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The wonder, and the curse, of friendship is choice.

If I had to pick one trait, it would be the ability to be comfortable with “the struggle”. That part of the day/hour/minute where the code isn’t doing what you expected, things aren’t looking like they should, or where things are going wrong and you don’t know why. The times where you’ve planned out a system, realised you’ve screwed it up and missed something crucial, again. The times where you swear at the screen, let out a massive sigh or hit rest your head on the desk in exasperation.

In January of 2021 I was exploring the corpus of Skins I collected for the Winamp Skin Museum and found some that seemed corrupted, so I decided to explore them.

You might feel you can trust your gut to tell right from wrong, but the friction of social change shows that you can’t.

Over the years, Google spokespeople have repeatedly denied that user clicks factor into ranking websites, for example — but the leaked documents make note of several types of clicks users make and indicate they feed into ranking pages in search.

Another major point highlighted by Fishkin and King relates to how Google may use Chrome data in its search rankings. Google Search representatives have said that they don’t use anything from Chrome for ranking, but the leaked documents suggest that may not be true. One section, for example, lists “chrome_trans_clicks” as informing which links from a domain appear below the main webpage in search results. Fishkin interprets it as meaning Google “uses the number of clicks on pages in Chrome browsers and uses that to determine the most popular/important URLs on a site, which go into the calculation of which to include in the sitelinks feature.”

Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

I had just switched from Google Drive, and instead of making a new email address, I used an ancient Hotmail account that’s been tied to my Xbox account for over a decade. If you had told me I had photos in that email’s cloud storage, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d swear up and down I never used cloud storage under that email address. Yet, a day after I updated my subscription, an “On this day” memories alert popped up.

I clicked on it — and, oh my, was that a mistake. Microsoft OneDrive wanted me to remember one of the darkest times of my life by shoving photos of an abusive ex in my face — photos I had forgotten existed.

Pitchfork exploded as the music industry changed, then was cut down to size by another wave of technological change. Was that it?

…Cal Newport argues that we need to recognize the harms that technology has on us and our minds, and that it might be time to more aggressively curate the tools we allow in our lives.

Scott Nesbitt

“Don’t even bother,” the upholsterer told me. I was on the phone, asking for a theoretical quote to reupholster a five-year-old or so midrange sofa, which cost more than $1,000 when new. That task, the upholsterer told me, would run me several times more than the couch was originally worth, and, owing to its construction, it was now worth nowhere near its sale price. The upholsterer proceeded to lecture me, in a helpful, passionate, and sometimes kindly manner, about how sofas made in the past 15 years or so are absolute garbage, constructed of sawdust compressed and bonded with cheap glue, simple brackets in place of proper joinery, substandard spring design, flimsy foam, and a lot of staples.

In short, beyond accounting for new releases, there must be other factors influencing Rolling Stone’s choices.

This project uses Rolling Stone album rankings – twenty years apart in time – to determine what influences “greatness”.

First, musical greatness is shaped by how we listen.

We’re at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it’s become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.

Yet what’s happening to the web is far more sinister than simple greed, but the destruction of the user-generated internet, where executives think they’ve found a way to replace human beings making cool things with generative monstrosities trained on datasets controlled and monetized by trillion-dollar firms.

Their ideal situation isn’t one where you visit distinct websites with content created by human beings, but a return to the dark ages of the internet where most traffic ran through a series of heavily-curated portals operated by a few select companies, with results generated based on datasets that are increasingly poisoned by generative content built to fill space rather than be consumed by a customer.