The final question and answer set in Ben Sasse’s interview with Ross Douthat is incredibly moving.
The final question and answer set in Ben Sasse’s interview with Ross Douthat is incredibly moving.
IKEA is running a buy-back program for their recalled dressers and shelving. You can find a list of recalled items here.
I traded in my M1 iPad Air for a MacBook Neo. It’s the first MacBook I’ve owned since December of 2018 (…which on short reflection is a little over two laps around the sun from being 10 years ago…yikes.). It feels good to be back.
The first PC that I purchased with my own money was a [white polycarbonate MacBook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2006%E2%80%932012) procured in 2006 with the scrounged-together proceeds of high school graduation gifts, and an office supply warehouse job I’d held the summer after the preceding junior year. Macs have always had their maddening quirks; I still remember purchasing the tape that would help prevent skin oils from staining the palm rests yellow.
It’s giving early 2000s vibes…
It was a good machine that served me well. I recall purchasing additional RAM and a hybrid SSD from OWC to squeeze an extra year or 2 of life out of it. I loved that MacBook; it accompanied me through some of the most significant transitions of my young adulthood–through obtaining a bachelor’s degree, marriage (my spouse brought her own polycarbonate MacBook into our household), a cross-country move, and the Master’s program that predicated it.
A self-portrait from college. Hours were lost (procrastinating) taking photos on my original Macbook with Photobooth.
I eventually upgraded to an aluminum MacBook Pro. My spouse traded in hers for a MacBook Air. As the end of 2018 approached, I had ambitions for a long-term change in my personal computing relationship to Apple devices. I envisioned a future with motherships and runabouts. For most of elementary school, my family had a Dell tower PC on which I spent many hours playing Age of Empires and Command and Conquer (the O.G. Red Alert remains undefeated as the franchise’s best). Around the transition from middle school to high school, my dad purchased an iMac G5, and we never looked back to Windows. I remembered that G5 fondly and wanted to return to a setup where a desktop computer with a large monitor and peripherals was the workhorse for most administrative tasks, and a lighter device could be used for streaming and emails. In anticipation for this transition, I traded in the Macbook Pro for an 2018 intel Mac Mini (which we still use too this day as our home mothership).
Ultimately, I bought into the marketing hype (remember the ‘What will your verse be’ iPad Air ads?) and wanted to ditch the laptop altogether and embrace an iPad for most daily compute activities. However, with the capabilities of the MacBook Air and Mac Mini we possessed, I didn’t feel I could justify the decrease in functionality. That all changed with a major life transition and the arrival of the M1 chip.
Starting a PhD program, and the RISC-V SoC era provided the justification for jettisoning the MacBook Air and “investing” in a tablet. In my head were visions of a computing existence where I carried a light and breezy tablet to lectures or the library. This would evoke the tactile development of knowledge development with pen, and notebook with the computational power of a PC moonlighting as a tablet. On the home front, this dream was practically realized: most of my domestic life computer tasks were amenable to being done on an iPad with a Smart Keyboard. However, in my academic life, as I’ve progressed through my program of study and moved from primarily consuming literature to writing and compiling research, the shortcomings of iPadOS have become glaring.
In my opinion when it comes down to brass tax, most people participating in the “should an iPad run macOS” debate have 1 or 2 very specific use cases or software that inform their opinion on the debate. For me, the use case was Zotero, the citation management software with robust note-taking features, a decent minimalist text editor, and the best PDF reader in the business.
Using an iPad was great for reading and annotating research papers, but synthesizing that literature into papers and articles proved to be a bridge too far for the iPad. In the context of academia, the iPad is optimized for knowledge consumption; it struggles at knowledge production unless you give yourself completely over to its app-based logic. The iPad is not optimized for open-source software that academics have used for decades to conduct their work. You can technically use LaTeX, Python, or R on an iPad, but you’ll be shelling out a lot of money for the appropriate software and will have limited workflows for moving your content between different publishing tools. Zotero is pleasant to use on an iPad, and you can access a lot of software platforms through a web browser; but the iPad web browsers are all less functional derivatives of Safari/Webkit; all iPad word processors are basically derivatives of Pages. You couldn’t seamlessly port over your citations and bibliography into your word processor of choice as you can with macOS. Beyond functionality limitations, there are ideological reasons I started to sower on the iPad experience. I’ve been convinced that the way Apple manages its app economy is worth resisting for the greater good of the future of computing. MacOS and the devices that run on it hold Apple’s worst profit-driven corporate proclivities at bay.
I’ve watched or listened to an increasing number of lectures or interviews with Cory Doctorow and the vision he casts for how open source software and computer engineering can be a tool for economic justice in the face of monopolistic greed. A key component of that dynamic I had never heard of before engaging his lectures and interviews is the relationship between software licensing, apps, and copyright. The way that copyright law applies to mobile apps vs PC software ensures that a primarily app-based computing system (like a mobile phone or tablet) will be easier to monetize and close off to software developers. It’s the principle of repairability and the right to own your own property with the implied ability to do what you like to improve or modify it applied to 1s and 0s. Continuing to use the iPad further allows Apple to lock up more of their tech products into an ecosystem where they can enshittify to their shareholders’ glutinously greedy glee. A return to the MacBook is an attempt to vote with my dollars that this is not the future I want to encourage Apple to pursue.
So here I am, composing this post on my first MacBook in almost 10 years. Going back to the Mac truly feels like returning to a well-loved bicycle…for the mind. I recently came across a meme urging the reader to give their children generous access to a desktop computer while limiting their time on tablets. They compared a computer to a nervous horse that can love you, in contrast to the soulless aluminum and glass of the tablet. I agree with the sentiment.
