Updates

This is a page for half-baked or brief blog posts that aren't interesting enough for the weblog but took up too much space or I wanted to be more permanent than a social-media post or a Now: update.

• 12.07.24: You Should Hack Your 3DS
• 12.12.24: Despotification
• 01.03.25: The Best Books of 2024
• 01.30.25: My Tiny Home Server
• 02.15.24: How To Fix YouTube

02.15.25

How To Fix YouTube: An Impossible Plan

YouTube turned 20 years old yesterday, and unfortunately that link disputes the next thing I was going to say, which is that it was originally engineered because a handful of PayPal programmers wanted to look at Janet Jackson's nipple. I will be continuing to believe that story, personally.

Like all corprate websites, YouTube is currently a huge and ever-expanding ocean of worthless garbage that it's possible but harder every day to have a nice time on. As the social-media platform where "the algorithm" is maybe the most in control of a video's impact—and, as uploading videos shifted from a hobby to an industry, a video's creator's livelihood—YouTube is also the platform where the practice of tricking or baiting the computer and the humans on the other side of it is the most transparent.

YouTube has management and culture problems, of course: a joke of a copyright enforcement system, grating and constant advertising, a tendency to radicalize high-school boys into mass murderers. In 2025 it is barely usable with a whole suite of third-party software between you and the raw website, and even then I find myself opening a YouTube tab, scrolling the homepage for five minutes, and then closing it without watching anything more often than not.

I think a lot, and have written a lot, about just how soul-eroding and bleak the modern Internet is to use. Firing up YouTube on a logged-out device is a great way to feel utterly alienated from humanity: you will be greeted by scoop after scoop of blaring, artless, vapid goo that you can't fathom ever volunteering to watch; and yet the website claims that millions of people worldwide volunteer to watch it every single day. I know I'm a hater and a jerk and don't like anything, but it boggles the mind to imagine an eight-figure number of beings just as human as yourself burning some amount of their finite time on Earth watching an AI-narrated slideshow rehashing a movie from ten years ago as if it really happened.

I think the main thing that aggravates me about this kind of "content" is that it's in a whole different class from just something bad. I can watch something and decide I don't like it, but still respect and appreciate it as being made by a human being in service of an idea. There's loads of bad art, and if you tilt yourself against bad art you're going to lose. There's not even anything wrong with an amusing, pointless diversion: God knows we need to be diverted sometimes. The thing I can't stand is content: something a person may have technically made but which they don't care about in substance; something designed to maximize engagement at the cost of its soul. Video slop insults me the same way AI-generated "art" does. I'm supposed to respect something you didn't think was worth your time to make?

"Ninety percent of everything has always been bad."
– Harris Bomberguy

This v21 post about the concept of "content" has really injected itself into my view of the attention economy. They posit that modern online content is not necessarily meaningless, but rather that the presence of meaning is a non-factor; like Harry Frankfurt's definition of 'bullshit', "content" is a void-fill product where sheer volume is the only quality that matters about it. What Frankfurt tells us is that this nihilism re:value makes the bullshitter more dangerous than the liar, who at least cares about the truth enough to reject it. We can draw a parallel line here between even the least talented or interesting creator of art and the creators of content—the former is at least trying to express something; the latter, only looking to produce something.

The ability to share video—a tremendously capable, vital art medium—in a venue as vast and volatile as the internet is a great idea, and it has of course resulted in some great creative works in the last 20 years. I don't mean to accuse everyone who uploads video to YouTube of being a soulless grifter. There is good and worthwhile work hidden in there; it's just increasingly tough to find these needles in the massive haystack of slop. To me, every major website now requires you to build your own micro-network within it and then navigate those little connections very carefully lest you (or something you post, in the case of Bluesky/Twitter) fall overboard and join the churning slop below.

I really like Ted Chiang's definition of art as "something that results from making lots of decisions." I would argue that by this definition there is no overlap between art and content: if we define content as value-optional work made to maximize statistical performance, then even the most technically-complex content is designed to suit the whims of an algorithm, and therefore the choices that go into it have been predetermined by the computer, not the person. Ubiquitous is the online artist forced to dilute their vision to pander to the algorithm, or even forced to wreck their artistic process with marketing, devoting more and more time to lifestyle-focused TikToks and less and less time to the actual creation of their art. Viciously, the modern slop economy actually penalizes you for hanging on to any shred of creative integrity: someone looking to express an idea in a thoughtful way has given themselves a ton of labor to do, in which time they will inevitably get lapped by somebody who can roll a hundred jars of Orbeez down the stairs in a day. Individuals who use online video to express interesting or important ideas still survive, and have built audiences that can support them despite infrequent output, but picture someone wholly new to a platform like YouTube trying to figure out what's good on there by checking out the most looked-at videos. Without the outside help of a human friend, how would this user ever find anything memorable beneath the constant spew of filler?

