A few strays for March

Before March slips through our fingers, I just wanted to share something with you quickly: for the past few months I've been hard at work doing building a version of Read Me Like A Book that I could share online. I think the in person version is still the most fun, but as an alternative way to find book recommendations and/or an alternative form of brief journaling, allow me to present...

Read Me Like A Book: Collector Edition

It's pretty simple really: once a week, you can open a pack of cards. Each pack has 5 cards, each card has a prompt about a personal story or memory related to a book. You choose 1 card, and then you find a book that works for that card and either snap or upload a photo, and explain a little bit about why you chose that book. Then you can share the card to an anonymous public feed, or you can just keep it on your own little private bookshelf.

And, yeah, what the heck, I also made a TikTok account to share my own card draws & choices every week.

Did I vibe code that web app? Of course I did, and it's not the only thing I've built in a terminal window with my buddy Claude lately...but it's the only one that I'm sharing with other people, because it's the only one that isn't just some piece of commodity software that does a basic job that I want software to do. To me, it's a different kind of thing: it's a way of bringing to life an experience that I'm very opinionated about for which I can create a software experience that is expressive of my opinions. It's software that has a strong point of view and will, therefore, not be for everybody but will be a delight for the people for whom it really lands. 

Building that particular webapp has been my own little form of play lately. There was no AI involved in coming up with all the prompts, designing the card backs, creating the color palettes, choosing the typefaces, and so on - all of the design elements of the work. Taking all of those pieces and describing with mostly natural language and a small bit of the dialect of the engineer what I wanted to see happen with them, and then refining it together with Claude and figuring out how to do all the technical backend to be able to self host it...it's been good fun for me. It might even be too much fun. It taps into that part of my brain that can get obsessive about something and that is hard to put the brakes on once it gets started - I refuse to upgrade beyond the Claude Pro account because it acts as an effective check on my time. 

There is an irony in building a game that is meant to create context for deeper relationships between people and in doing so getting sucked into such an isolating activity.

On that note, I always love reading what Robin Sloan writes, but I particularly enjoyed this recent piece on the way that the digital world and the physical world interact, the way that the demands to make things work in software exert influence over the way we design physical objects, the possibility that we might try to resist that, and the necessity of not reducing our view exclusively to the digital world. 

Robin's an example of a person who is thoughtfully creating digital things that fit into a broader vision of human flourishing, things that don't denature the richness of human experience and the natural world writ large. 

What's happening with AI is weird and there's plenty of reasons to be concerned about a lot of it - and I am...but I also see cause for hope in Robin's mail tracker and a hundred other opinionated, niche pieces of software I see popping up in my communities. Increasingly, I think of them as artisanal software - they aren't things that are meant to be built out to enterprise scale. They're just meant to scratch an itch for some modest number of people, and they are crafted with great care to do just that. 

This all fits into the ideas behind Play's The Thing, because I think the world of games have long held an appreciation for the idea of meaningful experiences that only appeal to a specific group and that don't demand frequent engagement in order to create the experience those people seek...and the barrier to being able to create like that is only getting lower, which I hope means that instead of dull monoculture we might be moving more towards a space of distinct yet overlapping microcultures. 

Fingers crossed, I guess. 

Three more things I've read recently that stuck with me:

• Can Artists Help Shape American Cities Again? - I often think about how stable provision of basic necessities is an essential element of a creative society. If you know artists, you know that they still make art even when they're hustling to make ends meet. The difference when they have stability is the way they invest into creative communities. 
• AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage. - I always appreciate Cory Doctorow's perspective, even when I don't fully agree with it. In this particular article he's getting at something important: generative AI as a tool has a lot of utility - unlike a lot of technology hype cycles, it isn't all vaporware. But that doesn't mean the current crop of AI companies can or should become viable, nor does it mean that private industry is even the right or best way of developing these tools. 
• The Fantasy Baseball Ties That Bind - I've never really gotten deep into fantasy sports, but the phenomenon described in this article of having deep, close friends who one has never (or almost never) even met IRL is something that I'm very well-acquainted with. The idea that shared activity - even when it's not face-to-face - creates relational context that allows a lot of men to be real and vulnerable is probably something we should talk about more. 

God help me, April will be the month that I get an indepth write up about Singapore to you. I've got the structure (finally) and am slowly putting all the pieces together.

I've also got at least one surprise up my sleeve for April...but you'll just have to watch this space.