Social media businesses should not charge* for APIs. If a company like Reddit or Twitter derives most of its value from content that users write for free then it must provide APIs for anyone to download and manipulate that content. While an interactive API that enables third party applications is desirable, a simple static dump is the bare minimum to fulfill the social contract (see StackOverflow or Metafilter for examples.)

Unfortunately Twitter and Reddit don’t agree. They are both rent seeking with their APIs. Their main intent is to destroy third party apps that no longer aid the company’s business goals. But they’re also trying to make a few million bucks a year licensing access to data, particularly on the back of AI training. It’s wrong.

The key thing here is social media sites don’t produce content. They merely host it. Millions of users create the content expecting it will be widely available. Locking down an API breaks that social contract.

Honestly I don’t care as much about full fledged third party clients like Apollo or Tweetbot; I like them but I understand why the companies want to kill them. What I care about more are analytics sites, things that provide interesting alternative views like a Reddit user profile or Emoji tracking. I also think it is the greater good to let AIs train for free.

*I don’t mind a site charging a nominal fee for API access. Either to cover the cost of API service itself, or more importantly to encourage API developers to be efficient when making API requests. But that's hundreds to thousands of dollars a year, not millions.

The short sighted thing about these API fees is they will harm the company in the long term. If it becomes difficult to use a proper API to get at content folks will simply screen scrape it instead. That’s bad for everyone.

I’ve been listening to the same music every night when I go to sleep 10+ years now. Weird endorsement; I’ve listened to it with more attention plenty of times too. But it’s particularly good for going to sleep; calm, interesting, and comfortably familiar.

That music is GAS, Werner Voigt’s ambient techno project (Bandcamp, Youtube). The primary collection is Nah und Fern, four albums that were made over 1996–2000. In 2017 he released a new GAS album, Narkopop. Followed in 2018 by Rausch and 2021 Die Lange Marsch (a sort of remix). I like the first four most.

Ambient music is pretty hit or miss. For every brilliant work like Music for Airports or Aphex Twin’s early music there’s a zillion gormless electronica and “earth fart” recordings that fail to inspire. Furniture music is supposed to be in the background, sure. But still high enough quality to be appreciated.

GAS succeeds. It has just enough of a beat (sometimes) to make time flow without being overwhelming like regular techno or something rhythmically complex like Autechre. The sounds are richly textured with a bit of fuzz and noise to make it organic. And I like the slightly broody or sinister tone. Not scary, but they make me happy I’m snug in my home under the blankets.

For the past 4+ years I’ve played a lot of League of Legends and written about it here. Last week I quit entirely; no longer playing the game, unsubscribed from all the reddits, not watching the broadcasts. I’m still running Logs of Lag but I’ve added a new link to the page that I suspect Riot Games will not be happy with.

The big story is Inside The Culture Of Sexism At Riot Games, a meticulously researched and detailed story about sexual harassment of employees at the company. Riot apparently is the worst kind of bro-culture and the problem starts at the top. This story was swiftly confirmed by a variety of personal reports.

Riot Games responded a few weeks later with the smarmiest of PR-crafted replies. They pinky-swear they’re going to do better by having some introspective discussions and some training. In the meantime what they’ve actually been doing is retaliating against current and former employees with aggressive legal threats. And firing highly visible employees who aren’t toeing the PR line. (I know the work of both Lehman and Klein; Riot lost some very smart people.)

Video game culture in America has a huge problem of sexism and racism. Tech companies often have sexism and racism too. But I’d somehow hoped that Riot Games was better. The individuals I know there are decent people. But the company culture created by the founders Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck is disgusting and childish. I want nothing to do with it.

Like any other decent human I’ve been horrified at the atrocity of Trump and the Republicans separating children from their parents. The immediate crisis seems to be over but there’s still an immense need for legal aid for immigrants. To try to unite the snatched kids back with their parents, to help asylum seekers in need. Every person deserves legal representation.

I went looking for well organized legal aid charities in California that I could donate to. I asked on Reddit and Metafilter and found a few helpful lists of organizations: San Francisco Magazine, Slate, Immigration Advocates Network.

I ended up having a hard time picking California specific organizations because there are so many small groups and I don’t know how to evaluate them all. Here’s what I ended up donating to:

• Kids in Need of Defense (Charity Navigator)
  National: “Ensuring that no child appears in immigration court without high quality legal representation.”
• Centro Legal de la Raza (Charity Navigator)
  Bay Area: “promotes access to justice for thousands of individuals and families each year throughout Northern and Central California”
• RAICES (Charity Navigator)
  Texas: “free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees”. They’ve gotten a huge amount of attention and it looks like they can put all this money to good use.

