Blog

NOTE: If you’re reading this via email, some things may look different because I made a bunch of backend changes to my website, but it’s still me and my five things of interest. If you’re on my website, the differences will be a little more subtle and I’d honestly be surprised if you notice any of them. If you’re Team RSS, it should be business as usual. I appreciate all of you!

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Beehiiv’s CEO isn’t worried about newsletter saturation | Anthony Ha

I do think you’re going to see this feature creep of consolidation across the creator stack and content stack. My bet is, email is very difficult to do. There’s tons of infrastructure, it’s very complicated at scale. I think it’s one of the more competitive wedges, because it’s the means of communication. And I’m making the bet that we can go into website, link-in-bio, courses, community better than they could go the other way.

I spent most of the past week figuring out what I wanted to do with my website moving forward because Jetpack is doubling its price for the “cheaper” package I moved to last year, and my generic hosting service was also up for renewal. I strongly considered Ghost, and while I think it’s a great alternative to WordPress, it would be a significant migration project that would force me to think about what I’m doing here in a different way. I also assume Ghost will experience its own version of feature bloat over the next couple of years, potentially putting me back into the situation I’m currently trying to figure out how to resolve.

I like blogging, I like having the option for people to get my posts via email, and… that’s pretty much it. Most importantly, I have no plans to monetize anything I’m doing here and would ideally prefer a slightly stripped-down blogging experience than WordPress offers these days.

I’d forgotten about Beehiiv’s Morning Brew and advertising origins, a primary reason it was never a serious consideration for me in the past, but I found Denk’s insights about the overall market interesting, particularly his take on Beehiiv vs. Substack as tools and infrastructure vs. platform, and the challenges of simultaneously serving large media organizations and individual creators. I definitely agree with his take on email as a competitive moat, something I’ve been dealing with for the past couple of years with Jetpack’s subpar email offering.

This week, I completely removed Jetpack from my site and am using The Newsletter Plugin for email now, which is a lot more robust than I expected and, ironically, has me starting to think about what I’m doing here in a different way… O_o

(If you’re a subscriber and got this via email, I don’t quite know what that full experience will look like as I’m writing this, so some things may change over the next few weeks. If you have any initial feedback, hit reply and let me know!)

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Clippy Came Too Soon | Lester Smith

Modern AI “assistants” are like a Dunning-Kruger version of Clippy. We actually lose time double-checking an “AI Overview” for factual errors. Lose time scrolling past them. Lose time saying “No, thanks” when they offer aid. We are unpaid test subjects for AI tech developers.

A colleague who knows how I feel about “AI” hype recently asked me if there were any scenarios I might find them useful, and I legitimately couldn’t think of a single use case. While there are definitely use cases that potentially fall into areas some “AI” tools have co-opted — like recommendations based on site and/or user activity, or smarter search results, etc. — using “spicy autocomplete” as an assistant isn’t ever going to be appealing to me, the same way Clippy wasn’t ever appealing to me.

I do think there’s potential for helping analyze large datasets, but anyone who’s ever actually worked with large datasets knows, it’s always garbage in / garbage out. You have to fully understand the data you’re working with to do any proper analysis on your own, never mind trusting and validating the output of a defiantly error-prone tool you’re actually helping debug for free.

What struck me about Smith’s post wasn’t the “AI” angle, though, it was how Microsoft’s forcing it everywhere has diminished the benefits of Windows 11, and it’s actually making Linux seem more interesting to people who’ve resisted it so far — including me. I’d never given much thought to Linux, but it pops up A LOT on Mastodon, and I became more aware of it via Steam OS because of its incompatibility with a category of games I typically don’t have much interest in anyway. Notably, the gaming PC I inherited from my son can’t be upgraded to Windows 11, so now I’m wondering if that’s going to be my gateway to Linux, and maybe I should give LibreOffice a look…

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Making progress is more than making policy – what Mamdani can learn from de Blasio about the politics of urban progress | Nicole West Bassoff

Maybe the question is not whether Mamdani’s policies are realistic, but what it actually takes to win over citizens with a progressive vision. De Blasio himself cautions that it takes more than policy. He recently said that he “often mistook good policy for good politics, a classic progressive error.”

