"This is how we used to develop in the last decade, hitting reload on different browsers on different operating systems and adding special cases to our code until everything looked and worked okay. Eventually a consistent platform emerged." Yup. Yet another downside of the future-is-services: it's also a mess, and everyone just seems to be _coping_ rather than offering alternatives.

A nice talk from Adrian at Making It (which I was too ill to attend, annoyingly). In particular, good at covering the _middle_ of things: small-to-medium enterprise, small-to-medium-term companies, manufacturing between "China" or "hyperlocal".

Cracking cultural analysis of technology from Phillip Sherburne – a huge dive into the nitty-gritty of autotune and its impact across music and around the world. Deep and nuanced.

"Specifications and bureaucracies live forever." Or: why a Solid Rocket Booster is the width of a Roman chariot. This is good.

Cracking piece of… technology history and perspective, I guess, from Mike Johnston: a history of the 35mm film frame size, the things that threatened to unseat it, the ways it bounced back, and the ways other inventions embedded it in history. A really good Total Perspective Vortex of the history of a technology.

"In a nutshell: judging RSS itself because RSS readers are not mainstream is to miss everything that RSS does. And judging RSS readers for not being mainstream is to judge them against expectations set by some hype artists more than a decade ago — but not by me or anybody else actually doing the work…

It’s 2018, and I think by now we’re allowed to have things that some people like, but that not everybody uses." (This is good, even as someone who admittedly is Always Going To Like It)

This is very good stuff from Kars: from the challenges of designing with machine learning through to Value Sensitive Design and the complexity of good work.

"The problem is that photography has always been a technical pursuit and the mediating technology required to make a photograph has always threatened to overwhelm it. To quote Donald Kuspit, 'Technology is the last valiant attempt to discredit and devalue the unconscious…. The unconscious is the bête noire in a scientifically and technologically managed world, which is why it must be killed or at least ostracized.' The endless upgrade cycle, the more and more laborious and tedious mastery of imaging software, the solid belief in technical improvement and control as a means to achieve success, all of this leads one further and further away from any possibility of making original or authentic work. This is the bind of the technology treadmill. What it gives, it also takes away. So in digital photography we have an inherent pitfall in the photographic process married to the culturally dominant fixation with technology and control which are themselves obstacles to the unconscious, the very source of creativity itself."

Fantastic quotation and comment from David Comdico over at TOP. I feel this applies hugely to electronic music, too.

Great writeup of the V&A games show from Robert Yang, making me all the more excited to see it, and all the prouder of peers and friends.

"This essay is a loose collection of principles for physical interaction." This is good, from Tom Igoe.

This is a lovely article about being an Autechre fan.