The current moment bears way too much resemblance to tech culture participatory make-believe (to use @vortexegg.com's phrase) for my comfort.
06.03.2026 21:01
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The current moment bears way too much resemblance to tech culture participatory make-believe (to use @vortexegg.com's phrase) for my comfort.
I already didn't watch the show, so I am UPSET about having to live in it.
It might have been a mistake to drink caffeinated coffee this morning.
I must read Into the Midnight Wood by Alexandra McCollum:
strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...
Ben.
I've had Nanci Griffith's "Living in a Time of Inconvenience" playing in my head for many reasons, so it is resonating with this article:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IO4...
o how lovely! I will of course try to sing, for some version of the word, this to my cats.
The drive to believe that good work rises to the top on its own is strong, even when I know viscerally how often that isn't accurate. Good work still needs champions and supporters and adopters.
I ran across this while looking for something else, and: I recently started Eva Hagberg's book on Aline Saarinen, whom she calls the first architectural publicist, and it is making me smarter (and somewhat queasier) about publicity.
press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
Jumping around a little bit today to Total Fucking Darkness
totalfuck1ngdarkness.bandcamp.com/track/give-m...
*looks at @benwurgaft.bsky.social *
Which reminds me, a neighbor (a fan, not the cat's person) informs me that this is Pangur! I still think he looks like a Jeff, but I can see why he was offended when I called him that.
Blorred Blorb!
@andrewwyld.bsky.social
I did not know about that one, but I am not surprised to hear that it is a thing!
They're both areas where the myth and the legend somehow override people's lived experience. What @vortexegg.com calls participatory make-believe.
an excellent question!
There was like a month when the entire US-based team was getting up at some horrible hour to try to trap an elusive bug that had to do with local timezones near the international dateline...
ganked from a convo with someone who has also seen some Time Shit:
bsky.app/profile/did:...
Something I think about all the time is a comment from a co-host of @cheeseplus.biz's long-ago devops podcast that most companies probably don't need every developer to be an expert in, e.g. git, but it's good to have access to an expert when they absolutely need one. Time is like that too.
I bet! I know someone who for many years was the person on the MS Office team for Mac integrations. About 6 months after he left, I started seeing reviews complaining that the latest version of Office wasn't as nice for Mac users as previous ones were, and they have not let up since.
We want so hard to believe that everything is stateless! Adding in timezones is adding in a TON of state!
I have been through this one too!
... simple and reasonable like "We'll display in the timezone that the end user configures," can turn out to be a mess for all kinds of reasons, particularly when you're dealing with time calculations in multiple layers of the software stack.
There's a reason why we do everything in GMT/UTC, and it's because it smooths out a lot, not all, but a lot, of these issues. Removing the constraint to use GMT/UTC even at the display level is going to expose a huge amount of stuff in even moderately complicated software. Things that sound ...
Everything to do with software and time is terrible and full of horrible sharp little corner cases that you have to run into and fix one at a time. *Someone* might know enough about time to reason about them ahead of time, but I've never met that person.
I've dealt with software time a *lot* over the years, and it is never not a pain in the butt, so I saw this coming. But there is no telling people who hear the word "display" and think in terms of a visual change; they have to find it out the hard way for themselves.
...when it does. If anyone had said when the project was being designed, "We need to standardize on how we handle time information at all these levels somehow," everyone would have said it was overkill.