I remember how the web once was – and I want it back. I want to make stuff, not hate stuff. We can have a different web, if we fight for it.
Technology
222 posts
Over the past several months, I keep coming back to this thought: The internet is a confirmation bias machine. I once believed that because the internet exposes people to new ideas, it helps us to think more carefully. I still believe it can, but the vast majority of the time, […]
I’ve never spent more than maybe $20 on a keyboard. In fact, I’m not sure if I’ve ever bought more than one keyboard – aside from purchasing three of the excellent Logitech K400s for my family room, tabling, etc. I’ve always just had old spare keyboards lying around my house […]
24 years ago, Ben Folds’ Rockin’ the Suburbs entered my bloodstream – and I still remember the bus ride to Montreal with the CD in my Discman. It wasn’t just the music though. Part of what mesmerized me is that the album was practically a one-man show. Ben Folds wrote, […]
There are about 30 working desktops and laptops in my house, ranging from 1993 to present, but I think the coolest computer I have is my parents’ old IBM ThinkPad 240. One of the smallest ThinkPads ever made back in 1999, this is a vintage ThinkPad. It’s still operational today […]
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been expanding my two-screen setups into three-screen setups — a laptop plus two external monitors. Because I thought I only had one display port (HDMI), I went searching for USB display adapters. (I just realized today that my ThinkPad T470 has a USB-C / […]
Printers have always been terrible. I got away without buying a new printer since 2008 or 2010… until today. I bought an HP printer, because I’ve used HP printers for a long time, and mainly because of the existence of hplip. My goal, after all, is to have no nonsense […]
Understanding exponential growth is a prerequisite to understanding the pandemic. I’ve had many conversations about the public health response to COVID-19 over the past year. Setting aside more extreme conspiracy thinking, I’m increasingly convinced that most of the non-conspiracy skepticism of public health measures comes down to misunderstanding exponentials. People […]
In Part 1 in this series, I explained why there are no easy answers to social media censorship. The problem is not a “Big Tech” conspiracy to silence particular voices. The problem is that too much of our public discourse is mediated by private platforms — centralized, proprietary, walled gardens. […]