"'Amusing' will always defeat 'beautiful'. All that remains is popularity - a status achieved by being rich, attractive, a panderer, or all three."
— Zach Weiner

Because a computer only understands numbers, the website only cares about statistics, and better statistics are built by maximizing your output. Whether something is good or deserves to exist on its own does not matter compared to the simple binary of whether it occupies space and can therefore be attached to advertising. This incentivizes and cultivates the kind of pointless, uninteresting, paper-thin slop that can be easily produced in industrial quantities: mutated clips from TV shows, AI voices reading Reddit posts, unnervingly-horny-but-not-technically-explicit material, all manner of toxic attention-hijacking that boils down to someone jingling digital keys in front of your face. The fact that everyone who spent their adolescence online has a pathologically withered attention span isn't a generational problem: it's the intended result of YouTube (and Google and Meta and Twitter and TikTok et al.) strategy to manufacture a better breed of consumers.

This is my impossible pitch to fix YouTube, my day-one move if I was suddenly placed in charge of the whole operation: Remove all the money. Eliminate all advertising except for the minumum required to keep the lights on. Shut down the industry and the incentives and make it what it was meant to be: a free place to post a video and share it with no expectation of a monetary return. (After it was meant to be a place to look at Janet Jackson's nipple, I mean.)

This is a cruel and spiteful idea that would wreck a lot of careers and impoverish a lot of young artists. I admit that. But my main motivation is to make quality no longer optional. How many people would choose to spend their time cropping Big Bang Theory clips if there was no payout? If the choice whether to post something was returned to the human, rather than imposed on them by a machine, then the only reason to post something would be a belief that it deserves on its own merits to exist. I think there would still be tons and tons of lazy, bewildering, bad stuff to look at. But it would at least exist on purpose.

01.30.25

My Tiny Home Server

Maybe two years ago I bought a Raspberry Pi Zero with the intention of using it to run Pi-Hole, which if you're not familiar is a system for intercepting and eliminating ads from all traffic on your home network. I think Pi-Hole is a great idea, and it's pretty popular with people who do a little bit of tinkering. Unfortunately, it's not capable of the one ultra-specific thing I bought it for, which is to kill YouTube ads on the Nintendo Switch client so my partner could watch Let's Plays on the couch in peace.

(This isn't Pi-Hole's fault; YouTube ads and videos come from the same server so there's no DNS-based way to filter one and not the other, which I should have looked up before I did all that work. I still don't know how to kill ads on the Switch—let me know if you do, short of paying money for YouTube, which I will never do.)

Anyway, that means I've had a Rasperry Pi—a pretty cabaple, amusingly tiny computer—just sitting around not doing anything for a while. I've also been thinking more and more about setting up a NAS (network-attached storage) in my apartment, as my hard drive gradually fills up with locally-stored music.

The Raspberry Pi can be set up to run "headless," which means you can control it from another computer without needing an extra mouse/keyboard/monitor. Once that's all done, you can order it to install a program called Samba that turns it (and whatever storage you attach) into a network drive discoverable by Windows. Once you have the Pi formatted and connected to your wifi it's a pretty rewarding process, if you judge that by the ratio of "number of command prompts you have to type" over "how much text you get to watch scroll by and feel like a cool hacker."

Is the Pi Zero a good NAS? No; it's a 128-gig SD card in a $10 computer with the kind of wifi bandwidth a $10 computer has. Also it keeps going down randomly and then I have to unplug it and assign a new address. My original intent was to set it up as a music server I could stream from my (nearby) laptop over network and my (far away, sometimes) phone using port-forwarding; given the pretty weak and unreliable specs I don't know if that'll even work.

(Update: After a while trying to load music onto this thing while resetting it every 45 minutes because of the same error, I figured out what the issue was. Go here if this happens to you, although I hope it just works fine.)

However, the Pi/Samba NAS does have three key redeeming qualities:

• 1. It's more useful than it was sitting in a drawer unused, and I like keeping my devices useful.
• 2. It's pretty good for some hardware I already had on hand without buying anything.
• 3. It's cute.

