Long Links

This will be the 30th “Long Links” post. The frequency has fallen off over the years; perhaps my time for long-form pieces has decreased or, just as likely, I protect my sanity in these dark days by consuming less. No, I don’t filter out Fascist Craziness, because it’s a thing that needs to be understood to be resisted. Thus, today’s Long Links does contain “the world is broken” pieces.” But not only; there’s good news here too, including fine typography and music.

Let’s start with music.

Music · “All of Bach is a project of the Netherlands Bach Society with the aim to perform and record all of Bach's works and share them online with the world for free.” The project manifests on YouTube and I have spent a lot of hours enjoying it. The performances are all competent and while I disagree with an artistic choice here or there, I also think that many of these are triumphs.

One such triumph, and definitely a Long link, is Bach’s last work, The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080. Bach didn’t say which order the many parts of the piece should be performed in, or what instruments should be used, so there’s a lot of scope for choice and creativity in putting together a performance. This one is by Shinsuke Sato, the maestro of the Netherlands Bach Society. It is clever, unfancy, and its ninety or so minutes are mostly exquisite.

Vi Hart, mathemusician is now a Microsoftie, but has been one of my intellectual heroes. Get a comfy chair and pull up Twelve Tones, which addresses profound themes with a combination of cynicism, fun, music, and laserbats. You will need a bit of basic music literacy and intellectual flexibility, but you’ll probably end up smarter.

IsraPal · On the “everything is broken” front, Israel/Palestine looms large. Here are two New York Times gift links that face the ugliness with clear eyes. First, ‘No Other Land’ Won an Oscar. Many People Hope You Don’t See It is what the title says. Second, it’s bad that criticism of Israel has become Thoughtcrime, and worse when AI is weaponized to look for it.

Tchaikovsky Opera · Adrian not Pyotr, I mean, and space opera not musical costume drama. In particular, The Final Architecture series. It’s ultra-large-scale space opera in three big fat volumes. I would say it’s mining the same vein as The Expanse and while it didn’t hit me nearly as hard as that did, it’s fun, will keep you turning pages.

Photography · I’m a photography enthusiast and as a side-effect am gloomy about pro photogs’ increasing difficulty in making a living. I also buy a lot of stuff online. For both these reasons, What WhiteWall’s New Shopify Integration Means to Photographers caught my eye. First of all, it’s generally cool that someone’s offering a platform to help photogs get online and sell their wares.

Second, I can’t help but react to Shopify’s involvement. This gets complicated. First of all, Shopify is Canadian, yay. But, CEO Tobi Lütke is a MAGA panderer and invites wastrels like Breitbart onto the platform. And having said all that, speaking as a regular shopper, the Shopify platform is freaking excellent.

Whenever I’m on a new online merchant and I see their distinctive styling around the “Proceed to payment” button, I know this thing is gonna Just Work. A lot of times, once I’ve typed in my email address, it says “OK, done”, because it shares my payment data from merchant to merchant. Occasionally it’ll want me to re-authenticate or send a security code to my phone or or whatever.

If I were setting up an online store to sell anything, that’s what I’d use. I mean, I’d hold my nose and let the company know that they need to fire their CEO for treason, but it’s still what I’d probably use.

Speaking of photography, I’ve repeatedly written about “C2PA”, see On C2PA and C2PA Progress. I’m not going to explain once again what it is, but for those who know and care, it looks like Sony is doubling down on it, yay Sony!

Vancouver · Vancouver residents who know the names “Concord Pacific” or “Terry Hui”, or who have feelings about False Creek, will probably enjoy Terry Hui’s Hole in Vancouver’s Heart. You will have noticed some of the fragments of this bit of history going by, but Geoff Meggs puts it all together on a large vivid canvas that will you better informed and probably somewhat mind-boggled.

Let’s talk about TV! · By which I mean a video screen used recreationally. Check out Archimago’s HDMI Musings: high speed cables, data rates, YCbCr color subsampling, Dolby Vision MEL/FEL, optical cables and +5V injection. Yes, that’s a long title, and it’s a substantial piece, because HDMI is increasingly how you connect any two video-centric pieces of technology.

From which I quote: “This recent update makes HDMI the fastest of all currently-announced consumer Audio-Video connection standards, the one wire that basically does it all”. I’m not going to try to summarize, but if you plow through this one you’ll know a lot more about those black wires all over your A/V setup. There’s lots of practical advice; it turns out that if you’re going to run an HDMI cable further than about two meters, certification matters.

Life online · Where do people learn about the world from? The Pew Research Center investigated and published Social Media and News Fact Sheet. I suspect the results will surprise few of you, but it’s nice to have quantitative data. I would hope that a similar study, done next year not last year, would include decentralized social media, which this doesn’t.

I know that Ed Zitron’s Never Forgive Them went viral, and I bet a lot of you saw it go by, or even started reading then left it parked in a tab you meant to get back to, because it’s so long. Yeah; it’s arguably too long and too shrill, but on the other hand it is full of truth and says important things I’ve not seen elsewhere.

For example, I suspect most people reading this are angry about the ubiquitous enshittification of the online, but Zitron points out that people like us suffer much less because we have the money and the expertise to dodge and filter and route around a lot of the crap. Zitron actually purchased one of the most popular cheap Windows PCs — the kind of device ordinary people can afford — and reports from the front lines of what is in part a class war. The picture is much worse than you thought it was.

Here are a few bangers:
“It isn’t that you don’t ’get‘ tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.”
“almost every single interaction with technology, which is required to live in modern society, has become actively adversarial to the user”.
“The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma.”

Publishing tech · It’s where I got my start. Two of the most important things are typography and color. And there’s good news!

The Braille Institute offers Read Easier With Our Family of Hyperlegible™ Fonts, which begins “Is this font easy for you to read? Good—that’s the idea.” Like! Would use. And in an era where the Web is too much infested by teeny-tiny low-contrast typography, it’s good to have alternatives.

Now, as for color: It is a sickeningly complex subject, both at the theory level and in the many-layered stack of models and equations and hardware and software that cause something to happen on a screen that your brain perceives as color. Bram Cohen, best-known for inventing BitTorrent, has been digging in, and gives us Color Theory and A Simple Color Palette. I enjoyed them.

Geekery · If you know what “IPv6” is, then Geoff Huston’s The IPv6 Transition will probably interest you. Tl;dr: Don’t hold your breath waiting for an all-IPv6 Internet.

And, much as I’d like to, it’s difficult to avoid AI news. So here is plenty, from Simon Willison, who has no AI axe to grind nor product to sell: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024.

Business · I can testify from personal experience that Andy Jassy is an extremely skilled manager, but I found Amazon and the endangered future of the middle manager, from CNBC, unconvincing. The intro: “Jassy's messaging on an increased ratio of individual contributors to managers raises a much bigger question about organizational structure: What is the right balance between individual workers and managers in overall headcount?” There’s talk of laying off many thousands of managers.

Before I worked at Amazon I was at Google, which has a much higher IC/manager ratio. Teams of 20 were not uncommon, and as a result, there was both a manager and a Tech Lead, which meant the manager was basically an HR droid. Amazon always insisted that the manager sweat the details of what their team was working on, deeply understand the issues they were facing and what they were building. I don’t see how that’s compatible with increasing the ratio.

And, Google management was way weaker than Amazon’s, not even close. So I’d have to say that the evidence is against Andy on this one.

Art island · Japan has one. It’s called Naoshima. Great idea. I’d go.

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