Fourteen hours of daylight

There’s a magic threshold crossed when the sun rises before 6 and sets after 8. Twelve hours of daylight is one thing, but fourteen? Bursting with potential.

Maybe the magic isn’t because of the daylight, but the shorter evenings—pack eight hours sleep into those ten hours of night and there’s just that much less time to let the nighttime worries in. The good advice to “deal with problems in daylight” is because problems seem so much weightier in the night.

This weekend, we crossed that threshold, and thank goodness. We’ve got sixteen weeks of fourteen-hour-plus days ahead of us—plenty of time to bask in the sun.

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• XOXO Explore is the archive of XOXO, “an experiment gone right”—a festival celebrating independent creativity on the internet. It‘s one of those gatherings you hear spoken of with such love, and now its entire archive of talks is available in one place. Each year is lovingly documented, with the schedules preserved and brief memories woven throughout. If you’re looking for a talk to start with, check out Erin Kissane’s 2024 talk, which she describes as “[explaining] the extraordinary thing the Covid Tracking Project was, why I got off the internet, and why I’m back and all in on networks”.
• Nilay Patel wrote about “software brain”, the disconnect between those who see the world as something that can be smushed into a set of databases, and those who don’t. The former type gold rushes toward AI, while the latter? “The people do not yearn for automation.” (Leave aside the AI angle, “software brain” is a very useful analytical frame—one that better helps me understand some of the people I’ve worked with and known over the years.)
• John Gruber wrote about the recent printing error in the New York Times crossword, using it as an example of software brain versus hardware brain.
• Rachel Andrew on “the importance of people who care”: “The problem for us is that it’s very difficult to demonstrate the impact of it until it’s gone. Even then, people may not connect the fact that support requests have gone up with poor quality documentation, or poor reviews with an unintuitive UI.” (Related: “Before You Fire All Your Glue People Because of AI”.)
• Mike Monteiro on how to read: “the only New Years resolution that’s ever stuck: if I am bored, I read.”
• Low-tech Magazine experimented with a handcart, using it for both ordinary and extraordinary errands. What a delightful tool. Explains the physics of it well, too (you’re not actually moving all the weight it can carry yourself, at least not on flat ground [would that Ottawa had flatter ground]).
• David Coletto on the increasingly difficult work of political polling. Read up on methods for survey weighting after this, fascinating stuff. (That methods link is part of a broader Pew Research Center report, “For Weighting Online Opt-In Samples, What Matters Most?”)
• “I just made 424 animated pie charts because if you’re going to break a rule you should break it good and hard.”

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas