Coyote Tracks

I came across a blog post today that hit me harder than expected. It’s nominally about one specific action and person—companies and people giving money to David Heinemeier Hansson’s “Omacom Foundation,” despite DHH’s well-publicized turn toward fascist ideology—but it’s also about, well, everything. Brennan Kenneth Brown writes in “Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH”, Much of the world has become far too complacent and complicit with people (and their companies) who…

I’ve long liked Federico Viticci’s MacStories, although I’ve drifted away from it as it’s gotten more focused on AI lately. (Note: this is what writers call “foreshadowing”.) I’ve been listening to the Connected podcast he co-hosts since before it was called Connected. Federico is a man of strong opinions and, from all appearances, strong principles. In 2024, for instance, he and MacStories managing editor John Voorhees strongly called for AI regulation, writing, The trouble with the companies…

In July 2022, I wrote “Thoughts on Leaving California” about my move back to Florida after twenty years in the Golden State; I followed it a year later with “A Year Back in Florida”, which ended with “I’ll check back in after another year.” I’ve been doing that annually ever since, although the date has kind of crept up; this year I’m over a month late. I wrote 2024’s check-in during a 16-month stretch of unemployment. While part of that was a deliberate break, most of it wasn’t. That check-in…

There’s been buzz recently about how a nascent web and mobile astronomy app, Dark Hours, got wildly incorrectly rejected from Apple’s App Store. Then maybe it turned out that the rejection wasn’t so wild because Apple may well have been looking at the astrology app the developer first submitted under the name “Asterly”. Then it turned out that the web version of Dark Hours was strikingly similar—although UI-wise, hardly identical—to an existing web app called DarkHours (camelcase rather than…

I’ve written before about being between two communities with very different attitudes toward our current generative AI moment: Artists, writers, and other (non-tech) creators mostly loathe it with every fiber of their being, to the point where they’ll vociferously argue that so much as asking Claude for a list of good curry places in London is a betrayal of the Enlightenment. Tech people often embrace it even when they admit the downsides. There’s a lot of “the energy costs are horrible, stolen…

Back in the olden days, there was an Insert key on Mac keyboards. (There still is on PC keyboards, although in many programs it doesn’t actually do anything anymore.) If you were editing text, you had two different modes, overwrite and insert. If you were in insert mode, then when text was in front of the cursor, typing would insert text. If the | character represents the cursor: banana |crazypants And you typed plaid, you’d get: banana plaid|crazypants This is what you expect in modern…

In November of last year, I wrote about what I did and didn’t want to do in Emacs. It’s great for anything that involves text editing/processing, good for certain kinds of management tasks (it’s a great Git client, and even has surprisingly useful file management tricks up its sleeve); it’s not—at least to me—great for tasks that involve viewing, like RSS reading and PDF viewing. I’ve kept putting this to the test, and stand by most of what I said back then. Most of the time I’d rather view…

If you’ve been on the Internet in the last fifteen years and change, you’ve probably heard of Soylent, whether you wanted to or not. Nutrition drinks as a category have been around forever, pitched in various forms to dieters or weightlifters or people who just frequently find themselves rushing in the morning. Nobody gives their coworkers shit for grabbing a prepackaged smoothie for breakfast. Soylent, though, has a distinctly bad reputation. Partly, that comes from the fact that the original…

Technology needs another revolution. It's just not the one the industry seems hellbent on delivering.

It's a question I expect to be asked in the future. I have an answer, but I can't help suspect it's the wrong question.

On real restrictions in computing life versus imagined ones.