Technology

For his 50th birthday, my buddy Chris Shiflett wrote a lovely post chronicling the ups and downs of his life in technology. We participate in tech in different ways but approach it with the same spirit, so I found a lot to identify with, and I enjoyed remembering the euphoria of my own mental growth spurts and moments of discovery like what he describes here:

For a few years, I was learning faster than at… See more →

Philly being Philly:

Within the first three weeks of the delivery robots’ arrival in Philly, videos emerged of people sitting on them, graffitiing them and eventually kicking one over.

And it’s not just Philly:

A quick web search produces a long list of examples of people being filmed or filming themselves attacking robots.

Buy why?

In Ouellette’s dissertation, “From Fiction to Friction: Abusing Autonomous Mobile Robots,” she created conditions to try and find out what motivated subjects… See more →

Anil Dash makes the case that we’re running out of time to save the last vestiges of the open web from the big-tech robber barons’ multifaceted (but mostly AI-shaped) rampage, which probably isn’t news to anyone who actually understands what’s at stake, but his post does a good job of enumerating and describing the threats for those who don’t.

Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go… See more →

Gotta print some zines. Off to FedEx I go. The self-service printer/copier takes credit cards. I’m prompted to pre-authorize a payment amount. Look at the sticker on the machine with the printing rates. Recall my document’s page count and how many copies I want. Do the math in my head. Select an amount from the preset options. Pop my thumb drive into the machine. It won’t read. No problem, I have a backup. But that… See more →

Two and a half years ago, I came away from Kinference 2023 disappointed that more of my peers weren’t as put off as I was by the current state of tech’s dominant preoccupations. My experience wasn’t much different this time, except that in the intervening years, Web3 enthusiasm has fashionably given way to AI enthusiasm. This isn’t to say all the speakers were doing PR for LLMs, and among those intermittently expressing guarded misgivings, Frank… See more →

I finally ditched Spotify at the end of 2024. I never loved it, and I felt extra icky about giving them my money ever since they had no trouble finding $250 million for the sham supplement salesman and douchebag magnet Joe Rogan, despite their inability to promote or pay the vast majority of the musicians who are the heart and soul of their service. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was learning… See more →

From: Twitter <noreply@twitter.com>
To: Rob Weychert <rob@robweychert.com>
Date: October 10, 2007, 5:54pm
Subject: Welcoming you to Twitter!

Hello, new Twitter-er!

Using Twitter is going to change the way you think about staying in touch with friends and family. Did you know you can send and receive Twitter updates via mobile texting, instant message, or the web? To do that, you'll want to visit your settings page (and you'll want to invite… See more →

I had a website long before Twitter and I’ll have a website long after Twitter. Not sure what my future is on the social internet, but you can always find me and my RSS feed here: robweychert.com

The level of naivete, if not outright hubris, on display in a recent New York Times article about AI-generated art is gobsmacking:

The resulting image didn’t end up going into an ad, but Mr. Carmel predicts that generative A.I. will become part of every ad agency’s creative process. He doesn’t, however, think that using A.I. will meaningfully speed up the agencies’ work, or replace their art departments. He said many of the images generated by… See more →

Has VR tech or UX meaningfully evolved at all in its long lifetime? Still looks like this to me.

VR has been trying for over 30 years to convince us it’s the future. Seems a lot more like the past by now. twitter.com/seldo/status/1…

As of today I’ve been on Twitter for 15 years. Feeling about the same as I did at 10: v6.robweychert.com/blog/2017/10/t…

@eleven_ty @pdehaan Evergreen thanks also to @stuntbox, without whom I might never have gotten past being intimidated by the command line and static site generators. They’ve improved my web life so much over the past seven years. 🙌🏻

I’ve been coding plusequals.art entirely by hand up until now (apart from the SVG), but I’m happy to say I’m just about done moving it onto @eleven_ty, and it’s been easier than expected! Big thanks to @pdehaan for his help with the final hurdle: github.com/11ty/eleventy/…

How it started: philadelphiaweekly.com/the-bitcoin-bo…

How it’s going: post-gazette.com/news/state/202…

Note the passive voice where the second article references the first: “In local media, Mr. Vo was championed as Pennsylvania’s cryptocurrency luminary.”