I’m using Mastodon regularly now, I’m @nelson@lgbt.io. Add me!

Mastodon is a Twitter-like social media that the cool kids started using back in April. At first blush it’s just like Twitter. You post messages about your breakfast, you follow other people to see their cat pictures, and you get a little dopamine rush from social engagement. Also maybe you share things of personal or public interest and help build an important online culture. The UI isn’t as polished and it doesn’t have as many features as Twitter, but it’s good.

If you want to start using Mastodon this beginner’s guide or the Join Mastodon site are good places to start. The key thing is you have to pick an instance to sign up on. This tool helps find instances or you can just pick the biggest instance. I picked lgbt.io because I like the idea of an LGBT identity.

Once you join you need to find people to follow. The best tool I’ve found for that is the Twitter/Mastodon bridge which helps you find your Twitter friends on Mastodon. It requires both sides opt-in and the UI is a little awkward. I also followed a lot of people from Metafilter.

I don't like the default multi-column web UI. I'm using this one column layout instead but it's not particularly easy to install. Halcyon is an alternate Mastodon web client that is a Twitter UI clone; you can use it with any Mastodon account. For iPhone apps people recommend Amaroq.

So why Mastodon? For me it’s because I’m angry with Twitter’s endorsement of Nazis and want an alternative. Also it’s fun to try something new. The big drawback is very little of my community is there. But maybe it’ll grow! Also it’s good that Mastodon is a different community than Twitter; the goal is to not replicate all the awful community mistakes Twitter made. Hopefully the abusers and Nazis and insane presidents will never join Mastodon or at least will be filtered out somehow.

The big technical difference with Mastodon is it is federated; instead of one single Mastodon server there’s separate instances that communicate with each other. For casual use the federation doesn’t matter since most everyone can talk to everyone else across instances. But in theory it allows for diverse communities with different standards. Also possibly some interesting scaling properties. I’m a little skeptical about how this will work as Mastodon grows, I don’t know that they have any magic solution to Internet abuse. But I’m excited to see someone trying something new.

As a white American I feel a strong sense of guilt and responsibility for the injustices African Americans still suffer today. Not abstract collective responsibility: concrete, personal. But first the abstract. America was built on slave labor. The legacy of that slavery is deprivation for many black families even now, seven generations after emancipation. Moral white Americans have an obligation to help undo the harm America’s original sin has done to our fellow countrymen and our country.

But that’s abstract, and I keep thinking of the personal. Of my white Texas family’s history. I know they were racist, but just how bad were they? Were they slave owners? Lynchers?

The particular cruelty in my family’s history I’d like to understand better is the murder by lynching of Ted Smith in Greenville Texas on July 28, 1908. I know the date because there’s a souvenir postcard (warning; image of burned dead man). White people in the early 1900s were so proud of lynching black men there were frequently postcards.

My great-grandparents lived in Greenville in 1908. White people, town folks, he was an educated professional. Was he at the lynching? Did he approve? Are they in the crowd in that postcard? I got thinking about these questions after reading an article about the lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia. They made souvenir postcards too. One thing the article notes is that in 2000, someone made a list of some of the lynching participants. I wonder if such a list could be made for Greenville? Would my great grandparents be on it?

The motto of Greenville, TX was The Blackest Land, the Whitest People. They displayed that proudly on a banner over the center of town through the 1960s. These are my people.

The Ubiquiti NanoStation loco 5M is good hardware. It’s speciality gear for setting up long distance wireless network links. All of Ubiquiti’s networking gear is worth knowing about if you’re a prosumer-type networking person. I will probably buy their wifi access points next time I need one.

I’m using two NanoStations as a wireless ethernet bridge. My Internet up in Grass Valley terminates 200’ from my house. I couldn’t run a cable but a hacky wireless thing I set up was sort of working. So I asked on Metafilter on how to do a wireless solution right and got a clear consensus on using Ubiquiti equipment. $150 later and it works great! Kind of overkill; the firmware can do a lot more than just bridging and the radios are good for 5+ miles. But it’s reliable and good.

The key thing about Ubiquiti gear is the high quality radios and antennas. It just seems much more reliable than most consumer WiFi gear. Their airOS firmware is good too, it’s a bit complicated to set up but very capable and flexible. And in addition to normal 802.11n or 802.11ac they also have an optional proprietary TDMA protocol called airMax that’s designed for serving several long haul links from a single basestation. They’re mostly marketing to business customers but the equipment is sold retail and well documented for ordinary nerds to figure out.

