Notes

In reply to: The Advocate: History-making Sarah McBride sworn in as first out transgender member of Congress

I’ve been following the career of Congresswoman McBride for a number of years. She’s a remarkable person, and I think someone who will be a positive force in DC. I highly recommend her book, which is so much more than a conventional political memoir.

The coming months will show us all, once again, the extraordinary pressure put on trailblazers. McBride’s election is a huge milestone for trans rights in the middle of a vicious backlash against trans people. She’s a talented legislator with goals and ambitions to help her constituents, she’ll have good ideas and she’ll make mistakes, like anyone else. But everything she says and does will be viewed through the lens of “the first trans member of Congress.” It’s unfair.

But tomorrow will be different.

I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to design a user interface that prompts a user to mistrust it, and when it would be appropriate to create such an interface without undermining the utility of the interface.

I think I’ll have more on this. It’s a fun line of thought.

If I were more organized — and if everyone in my home wasn’t sick — I might write a “year in review” blog post. Instead, a half-hearted note will have to suffice.

When I did my annual performance self-evaluation at work, I found that I accomplished a ton of important things but made very little progress on some of the goals I had set in January. Many of those goals aren’t really relevant anymore, either, which maybe says more about the corporate culture of goal-setting than anything else. I’m incredibly proud of the things I did this year, they’re just mostly things I couldn’t have anticipated before they happened.

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions so I don’t have any goal-setting document to compare against for my non-professional life. But I think it’s very much the same story. The things I am most proud of in 2024 are largely things I wouldn’t have been able to predict at the start of it.

I realize this isn’t an original observation, that life is unpredictable. That’s still where I’m at, cliche as it is.

This has been a difficult year for so many reasons. I expect 2025 to be even harder. But I’m so grateful to the kind and loving people in my life, and for the extraordinary place that is Chicago.

Nothing like ending 2024 with strep!

“Hard to Tell You” lyrics

Warpaint is a band that I find myself returning to all the time, and “Hard to Tell You” is one of my favorites — telling someone you love that the life you’ve built together, the life you’ve helped to define, just isn’t working for you anymore. (I’m fine! We’re fine! But, you know, relationships are complicated sometimes.)

This is a song that gets played on gray and gloomy days like today, melancholy music for melancholy days.

In reply to: Tech bro missing the point

My 5 year old and I spent a big part of yesterday building a car out of K’nex, 100% a product of our own imaginations. He needed some help and at times I had to take the lead, but he was very engaged the whole time.

This morning within a few minutes of waking up he told me he had ideas for changes to the car and wanted to work on it more.

Sometimes parenting is exhausting! Sometimes it’s nice to have the kiddo watch a movie so I can check out for a few minutes! But I just fundamentally don’t understand the mindset of someone who would look at playing with their kids and say “can I make AI do it for me?”

I spent some time recently setting up an RSS reader app on my phone, which I really should have done ages ago. Besides news and classic blogging, what prompted me to do this was the discovery that both Bluesky and Substack support RSS feeds.

Substack is its own kind of problematic, but a lot of people whose thoughts I’d like to read currently publish there (and I am a paid subscriber for a few of them despite my reservations). Bluesky seems less problematic so far, but after the Twitter debacle I’m not about to give my heart to another social media company.

But RSS? That’s where it’s at! I can read what’s being broadcast free to the world in an app on my phone without having to put myself into someone else’s membership ecosystem!

I don’t think anyone has really figured out how to be an ethical user of the web, and every day I feel like this thing that I’ve built my career on might also be destroying society. But this feels like a tiny little way to maintain some ethical distance.

In reply to: Microblogging again

The biggest downside I’m seeing right now is that my current Notes setup might make it harder to ditch WordPress, which I hear is kind of eating itself thanks to the vanity and hubris of the problematic rich dude running the show.

Am I microblogging again? This feels like a mistake, yet here I am!

Sometimes I feel like the 30% of what I do at the VA is bother people to think about how controls will work for people who say things out loud to their computers. So I wrote a blog post about it!

Will this be the beginning of regular blogging? Almost certainly not.