The analogy I’d use for the return is that it’s like picking up a supple, well-worn leather-bound journal that you’ve spent a lot of time with. While my children may grow up in a world where the default is hand held touch screens and styluses, I am thoroughly a product of the desktop and laptop world. It took an 8-year sabbatical to drive home that personal reality.
I’m struggling to hold together the fact that daily for the past couple weeks the same nation whose administrative head is threatening civilizational destruction of a perceived enemy is also pumping out a deluge of photos showing just how precious is our shared existence on this blue dot in the void
The toddler is experiencing some sort of sleep regression.
Happy Easter. Christus Victor.
RE “bluesky is dying” discourse: No one has yet mentioned in my feeds that what made Twitter (and algorithmically surfaced microblog content in general) appealing is also corrosive to the soul. Taps the same portion of the psyche as the grocery store checkout tabloid. Long live RSS and web blogs.
Growing up I remember watching “shifting baseline” ads advocating for environmental regulation. This online resource provides a similar service for how the current U.S. Federal administration is erasing history:
Ongoing Artemis 2 mission updates on this blog.
The Artemis launch has me thinking about Mass Effect space exploration so here’s the links to each game’s galaxy map music:
Perhaps you’ve been warned to watch for “woke” Michigan companies but have you been informed about:
When you’ve been forced (for better or worse) to live through “interesting times:”
According to the history I’ve perused my adopted home state of Michigan is a part of the story in making March 31st a day to recognize and contend with the embodied realities of trans people. Given the centrality of my religious faith to daily life I’m particularly interested in looking for examples of people who share my faith contending with their experience of sex and gender. Dwelling on this article from Sojourners this year.
Currently reading: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden 📚
On the compatibility of a fundamentalist worldview and technological progress:
Mystical, metaphorical, and symbolic perceptions of reality have largely disappeared. Instead, most Americans share what sociologist Michael Cavanaugh designates as “empiricist folk epistemology.“ Things are thought best described exactly the way they appear, accurately with no hidden meanings. Such folk epistemology, it happens, is close to what which works best for engineers – straightforward, consistent, factual, with no nonsense. In fact, there are an unusual number of engineers in the creation-science movement. Henry Morris, an engineer himself, connects his engineering standards to his standards for biblical hermeneutics. “Probably for no class of people more than engineers do common sense and reason have their greatest value, and I hope that these qualities have not remained completely undeveloped in me.“ Many of his readers will agree, Moore quickly observed, that such “common sense and reason” must be applied to biblical interpretation. (p. 166)
Epilogue for my post from an hour ago, I’ve now observed a second patron talking about weather control. Ya’ll, what if the increasing volatility of weather induced by climate change leads not to a collective reckoning with the effects of the Anthropocene but a collective assertion that its all a government conspiracy to raise your taxes and constrain your civil liberties?
Someone just came into the coffee shop and ordered a very customized drink involving a couple different syrups and milk to coffee ratios. They laughed off the complexity of their order by self-deprecatingly confessing they are a coffee snob. At no point did they ask about the origin or fermentation process for the beans or the dialed-in specs for espresso shots today.
The barista and other patron in the coffee shop I’m at are having a sincere discussion about cloud seeding, celebrity cabals, and writing about conspiracy theories for academic assignments-not to disprove them, but to justify taking them seriously.
Technology is shaped by , and shapes us:
What would it mean to have your every adolescent intuition turned into persuasive prose? What is lost in not having to do the work to build out our intuitions ourselves?
If a President can point to any unspent funds for an agency, he can reappropriate it for what purposes he wants. We are increasingly operating a form of government where a) we routinely have government shutdowns, and b) the President can selectively end shutdowns for parts of the government he likes, while maintaining them for the part he dislikes. That is is a system of government where Congress has little functional power.
Do yourself a favor and make some time to watch this Animagraffs video on how early 20th century steamships work.
Currently reading: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon 📚
On the books central thesis:
…one of our chief claims is that the self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of the project of the humanities.
🎵 Feist’s Let It Die is an undefeated album.
Katherine Dee reflecting on the dinergoth discourse of the moment:
What makes Mariani’s essay frustrating is how close it gets to getting it. He acknowledges that “mallgoth aesthetics become Walmart defaults.” He knows Hot Topic scaled this culture. But he treats a change in scale as a change in kind, as though moving from niche to mainstream produces a new species of person. It doesn’t!
This is where the essay reveals more about the observer than the observed. The dinergoth becomes interesting because of her distance from his world. He writes about simplicity, lack of guile, a low-stakes way of being. This is a familiar move in writing about class: mistaking distance for innocence, reading someone else’s constraints as freedom.
I’m not on X so mostly insulated from the wider discussion of the original essay. I spent my public secondary school years in a rust-belt town dealing with a long tail of economic disinvestment and with the ripples of myspace and social media just starting to become noticeable on the surface of the cultural river. Katherine’s take seems right.
Currently reading: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden 📚
On the appeal of secularization in the 19th century U.S. context:
On the one hand, the push to secularize might come from nonreligious people, such as the agnostics, who were convinced that their positivism (using the term loosely) provided a better moral basis for civilization than did Christianity. On the other hand, secularization might be promoted simply as a methodology. That is, various activities might be removed from religious reference not because people sought to promote a non-Christian worldview, but simply because people were convinced that their positivism activities could be better carried out without the distractions of religious considerations, however valuable those considerations might be in other contexts. (p. 141-142)