"…killing off links is a strategy. It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.

Links take us to places where we can make choices that Instagram never would."

It never ceases to infuriate me that links on Instagram just don't work. "Link in bio" drives me spare, and worst of all, it is never the fault of the people resorting to it. This is good stuff from Anil Dash.

Yeah, this is good / this is roughly the internet I used to know and still know / not everything is terrible.

"Look, all technology breaks sometimes. I’m not saying that new is bad because it’s buggy; I promise you, the old stuff broke too. You probably do not want to go back. But there’s a difference between “the car broke down” and “the car got lost”. One is a fragility of *things*: if you drive a car, you need to take responsibility for keeping it in good shape. It’s a scarcity problem. But the latter feels more like an abundance problem: it’s fragility of *something*, I just couldn’t put my finger on what."

I liked this paragraph.

"At the turn of the millennium, the internet seemed full of heartfelt pitches. Millions of users singing the praises of their favourite things – crowding around them, talking about them, calling for others to recognize their charms. Not the sturm und drang of social media: just clear-throated whoops, and echoes. Strangers like Pedro logging on to share their passions, not just once but every week, long after they had earned their Into the Grove membership rights, as if they couldn't help themselves."

"The fact that I cannot remember the last time the internet made me feel, on balance, less anxious and better about other people tells you something about how much has changed online since 1999, 2001, and even 2007." This is very good, on what the Internet used to feel like for so many of us, and perhaps why I still engage, or hold out hope parts of it might be like that again.

Paul Ford's website is 20. I have always liked it.

"I’m especially intrigued by reader reviews written by people unfamiliar with the vocabulary of literary criticism. They aim to describe experiences that most of us recognize but that can be hard to articulate, and they have to make up the language for it as they go along." This is a great article on the various assets of reader-reviews, and where they set on the spectrum of criticism.

"keep some parts of myself severely to myself, am thus able to maintain a deep fruitful disjunction between this real world & the real real world." (and: of _course_ the "Robin" commenting on MJH's blog is Robin Sloan)

"The lineage of luxury in art – from lapis lazuli, to bronze casting, gold plating or diamond encrusting –  extends now to graphics cards, ray-tracing, skin rendering, reflection mapping and to processor speeds, hyperthreading, render farms and the complex world of outsourcing, government subsidies or mineral extraction. It’s important and interesting! Curators take note!" This is good / the Ed Atkins also sounds good.

Bookmarked for reference – Dan's lists are usually good.

Beautiful. (via Denise).

"King Lear would have killed it in Silicon Valley." More Maciej, and yes, it's great.

These are also good. And funny.

Seems like a reasonable set of tools to help out with this.

"MailCatcher runs a super simple SMTP server which catches any message sent to it to display in a web interface. Run mailcatcher, set your favourite app to deliver to smtp://127.0.0.1:1025 instead of your default SMTP server, then check out http://127.0.0.1:1080 to see the mail that's arrived so far." Useful!

"The reason I am able to make Twitter bots is because I have been programming computers in a shitty, haphazard way for 15 years, followed by maybe 5 years of less-shitty programming. Every single sentence in the big preceding paragraph, every little atom of knowledge, represents hours of banging my head up against a series of technical walls, googling for magic words to get libraries to compile, scouring obscure documentation to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do, and re-learning stuff I’d forgotten because I hadn’t used it in a while." This paragraph also represents my experience of both programming and how I write my toys; a slightly round-about set of experience to get to where we are now, with lots of reading the manual and doing things in dumb ways occasionally. Programming!

Yep, this all seems like a very good list to me. Filed away for the next time I have to do anything with maps.

Enjoyed this a lot: Kim Stanley Robinson on California, SF, and the relationship between the two. For me, timely.

"In this film I wanted to look beyond the childish myth of ‘the cloud’, to investigate what the infrastructures of the internet actually look like. It felt important to be able to see and hear the energy that goes into powering these machines, and the associated systems for securing, cooling and maintaining them." Looks beautiful: Timo's customary look in enveloping, three-screen 4K. Gosh. Also: the uses of stills-as-film is really interesting to me at the moment.

"One-thousand dollars invested at a 20% discount with 5% interest (calculating interest every 3 turns, but simple, not compounding interest) means a player will have starting debt of $1000. After three turns the debt is $1050, 6 turns is $1100, 9 turns is $1150, etc. Totally manageable. The banker is your friend and wants you to succeed."

A lovely game – almost a poem, but definitely Enough Game – by Holly Gramazio, about being a blackbird in a city. It made me feel many things, which is what the best writing does. Also, I shall now probably play it again.

"We foresee an amazing future where not only can your household devices communicate with each other, they can also communicate with us over the same Internet lines. How cool would it be if your fridge could post a Medium here on Medium every time it needed you to buy more milk? And that’s just one idea." There are many more ideas in this post.

These are all very true.

"That is how the internet first appeared to me: as shared experience of make believe and dreams. And while much has changed in the decade since: that slipperiness, those mutable boundaries, the capacity for experimentation and imagination still is here. The internet is made of dreams."