i’ve been transitioning to the Affinity suite (as replacements mostly for Photoshop and InDesign). affinity.serif.com

📌

(when I lived in SF, i did once attend a dinner with him. he was cordial, interesting, didn’t do anything dickish. he already had views i knew i disagreed with, but, a decade ago, pre-Trump, the stakes didn’t seem so high, it was a fine conversation. sometimes i wonder what happened to people.)

there are some clubs, the more exclusive you make them, the less desirable they become, even for the kind of people misguided enough to imagine "exclusive" is somehow attractive.

“‘targeting’ is just taxing by another name. Means-testers have not figured out how 2 better spend a fixed amount of tax revenue. Rather…they use national accting rules to allow themselves to tax more in order to spend more while preventing universalists from doing the same” @mattbruenig.bsky.social

do district court judges really have to follow the precedents of higher courts when those precedents are wrong and unconscionable? district court judges have life tenure too. let courts that make up law beyond conscience or reason have to take every appeal if they mean to enforce their atrocities.

youtu.be/pDlZLsJJkVA

we might have a reliberation day, but we can be sure we will have no deliberation day.

“The China challenge is much bigger than alarmists understand. It’s not just about espionage or market share. It’s about the United States and the West more broadly losing preeminence and Chinese firms becoming reliable parts of life.”

in the photographs, we are stuck, frozen in time, but we are young. so perhaps it’s a wash.

not sure how increasing costs to news organizations would have made them less dependent on consumers?

if you’ll tolerate the self-promoting… drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/03/09/v...

you don’t want news organizations optimizing for viewership or subscriptions. what should they optimize for? that’s a hard question. but definitely not viewership or subscriptions.

“Liberals often refer to right-wing lies, misinformation, disinformation, or conspiracy theories, but what they are identifying are myths in the Sorelian sense.” @lioneltrolling.bsky.social ht @devinnn.bsky.social

i'd usually agree, a great virtue of PR is parties can build their identities on their priorities and let inevitable divisions on contentious other issues get sorted out over time. but this research seems to suggest that there's less need for that kind of strategy than i might have expected?

a majority of people who voted voted against Donald Trump. if you are going to make claims about the will of a supernatural "we" based on outcomes of flawed procedures, perhaps at least rely on procedures that yield a supermajority of assent. (50.1% is not magically more meaningful than 49.81%.)

that is to say, it could be that as a matter of proportionately represented public support, there are not serious tradeoffs, but in the 50/50 2-party electorates FPTP encourages even tiny wedges can have big consequences. as can the weather, or a well-timed scandal, etc.

Maybe! But Europeans are inheritors of a brutal feudalism. Not racialized and perhaps not quite as brutal as US chattel slavery, but still not a heritage of equality or liberty.

when websites do something annoying and you reward them with your e-mail address or whatever, think of the incentives you are creating.