That wasn’t my experience, having just driven across the city and back during tonight’s outage. It was actually weirdly inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the powerless intersections.
There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine.
The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
I think a significant factor helping that to work is the mixing of all traffic on the street. I've noticed that in LA's Skid Row, where homeless people are constantly moving into the street on foot or on bicycle and they walk around in vehicle lanes pushing shopping cart armadas and so on, drivers are more cautious than usual and I see, if anything, less reckless driving and close calls there than in other parts of downtown, where pedestrians stick to the sidewalk and distracted or car-brained drivers don't look out for them. Just anecdotal observation, of course.
Different things. A country with lax rules is not the same as a specific environment with shared spaces, where according to known data it's safer to eliminate some specific kind of regulation and let the remaining part take over.
There have been some experiments that suggest that traffic flow is both safer and more efficient if you just turn disable the signals entirely. I doubt it applies to all, or even most, situations but it's definitely food for thought: https://www.npr.org/2008/01/19/18217318/german-towns-traffic...
So, just to make it clear… you define good art by “whether the artist is any good at art”.
Illuminating…
——
For anyone who’s interested in a slightly more nuanced take on how people in the Middle Ages perceived of “art” — and how different that notion was to how we perceive it today — Forgery, Replica, Fiction by Christopher Wood [1] is a really interesting read.
Here’s the last sentence of the Goodreads summary, which describes the major transition in thinking:
“… Ultimately, as forged replicas lost their value as historical evidence, they found a new identity as the intentionally fictional image-making we have come to understand as art.”
I can't help but feel that this article was written in a format that is the textual equivalent of thin desires…
Every sentence is separated into its own paragraph, like each one is supposed to be revelatory (or maybe tweet-worthy). It's pretty common design knowledge that if you try to emphasize everything, you end up emphasizing nothing. The result is that reading the article feels choppy, and weirdly unsatisfying, since the larger arc of each point is constantly being interrupted.
Why choose such an antithetical form, to what is otherwise an important and deep message?
The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.
Reading, I knew someone would comment on it. I actually prefer the style - maybe because my attention span is shot. But I think it’s more because the author made sure each sentence was content heavy. No verbose paragraphs. And paragraphs made of dense sentences are themselves dense and become harder to read.
Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic.
Edit: revisiting the article, I’ll allow that the author may have over-done it in some parts. But I think the bias was in the right direction.
A paragraph is a feature designed to help the reader understand the writer's intentions.
If it is used all the time, just like here, then it ceases to be helpful in marking breaks in trains of thought; or anything for that matter.
Consider the following excerpt of the post:
The thick life doesn't scale.
That's the whole point.
So: bake bread.
There is absolutely no information there that would warrant three full stops. I also don't know the author nearly well enough to consider pondering its meaning: To my eyes there is only a need to stop and ponder at most once. It is essentially just noise.
There is something to be gained from the text, but it is overblown in size due to what appears to be a lack of time or skill of the author.
PS: If some context is missing in the excerpt: Well to bad that there is no natural marker signifying that a train of thought has concluded (or started).
Wouldn’t it be handy if the browser could intelligently join this author’s sentences into paragraphs?! (in connection to the thread about Mozilla putting AI in the browser)
The prose is self-consciously different, makes the reader work a little harder. One can almost feel a literary water ripple or pebble garden, stillness and simplicity.
Consider an analogy: the writer knows that a reader readily digests concepts in C++ and purposely pivots to something obscure like Pony. The reader says "this is inconvenient, I need to change my process to digest your work" and the author says "that's the point."
I've never baked anything more complex than a pre-packaged cornbread mix, or a frozen pizza.
Baking has always been someone else's problem.
But having now skimmed through this bit of weirdly-formatted writing, I might give it a shot.
(Oh, and of that formatting: It reminds me a bit of what suck.com looked like in the mid-late 1990s. I still have the sticker they sent me stuck to a thing ~30 years later, but the suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom they sent with it got mangled pretty bad in the mail.)
I started baking bread because I had a bag of plain flour (i.e. not bread flour, only 9% protein) sitting in the cupboard and approaching its sell-by date. So I made 'ships biscuits', and one thing led to another.
