The disclosure was due to human error during the distribution of the email. Specifically, recipients' email addresses were visible to one another when the email was sent.

So what did they do?

Sent another mass email with this simple request:

We are requesting that all recipients permanently delete the email from their inboxes, sent folders, deleted items, archives, and any other storage locations, and refrain from further using, sharing, copying, or disclosing any email addresses contained within the message. We appreciate your cooperation in helping to protect the privacy of all affected individuals.

Problem solved.

Phew.

Hoping they can solve the streetcar delay issues just as easily.

Postscript

At least they did try to recall the email after sending it (there were 500 addresses on the message I got…).

Sixty-nine years ago today, his second book was tragically celebrated, seventy-nine years after the events it depicted.

And today I biked through my old university campus.

I would never have been there when I was had I not followed his footsteps to, in our youth, study writing in the heart of our Big Cites.

Through his works I found the way again, which meant I was able to find everything else again.

I’ve read his words blurry-eyed while riding buses across the continent and sitting in smoke-filled cafés.

I’ve read his words translated again into foreign languages I almost speak.

(Amazing how much those letters typed on a continuous scroll of paper resonated despite the problematic prose they created.)

Despite all that, it wasn’t him, but a remembrance of him abstracted through distant observers’ silent performances (and sonic ones, too) that shifted my gaze to this famous story of a first-generation immigrant’s time on the road.  

And today I still know, as I’ve always known, (even before I was born) that God truly
is Pooh Bear

Pecorino romano cheese (or good Parmigiano Reggiano) plus aged prosciutto (and maybe with some seasonal fresh fruit or veg) = best simple pleasure in the world.

Especially with the crunch of good tarallini (or even just roasted almonds).

LinkedIn wouldn’t let me copy the text.

So I took a screenshot — and then used Apple’s built in OCR technology to copy the text I wanted.

LinkedIn prevented me from making use of the value its network provides. Once again, then, I turned to one of Apple’s best (and most underrated) features to do what I wanted. A perfect example of how one company’s loud use of AI misses the mark while another’s “boring” implementation does what people need.

(Every time I use “Live Text” I feel like I’m living in the future. Silly, I know. But also reliably true.)

At some point, the accounts of Johnson and Wu (at least) were taken over by people clearly not them.

Ironically, it took me a bit to notice as both have plausible reasons for the noise the feeds introduced. I could imagine Johnson experimenting with short stories, or Wu trying to broaden his ideas by publishing in Chinese.

Much like Meetup was, on more focused attention, it was clear their accounts were hijacked.

I don’t know if it was because they were hacked or the original authors let them go dormant, but it’s again a reminder of what people will do to gain an audience. (Or maybe it was the fault of Matter’s aggregator that confused them, but still.)

fwiw, Wu’s Wikipedia linked “official site” has been removed and Johnson’s official site has vanished, too.

John D. Boswell decided to make a short film of them instead.

I’m glad he did.

Colossal

The effort itself was the definition of grassroots. A bunch of like-minded people getting together to make the place they congregated better. In hindsight, it’s hard to see the influence we had because those ideas championed are now a ubiquitous part of the modern landscape.

Reading that history, reflected back to the world in a whole new context was both oddly dissonant and inspiring.

The story told, while true, is burnished with the language of a legend. Still, if this story-myth can help energize a new generation to make their — our — world a better place, too, then I know Zeldman will be pleased.

The em dash is a tool that lets writers expand their ideas without making them inaccessible. It’s almost always easy to follow in use, and the rules that govern it aren’t as ironclad as the rules that govern parentheses or semicolons; you’re able to deploy the em dash in more discretionary ways. It lets you break up sentences into parts that rub up against each other, challenge each other, give each other new inflections, or change each other’s meanings in ways that resemble the flow of human thought.

Phillips spends many words explaining how grand piece of punctuation’s apparent favour by AI is side effect of better writers everywhere using it. for much longer. We had, he suggests, just become less familiar with it in the past decades because brevity in written communication was favoured over complexity.

It all makes sense, but I still hesitate for knee jerk reactions to include it any my more professional writing.

But maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reset my habit and embrace the em dash once again.

Idea Surplus Disorder

Overview: Human by Zandland, 2026

The feel calls back to 1337 (and hints at contemporary algospeak) but also aspires to be physical artifacts from the turn of the century.

This intentional analogue glitchiness isn’t for every brand, or for that matter most digital interfaces, but it’ll be fun to watch as it gets smoothed and adopted in the next couple of years.

Regardless, here are a few that caught my eye:

Finite games focus on how they end; infinite games focus on how they continue.

Our job is to keep the process of progress going.

Thinking about the future is a way to think about the systems.

Nearly all predictions are wrong. But some are useful.

A key advantage to taking the long view is that you will have few competitors there.

Things that have never happened before happen all the time.

The music itself was composed by the master of minimalism, Mr. John Cage, and is itself an adoption of a piece he wrote for piano and is appropriately known as “As Slow as Possible” (the piano version only lasts about an hour or so). The last time the custom-built organ in the German town of Halberstadt change the sound it was playing was 912 days ago.