(I am thinking of setting up a real home server—or, more likely, a general-purpose mini-PC that could serve as a NAS and a media box hooked up to the TV—at a future time when I have 200 to 500 dollars laying around.)

01.03.25

The Best Books I Read in 2024

I wrote that header as "My Favorite Books of 2024" on first pass and then after I spent a minute thinking about it I realized only one of them was actually published this year. So this is the best of the stuff I got around to in 2024.

Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear

Greg Bear rocks. The Forge of God, the book before Anvil, is the first book I finished in 2024. It's really great—a premise that's probably been done plenty (a tiny, random sample of humanity escaping the destruction of the Earth) executed with expert pacing and an overall atmosphere that, being written about the near future in 1987, is only a little dated in a charming way. In Anvil of Stars we get to see the next generation deal with the aftermath: a young crew traversing deep space in a vessel provided by benevolent but mysterious aliens who claim that their mission is to help the survivors of destroyed planets seek revenge but insist that a human must pull the trigger when the time comes. This book is like one of those French sandwiches that's just ham and butter: the two simple ingredients of great scifi (human, relatable characters in an imaginative, engaging situation) in the highest quality you can get 'em. If I have one note it's that the ending is a little more clean-cut than I wanted, but this is still one of the works of fiction I've thought about the most after finishing. Huge recommend on this book specifically and also basically any Greg Bear novel you can find.

Water, Wasted by Alex Branson

In an era where every novel and movie and high-budget TV show has to be about trauma and grief, Water, Wasted is the first thing I've seen usefully explore the contradiction and confusion of it. Set in rural Missouri, the book takes its time walking you around, introducing you to people and their little tics and routines. It's such an empathetic and real telling of the rural experience that I was almost sad when the setup was finished and the plot started happening. That plot is that the accidental death of a high-school boy sends his girlfriend into social exile, and the couple who look after her are forced to relitigate the death of their own daughter, finally reading the amateur fantasy novels she was working on in life. Elements of the fantasy world begin to seep through the cracks into reality, which sounds very silly written out but unfolds in a way that is genuinely compelling. Nested layers of fiction slowly merge until the traditional novel structure crashes down. If you like ambiguity and open-endedness, a resource getting scarcer all the time, pick this one up. I can't praise enough the chapters of fantasy excerpts, which are genuinely so goofy and charming that I would gladly buy a full copy.

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (& Joel Martinsen)

The Three-Body Problem has been getting a lot of buzz after finally getting published in English. You've probably heard it recommended, and they did a TV show I watched like the first hour of (pretty good!). Once again I find myself liking the second book more.

You, Me, & Ulysses S. Grant by Brad Neely

I don't think I could name another book that I've laughed out loud while reading, but You, Me, & Ulysses S. Grant had me honest-to-God cracking up so often that my girlfriend eventually quit even asking what it was about. Written in character as a deranged amateur historian, the book focuses on the life of U.S. Grant from his childhood through the end of the Civil War. It's also a critique of the concept of biography, inventing so much gap-filler and speculation that it strains the label “non-fiction”—but, arguably, only as much as any book claiming to reveal the inner motives of someone long-dead. Neely is just more transparent about the parts he made up—inventing insane dialogue, hypothesizing about how bad it would suck to hike across Panama in the 1850s, making the conflict between Grant and Robert E. Lee deeply personal rather than just political. Speaking of Lee: unlike many Civil War accounts and biographies, Neely treats the backward attitudes of the 19th century and the evil motives of the Confederacy with the correct (total) amount of ridicule and scorn, something sorely lacking in “real” history books on this era. His prose is frequently over-the-top and overwrought on purpose but also manages to be beautiful and transportative in passages describing the horrors of Shiloh or the bizarre character of Abe Lincoln. This might very well be my favorite book I read all year.