So a bag of what in the UK is called 'strong white flour' (i.e. protein around 12%, I think it is 'all purpose' in US) and a sachet of instant yeast and some salt. Followed the instructions on the bread bag and it worked sort of, a bit solid but edible and it toasted nice.
Then you just iterate. Lots of stuff out on the Web. I use supermarket flour and the dried active yeast and the ingredients are 10x cheaper than even a basic bought loaf. And mixing and baking is fun.
Sourdough is OK but you then have a pet to look after...
Maybe you like being restricted to reading in the ad-copy register, in which case go ahead and make virtue of vice, but otherwise: this lack is well within your power to remedy.
Same reaction - I could immediately tell this person had learned to write on Twitter (or Linkedin), not real meaty writing. I had an English professor who wrote "FORM = CONTENT" on the chalkboard; this article would send him into a fury.
It's not just you. I've read this person's stuff before. Every sentence comes off as if they are presenting the results of a major epiphany.
You can write things which sound pretty. It's the equivalent of wordy sugar. It's much harder to to write things you've learned from life experience or thought deeply about.
Subject your beliefs to the Socratic method. If they've survived your own criticism to the fullest extent and can be validated by your own lived experience, then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about.
News is the ultimate in thin writing, by definition.
I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing. It's explicitly advocating for people to engage with the world around them, even if that means they have to face the possibility of changing themselves.
Long-form paragraphs are exactly that: harder to read, but they invite you to grapple with the material that's being written.
I agree with you to a degree. I considered that as a reason as well, and "meeting people where they are" in communication design is something I think about a lot.
But if using an approachable format to deliver an alternative message was the strategy, I think we'd see a few places where the author tried to stretch the format slightly, to give a few core ideas more chance to resonate. In which case it could have been a masterful use of an antithetical format, to prove and point and enrich the message.
Instead, since the entire post conforms, it feels much more like an internalized autopilot, or purposefully manipulative technique.
Hah, that’s a good point. It’s always interesting to see somebody find a clever little bit of redemption for a widely disliked aspect in an article—nice.
>The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.
From the about page:
>Free subscribers get previews of these essays and occasional full posts. Paid subscribers get all essays, the most useful ideas, conversations, and community access.
I really don’t like this new feeling of not knowing if what I’m reading is from a person or a machine but I can’t quantify why it bothers me. I wonder if it will be a temporary thing like in 5 years nobody will ever care again even though the chance of it being a machine might be higher.
When I was young my parents were scared that the MTV generation couldn't focus long enough to watch the "real news".
Not long ago I feared that twitters short form content was shortening peoples attention spans so much that they would stop being able to appreciate nuance at all... Then came TikTok.
I don't know what comes next, but I promise you it will be worse. Either way, it's a race to the bottom and we're not there yet.
I think that LinkedIn writing style is so infectious that people who do have something to say wind up getting sucked into it and wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.
There’s the prolific curmudgeon with a tomato cannon backed by a whole tomato farm and then there’s what you get when people thought your blog post was written by A.I. Ignore the first.
I've seen this author's work elsewhere like Substack/Threads.
Good article, good writer.
But this whole post reminds me of a series of 1 or 2-line tweets. And I think that's the point. It's almost written as a series of scheduled posts that dribble out once a day for the next X days. Write once, re-purpose many times.
In my perspective, this is a style of writing that emphasizes the poetic side of speech. The thin paragraphs you see is a result of a rhythmic decision to make it short burst.
More than anything it seems to make sense to read it out loud in a theatrical performance.
Didn't really come off as design-y or antithetical form and definitely not manipulating lol, maybe a little poetic or artsy fartsy. Agree that it's important and deep.
Same. It looks like the author is playing with poetry to me. They're clearly playing with the stanza with the similar lines and the contrasting lines. Yeah, it's amateur, but who cares? It tracks with the message.
If anything I think the GP's comment is an example of a thin desire. Being nitpicky/petty to justify internalizing and actually reading the post. There's no lines to read between here, it's plain as day. We are addicted to dismissing things because it's gratifying and easy. It's trivial to find errors or complaints about anything, but it's difficult to actually critique. I'd argue in our thin desires we've conflated the two. It's cargo cult intellectualism. Complaints look similar to critiques in form but they lack the substance, the depth.
That's not always the intention behind that style of writing.