Both articles have the same byline. 😂

I love the smell of confirmation bias in the morning. washingtonpost.com/music/2022/08/…

accidentally summarized the internet twitter.com/robweychert/st…

🎶 Noooo moooore Twiiiit-terrrr
🎶 Noooo moooore neeeewwwws
🎶 Goooo-glllle hooww toooo
🎶 Tiiiie aaaa noooosssse

👀 twitter.com/aarron/status/…

Me, moments before my JavaScript idea does not, in fact, work

I have two different product types which use two different package sizes and are specified as shipping separately, but @Shopify ($30/mo) will only calculate shipping rates for one package size, unless I pay extra for a plugin. Is what I want to do really such an edge case?

Trying to set up what I thought was a fairly simple online store and man is it a headache.

A wonderful story of a girl finding herself on the web, and another example of what makes personal websites so great. sailorhg.com/home_sweet_hom…

Glad to hear these crypto dipshits didn’t get to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Not glad to hear somebody else did. Who decided private ownership of these artifacts is OK? nytimes.com/2021/11/18/tec…

“‘Getting rich quick’ is less an American pathology and more the best bet for a stable life. The side hustles, as it turns out, haven’t been working.” motherjones.com/politics/2021/…

My @letterboxd account turned 10 last week, and it is the only such social media anniversary I can celebrate unreservedly. 🎉

“Massively negative sum investment schemes where for every one person who makes a return nine others lose money is not innovation.” stephendiehl.com/blog/non-innov…

self-driving car = faster horse

I love this post from @cassiecodes using a practical example to explain a few SVG concepts that are as simple as they are powerful. cassie.codes/posts/swipey-i…

I keep thinking about how capitalism’s loathsome veneration of exclusivity is baked right into the prefix “crypto.” medium.com/@everestpipkin…

I’ve begun the process of replicating my @letterboxd film diary on my site, which Letterboxd’s outstanding data export makes relatively easy. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2021/01/v…

It’s good that that the internet has shown Parler the door. It’s bad that it only took the combined efforts of three companies to do that.

Now’s as good a time as any to quibble with the oxymoronic term “permanent suspension.”

After fretting for months over what CMS to use for my site redesign, I’m relieved to say I’m just staying with @jekyllrb. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/12/v…

like when netflix adds christmas movies on january 1 twitter.com/MikeIsaac/stat…

zoom needs an irish goodbye feature

just got a captcha on an unsubscribe form who can i talk to about an air strike

Added documentation to the tinnitus.robweychert.com repo because by the time there’s live music again, I may have forgotten how to update the site. 😞

remember when front end web development did not require a computer science degree

What a loss. @teleject worked tirelessly to improve the web and help others learn to do the same. Much love to Ari and family. RIP 💔 twitter.com/ari4nne/status…

Of the first 50 tweets in my Twitter feed this morning, 18 were from accounts I follow. All but three were more than an hour old.

It’s just fucked up that the reason we don’t disengage is we don’t know how to operate on the outside anymore. Like a convict facing parole.

I guess it was naive to think asynchronous friendships could work at scale and/or be compatible with a business model that does no harm.

I’m off Facebook. I use Instagram and Twitter begrudgingly. The only social network I actually like is @letterboxd. How long will that last?

Twitter is now mostly write-only for me. My feed is too junked up to read anymore. Whatever FOMO I still have can’t abide the algorithms.

I now end Twitter visits at first sight of a reductive character assassination from someone I don’t even follow. Visits tend to be short.

So I took @tweetbot off all my devices and am now at the mercy of Twitter’s algorithms. And friends, it feels like the beginning of the end.

@tweetbot made Twitter tolerable but – like any native app – too available. You know the drill: any spare moment, out comes the phone.

For years, I’ve stemmed the tide of Twitter’s algorithmic poison by using @tweetbot to keep things chronological and focused.

From last night’s dream about Zuck looking for new sources of training data, the phrase that’ll stay with me is “quivering stack of ham.”