Drawing from Debord and Heidegger, this film examines our subjective experience of time throughout history. It reveals how the relentless pursuit of productivity has shaped society and our perceptions of time, creating a perpetual present driven by an autonomous economy and accelerated by surveillan...

We stand on the brink of a precipice. In front of us lies a society driven for the sake of productivity, the mechanics increasingly directed by artificial intelligence to serve corporate interests. Behind us lies centuries of experiments in social organization that provide the historical and materia...

Christopher Nolan’s 2020 sci-fi action thriller Tenet is a heist film in which the titular organization attempts to stop the end of the world through time travel.1 Due to the sensitivity of the main characters mission, they use a call-and-response passphrase: “We live in a twilight world.” and “Ther...

Welcome back, stranger. Remember, its about their needs, not yours. From Q4 2022 through Q1 2024 the tech industry has seen a shit-ton of layoffs. These are due to a combination of factors: The end of the ZIRP: Zero Interest Rate PolicyZIRP era, higher interest rates means investors demand profitabi...

Six years ago, I wrote a summary of my experience working with Ember for a year. I had been with Cinch Financial for a year, building their web & mobile apps with Ember and Elixir/Phoenix. After Cinch I joined Salsify, a leader in the Ember ecosystem, and shipped some great products built with Ember...

Denis Villeneuve, expert of visual storytelling, frequently employs the panning shot with an extensive use of the parallax effect to immerse viewers in his films, allowing them to experience a sense of place, scale, and depth like never before. He uses these teqniques most visibly in “Blade Runner 2...

Oscar the Grouch, a character from the popular children’s television show “Sesame Street,” can be seen as a modern-day embodiment of the Hellenistic philosophical tradition of Diogenes the Cynic. Like Diogenes, Oscar rejects the trappings of mainstream society and embraces a simpler, more ascetic li...

Throughout its history, a certain Japanese automaker has offered its customers stripped-back, homologation models ready for the track. This Subaru BRZ is a nod to those cars. In 2020 I wrote about the potential of the Subaru BRZ but its lack of a track-oriented trim level: If we want a truely lightw...

Software engineering, knowledge work, or most broadly any type of white collar labor is, primarily, the production of our own psychology. Our mental capacity is our means of production. We embody the values of our work. Our identity is tightly bound up with our careers, knowledge, skills, methods, c...

Readers of my site may have noticed the many references to Guy Debord in my writing over the years, and especially since 2016. This is largely because I’ve been writing a new edition of his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle adapted for our present moment. This edition is out now on the web. A h...

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) is an interactive film in which viewers are periodically asked to make decisions for the main character Stefan Butler, the decisions then result in different scenes, and paths through the film, resulting in a branching path to a variety of endings. Think “choose-you...

The Subaru BRZ RA Racing is a Japan-only edition of the BRZ that is designed to compete in the Japanese 8Beat 86/BRZ one-make spec racing series. It comes with a factory rollcage, 4-point Takata harnesses, air-oil cooler, no trunk interior trim, no radio or sound system, unpainted door handles, 16” ...

2020 Elections are coming up, and beyond the Trump vs Biden theatrics, in Massachusets we have a ballot referendum on the Right to Repair. TL;DR: Vote ‘Yes’ on Question 1. Currently auto manufacturers must provide independent auto repair shops access to the same diagnostic and repair information abo...

Set the current user accounts profile photo (displayed on the login UI) using a local JPG image. dscl . delete "${HOME}" JPEGPhoto dscl . delete "${HOME}" Picture sudo dscl . create "${HOME}" Picture "${PWD}/avatar.jpg" Replace Time Machine with Volume on the menu bar defaults write com.apple.system...

The United States was started as a rational experiment in democratic capitalism based on ideas that inspired its forefathers. They were influenced by ideas coming out of the Enlightenment, specifically Adam Smith, Locke, Rousseau, and the conception of humans resorting to “the state of nature” and a...

Good Evening, my name is ███████ I am a 10 year resident of Ward █ in Somerville. The first steps to address the problem of systemic racism in Somerville is two-fold: Defund the police by at least 60% or more; and Hold the Mayor accountable to direct these funds to non-disciplinary social programs; ...

Looting is an obvious response to the glorification of consumer products— commodities in a society that worships conspicuous consumption. The very act of looting is resistance to the celebrity status of these commodities and what they imply: inanimate objects celebrated for the image, status, and pr...

This articles describes the difference between how component invocation differs when using curlies {​{...}}, angle brackets <...> or an (...) s-expression in Ember templates. Ember has three methods for invoking components and helpers in a template, either of the three can be used to invoke both cla...

A central issue of contestation is elasticity versus discipline, elasticity for me and discipline for you, alchemy of banking and money funding for me, austerity and borrowing/payment for you. Like 2009, the (coming/arriving) financial collapse of 2020 will reveal the asymmetry of power between the ...

The Laughing Man 笑(わらい) い 男(おとこ) (warai otoko) is a fictional character in the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. This lil’ project is an animated SVG using CSS transforms to rotate the text. The Laughing Man logo is an animated image of a smiling figure wearing a cap, with circli...

Released a tiny npm package today: @0xadada/random-emoji, a javascript random emoji function with zero dependencies. $ yarn add @0xadada/random-emoji $ node > const random = require('@0xadada/random-emoji'); > random() '😁' let a = random(); // defaults to 'emoticons' let b = random('emoticons'); let...

Fascism is an expensive to maintain state-of-siege by the capitalist economy attempting to defend itself by an irrational means. Fascism rallies to the defense of the conservative bourgeois ideology of the family, private property, the moral order, and patriotic nationalism. It unites the petty-bour...

I love bookmarklets, those small and elegant lines of javascript that you can bookmark and which do random functions in the browser when clicked. uri-editor.js is 1-line of HTML that’ll run a text editor in your browser. Drag the link into your bookmarks to save it as a quick browser-based editor to...

This talk was presented at the Boston Ember.js Community meetup at Salsify, Inc about a unique usecase for deploying FastBoot in order to do server-side rendering of Ember applications at scale. I review traditional, single-page web applications, I discuss server-side rendering by introducing Ember ...

2019 has been a great year for Ember so far, so while my peers are focused on setting direction for the framework for the rest of 2019, I wanted to take stock of the existing addons ecosystem. In this article I’d like to present a list of Ember addons that I use in most of my projects. I’ve been usi...

Gibsons “San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide” is worth reading, his take is that San Francisco has become too successful… inevitable to decline into some expensive backwater due to “the rent is too damn high”. He paints a compelling vision of the ills of appalling levels of income inequality, the mo...

A browser extension adds features to a web browser. They’re created using standard web technologies— JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Extensions can run JavaScript permanently in the background or can run on any page the user visits. Extensions can also specify popup windows and options pages. All modern ...

★★★★★ Review of the manga “Opus” by Satoshi Kon. “Opus” is a brilliant postmodernist introspection of the challenges of writing, creativity, and the cliches of pop culture; delivered in a manga format. Author Satoshi Kon worked on this manga between 1995-1996 as it was serialized in “Comic Guy” mang...

I came across an interesting interview question, along the lines of ”How would you make this work?” add(2, 5); // multiple arguments style > 7 add(2)(5); // currying, a chained invocation style > 7 add(1,2)(3,4) // both > 10 I thought this was a very interesting question, so took some time to implem...

Alarm goes off, time to wake up. Snooze alarm, and then repeat: check email, check Facebook, check Twitter, check Snapchat, rinse; repeat again; no new posts? Check again. No second spared to compose a thought; dreams fade away. Day continues just the same way — rise, rinse, repeat, repeat. Can’t sp...