doing some blaugust catchup:
It’s really nice to just be a little bit less alone by commiserating over the internet. I hope things get better for everyone 
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I just published On the Death of Personal Computing today. I felt compelled to write this after a conversation with some of my colleagues.
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blaugust recap :D
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I really gotta learn visual design sometimes. Like, the basics of it. I don’t know how to match shapes let alone colors.
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I expanded my section on vibe coding and moved it to its own page (previously it was just a section on my gen ai page)
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I agree, “lean to the left” to me always seemed a bit simplistic, especially because the notion of left and right and which issues line up with which has proven so malleable. A “progressive” from the 1920s US supported eugenics and alcohol prohibition, for example.
That said, I’m not sure about the “collaboration” framing either—amassing resources, expanding your empire, and vanquishing enemies looks like collaboration from the inside and conflict from the outside. There is just enough ambiguity built into the term that it seems hard to apply this frame to history without falling victim to confirmation bias.
As you note, collaboration (or at least my idea of it) is definitely not winning US politics at the moment. In fact, being seen as willing to “collaborate” with the other side or with undeserving victims is a certain kiss of death in many political primaries. I hope that this is just a temporary phenomenon and that history will correct itself.
But another way of explaining some of the same trends that support the “history leans toward collaboration” argument would be the technological determinist angle: Technological improvement generally makes it easier and more economical for people to collaborate, and that’s why we see more social developments that look like collaboration as we move forward—not a cause, but an effect.
Food for thought: Aren’t the highly controversial Flock security cameras, which enable police departments to share license plate and face tracking across jurisdictions and state lines in order to stop more immigrants crime an example of history leaning toward collaboration?
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Can I ask about how you decide what to put in the “incoming posts” footer? Do you already have the next post drafted and this is just a sort of queuing system? Or is it more of a self-accountability device? I really like this approach in either case. It makes me want to come back to your blog but does so in a way that feels honest instead of clickbaity.
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Ah yes… the joys of parental expectations. I wonder if your mom is case of projecting onto you a career or talent that she regretted not nurturing herself. I.e. maybe it’s all about her and not at all about you.
Like you, I grew up doing a lot of reading and writing and often heard from older relatives that I should try to get a career in it. When I got further along in education and started suggesting that maybe I would, in fact, like to be a writer, their tone suddenly shifted: “But how will you feed yourself??” First they projected their desires, and then their fears.
Thankfully I still get to write now, but on my own terms and at my own pace. I can’t imagine doing this on any sort of deadline.
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It has been quite some time since I posted anything on my blog, thanks in part to the melancholy I’ve been feeling over “summer” coming to an end (it didn’t feel like we had much of a summer to begin with…). To break the general inertia and writer’s block I’ve been dealing with, I’ve decided to start writing weeknotes. 
Here’s my first entry, if you’re interested in giving it a read.
I don’t know that I’ll post links here to every weeknote I write (some weeks will obviously be more noteworthy than others), but I’m definitely going to do my best to keep writing them!
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I’m particularly proud of this post : D
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All very good points. It is worth pointing out that I am a scientist who works on high speed communication systems. So asking me if collaboration fuels progress may be a little bit like asking the barber if you need a haircut! So I am also partial to the argument that technology fuels increased collaboration, which fuels more technology, which fuels more…
Overall, in the framework I am working under in that essay, “Collaboration” ends up being a bit of a amoral concept. That is why I used Genghis Khan as an example, though I probably could of highlighted more concretely the contrast between the Mongol empire as favoring collaboration while also not being a great thing to live through.
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I think I may be posting here too much, but I feel like y’all are my people.
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Oohh looks like they’re spinning rn. I’ll switch it on
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I don’t get what those words mean together, “posting too much”? What does that even mean?
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The Weekly Wrap Up is posted! Links this week include crappy birds, a radio station in a place that never was and a post office for letters to the dead. I talk about Italian charm bracelets, being mistakenly invited to join a rightwing group’s efforts to ban books and volunteering for an election protection role. Plus, as usual, I listened to, read and watched things.
There have been more Blaugust posts, too!
- Mortification - I like reading Ask a Manager’s Mortification Week stories not out of a sense of schadenfreude but more out of a sense of camaraderie.
- Scarabs from Heaven - Some people say they have found pennies from heaven - my mom sent me scarabs.
- Kobo vs Kindle - I used to be a diehard Kindle Keyboard fan. Then the Kobo Libra 2 caught my eye.
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I love that your mom manifested scarabs!! I found one in a box of childhood things my mom was happy for me to reclaim - they were such a precious object to me (and probably from the museum gift shop, a special place).
In the southern US the “pennies from heaven” phenomenon shows up often as “redbirds” (cardinals) for rural folks, and sometimes yellow butterflies (cloudless sulphurs)
Excited to know about bookdrop, too!
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The Canada Goose absolutely deserves to be higher on that list, haha. I did my graduate degree at the University of Western Ontario… There is a large population of incredibly vindictive, aggressive Canada Geese that congregate on the lawn right outside University College, shitting on absolutely everything and terrorizing anything that dares to exist in their presence. They’re so bad, the university’s website actually has a page featuring “safety tips to reduce conflict with Canada Geese.”
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