Once I stopped commuting into NYC in 2019 (and stopped doing the two-state taxes dance), I mostly lost touch with its daily politics. I was firmly in the anti-Cuomo camp during the latest Mayoral election because I remember how bad he was in general, even while he was opportunistically antagonizing Trump in the early days of the pandemic. While I haven’t lived there since 2007 and finally embraced NJ as my new home in recent years (it took a long time!), I was born and raised in The Bronx and will always have a soft spot for “the city”.

In that context, it was interesting to watch the evolution of Mamdani’s candidacy, and how aggressively and shamelessly the powers-that-be coalesced to oppose him. I vaguely recall de Blasio having a similar trajectory when he won his first term for Mayor (albeit with more subtle racist undertones), so the insights here about what went right and wrong for him are an interesting read, not just from a political perspective, but for general community organizing, too.

Taking power is the first step, and often the easiest one, but how you wield it determines the actual impact you’ll have. Hopefully Mamdani learns from the past and doesn’t abandon the “poetry” that got him elected in favor of playing the same old tired political games many will insist he’ll have to play now.

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Treating love for work like a virtue can backfire on employees and teams | Mijeong Kwon

The moralization of intrinsic motivation follows a similar logic. People work for many reasons: passion, duty, family, security or social status. But once intrinsic motivation becomes moralized, loving what you do is seen as not only enjoyable but virtuous. Working for money, prestige or family obligation starts to look less admirable, even suspect.

I need this reminder now and then, and I suspect a lot of people who work in similar industries need it, too.

I’ve been “fortunate” to work in roles that were aligned with things that are meaningful to me — poetry, publishing, libraries, comics — even when the companies themselves weren’t always the greatest places to work. I’ve also had roles aligned with things I had no strong interest in, or worse, quickly came to despise — hello, finance! Not coincidentally, in almost every scenario, the roles aligned with things I cared about paid less, but I’ve always been able to justify that sacrifice and carry on.

Unfortunately, many of the things I care about are actively being devalued, dismantled, or destroyed, and even though my current job is (relatively) safe (for now), I do occasionally think that working purely for money is something I seriously need to consider as an option in the future. Except for finance. FOH!

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The Benefits of Folding Electric Bikes | Ride1Up

Owning a car involves many expenses, including fuel, maintenance, parking fees, and insurance. Folding electric bikes offer a cost-effective alternative that is easy on your wallet. The initial investment in a folding electric bike may seem higher than that of a traditional bicycle. Still, considering the long-term savings on fuel, parking, and maintenance, the benefits quickly outweigh the costs.

Warning: that is content marketing from an ebike company trying to sell you an ebike, but it’s specifically about the ebike I purchased and am expecting delivery of this weekend. It’s not an affiliate link, though; just an interesting reference point to talk about my big decision.

After a few years of listening to the War on Cars podcast, reading David Zipper, frequently questioning the viability of electric cars, and spending the past year debating the practicality of an ebike in Northern NJ — I’m joining the cult! After quickly eliminating the cheap bikes from Amazon and Wal-Mart as options, I was poking around YouTube and Reddit trying to figure out if there were any decent ebikes I could afford, while also pinning down exactly what I needed an ebike to be able to do as an alternative to my regular bike, or a second car we can’t afford and wouldn’t use often enough to justify the expense.

Since I work from home and my wife uses our car to get to and from work every day, the main use cases were local appointments, running errands, getting out of the house more often than just for running, etc. An outlier is going into the city, which often includes a second train ride to get wherever I’m going, which could potentially become a bike ride with good folding bike.

Most days, my regular bike is usually good enough, as long as I give myself enough time to get where I’m going, but we live at the bottom of a cliff, so many of those trips include an unavoidable steep incline at some point. While it’s great for exercise, not so much for showing up to the doctor, a haircut, or lunch — especially in warmer months. In fact, that hill often keeps me from doing many errands on my bike at all, and every time I have to pay for a cab to go somewhere a few miles away quickly, I resent it.

But not enough to get a second car. (RIP Corvair.)

So, after watching a bunch of videos and reading a bunch of Reddit threads about different bikes and styles, I decided to get a Ride1Up Portola! I watched a bunch of videos, but the one below closed the deal, and it’s also a pretty good channel for ebikes in general, so not only did I like and subscribe — I used their affiliate link to make the purchase, too!

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