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It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her. It’s been nearly 20 years since his death by suicide, and while the legend of DFW the writer has grown, the story of the human has been flattened to the stereotype of a tortured artist who came to a tragic end.

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It’s a massive and impossible assignment to turn around the cruise ship that is David Foster Wallace’s legacy. Amy could simply recede, as many family members of famous artists do after a tragic and untimely end. She could keep the fullness of her brother’s life to herself and stay away from environments where her presence challenges the conventional perspective on him.

But she has a lot to say about David, and she wants people to hear it.

“I remember that when Kurt Cobain died, people started going back for hints and clues in his songs,” Amy says. “When people started to do that with David, I was infuriated and grossed out. His whole life wasn’t an allusion to ‘I will off myself when people least expect it.’”

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I saw people yelling into cellphones, crying into cellphones, taxi drivers whispering in Hindi into cellphones like they were running an OnlyFans ASMR account for fans in Delhi. Make note: It’s illegal to walk your dog without taking a phone call here. I’ve seen a thousand people kissing, a million people hugging. Someone did human diarrhea in front of us as we walked near Washington Square Park. Here be Robert Frank’s old home and studio around the corner from CBGB, which is now a shop selling expensive suits.

…and “got to see a taping of SNL and go to the after party” level.

The “celebrity infrastructure” is especially impressive. Time to go? Your handler escorts you through a series of security locks and down into the bowels of 30 Rock to a sea of Escalades in waiting, doors and trunks ajar. Everyone knows your name and issue forth lots of hellos and good jobs and all that, and then you’re whisked to the after-party, which doesn’t get going until after 2 a.m. Lorne Michaels just sits in his booth and when you leave at 4:30, he’s still just sitting there, flanked by John Hamm, people coming up and bowing like they’re visiting a popcorn-addicted pope. He clearly enjoys it. That this guy has done this for ~fifty years is a bit TV bananas. The scale of it, the slapping together of the show in (basically) two days, the dress rehearsal just hours before going live, the cutting of jokes in real time, the manic set production, the (mostly) nailing it all and then the mega gathering afterwards — there must have been three hundred people in the post-show restaurant — is, well, it’s something else. What a thing to have kept going. And you feel like this is the last of an era, the final scraps of what used to be (the norm?) for network TV. Goodbye whatever this was. Glad I got to see you once.

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I had a lot of not-as-good titles, but there’s no clarity about a title until the very end. Metals. It was like how I chose Big Sur. I knew what the songs were about and who I was going to be working with. Gonzales and Mocky being the kingpins, my brothers-inarms, old witnesses, and I knew the expansion was going to happen. “The Bad in Each Other” was going to be a war cry. I was talking to the guys and I was like, “This has to be like they’re coming – there’s an army bigger than you’ve ever seen that is about to come over the rise of the hill, and you’re in your fortress, and you’re playing, and someone’s going [makes a trumpet noise] because they’re harking to call their brothers out to fight for their lives. It has to be that sense of massive life or death.”

Emphasis mine. And that song, “The Bad in Each Other,” is a war cry.

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The car emits joy wherever it goes. People smile at you, wave, and give a tiny honk when they see you. EVERYONE wants to ask what it drives like and what you think of it whenever they see you in a parking lot.

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The Seven Sisters shined brighter than I’d ever seen them, Orion’s belt was diorentingly-skewed, but what struck me most was the depth of the universe in its utter darkness. I felt like I was seeing past everything I’d ever seen, and as if in the midst of a tech-filled pitch for a new TV, I was seeing levels of black so much richer and darker than ever before— Anish Kapoor by way of Neil deGrasse Tyson.

…and Canyonlands National Park:

The ensuing night sky was disappointing after the one I’d recently witnessed in Namibia – in the corner of my eye I could make out some of Moab’s light pollution and the stars themselves felt fainter, dustier. But what I will never forget was the silence: as great and powerful as Namibia’s endless starscape, the quiet I experienced at dusk here in Canyonlands was unlike any other. At a certain moment a bird flew about twenty feet over my head, and in the supreme stillness I could hear its wings pushing the air around it. I’d never heard that in my life.

