Finally found the original source for the 'black triangles' anecdote. On: pipelines, and the bursty nature of software engineering progress.

A superb interactive explainer. I've long believed the best way to understand this stuff – how sound works – is by seeing and hearing it simultaneously. This page does just that. Brilliant.

Bandcamp is one of my favourite internet things; it's where the majority of music I purchase comes from, and discovery via the streaming services I pay for regularly leads to purchases from Bandcamp. And I'm now doubled-down on it, as an artist who sells through them. Their brief year-in-review piece is always worth a read.

"All my work is tracked through a Git repository — a way to track code changes over time, complete with comments on why something has changed or what that commit was about. In conduction with that I take timestamped screenshots. These two things combined — words and image — have the side-effect of creating a document of the making process. So with that in mind I have begun to take those words and images and compile them chronologically into small books, both for myself and the client, as an historical record of how something went from A to B." Very good. I really like (in general) the idea of Project Books.

"What I find appealing about a Sapper-influenced future is the sense that we wouldn’t have to be so careful not to break, to spill, to let sentiment intrude or go over our daily calories. That future can be made of almost anything, can stack neatly and doesn’t require custom furniture to fit its curves. We might not need to waste energy on stairs, elevators, and ziplines to get us to our clifftops like James Bond villains. We wouldn’t have to figure out how to open a closed pod without tactile or visual cues. We would not be living up to our future, it would be working for us." From the Thinkpad outward – notes on Richard Sapper, and the kind of industrial design I can get behind.

Nice interview with Tony Rolando, and lovely shots of the Make Noise studio/workspace, which is just beautiful.

"Let’s say the computers I was working with had been powerful enough for me to do my experiments in real time. I’m not at all sure that I would have made the discovery! Because the condition under which I was working, on a time-share machine, a few seconds of sound might take me nearly two hours. So the time it took, perhaps specifically the time between experiments, I had to think. These were discrete times: I would generate a sample of a sound that was 20 Hz, with a modulating frequency of 20 Hz and a deviation of 100 Hz. Then I would wait. Then I would listen. Then I would increase to another. If I’d had continuous control, I think I probably would have missed it. I could have let the carrier sweep through frequencies that were way too high, and I would have missed the points where they converged to harmonic spectra. That being the case, the fact that I had to sit and wait and think, and listen, and then think about what I heard, “what will be the next step?” greatly enhanced my ability in realizing the discovery." John Chowning on how not having realtime feedback was an asset, rather than a problem.

"This course is an advanced seminar in the anthropology of attention. What makes the
anthropology of attention different from other ways of studying attention (e.g.
psychology) is that we study it as a social and cultural phenomenon: attention is not just a matter of individual minds selecting objects from environments. Rather, attention is collectively organized and valued. We learn how to pay attention and what to pay
attention to from other people; other people make technological and media systems to
intentionally organize collective attention. We learn to value certain kinds of attention
(e.g. intense focus on work, mindfulness, or multi-tasking) and to criticize others (e.g.
absent-mindedness, distraction, intense focus on entertainment) in cultural contexts. So, while we will be experimenting with our own attentions throughout this course, we will remember that our attentions are not really our own. No one pays attention alone." This paper sounds brilliant.