Often, when I'm communicating with someone who is either dyslexic, or uses English as a second (or even third or fourth) language, then I make an effort to shorten sentences, and almost make bullet points of them.
It's actually a good exercise for the person writing too. Less can indeed be more.
Not saying I agree with OP, but for the law you described: any photo you take of a license plate on your smartphone would fit that description (unless you’ve explicitly disabled the automatic location and time stamping default).
So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.
There’s a difference in intent, and you’re aware of that. Aggregating photos of license plates for the express purpose of building a database of license plates with location and other metadata to make profit from granting access to that database is clearly different to most other cases of taking, storing, and even selling photographs. There is no overlap here at all.
Its not hard to distugush individual pictures that contain trackable attributes like a license plate number from building a large scale database of them for sale. Or making such a database not legal to sell access to without removing that information, etc. It doesn't need to center on the contents of a single photo.
No I don’t think it’s “very hard”. But I also don’t pretend like OP that it’s super simple, only to suggest a law that would make most people criminals.
I think regulation is critically needed in this area, but acting like it’s easy to do well is a recipe for laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that have massive unexpected consequences.
Basing it around the act of selling data seems like a much better approach to me than what OP suggested, I agree. I imagine there are edge cases to consider around how acquisitions of company assets would work, although it’s not a use case I particularly care to defend.
“Intent to track” could be an approach, but the toll bridges near me use license plate scanners for payment, so I could see it not being that clear cut. There are likely other valid use cases, like statistical surveys, congestion pricing laws, etc.
Also, currently have a ton of MMR, Punk Planet and HeartAttack. These were far and away the "bigs". I am really hunting for more underground stuff. Back in the day (I am old) we had a physical zine library in our punk house and it was a treasure!! My goal is to connect later to institutions via IIIF (Pratt, Barnard, Brown, RISD) and other institutional databases. Hunting up Burn Collector and Cometbus currently.
Seeing this on the front page again prompted me to dig into some of the Whole Earth Catalog successor publications for the first time.
I came across an article in Whole Earth Software Review, where many participants on a forum discuss the emerging technology of word processors — particularly interesting given the rise of LLMs as a new tool for "writing".
> LEVY: I readily admit that using my Apple and Wordstar has changed me considerably. I do stories faster, write them more organically and have time to play more. I play on my computer a lot. Word processing, even in our current brain-damaged technological state, is something that significantly improves lives.
> SPEZZANO: … You could thoroughly try out five cars in one day, but it would take a month to really test out five word processors.
> SPEZZANO: … I think the overall plan should be to work towards a software aesthetic, a capacity on the part of the reader to appreciate a good program. Most of us don't have this because a computer program is a new medium. Like the appreciation of art or music or literature, software appreciation may not lead to one perfect word processor but an increased ability to see the subtleties of the medium, and to be articulate about what you think and don't like.
> ICENOGLE: … Transparency isn't a property of the program. It concerns the relationship of the user to the program. If you don't have to think about it, it's transparent.
> LISWOOD: Some day I will be able to talk at the screen, and then I can really screw things up in a hurry.
> McWILLIAMS: I have noticed my handwriting has deteriorated significantly ever since my word processor arrived. Is this happening to anyone else?
> NAIMAN: … Yes, my handwriting has gotten much worse since I've been using a word processor. And I find I can hardly ever write a short note, even just a line or two, without scratching something out and rewording it.
The list of "Fifteen Word Processor Commandments" at the end of the article is also a fun read. And right after that:
> The typewriter is a tool that extends human capabilities. It lets the dysgraphic writer read his own writing and allows him to share it with others. The word processing computer goes further. It separates writing (modeling ideas with words) from printing. This is why this tool is so important to me. Since the writing first exists only electronically, one can word and rework it for as long as necessary — moving things around, correcting spelling, transpositions and typos — before it gets printed.
> It's unfortunate that there's been so much hype and lack of imagination an insight about all of the wonderful things computers can do for us. Given this, it was hard for me to visualize a personal use for a computer until I found out about word processing.
It seems fairly easy to figure this out with a little thought…
When talking to a chatbot you're likely to type more words per query, as a simple measure. But you're also more likely to have to clarify your queries with logic and intent — to prevent it going off the rails — revealing more about the intentions behind your searches than just stringing together keywords.
It'd be harder to claim purely informational reasons for searching if your prompts betray motive.
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