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These days so much of my spare time is spent hunched over a phone listening to the latest trivialities from food bloggers and stand-up comedians while electric blue light forces itself down my rods. I was so grateful to have two moments of absolute, majestic, universe-sweeping, NOTHING. Here a silence so pure it made my eardrums feel bionic, there a darkness so vast it made my brain melt.

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The horror of the Tonight Show is not found in any singular problem, but in the totality of its project: the systematic replacement of the real world with a brightly lit simulation of “niceness.” Fallon is the court jester of the Anthropocene, a figure who invites us to watch celebrities play parlor games on stage while the air outside the studio begins to smell of tear gas and smoke. In Fallon’s sterile loop of viral repetition comes the final victory of the commodity over human beings—a world where even our laughter is outsourced to the demands of the algorithm. You don’t even need jokes anymore. All you need is to say something that sounds like it could be a joke, and the hollow laughter will come. To watch Fallon is to stare at the face of a culture that has chosen the comfort of a rictus grin over the heavy, necessary terror of the truth.

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Among hyper-engaged politics enthusiasts, almost everyone bashes Obama. Progressives bash him for not being the left-wing hero of their dreams, moderate liberals bash him for not being successful enough at building the foundations for enduring Democratic electoral success, and conservatives basically view him as Satan.

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But ultimately the rebuttal to the right-wing anti-Obama revisionism should be the same as the rebuttal to the left-wing version: Obama was a good President who did lots of good policies. That’s why the bulk of the American populace remembers Obama fondly. And that’s why commentators of all stripes should discard their fashionable anti-Obama hipsterism and acknowledge the strengths — and the actual weaknesses — of our country’s last truly popular leader.

The “fashionable anti-Obama hipsterism” is why I can’t stand so much of progressive media. I can’t wait for the second volume of his memoirs; I’m sure the chattering class will lose their fucking minds…

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Via Flowing Data, The Public Domain Review on “The Polish System,” a grid system for visualizing a century’s worth of history:

The Polish System — which almost anticipates Piet Mondrian’s abstract checkerboards and the wider modernist fascination with grid figures — coupled chronology to the map-making traditions of geography. In Jażwiński’s original chart, each main 10x10 box is a century and the rows separate decades. Within a century box, each individual square is a year, each color a nation (with shading for different monarchs or governments), and symbols can stand for marriages, wars, treaties, and other types of events. Should one become proficient with this system, they can peer down on the history of the world, summarized on a surface not much larger than a chessboard.

This reminded me (like a lot of things do) of a post of Paul Ford’s, Unscroll Into, about his timelines project:

About fifteen years ago I had this idea: Timelines on the World Wide Web! Hardly an original idea. But I got super into it. I thought I could somehow fix the world a little by making a great website that organized things chronologically.

I did a ton of thinking about time. I learned a lot about how, for example, the Postgres database handles dates. I learned about different dating systems and calendars, and how various disciplines date things back to the beginning of the universe, and how the Library of Congress dates things. Chronology is hard. Time doesn’t lend itself to becoming data, no matter what the stock market tells you. … Nothing is more satisfying than learning about calendrical systems or the calculation of Easter. You feel how much people were stumbling in the dark, timewise.

Emphasis mine.

PS – Oh, and back in 2004 I was mucking around with the intersection of one-line blog entries and iCal files. Here’s the blog post, and here’s the archive.org snapshot of sippey.com/timeline (I should move that over here). “Calendars are not only planning tools, they’re rememberance agents.”

24. Finish. All my coworkers told me I should come to the annual Turkey Trot. And I was like, “Really?” And they were like, “Do it for office morale.” And so I come to find out it’s a speed walking competition, which sort of threw me for a loop, because what counts as running versus walking? Something to do with knees, I think? Anyway, I won, but I had to trip a guy.

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A flag is never neutral: it carries meanings that shift with the viewer’s nationality, historical moment, and personal relationship to the nation it represents. As an emblem of the United States—its government, ideals, and people—the image is inevitably political. It is also a popular symbol that, much like the Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, can be recontextualized through repetition and display. By altering its palette, multiplying its form, or isolating its structural elements, Johns transforms the flag from a stable symbol into a site where cultural attitudes, anxieties, and projections surface.

Via greg.org.