The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey

I really liked the Expanse TV show (the first couple episodes are corny but it gets good later on) and for years while it was running I would see these at the bookstore, pick one up and consider it, then decide I just didn't have room in my life to commit to a series of huge-ass paperbacks. Then I got an ereader and books no longer have mass or volume, so I spent most of this year just absolutely ripping through the series. It's great. There's like 5,000 pages total and almost zero filler. The world they (it's two guys) establish feels so real and dangerous and sprawling, and then more than once everything about it gets flipped over. There are some quirks—it's weird how every time somebody new meets Bobbie Draper there's at least once sentence about how hot / intimidating / Polynesian she is—but the big-picture narrative rhythm is unbeatable. It's kind of true that Jim Holden is a protagonist built out of Principles in an almost mythical way (toward the end of Cibola Burn when he refuses to just take out the evil and insane security guy because he believes in the power of courts or whatever I think you're kind of meant to roll your eyes) but I think this is the only way the rest of the thing works: Holden, the crew, and the Rocinante are a stationary vantage point from which you can watch the rest of human civilization shift and evolve. I plowed through the first six books between about July and September, took a break, and then slammed the last three (which are almost their own trilogy because of how far the scope has shifted) between November and New Year's.

Yes, the Expanse is about big and important questions concerning the future of humanity and its inherent flaws, and the dueling existential horrors of highly-advanced alien technology and spacebound capitalism. It handles these questions with idealistic but serious consideration, and I'd like to believe in its conclusions. It's also just a total blast as a piece of writing: everything that happens is important, every character is unique, every side of the conflict and conseqence of its unfolding is thought of. Like a good spaceship, it's wickedly fast and totally airtight.

Strange Disappearances by Brad Steiger

I have a little collection shelf of paranormal literature: almost all UFO and alien-abduction stuff from the 60s through the 90s. Most of them I have read or attempted to read. None of them brought me as much joy as this one. Strange Disappearances is basically a book of newspaper clippings about weird stuff happening separated by completely baseless “explanations” through which the author attempts to pitch a theory that sometimes people or cars or Bermuda Triangle-bound airplanes fall through a hole to another dimension and disappear from ours. Of course Mr. Steiger also wraps in flying saucers, Bigfoot, whatever else you want from the grab-bag of goofy beliefs; he attributes the epidemic of people's windows cracking in 1950s Washington to some extradimensional creatures basically shooting spitballs at cars for fun. I can't stress enough how delightful this book is in its writing style and complete disregard for facts.

Some Honorable Mentions:

Morphotrophic by Greg Egan

The Three-Body Problem & The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

The Descent by Jeff Long

12.12.24

Despotification

Thanks to homie cones for coining the term, or at least being the person I first heard it from.

Yesterday I canceled my premium Spotify subscription, which I had for a little over four years. Spotify is ubiquitous and universal for good reasons: the app is, or was, really easy to use and had just about anything you could think of. Their focus on playlists and “release radar” and the social aspect of music listening was a good idea (or is still a good idea, I don't mean to talk about an app like I'm at its funeral).

Like all apps, the company behind Spotify has done a bunch of evil shit. Most famously, their payout rate for musicians is basically nil, which has been the main argument against using it since almost day one. Its founder has invested undisclosed millions—statistically including a few of your dollars—in an AI firm that licenses its software to militaries.

But you don't need me to tell you Spotify is bad. It's worth billions of dollars, of course it's bad. I would love to tell you I stopped paying for it entirely because of the dinky payouts or the defense contracting. But while those are big factors, the thing that pushed me over the edge is that it's just annoying now.

Their annual “Wrapped” thing for 2024 (my top artist was allegedly FM Skyline, by the way) was bare-bones at best—I appreciate them dropping the “you ate the assignment this year, no cap” copy style but everything else about it stinks of “we laid off all the data guys six weeks ago.” Instead they pushed everyone an AI-generated “podcast“ where (I guess, I will never listen to it) a gratingly-cheery fake voice tells you what songs you like. Everything generative AI touches immediately takes on, for me, the sheen of creative bankruptcy. I've already been fastidiously avoiding tapping on the "AI DJ" icon for months, while also dodging sponsored recommendations, inline video content, and a general UI experience that resembles 2018-era Snapchat more every day. People who make an app that's installed on a critical mass of phones love to forget what their app is actually for.

There is stuff I will miss about Spotify, most of it playlist-related: making them seasonally, sharing them, etc. But I also think Spotify did a lot to shave down the minimum unit of music from the album to the song to, in the age of TikTok, the ten-second highlight. MusicBee does playlists and does let you shuffle your whole library, but I find something satisfying about seeing a big page of album covers, picking one, and just listening to the whole thing. It feels like I'm rebuilding my online-addled attention span.

And speaking of the age of TikTok, I'm increasingly sick of letting a computer decide what I should like, especially when that computer has a vested interest in funneling me toward the most popular and profitable stuff it has. Maybe just ask your friends what they're into.

