Links #102
Diana Kimball Berlin on no more forever projects. This. The forever projects I’ve done (thinking primarily of Mormon Artist and Mormon Texts Project) were fun, but I don’t think I’m made for that type of work. The closure from one-offs feels better to my brain.
Jason Rodriguez on how tech will never love you back. I’ve felt similarly, and that’s why I don’t spend a ton of time writing software outside of work these days.
Emily Miller on free indirect speech in Jane Austen’s works. Fascinating.
Sean O’Neill on Melly Shum Hates Her Job. Ha.
Jim Nielsen on AI being like a lossy JPEG. “It follows that, as Paul notes, you end up with not only a tool whose output is akin to the lossy, visual artifacts of a JPEG, but a tool whose output introduces into the world the cognitive and social equivalent of those big blocky compression artifacts of a JPEG.”
Tom Holt interviews K. J. Parker about writing. Enjoyed this. (And note that while it’s on a Chinese site, the interview is in English.)
Jason Kottke on Bill Braun’s trompe l’oeil papercraft paintings. These are awesome.
Jennifer Ludden on places in the U.S. that are piloting basic income programs. Yes! Delighted to see this. I realize this is America so it probably won’t catch on everywhere, but having it here and there is better than not at all.
John-Clark Levin’s Gen Z translation of Beowulf. Amazing.
Roger Pimentel on grace. This is good. “These explanations also invite another interpretation of this verse, which does speak to the undeserved, unmerited definition of grace that we find in other faiths. If we are, in fact, saved despite all we can do, that means all we can do, good or bad. This is a little bit counterintuitive, because we think of grace being a reward for those who do good works. But in addition to being saved despite our good works, it also means we are saved despite our constant mistakes, our frequent failing to love God and our neighbor, and our seeming inability to change for the better. Despite all we can do to stop it, grace still flows to us.”
Josh Collinsworth on the quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend dev. I think there’s something to this.
Rejected Icelandic female names and male names. I had no idea only approved names can be used. Wow.
JSON Canvas, an open file format for infinite canvas data. Cool.
Dead Simple Sites, a catalog of minimalist websites.
Jim Nielsen on following links on the web. “Discovering things via links is way more fun than most algorithmically-driven discovery — in my humble opinion.” Yep!
Rebecca Toh on reading people’s blogs. “I feel connected by our common humanity. We’ll never meet, but I can picture them sitting on their sofa writing on their laptop or using the computer in their kitchen, writing when the kids are asleep, writing in the morning, writing when the first snowfall arrives, writing about their new job, about losing their job, about moving to a new city, about this film they just watched, about their husband who died a few years ago. A blog is a small and beautiful thing and I am grateful it exists.” Love this.