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Sadly, Thee Parkside will close on July 5th, after 25 years at the bottom of Potrero Hill. (Not that Bottom, which is also closing.) If you have plans to stop by for some tater tots on the patio, let me know and I’ll gladly join you.

But goal-based conversations (where goal == implementing a feature) with Claude Code have a shape to them that feels like something new, and have a pace that lets you ride them like a gentle wave. They’re slow-ish, they’re deliberate-ish, they’re deep-ish… For me, this feeling has been amplified by becoming a dedicated user of Jesse Vincent’s superpowers skills pack: brainstorm, answer questions, fire up a visual companion, iteratively draft the spec, review it, wait for the plan, review it, set automode, wait for code, test it, adjust, fix bugs, tweak UI, have it write the changelog, open the PR, close the issues, etc. The rhythm and shape feels so predictable now that I can tell when Claude has it easy, I can tell when Claude is deep in it, I can tell before loading the status page when there are operational issues on claude.ai.

cdn-worker phase done (commits 78e1978 + e5f828e, 45/45 tests). Skipping Task 5 (deploy) for your go-ahead later. Bundling Tasks 6-9 (foundation) into one implementer dispatch since they’re tightly coupled.

This is a typical message from Claude while it’s off doing its thing. It’s not quite chatty, but it’s not the stoic type, either.

I enjoy these messages. I like seeing Claude tick things off its own list, talking to itself, reporting its own progress to itself and its spawn. I haven’t transformed into a super-orchestrator, because I prefer to be on a single branch with a single feature at once, monotasking one improvement at a time. I like giving the robot my attention. I try to treat it well, even when it wants to rush ahead without thinking, or ignores the bigger picture, or traverses down some rabbit hole in a loop. It feels like a fair exchange: I give my care and attention to this tireless robot, and in return it will catalog all the ways that code path X does Y, or humor me without complaint while I endlessly iterate on little UI details.

During the quiet times when Claude is off working – making edits, running tests, committing code – I wonder about the product design decisions that have gone into this user experience…and who made them. What messages are shared with the user, and when? How much insight do you give to a normal human (lol) about the inner workings of the robot? And what’s its humor setting dialed to?

Obviously I know that Claude doesn’t have “feelings” or intentions, but its PMs and designers do. Do they want me along for this wave-like ride? How intentional is this flow state they’ve created? Have they instrumented my attention? Or is this feeling just dark mode shadow play, a terminal iteration of the IKEA effect?

Whatever. It works for me…to the tune of $200 a month.

“It’s a new approach and shows his sensitivity to how a presidency can be reflected in the culture,” said the presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “This is a president who, from the time he began running through the length of his presidency, loved contemporary culture, spoke about it, was conversant in it and talked in a serious way with people who created it.”

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The traditional authoritarian impulse to destroy or falsify the public record has not spared the digital realm under the current administration. Wide swaths of the government’s websites have been erased, taken offline, or had their content modified to either delete or adulterate the content. Leaders who regularly post AI slop on their social media accounts, and who have begun posting lies and distortions on major websites like the White House’s, will of course not hesitate to modify or remove photos from public archives as well. By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.

Thank you, Ben & Don MacAskill:

We’re doing this so that in 100 years, we aren’t just sharing millions of cultural heritage photographs. With the work of the Flickr Foundation, we’re creating a visual commons—a collective reference of our history and our humanity, accessible by anyone, anywhere.

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Given the issues Mythos has already found – across every operating system and seemingly every piece of software they’ve looked into – it’s hard to feel anything other than overwhelmed here. And again, that to me is sort of the story of AI right now. It’s less about “superintelligence”, and more about intelligence scaled in a way that humanity cannot.

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Creative endeavors feel more protected. And that’s because while AI technically could write the works of Shakespeare – again, time is not an issue, endless possibilities are literal – the system wouldn’t necessarily know when it had. It would only know which version to pick if compared against the existing works of Shakespeare. But what about future Shakespeares?

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Look how beautiful you look as you read.
Look how peaceful you look
as you let an entire continent colonize you;
as you lay the book down on the nightstand,
as if returning to the world
something that belongs to it—
as you stand, dazzled by the hills
as though the book, too,
has returned to the world
something that belongs to it.

Loved this.

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