Simon’s rule

I got a nice email from someone regarding my recent posts about performance on The Session. They said:

I hope this message finds you well. First and foremost, I want to express how impressed I am with the overall performance of https://thesession.org/. It’s a fantastic resource for music enthusiasts like me.

How nice! I responded, thanking them for the kind words.

They sent a follow-up clarification:

Awesome, anyway there was an issue in my message.

The line ‘It’s a fantastic resource for music enthusiasts like me.’ added by chatGPT and I didn’t notice.

I imagine this is what it feels like when you’re on a phone call with someone and towards the end of the call you hear a distinct flushing sound.

I wrote back and told them about Simon’s rule:

I will not publish anything that takes someone else longer to read than it took me to write.

That just feels so rude!

I think that’s a good rule.

Superhuman’s Superficial Privacy Fixes Do Not Prevent It From Spying on You » Mike Industries

Mike follows up on the changes made by email startup Superhuman after his initial post:

I will say this: if you were skeptical of Superhuman’s commitment to privacy and safety after reading the last article, you should probably be even more skeptical after these changes. The company’s efforts demonstrate a desire to tamp down liability and damage to their brand, but they do not show an understanding of the core problem: you should not build software that surreptitiously collects data on people in a way that would surprise and frighten them.

Superhuman is Spying on You » Mike Industries

A really excellent analysis by Mike of a dark pattern in the Superhuman email app.

That’s right. A running log of every single time you have opened my email, including your location when you opened it. Before we continue, ask yourself if you expect this information to be collected on you and relayed back to your parent, your child, your spouse, your co-worker, a salesperson, an ex, a random stranger, or a stalker every time you read an email.

Exactly! This violates the principle of least surprise. Also, it’s just plain wrong.

Amazingly though, Mike has been getting pushback from guys on Twitter (and it’s always guys) who don’t think this is a big deal.

Anyway, read the whole thing—it’s fair, balanced, and really well written.

The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected | WIRED

Craig writes about reading and publishing, from the memex and the dynabook to the Kindle, the iPhone, and the iPad, all the way back around to plain ol’ email and good old-fashioned physical books.

We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

Writing Hacks: The Adafruit Guide to Being Excellent to Each Other in Emails « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

Language is a technology. It’s a particularly strange one that’s made of squiggles and sounds and maps of meaning, but like any other technology, it’s hackable.

Good advice on reducing unintended stress via email.

Negativity bias is a tendency for negatives to have a greater effect than positives on our emotional state.

For email this can have radical effects: positive emails seem neutral, neutral emails seem negative, and even slightly negative emails can lead to actual, measurable pain.

Even with the best of intentions we can come off distant — or just plain mean.

The one about AI - macwright.com

Writing, both code and prose, for me, is both an end product and an end in itself. I don’t want to automate away the things that give me joy.

And that is something that I’m more and more aware of as I get older – sources of joy. It’s good to diversify them, to keep track of them, because it’s way too easy to run out. Or to end up with just one, and then lose it.

The thing about luddites is that they make good punchlines, but they were all people.