Frosted Echoes

Our new kitten is learning that our older cat is really good at cat tower defense games.

From Ross Douthat, an attempt to fuse together the themes of his two books, The Deep Places and The Decadent Society.

Both decadence and chronic ailments cut against the human tendency to imagine a crisis as something that either leads to some kind of fatal endgame quickly or else resolves itself and goes away. Being sick for a long period of time has a baffling effect on friends and family and acquaintances, not because they’re unsympathetic or unwilling to help, but because our primary image of sickness is something that comes and quickly leaves, or comes and threatens your life and needs to be treated intensely with the highest stakes — and it’s harder to know how to respond to having something that apparently isn’t life-threatening but also doesn’t go away.

I can sympathize with Douthat’s attempt to draw parallels here. I certainly understand where he is coming from with regards to how people respond to chronic illness. Most people have difficulty understanding how to deal with illness that doesn’t go away with some modern treatment option or, on the flip side, doesn’t leave you dead. Many times, if people don’t hear from you, they assume you are better. Similarly, I suppose, unless people are raising an alarm, a decadent society is thought of as getting better, as well.

→ Decadence is a Chronic Illness | Ross Douthat

🔗Via Alan Jacobs

Watching The Neverending Story with my last night of Netflix. This movie is such a product of its time. Maybe my favorite movie theme song, though?

Jason Morehead wrote a fair and even-handed review of 2025: The World Enslaved By A Virus, the Plan 9 From Outer Space of Christian virus conspiracy movies. I appreciate the approach because, while I initially enjoyed seeing the tweets poking fun at this low-budget amateur production, I’m not sure if that’s the appropriate reaction. My teenage son watched it for a larf with his friends.¹ There’s a point at which you are laughing at something and you have a moment of self-realization that causes you to pause. For me, that pause happened when my son pointed out that the ending credits gave thanks to Jesus Christ as the second credit and started cackling. I just didn’t see where the humor was, and it seemed like laughing at something people created in earnest just for the sake of making ourselves feel superior to them.

I’m following Austin Kleon’s advice.

START A MAILING LIST, Y’ALL.

I even displayed the subscribe form on my blog’s home page so you can easily signup. Frostedechoes.com

There is finally a new Pinboard iOS client and it looks good.

Years ago, I saw Henry Zhou give a keynote speech at the All Things Open conference. I left his talk with a more acute understanding of just how hard it is to maintain an open source project that has become popular. Zhou, who is a humble and giving individual, spoke about the unreasonable demands of users who would get angry if their messages didn’t receive a response from the developer within 20 minutes. These developers are essentially volunteers, but they aren’t given the treatment you would expect for donating their time and effort to the common good.

It comes as no surprise then, as Clive Thompson reports, many open source developers are burning out and abandoning their projects. As he notes in his piece, open source projects were supposed to be like Amish barn raisings, where many hands make light work. For most projects, though, it hasn’t turned like that. He cites findings presented in Nadia Eghbal’s book Working In Public.

Twenty years into the open-source era, it hasn’t worked out that way. Eghbal found that only a minority of projects, perhaps 3%, resemble true barn-raisings — or “federations”, as she dubbed them — with lots and lots of contributors pitching in. (Some examples are Linux, Node, or Rust.)

In contrast, the great majority of open source projects are run by tiny teams, and often only one lone person. Outside contributions are pretty minor, and limited to a tiny one-line syntatic bug fix. That’s not nothing! Those little contributions are great.

But the upshot is, those lone coders wind up doing the lion’s share of the work. “Open source inexplicably skewed from a collaborative to a solo endeavor” as Eghbal writes.

Thompson likens coders working on a project that suddenly gets popular to an solo entertainer who finds themselves playing to stadiums full of fans.

But if a developer suddenly finds themselves playing to a stadium — and swallowed up by the time-sucking demands thereof — then not getting paid can become a serious problem. There aren’t enough hours in the day. Plus, watching wildly profitable and highly-funded tech firms use their code without contributing anything back: That can just feel like a moral insult.

