I just finished Ann Leckie’s Ancilliary Sword after many session of reading on my commute (~40 minutes each way, but often I’ll be talking with fellow bus-riders or reading the news). It was taking me a while to get through but I was terrified of reading-for-leisure outside of my commute because I might not be able to put it down and go to bed. This book was the second is a series, and it was not as jaw-dropping as the first but picking the series back up again was a great experience.
So good of an experience that I tore through the third book (Ancillary Mercy) in a day of almost solid reading.
I’m not sure what’s next! This was a mini-binge on genre fic after a dose of non-fiction (Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall, portions of Engineering a Safer World by Nancy G. Leveson), so I might go back to non-fiction for a bit.
by Craig Mod, Wired Found via HN
This is the kind of futurism/anti-futurism work I like. Technology has delivered transformations, but not always in the ways we expect.
Also this made me want to read The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing by Matt Taibbi - except Taibbi’s Substack page only talks about his new work, not his old one, and my usual tools (aka search on Goodreads and then give up) aren’t turning anything up.
I found the author’s web-site (at least, I assume it’s the author - the site I found was for someone named Craig Mod who writes about books) and some of their other works look really cool. Oh God It’s Raining Newsletters reminds me of another recent HN post about the power of newsletters as a creator to maintain control over your audience in a world full of walled-garden content-platforms (at least, the title reminds of that - I have not read Mod’s work). And If kottke.org were a book just sounds like a fun premise.
by Jenny Odell Found via HN
I can’t easily describe what I took a away from this, other than to say I thought it was worth the bus-ride I spent reading it.
by Andrew Van Dam, The Washington Post
A lot of the “rural decline” in America is statistical - as rural areas grow and are successful, if they start to become economically integrated into a nearby metro area (or just get big) they stop counting as “rural”, even if the area is still culturally the same as is was previously.
by Michael Hobbes, HuffPost
This article covers a lot of ground, which can be detrimental, but it’s an important topic and I feel like I know more that I started with about what the broad outline of the problem is.
What I learned:
The financial crisis and growing inequality has changed the nature of homelessness in the US. Programs which worked on the older face of the problem (individuals with chronic mental-health or substance-abuse problems) aren’t as suitable for folks who are homeless simply because housing is too expensive and were/are otherwise coping. (The second cohort would benefit from attacking inequality at its root, as opposed the interventions after they have been on the streets for a year when all of their problems are worse & more expensive.)
Our society has shifted the funding of the homeless problem from the federal government to state and city governments, who are able to spend less money in general on the problem.
Cities often don’t spend on the most effective interventions because they are not always popular.
Even if we were spending money in the right places we’re simply not putting in the resources required to make a difference.
I’m mildly interested in static-site hosting because that’s what this site is and I think the “low tech” approach is interesting. Proggit has a nice discussion on Static web - back to the roots?. (Although the “right” metric should be time-to-first-paint not size, but I guess size is likely a decent proxy? Maybe I don’t care enough about mobile) Interesting links out from the conversation:
The Website Obesity Crisis The title is a bit over-blown (crisis?) but the article is good. The article is adapted from a talk, so the title is forgivable. The talk/article is from Pinboard guy, who I should be following on Twitter but am not.
The Edge of the Static Web Follow-up to Static web - back to the roots? which I have not read yet.
Web Page Sizes: A (Not So) Brief History of Page Size through 2015
There’s also lots of love for Netlify out and about - it makes me feel silly for my approach of dumping everything into a GCP storage bucket and pointing Cloudflare at it?