Birchler admonish his readers against switching blogging platforms. Birchler's main point was that switching platforms made it harder on readers and, therefore, more difficult to retain consistent readership. It's a solid point and one that really resonated with me. I have a tendency to tinker with different tools, some of which are blogging engines. That means I sometimes use different services to publish my posts.

For a while, I've realized moving between domains or services can be confusing for my readers, but I haven't been able to settle on one platform (although I definitely use Micro.blog the most). I've used alternate domains and subdomains to experiment with a variety of different tools.

It's harder than ever to decide on a blogging service because being able to post in a chronological order on a well-designed, easy-to-read site is no longer the only criteria with which to evaluate the service. The situation has been complicated by the arrival of newsletters. While newsletters and blogs used to live separately, they have now merged in a way that makes sense (see Substack as the most popular example of this). As I detailed in this post about writing online, readers now want to be able to receive your writing in different mediums. One of those primary mediums is through email. The others are RSS, the web and social media. It's now an expectation that your work be accessible through all of those channels. Among those delivery mechanisms, Birchler's post seems to only consider the web and RSS. His point is mainly that you should never change your URL or your RSS feed, if you can avoid it. As he says, your readers couldn't care less what service you're using, as long as the experience doesn't change substantially for them.

An email list

Now that I've acknowledged that Birchler's post made a good point and caused me to think, let me play a bit of devil's advocate. When you factor in newsletters, you introduce a delivery mechanism where, theoretically, the service you are using matters even less. In contrast to the web and RSS, where your reader is fetching from your site, with email and newsletters, you are pushing your output to them. This puts less of a strain on your readers to follow you wherever you go. Instead of them having to take action to go with you, they just need to be there for the journey. It takes the burden off the reader and puts it on you to migrate their email addresses to your new location. You're doing all the heavy lifting. The reader may see a different UI, but they should be set up to receive the new content, from wherever it may come.

When I first set up the current iteration of my newsletter, I read this post from Austin Kleon about why you should have an email list of your followers. I gained a few followers just by posting about it. That list is with me, regardless of what service I choose to use, as long as I can import email addresses, like most services allow (ahem, Micro.blog). Since the readers have entrusted me with their email address, if I switch services, the most they will have to do is click on an email that gets autogenerated to consent to be part of a different newsletter provider. If your newsletters include pointers to your blog posts, your readers will have easy access to those posts.

Should I stay or should I go?

Even as I think about the difficulty in getting readers to follow you and then make a change, I realize that there are ways to make it easier on that group of people. It's possible now to put the hard work in the writer's corner, and leave the decision about return on investment up to them. It's empowering, but it takes an explicit call to your followers to trust you enough to share their email and allow you access to their inbox. Hopefully, you have earned that trust through your writing. If so, you should be able to carry your readers along for the ride. Let an email list be the bridge over which you cross to a different blogging platform.

The biggest irony of the last couple of weeks has to be Rep. Peter Meijer’s loss in the Western Michigan Republican primary. As recently as the end of last year, The Atlantic did an in-depth profile on Meijer and how he was at odds with his own party of the impeachment of Donald Trump and other issues related to the former president.

The piece, by Tim Alberta, is entitled What the GOP Does to Its Own Dissenters. The profile centered around the premise that in opposing the former president, Meijer had put himself in the crosshairs of his own party.

At one point, Meijer described to me the psychological forces at work in his party, the reasons so many Republicans have refused to confront the tragedy of January 6 and the nature of the ongoing threat. Some people are motivated by raw power, he said. Others have acted out of partisan spite, or ignorance, or warped perceptions of truth and lies. But the chief explanation, he said, is fear. People are afraid for their safety. They are afraid for their careers. Above all, they are afraid of fighting a losing battle in an empty foxhole.

Meijer described a group of colleagues too afraid to do what they knew was right and stand with him.

The irony came in the fact that ultimately, Meijer was not driven to defeat by his own party, as Alberta had strongly hinted that he might be in his profile. Meijer was defeated in his primary because the Democrats pumped a half a million dollars into the campaign of Meijer's opponent, John Gibbs, a Republican with a Trump endorsement. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has begun a pattern of supporting candidates who are most closely aligned with the twice-impeached former president by providing significant monetary support, reasoning that they will be easier to defeat in the general elections that follow their primaries.

