
I made a new gizmo! d3-xray is a bookmarklet which lets you debug data binding in D3.js by mousing over the graphical elements instead of editing the project code.
I made a new gizmo! d3-xray is a bookmarklet which lets you debug data binding in D3.js by mousing over the graphical elements instead of editing the project code.
For New York magazine, an attempt to explain how Apple’s institutional priorities can be understood by looking at its source code, and what that might mean for the big pending legal battle with the FBI over encryption in the iPhone:
One reliable peril of advanced technologies is that the details of implementation usually aren’t yet common knowledge among most people — often including judges and lawyers, regrettably — but the compulsion of speech, or software-as-speech, isn’t made any more acceptable simply because fewer people know how to interpret it. The FBI’s demands in this case rely on that confusion: Its application for the order to compel Apple to provide them with the custom software states that “writing software code is not an unreasonable burden for a company that writes software code as part of its regular business.” This phrasing contains a subtle gamble: that both the courts and the public will conceive of the software as a tangible artifact produced by an incomprehensible factory in the clouds, rather than fully considering its design and development a coordinated act driven by human motivations, politics, and principles.
On the occasion of its inventor’s passing, I wrote up a theory for New York about why it has been so hard for a more modern email replacement to take off.
That is, it will remain impossible to build a better communication system until the primary goal is actually communication itself. But by and large, we don’t invest much in creating new open standards, specifications, and protocols around which entirely new classes of tools can be built — we’re too busy trying to sell apps! The funding structure of the technology world is largely set up to fight interoperability.
My first story for Motherboard, the tech vertical at VICE, is about the darker side of Twitter’s recent experiments with polls and non-chronological timelines.
As polls spread highly structured tweet content, algorithmic presentation meanwhile creates a testable structure around the more chaotic tweets. Since the implicit contract with users would no longer be based on publicly verifiable values like timestamps, a fully algorithmic Twitter would actually just be an experimental Twitter, a service in which the content can be constantly tweaked and manipulated in order to see how users will react.
Here’s a strange interview I did with the lead developer of Drupal, a software project which is dramatically re-architected for every release, about general philosophies of change.
You’re sort of explaining striking a balance between hierarchical values and non-hierarchical values. How do you manage the relationship between those two types of concerns, and when there’s a new concern that appears, how do you determine whether it’s a hierarchical concern or a non-hierarchical concern?
Let’s say you go to a restaurant and you order fish. You don’t care which truck brought the fish to the restaurant, do you? Sometimes it’s as obvious as that. You have to do what’s right for the operator, the fish is fresh and what have you, but we don’t care what truck gets the fish to the restaurant. Everybody understands that, even the truck driver. Maybe it’s not a great analogy.
For the Message, a theory about the influence of Netflix on television scripts:
Nearly forty percent of American homes pay for access to a streaming video service like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video. A theory: even excluding forays into original programming, their prevalence has now started to shape the material they present. As we’ve seen from a decade of arms races in SEO and social media, content evolves to jockey for position with its audience.
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of coding in CoffeeScript, which is a very elegant language, but my favorite feature is actually just a workflow. Instead of first coding and then later annotating the code, with “literate mode” you first write out descriptions of your logical structures, and then inside that framework you start to embed the executable code. It’s a very interesting way of working, so a few days ago I put together a small shell script which allows me to apply a “literate” workflow to any other kind of code.
I’m so excited to have started as a contributor to The Message, the chaotic in-house tech and culture vertical at Medium – thrilled to be working alongside all these geniuses. First up, here’s a look back at the circumstances that have occasionally driven me to write scripts to solve personal issues:
I’d often react to a case of information overload by trying to find a way to pare it down, little data processors which attempted to solve the problems I’ve had in my life over the past decade. I realize these are very strange artifacts to feel nostalgic about, but we don’t get to choose these things.
I hope you had a great summer! I wrote about one last round of potential Song of the Summer candidates for the Awl, again excluding anything in English.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a teen pop group this large in the U.S.—there are eight members, including one drummer who doesn’t participate in the choreography. Here they swap out leads so quickly and stitch together the vocals so tightly that the singers are still all but indistinguishable by the end; it’s a five-minute song, so that’s 37.5 seconds allotted to each member, if we allow no time for breathing. To keep things under control, they’re sometimes split into two color-coded sub-groups, just like the blue and gold teams from the early-nineties X-Men.
I mostly threw together that last post so I could clear my plate for some new action happening over on GitHub: memento.js, which binds data sets along a timeline for dynamic recall during media playback.
My excitement about this code cannot be overstated.
It’s been more than a year since I posted it on GitHub<, so I suppose I should finally acknowledge the existence of my text wrapping plugin for D3.js. It has already been discovered by some folks (including Mike Bostock, who enthusiastically described it as “generalized somewhat.”) Gregor Aisch’s d3-jetpack also contains a simpler implementation of this feature based on counting characters instead of measuring the width of the rendered text.
The newest installment of Facepalm Pilot, my technology-driven column for McSweeney’s, focuses on grammatical structures and the way they influence our understanding of the world.
As a thought experiment, let’s examine in extremely close detail a set of iterative changes that can be made to a single simple grammatical structure.
Some of the samples harken back to the nineties heyday of white R&B/pop. They’re spliced in here with a heavy-handed aggression, though, a refreshing change from the usual misty-eyed nostalgia, so it sounds like nothing else so much as bludgeoning the New Radicals to death with Paula Abdul. more
My worldwide pop chart watch for the Awl continues.
In a world teeming with earnest YouTube bedroom confessionals, maybe finding the good ones becomes more rewarding? Everybody please take care when stampeding down to the pawn shop to buy ukuleles. more
I cannot stop listening to “Playback.”
Belatedly, I gave a short talk last week at BrooklynJS, New York’s nerdiest JavaScript event. I unveiled Multiverse JSON, a lightweight new specification for configurable editorial projects which are stored as structured data and compiled with Python before reading or publishing. More importantly, I gave the entire presentation using a sock puppet.
In a manner of speaking, The Awl has picked up the remnants of my erstwhile Spin column about foreign language pop songs. For the next few months, I’ll be covering the phenomenon of the “song of the summer,” but specifically excluding anything with English lyrics.
The Japanese songwriter’s new single is so relentlessly upbeat and optimistic that it almost reads as 2015’s response to Pharrell’s “Happy,” but it’s also somehow simultaneously weirder than anything currently happening in mainstream American pop. There are the unexpected production flourishes derived from disco, of course – shades of Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You,” or perhaps at least the lightweight adaptation of it he might have performed during a guest appearance on Sesame Street thirty years or so ago.
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