This trend should be worrying enterprises that rely heavily on open source software. A lot of big companies are using source software in order to reduce their expenses. Once the open source components are integrated, they can sometimes be hard to extract.

Discussions of cryptocurrencies seem to be on everyone's lips, these days. Most of the opinions I am reading are against crypto. Stephen Diehl has spent so much time explaining the problems with cryptocurrencies, that he's outlined them in a blog post called The Case Against Crypto.

Cryptocurrencies aren’t currencies and have no mechanism to ever become currencies. They are effectively unregulated securities where the only purpose of the products is price appreciation untethered to any economic activity. The only use case is gambling on the random price oscillations, attempting to buy low and sell high and cash out positions for wins in a real currency like dollars or euros. Yet crypto cannot create or destroy real money because unlike a stock there is no underlying company that generates income. So if you sell your crypto and make a profit in dollars, it’s exactly because a greater fool bought it at a higher price than you did.

I remember many times people have tried to tell me that buying stocks is just gambling. Some people simply don't understand the purpose of an investment in a company that is creating value and being able to share a financial stake in that company's outcome. However, buying and selling cryptocurrency, as Diehl points out, does actually feel like gambling.

Matter just added a send Articles to Kindle feature. Now if they would just do that for the Kobo…

The always insightful Russell Moore writes in his latest newsletter about Insurrection Day. He came to a realization about another factor compounding our polarization after reading the Nonzero newsletter.

Over the Christmas holidays I read a fascinating account in Robert Wright’s Nonzero Newsletter of his epiphany about social media and political polarization. Wright had listened to a podcast in which psychology and political science professor Philip Tetlock “noted that once people have taken a position publicly, they have trouble abandoning it, even if evidence against it accumulates.”

The easy ability we all now possess to make our opinions public, without going through any gatekeepers, may be making us more entrenched in those opinions.

Finished reading: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo 📚. I have to say I like the Crows series better than the Shadow and Bone series but I love the way the TV show merged them.

Austin Kleon has a post remembering poet and musician Dave Berman on the week of his birthday.

I’m not much of a lyrics guy. They’re usually an afterthought for me and, to be honest, a lot of music I listen to buries the vocals, anyway. Berman is an exception though. That man was a true lyricist with lines you could scribble in notebooks and in hastily erased pencil on classroom desks.

Half hours on earth, what are they worth?

I don’t know.

~ Silver Jews - “Trains Across the Sea”

Twitter frequently recommends contextless rage tweets from people I don’t even know or follow to me to “boost engagement.” This is one of the reasons we find ourselves in such an absurd state of affairs.

Given the recent damning ProPublica piece that focuses on Facebook’s role in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, there is a profound irony in a good Democratic Congressman using Facebook to host a discussion called “January 6th: Democracy Under Attack.”

Finished reading: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 📚

The Quick Reviews web app from @mattbirchler just dropped and it’s pretty sweet. Still a bit rough around the edges, but useful and pretty.

Andy Nicolaides over at the Dent urges us to take it easy on ourselves when it comes to social media. Look around the interwebs and you will find no shortage of people berating themselves up for their time spent on social media or trying to concoct ways to curb their use of those platforms.

A big one is the use of Twitter. A huge amount of people are using this service multiple times a day, for various reasons. I’ve started seeing quite a few posts, or comments just as an aside in a post however, with the authors both figuratively and literally apologising for using the service. They beat themselves up for using it too much, or for wasting time ‘just scrolling’. I’m starting to question why that is. I mean, don’t get me wrong, if you’re leaving a dog or child to starve to death because you’re too obsessed with Twitter to feed them you’re most definitely an animal and you should be ashamed. If, however, you’re a hardworking individual that likes to utilise (not waste) your time flicking around Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, or whatever your service of choice is then you go for it.

Social media can be addictive and you don’t have to be Jaron Lanier to understand the ways those companies use psychological tricks to keep you coming back. However, if you can manage the urge and make reasonable use of Twitter or similar platforms, then you should give yourself a break and recognize that it’s an enjoyable activity for you.

→ Give Yourself a Break | The Dent