It's an extremely cynical and disruptive play by the DCCC and, unsurprisingly, it has brought criticism.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who also voted to impeach Trump last year and is not seeking reelection, said that Democrats “own” Meijer’s loss, blaming them for compromising their own values by propping up the campaign of a candidate who has echoed Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

“Here’s the thing: don’t keep coming to me asking where are all the good Republicans that defend democracy and then take your donors’ money and spend half-a-million dollars promoting one of the worst election deniers that’s out there,” Kinzinger said on CNN. “The DCCC needs to be ashamed of themselves.”

The DCCC pouring funds into candidates who stand for everything they claim to be against is not only a dishonest strategy, it's a risky one. If the candidate that they support wins in the general election, they will have gambled away their money (presumably from donors to the party) and be put in the situation of having to fend off another election denier who is fighting against the democratic process. It imperils not only their chances of passing legislation that the Democratic base would like to see, but also the workings of elections that safeguard our republic.

Given this strategy, it would be perhaps fitting if the new Democratic slogan became, "Democrats: We may not be as treacherous as Republicans, but give us some time."

Relative Sci-fi

I've heard some grumblings about the new Star Wars TV series online. The Book of Boba Fett, which I quite enjoyed, was particularly stung by criticism. Even though Obi-Wan Kenobi seemed to be a success story, it had its share of detractors as well.

While it may not make writing about these shows as interesting, I have had a lot of fun watching all the Star Wars entries into episodic television. In fact, sometimes I can't understand the depths that people go to in their dissection of these series. I grew up on shows like Knight Rider, Wonder Woman, The Dukes of Hazzard, Battlestar Galactica, etc. Has anyone watched these shows recently and done a comparison to what we have available now? The difference is stark. On Buck Rogers, the droid would waddle around saying, "beedee beedee beedee." That was supposed to transport us to this future of robots and interplanetary travel we could all hardly imagine. It isn't just the special effects, either. The storylines and level of drama on these new shows are light years ahead of what we watched back then on TV. Shows on streaming services have a cinematic quality bar they jump over that we never would have dreamed of shows hurdling in those days.

Into this discussion comes the trailer for the soon-to-be-released Star Wars series, Andor. Given how much I liked Rogue One, I've been very eager to see this show about its protagonist come to fruition. The preview to which we have been treated looks astonishing. Action, intrigue, moral considerations, transcendent worldbuilding: it seems to check all of these boxes and more.

Asynchronously Yours

I like it when company culture acknowledges the difference in synchronous and asynchronous communication (see Twist, 37Signals rule #9, etc.). When things shifted to MS Teams, some people starting defaulting to sending most of their messages in Teams. When I’m out, and my message clearly states that, people will still direct message me over Teams, which is built for synchronous communications. For asynchronous communication, email is still best. The tools contained in any almost any email client — folders, tags, snooze, etc., make it a much better way to manage communications that don’t need immediate responses, and also a much better way of information retrieval later.

I think all of the above makes a pretty good argument for prioritizing email over instant messaging, in most cases. However, the one thing that bothers me most about instant messaging is that, at least in my company's culture, it leads people to think they should be able to get ahold of you instantaneously, any time. When I am in meetings, for instance, I do not pay attention to my instant messages or my email. Even the most ardent fans of multitasking would never say, "you do your best work when you are distracted." Yet, occasionally people seem to be bothered if they can't get in touch with you, while you are clearly noted by your presence indicator to be doing something else. Colleagues will readily admit that they don't pay attention to the status that shows up in Teams. It seems a bit inconsiderate.

In the days before the popularization of instant messaging in the workplace, coworkers would rarely come in an interrupt you while you were in a meeting (unless there was a production outage or something similar). I think we shouldn't lose that sense of courtesy, even with new tools that make invasiveness as close as a keyboard away.

