Category: Culture
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Why would you want to drive behind a slow cyclist?
Whenever I’m engaged in a conversation and the other party is saying something that doesn’t resonate with me, something I don’t get or something that just seems strange, I make an honest effort to put myself in the other person’s shoes. I do research, thought experiments, bounce scenarios off friends, hypothesize with LLMs, etc. I…
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A Case for Webrings in a Post-Social Internet
How’s that for a headline for the first post of a new year! Webrings hold a special place in my memories of the late-90s early internet. For those who never encountered one, or weren’t around back then, webrings were an early tool for content discovery. In the pre-Google and social media era, finding content —…
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Time Travel
I often think about what it would be like for teenage Ryan to be transported 25 or 30 years into the future… as you do. What aspects of culture or technology would surprise him the most? The two things I come back to over and over again are tattoos and FaceTime. Tattoos I don’t even…
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The Implicit Contract of The Internet
Earlier I posted this… …and I’ve realized that this is actually something that’s been bothering me for some time. I’ve been living in public online – posting details about my life that might have historically been seen as private, right out in the open – for decades now. Especially during the heyday of web 2.0.…
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Thoughts on Threads
Threads Launched. My overall impression of threads 48hrs in are pretty “meh.” If anything, it’s proving just how mature of a product Twitter really is at this point. It’s missing simple things that we’ve taken for granted, like gif integration. It’s missing more substaintial things hashtags and a way to actually see posts from people…