I still wish I just had a simple wire but I’ve now made my peace with wireless networking. It works well with good gear in a noncongested environment. I wrote up some technical notes on modern wifi so I understood the details better. Starting with 802.11n and MIMO there was a significant improvement in wireless networking protocols, it’s really pretty amazing technology.

Uber’s sure in a shitstorm now. On top of the long standing questions about their treatment of drivers, insurance, regulatory issues, etc they’ve shot themselves in the foot twice this week with ethical lapses. Once with an executive proposing doing “opposition research” on a journalist to discredit her, and again with troubling concerns about the privacy of rider records. I love the Uber product, but it’s clear the company has a serious problem.

Google’s “Don’t be Evil” policy was a valuable guiding principle for us. It was a shorthand for not doing things that were obviously unethical. Uber needs that. “Should we offer our drivers shady subprime loans?” Of course not, that’d be evil. “Should we poach Lyft drivers without worrying how it screws up their ride dispatch?” No, don’t be evil. There’s reasonable debate about exactly what is ethical or acceptable. For instance I’m 100% fine with Uber throwing elbows at corrupt cab companies. But the overriding principle needs to be acting ethically or else you end up with the shitstorm Uber has.

Uber’s problem appears to be at the top with Travis Kalanick, the founder and CEO. He’s set the company on an aggressive libertarian path and it’s ugly. (I’m also struck by Kalanick’s early founder role with Scour, a late-90's product for pirating music from unwitting people’s unsecured Windows computers.) It may be that a lack of ethics is in the company’s DNA.

I love Uber, but a transportation product like theirs is a natural monopoly and Uber is showing themselves untrustworthy. I’m beginning to share the pessimistic view of Metafilter user rhizome that “the taxi industry is so corrupt that any organization that would unseat them has to be just as bad”. It shouldn’t be that way, Uber could do better.

I’ve spent more time than was fun at various German museums and monuments remembering the Holocaust, the hideous state sponsored wholesale slaughter of Jews, Roma, and other “undesireables”. I’m always impressed with how direct and without bullshit the presentation is. “We did these things. These are the things we did.” Little explanation of why, certainly no attempt to justify or explain away. Not even a facile apology. Just a documentation of the evil that Germans did. It is enough.

I want a museum about the American Indian genocide. A couple of rooms documenting pre-Columbian life, to convey the Native American’s culture, their society, their technology. Purely to humanize them and set the context for what comes next. Then room after room documenting the systemic program of murder, and burning, and sabotage. A room dedicated to the science of disease, the amount of destruction wrought by smallpox whether accidental or deliberate. A room or two of war weapons. Letters from the Indian killers explaining their techniques and goals. A room about the Indians who fought back and the disproportionate response to that rebellion. A whole diorama about Andrew Jackson (themed to the twenty dollar bill). One stark room depicting the mathematical scale of the genocide, perhaps with abstract sculpture. A temporary exhibit on the Trail of Tears not as an anomaly, but as a systemization of the violence done more haphazardly before.

It’s not a museum about Native Americans really. It’s a museum about Europeans, the things we did to conquer this continent. And should never forget.

The indie game industry has been shifting in the past few years to a pre-funding model. Gamers pay for games before release, either via Kickstarter campaigns or by buying games in alpha release or Steam Early Access or the like. A lot of neat games have been funded this way (see: Minecraft) but I worry it’s bad for game consumers.

We’re no longer being asked to buy a game, we’re buying something completely ephemeral, the idea of a game. We hope that maybe someday the game will be released and we can play it. And we get no guarantee of a quality finished project. (See Clang, which cynically claimed their unplayable alpha tech demo counted as a game release). Games are no longer really released, they are put out as an “alpha”, then a “beta”, then laughably a “gamma”. Really, why bother even finishing a game if people will pay you for your game anyway? Avoid the whole review cycle!

The most predatory of these “buy the game that does not exist” things I’ve seen yet is Star Citizen. They have collected $44 million for a game where you fly around spaceships in a giant procedurally generated universe. Except that universe doesn’t exist and last I heard the only code you could actually run lets you look at a rendered spaceship sitting motionless in a hanger. Nevertheless, people are paying hundreds of dollars for special rare spaceships in the hopes one day they can fly them. The Star Citizen project is not a game, it’s a marketing campaign for a game. I sure hope it turns into a real game some day or a bunch of people are going to be disappointed. It’s many, many months behind schedule, to the extent there even is a schedule. Why bother shipping when you can just keep collecting money?