Just Joking

Looking back, one of the things that I don't like about my personality on Twitter over the years is the sarcasm and flippancy. Social media makes it so easy to put anything out there, that using it is often done with a lack of care. Hurtful remarks are easily tossed off, heedless of the feelings of the intended or unintended victim. People become very flippant, even about convictions that others may hold very deeply. Alan Noble writes about this in his essay What Is Social Media Good For?

Put differently, it’s one thing for the algorithm to love a tweet joking about fining video game designers who create games that don’t let you save anywhere. It’s quite another thing for it to boost a joke that trivializes the complexity of the pro-life movement, the reasons people are still concerned about COVID, poverty, sexual abuse victims, or gun violence in poor neighborhoods.

Users who are nice people IRL become troll(ish) on social media. Those who would think it beneath them to directly troll someone still make "jokes" that denigrate the views of others under the guise of a joke. I wouldn't call it fear, but I have concerns about being flippant. I would rather my prose come off as uninteresting than risk unintentionally maligning someone's beliefs while joking around. Chesterton covers this in his book Orthodoxy.

Dulness will, however, free me from the charge which I most lament; the charge of being flippant.

It is a different thing to take issue with ideas you think are erroneous, but to take them on directly, addressing them with concern and the seriousness which they may deserve. Being flippant just makes you seem obnoxious.

→ Essay: What Is Social Media Good For?

What Kinds Of Image Requests Confuse DALL-E?

In his latest newsletter, Charlie Warzel dives into DALL-E and profiles Andy Baio's experiments with the tool. Baio has found it rewarding to stretch DALL-E to its limits (call it boundary testing, if you like).

The engine doesn’t generate text well at all—it can generally only create short words. It’s bad at creating faces, and most trademarked material and images of famous people are blocked so that people don’t abuse the software. But Baio has also found more interesting limitations. “Anything that’s an opposite, like a horse riding a man or a hand with six fingers, is a real struggle for it,” he said. “We want to think that DALL-E has this wild imagination and that it is capable of generating wildly unusual images, but because it’s been trained on tens of thousands of images of people with 10 fingers, it really struggles.”

Rumor has it that DALL-E will be opening to a broader beta cohort in the upcoming weeks. I'd like to play around with it, but I expect my images will be fairly pedestrian. I'm not into surrealism like the image generator's namesake.

→ Tech's New Frontier Raises A "Buffet of Unwanted Questions"

Monocropping In Cities

Clive Thompson writes about rewilding cities, in a new extension of his "rewilding your attention" concept. In the piece, he profiles cities that have ripped up roads made for cars in favor of rivers and public spaces. He compares the way cities have been built around the automobile to monocropping.

Indeed, one thing we learned from the 20th century is that monocropping is freaking dangerous. Whenever we ploughed over fields and regions to plant a single crop, the land got weaker over time, because it lost that dense, gnarly, diverse spectrum of life. Farmers for centuries knew this, which is why they rotated crops and had a network of animal life interpenetrating small farms. But with big industrial farming, we monocropped, and created — decades down the line — crappier soil, entire regions susceptible to a single pest, and unexpected knock-on effects. (Like how industrial farming destroyed roadside milkweed, helping to decimate Monarch butterfly populations.)

It's an interesting concept that begs the questions of whether the cities that have "rewilded," to some extent, are healthier for their inhabitants and in what ways that could be measured.

In his book The Life We're Looking For, Andy Crouch examines how we are increasingly building our environments around machines.

The great urbanist Jane Jacobs masterfully outlined, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the elements of an urban environment that make it a healthy place for human habitation: mixed-use buildings, plenty of chances for street-level interaction, limited traffic, priority for pedestrians. It is not much exaggeration to say that these are precisely the conditions that are worst for autonomous vehicles. The closer an environment is to being genuinely good for human beings, the worse it is for a self-driving car.

He writes of humans creating "attenuated cultural environments that treat persons like machines." The effort to rewild cities is a pushback against this trend, and maybe even a necessary one if people are to flourish.

→ Rewilding Cities

From the blog

Airshow

A new podcast adjunct to a popular feed reader gets it right.

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

Arc Welder

A new browser makes the case for why it stands out from the pack.

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley