Week round-up: Mar 16
A Eulogy for Urban Dead - Adrien Hon
I am vaguely familiar with Urban Dead - I've read several fantastic blog posts about it over the last ten or so years, but never played it. This essay about its shutdown is interesting and sad. New laws in the UK expose people who operate small forums and online communities to extraordinary risk, and the people who run Urban Dead aren't the only affected ones who have chosen to end their project rather than continue it as a side venture. The post links to another article about a small forum operator who is shutting down 300 hosted forums rather than spend the money and effort necessary to comply with this new law.
Goodhart's Law - V Buckenham
I liked this post from V about what happens when data used to measure something instead becomes a target - either a target for policy or a target for a private entity like a company. There's a reddit post linked in the second half of the post which is no longer visible... I believe the image it means to link to can be found here. What a confusing image!!! You will have to read the blog post to figure out what's going on with it!
Duane Blehm - John Calhoun
A sad but interesting story about being a shareware developer and trying to connect with others in the field in the 1980s.
Behind the Scenes: VO's Factory Visits in Taiwan
This post from the website of Velo Orange, a bike company, is full of huge detailed photographs of the inside of the bike factory they work with in Taiwan. Taiwan is a major center of bicycle manufacturing globally, and tons of different brands on sale in the US and Europe are all manufactured in the same factories in Taiwan. Since I've gotten into bikes over the last few years, I've watched a lot of factory tour videos. The people who make these bikes in Taiwan - expensive ones, cheap ones, whatever, pretty much any type of bike you can imagine - are the most experienced bike makers in the world, pretty much, and they use some really wild jigs and presses and ovens and production lines to make them. Reading about this stuff scratches the same itch I had when, as a kid, I used to draw gigantic fantastical rube goldberg machines on graph paper for fun. I love seeing this shit. Scroll down to the bottom for a massive gallery that includes more factory photographs.
The Most Unsettling Inscription I've Ever Found on the Inside Cover of a Used Book, Bar None - Daniel Lavery
This short observation is tremendous.