Amazingly, there’s an even longer piece of music being performed: “Longplayer”, composed by a founding member of the Pogues, is scheduled to end Dec. 31, 2999. Not coincidentally, one of the places can this millennium-long performance is at the San Francisco headquarters of the Long Now Foundation

Nothing elaborate, just notes jotted down in Things to help me keep up my habit of cooking a new meal (as in a new mix of ingredients) every day.

Sparked by a change of working locations, meal portions, and some unfortunately wasted ingredients, it’s been a surprisingly helpful “future favour” to myself these past couple of weeks. So much so it might become a new post-market shop routine.

(And, yes, the minor tweaks to my little produce calendar has also helped spur my creative cooking along, especially since Toronto’s in the height of the season now, too.)

That said, here’s a clip of a video referencing a very different medium than I design in, but still resonated:

I like to make the most extreme thing in some certain way … and then bringing it back to more normal. You’ll feel if you’re making something really crazy, [and] you’ll notice [more easily] what’s happening and what’s going on in the design.

— Will Solly

The once essential service for connecting people together — which went into a steep decline after it began charging fees more than a decade ago — seems to be reawakened.

Recently, I’ve been getting invites to new events hosted by Meetup events I once belonged to. They are unfortunately not the sign of a community coming back together.

By way of example, one Toronto group formed around augmented reality is now hosting online-only (Pacific Timezone coded) sessions offering practice in navigating difficult conversations.A quick check finds the similar thing happening to a Montreal tech group and there are at least a few others like it.

Some are now hosted by the same “person,” so this might be a one-off, but I have my doubts. Regardless it’s a reminder of much of a graveyard the web has become, as well as there are always people will always find a way to exploit the remains.

Yesterday was a new moon, and this morning the sun was red with the haze of fire.

Soon I’ll kick-off a new phase myself.

New job, new routines, lots of changes.

This is just here to remind me later of how it all began.

I think.

Haven’t built my own iOS app, but tempted to now try.

Forty years after that, his remains, in telephone form were still washing up on the beaches of Brittany.

This is the story of the people his plastic presence has touched:

Worth reading the back story of that mini-doc, as well, to appreciate tale a bit more.

Real-time translation

The benefit offered by the LLM is not that it can create code (or create a PRD, or a design, or a working prototype) it’s that it creates a medium in which experts from a variety of disciplines can collaborate on the actual object, not a model, through their own preferred toolkits.

A designer can manipulate shapes on a canvas that generates code the developer can iterate on in turn changing the shapes the designer is manipulating, all of it being informed by the business rules that can themselves by updated and change the environment, too. (An early term for this I used was a “Living PRD”)

Teams concurrently collaborate, reaching solutions sooner because there’s no handover; the outputs, and insights, are real-time.

Reviews build resilience

The explicit intent of a design review (or any similar process) is to make the end result better. The implicit benefit, though, is in upleveling the team’s own skills. By actively exploring what is meets, misses, or exceeds a goal experts pass along they’re experience to non-experts.

The quality of everyone’s work improves. This is how to make space for those entering a practice to grow and learn.

Workable designs can easily be created by AI, and maybe they are better than those anyone else on the team might individually produce. Highlighting why the design, be it human- or AI-created, works helps reveal the underlying principles; stressing it to show where the design breaks, exposes the wisdom.

The knock-on effect is that these ceremonies, done well, remind people why they matter by highlighting the skills they each uniquely have to share.

What I really love about it is how it introduces the idea of human fallibility into the myth of objective truth. Much of the work modern (post-WWII) journalism has been done to confirm the veracity of a quote. Anything words contained by quotation marks were words actually spoken (or at least presented legibly).

But what if you couldn’t capture the quote exactly, but were able to repeat it the gist of it accurately?

How would you treat that?

Most journalistic style guides say leave it unquoted. The quasiquote was invented to fix that. By combining a quote, and overstriking it with a hyphen, fanzines were able to share the essence of what was said in a way that kept the words flowing.

As zines (and everything else written) moved off of typewriters on to computers, the ability to overtype the punctation mark disappeared.

That said, Houston offered a path to its resurrection, and I was tempted to refine it further with more semantic markup.

Style rule:

<style>
	q { 
		quotes: "“" "”" "'" "'"; 
	}
	q.quasi::before, q.quasi::after  {
		text-decoration: from-font line-through;
		padding: 0 0.2rem;
	}
</style>

HTML usage:

<p>Ned Brooks demonstrated to Keith Houston 
<q class="quasi">the quasiquote wasn't a 
flash in the pan</q></p>

Rendered as:

Ned Brooks demonstrated to Keith Houston the quasiquote wasn't a flash in the pan

This show has been so good, even as it was buffeted by the social hype cycles. I’ve watched it embrace and subvert the norms, and even through my fellow Parked-alien’s over the top performances, I still feel it.

I had hoped season 4 though would be the last. Leave things unanswered, like The Watchmen did. But that couldn’t happen, I guess.

I do hope, though, this last one does offer the actors — and the characters — deserve.

Regardless, you can trust I will be watching.