Maybe it’s just me, but Ontario wants to build 1.5 million homes by 2031 to help the housing market and all I can see is that it’s adding fuel to the fire. More homes without more regulation won’t make prices come down, it will perpetuate the problem. Crack down on house flippers and foreign buyers instead who use housing to make a buck at the expense of regular people who need a place to live.

There’s this really annoying autocorrect bug that I think started in iOS 16: Typing “love” in Messages always gets changed to “live”. Sure there is a certain poetry to it but still, “I live you” is usually not quite what I mean.

I figured out that it’s because I have “Love” in my contacts as my wife’s nickname. Removed it and it stops. But really, removing it is a non-starter so I’ll have to keep living with the bug until Apple fixes it. 🤞🏻

I love Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car à la McSweeney’s. 😄

This car is your ticket to anywhere. Just cruising in it feels like you’re entertaining yourself. It speeds so fast it feels like you’re drunk. Which, let’s be honest, is not recommended. I don’t want to feel like I’m drunk or buzzed while I’m driving; I want to feel safe and secure and, hopefully, get good gas mileage. I’m thinking maybe a Hyundai Kona or a Mazda CX-30.

Many things in politics make me want to cry, so I’ll gladly take this opportunity to laugh. Thank you, British humour:

Boris warmed to his stupidity theme. […] He wasn’t responsible for his own actions. Besides which, he had no idea what the rules and guidance were because he hadn’t yet worked out who had been prime minister at the time.

So psyched to be able to comment on a post on Kottke.org today! 25 years. What a milestone.

COVID is part of my daily reality. Not because I have it, but because I still do what I can to avoid it. Long COVID especially. I have seen what it’s like to have a long-term debilitating disease and I know the hardship of caring for someone in that situation.

Lately I learned that Diana Cowern, aka Physics Girl, has Long Covid. I find it very touching to see what she and her husband are going through. I hope she will pull through and be able to make fun and interesting science videos again.

I’m so glad I never bought a Tesla. I can’t imagine how I’d feel driving it knowing the antics of the deranged lunatic that Musk has turned out to be.

Confession time: I used to think he was smart. Now I’m horrified I ever thought that. It’s gotta be a disease, something must have flipped in his brain, right? How could he sleep at night otherwise. Is it money? If it is then I will never complain again about being in debt.

Just stumbled upon this bit from 2015 by Felix Salmon that potentially rings even more true today than it did then:

If your way to conquer global inequality is for rich people to get together and conquer it for you, then it’s not going to happen. Really.

I was searching online for a specific cable. I only found it at Walmart and Amazon. The latter was more appropriately priced but I don’t have an Amazon account so I asked a friend to order it for me. The purchase was not made on my computer nor using my email address, but within the hour I started getting junk mail from Amazon. Fuckers.

Considering that I already use content blockers and log out of sites when browsing, I decided it’s time for the next step in this arms race: clearing cookies. 🔥

This cry from the heart about the state of the Internet? I get it.

And that sucks because there are no real public spaces on the internet. Here in reality, I can fuck off to a park and hug a tree and sit on a bench and do stuff without ads, without anyone trying to track me, and without having to pay a dime. There was a time within my memory when people tried to make websites feel like semipublic places.

It’s not just that accounts are required on so many web sites. It’s also the ads and the tracking that you have to block. It’s the literacy in privacy that is needed to fend off the inevitable cookie prompts. It’s the algorithms taking control over what we see online. It’s the countless requests for a “good review” whenever you buy anything. It’s distinguishing the lies and the self-serving bullshit from the good stuff. The web now is so user-hostile.

Lately I’ve been noticing things that, if invented today, would require an account to use, but do not because they were invented before the digital age.

Example – Charging stations: You need an app and an account for every single brand of charger you want to plug your car into. But at gas stations, you can fill up, before paying even, and all you need is cash or a credit card. No credentials required.

Next up – Radio: Can you imagine if someone invented today a way to transmit sound over the air? It sure as heck wouldn’t be free.

Ever been told or hinted by a doctor that you’re fine and you should see a psychologist? This hits home for me because I’ve supported my wife through things like this.

According to Dr. Matthew Burke, a cognitive neurologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, it’s one of the most neglected areas in conventional medicine: How pain or other factors can modulate the brain.

“We’ve failed, really, to address some of these complex border-zones between medical and neurological illness and psychiatric illness,” he said.

This is so important. I’ve been there, home from the hospital after a health scare, trying to handle unexpected mental or physiological repercussions, and finding ourselves on a bumpy road to recovery without a map.

There are protocols for people recovering from cancer or heart disease, he said, yet when he was discharged from the hospital, there was little follow-up, and no discussion of potential mental health ramifications from his illness.

When you’re shopping for a car:

Hey come buy our cars, they’re so reliable you won’t believe it. Quality is what we do. Here’s all the awards that we won repeatedly. When you buy with us, you get peace of mind.

When you’ve made your choice and you’re negotiating to buy it:

Oh we really recommend that you get the extended warranty. Think about it if anything breaks. Repairs are so expensive, and you never know, things happen. That console display? That’s $5,000 right there. The manufacturer warranty only gets you so far. You really need to protect your investment.

