Facing west
Hit and Miss #352
In the titular story from Watch With Me, there’s a scene in which Tol Proudfoot and his band of neighbourhood characters see a coming storm: still leaves in the forest, heavy air, and a dark cloud on the horizon, moving fast toward them.
Being in Kentucky, they were presumably looking south or southwest to see this sign of rain to come. Sitting on the front porch, I realized I’ve almost always lived somewhere with a reasonably clear westward view. Being in Ottawa, this gives me a decent window on the weather to come, as prevailing winds carry most of our weather from the west (and, when the winds come instead from the east, you can almost guarantee it’ll be a mess).
Facing west, then, warns of what’s coming. Facing east, we see what’s gone, and how it’s changing—how it’s affecting others, but not how it’ll affect you.
There’s a comfort to facing west: you can see what’s coming and prepare for it. But I wonder if it doesn’t bring its own anxieties: a preoccupation with looking and predicting, instead of being and reflecting.
- Since this is a newsletter ostensibly about my reading, it makes sense to start off with Jeremy Keith’s reflection on online bookshelves (and what our reading patterns reveal about us). It’s a good reminder, too, of the fun of seeing what someone else is reading: I used to use Goodreads for this, but fell out with it; this newsletter is the best bet for now.
- Via Jeremy’s post, I learned about Maggie Appleton’s Antilibrary, with its endearing subtitle of “Books I like the idea of having read.” (I, too, like the idea of having one day read Seeing Like a State!) This led me to Maggie’s “Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden”. I’ve long loved the idea of a personal site as a garden, and am intrigued by the patterns Maggie puts forward—there’s always more tinkering to do :)
- Lorin Hochstein, in his never-ending quest to undo the idea of the “root cause”, pointing out that what we often describe as root causes are better considered “vulnerabilities” in a system: not guarantees of failure, but contributors to it.
- Relatedly, Mandy Brown riffs on Deb Chachra to point out the incompatibility between optimization and resilience: where optimization puts all resources in a system toward some desired purpose, resilience requires leaving slack in a system, to handle crisis. Deb, Mandy, and Lorin all take issue with the idea of an unfixed, unchanging external environment—often an unstated assumption in our treatment of complex systems.
- Speaking of assumptions, failure, and complex systems, the Antarctic IT worker behind brr.fyi returns to describe the extreme connectivity challenges at the bottom of the world, how web-connected applications frequently make bad assumptions about bandwidth, and patterns for better handling of flaky internet.
- Dan Luu describes what makes a great corporate engineering blog, and what makes a terrible one. Spoiler alert, it’s the same forces that make working in government either great or terrible!
- Meanwhile, the terrible, easy vulnerability of Microsoft’s new Recall feature. What a mess.
- I enjoyed this explanation of the diverging incentives between landlords and tenants when it comes to energy efficiency (e.g., the choice of heating and cooling hardware)—they almost never line up to favour efficient appliances!
- Finally, a great beginner’s guide to saké, including where to find it in Ottawa.
All the best for the week ahead!
Lucas