Now I'm gonna talk about my new setup, with links to all the (free!) software so you can do this too, if you feel inclined.

Bandcamp is huge, obviously. I figure if I was paying $12 a month for Spotify and Bandcamp Friday (when the website waives their usual sales cut) rolls around every 3 or 4 months then I can afford to drop 50 to 60 bones every time and still break even, except that now 100% of my money will go to the artists I listen to instead of 0.002%.

Merch Table is one of the best websites I've ever seen: paste in the URL of a Spotify playlist and it'll find the songs on Bandcamp and give you links to purchase them. I actually made a bespoke "Moving Out" playlist, threw a bunch of my likes on it, and ended up with hits on like 90 percent of them.

Nicotine+ is a frontend for Soulseek, which is a peer-to-peer filesharing network (like Napster but nice). It basically lets you search for and download music from thousands of people's hard drives around the world, and share what you have on yours. I should note that getting all your music this way is the only way to benefit artists less than Spotify. I'm only using Soulseek to download music I already own physically or by deceased artists.

MusicBee is the player I've moved to. It's, if anything, a little too feature-complete, and kind of dense with menus and options compared to Spotify's dead-simple UI. But you can install custom skins and really customize the hell out of it in general.

mp3tag is a super-capable little program for editing metadata on audio files so they all have the right tags and album art and stuff. MusicBee lets you do a lot of that too but this is lighter and less confusing.

MusicBee doesn't have an official mobile app as far as I can tell, so on my phone I'm just using VLC Media Player. MusicBee does have some way to sync your library across devices, but I haven't gotten too deep into that yet, so I'm just copying the files onto my phone the old-fashioned way. Might go ahead and buy a dedicated mp3 player once my storage fills up.

Anyway. I know that ditching Spotify is kind of the veganism of music, and I promise not to be annoying about it. I've given you everything you need to make the jump, and now I'll shut up.

12.07.24

You Should Hack Your 3DS

I don't know who this post is really for, because it seems like almost everyone who still owns a 3DS has modded it by now. But if you have one sitting in a closet since the eShop shut down, I am urging you to spend the 40 minutes it takes to install custom firmware.

I know the word "firmware" makes this sound like I'm asking you to switch to Linux or root your phone or whatever, but I was genuinely amazed by how easy and straightforward it is. The first step is the only mildly tricky part, and everything after that is just downloading files to an SD card. There's a clear, concise and complete website guide to the whole process that you just have to follow step-by-step, and even though they warn you that there's a non-zero chance of bricking it's pretty safe if you keep backups.

Visit the 3DS Hacks Guide →

Once you have your system running custom firmware you can install homebrew games & apps to the home menu. You can rip any physical cartridges you have, including save data. You can sideload ROMs off the SD card. You can (this made me do a full evil laugh when I realized it's possible) use the 3DS's WiFi connection to put files on it over FTP without even touching it.

I think most of the thrill I've derived from this process comes from knowing it's the result of a dedicated community working really hard for years on software that's all totally free. It's the kind of love-of-the-game stuff you just don't see in a lot of spaces, especially spaces where it's possible to monetize at all. I don't know anything about real programming, far less writing raw assembly for a device not designed to let you do that. But lots of people just enjoy the challenge. The Homebrew Launcher is full of tech-demo type stuff (a pi calculator, an MP4 decoder) that seem to have just been made to prove their possibility, the same way people make crazy demos for other old consoles. And they're all generous enough to let unskilled chumps like myself use their work to improve my life. My 2DSXL was a paperweight before I decided to pull the trigger on CFW and now I've got a new battery on the way and will probably keep it around for years.

This specific project intersects with my personal principles pretty heavily. For one, I am trying to look at my phone less by replacing it with other, nicer screens. A choice between spending a bus ride scrolling through posts designed to make me go insane and spending a bus ride playing Peggle: Dual Shot is pretty easy.

Second, I love to rescue a device from getting thrown away. Even if the device isn't very sleek or powerful by current standards, if it works, why chuck it? And if it can become useful again by being modified beyond the original manufacturer's intent, the original manufacturer can eat it, in my opinion. A company wanting you to buy their new thing doesn't mean you're required to throw the old thing away just because it lacks “official support.” Why whould you give up (there are loads of emulators a jailbroken 3DS can run) hundreds of games that'll never be legally available again?

“Videogames are built on, and kept alive by, acts of crime.”
 — myfriendpokey