“Our home on native land”

Sounds good to me. Let’s do it. I’ll expect our national anthem to be sung that way every time from now on. 🇨🇦

Sometimes you want to link to a web search but not impose your choice of search engine onto your readers. Seems like we need a way to launch the user’s browser default. We have mailto for your email app. Why not search for your favourite search engine?

I watched The Good Nurse today. That’s two movies in a row based on actual events. And I realized that those are our documentaries now. We watch a Hollywood movie and walk away thinking we know what really happened, when what we actually get are variably fictionalized accounts.

Seems dangerous. But at the same time, I don’t see many people willing to sit through a 2-hour documentary. Best to use the movie as a platform to dig further into the real thing.

She Said is one of those movies that should not be rated or ranked. But as someone who did not know how Weinstein was brought to justice and how #MeToo started, I found the movie to be really well told, well paced, and incredibly acted.

I can’t imagine how emotional it must have been to do many of these scenes. It’s absolutely unacceptable that women live in fear in any aspect of society, but unfortunately it continues. Let’s keep hearing these messages until it hopefully stops.

I read the beginning of the piece about the architecture of the Facebook iOS app and stopped reading in disgust. It’s not true that an app like Facebook has to be that complicated. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a codebase that could not be simplified. The reality of software development is complexity tends to grow linearly with time passing, either because it’s left unchecked or because it’s glorified. The Facebook app sounds like the latter.

I started porting Climateer from UIKit to SwiftUI and I’m using it as an experiment to check the feasibility of doing it top-down. I started with the App struct holding everything else, rewriting some views in SwiftUI and wrapping others in UIViewControllerRepresentable for the time being.

It’s like having two entry points into my app. I can comment out @UIApplicationMain in my AppDelegate, uncomment @main in my App struct, et voilà, I run from SwiftUI. No complex project configuration or plist incantation needed. Apple did a nice job making it easy to go full-SwiftUI at the app level.

Several years ago I was contracting at a software development shop. The place was infested with interesting problems that I won’t go into here, but I’m reminded of the day where a Q&A was held with the director of engineering. Someone asked what attracted him to work in technology. His response was, verbatim:

Because I like to build cool stuff?

He said it like a question too. This exemplifies the culture that surrounds tech.

I have been critical of the culture of technology for years. Especially in software where we tend to explore whether we can do something much more than whether we should. This wonderful post by @[email protected] hits the nail right on the head:

However thoughtful or well intentioned, a developer lives, works and is accustomed to a space where having fun “tinkering” is habit, using the “parts”/patterns already lying around the norm, and making tools/features that are seemingly magical to use in their ease or laziness the aim, but, deep consideration of the system wide design uncommon.

A developer sees themselves more like a young person hacking away at something for fun. This is still held as an ideal. They don’t tend to see themselves as a professional contributor/operator of an important social system with serious responsibilities.

Many young people—younger than me anyway—have been including the CO2 level at birth in their profile. PPM is a great unit of measure because it’s a value that, depressingly, keeps increasing at a reliably uniform rate.

It’s a simple way to point to the climate crisis so I updated my profile accordingly. I found my PPM from the nature.org web site.

I was proudly born at 323 PPM.

I keep seeing ads on the boards during NHL game broadcasts that say “The oilsands are on their way to net zero.”

Yes! Oil is not the problem! Let’s keep producing it, but completely clean this time, somehow! Easier and cheaper methods of producing clean energy exist, but let’s keep burning oil ya?

Are we insane?

Finally! I’ve been saying this for years to whoever will listen. Craig Hockenberry saw the light:

Federation exposes a lot of different data sources that you’d want to follow. Not all of these sources will be Mastodon instances: you may want to stay up-to-date with someone’s Micro.blog, or maybe another person’s Tumblr, or someone else’s photo feed. There are many apps and servers for you to choose from.

It feels like the time is right for a truly universal timeline.

Honestly, the news that Tesla is dropping prices by as much as 20% pisses me off. I know it’s capitalism 101. Demand drops, prices drop. But really, is that the world I want to live in?

I’ve been shopping for my next car. The used prices are decisively insane right now. A used car is more expensive than a new one because of shortage and demand? This is real people’s livelihood this system is toying with. Fuck that.

Unsurprisingly, hardware controls are found to be safer and faster. No way.

In 2016 I was one of those people who put down a $1,000 reservation for a Tesla Model 3. Until the car was revealed the next day and I asked for a refund.

Having a background in industrial design, it made no sense to me then to sacrifice safety by eschewing all physical controls.

Form follows function is the first thing we learned in design school. Give me buttons that I can feel and manipulate without looking.

Kottke.org is one of my all-time favorite blogs and I’m glad to see that Jason has created an official Kottke account on Mastodon.

That means I can stop following the unofficial one I’d been following since I joined Mastodon years ago.

It’s not every day that you see an app you worked on displayed 20 feet high on a billboard in Times Square.