The latest issue of our newsletter was rooted in memories of 2011. When we looked at the photo stream from that year (isn’t it great that memories are automatically saved these days if you regularly take photos), we were amazed by all the exciting things we did in just one year. In hindsight, it was also the last year of youthful carefreeness, a peak when life stopped growing and started shrinking. There is no bitterness to this, only a realization that comes with getting older and losing people around you.
Tumblr has been mentioned quite often lately. I miss it, too. For a while, its feed was a mirror of raw human creativity. The format did not encourage discussion, just the endless remixing of ideas. Technically, Tumblr still exists, although it lost its cultural significance. Of course, even in its heyday, it occupied a niche, somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, and was loved by some and ignored by many. My own old blog is still online, so I need to see what to do with it.
On Sunday, the Pioneer sailing season officially ended. Like last year, we participated in the final trip, which featured all four sails being raised at the same time. We’ll miss the Pioneer and the W.O. Decker – but we always have the NYC Ferry for some nautical fun.
Substack is now officially social media. This time, though, co-founder Hamish Mackenzie assures, it will be good social media. Not attention-grabbing, addictive, and abusive, but a space where humans can have deep and civilized discussions. However, as a venture-capital-backed, for-profit company, they have no more guarantees to offer than the good intentions of their founders.
Last Thursday, we visited Wagner Park at the tip of Manhattan to see Illumination, a light sculpture exhibition set in a spectacular location. There are plenty of lights to see on any evening, including the illuminated Statue of Liberty, but the colorful art pieces and a DJ playing good music added lots of extra flair.
I have been working as a software engineer for a few decades, and it is mind-boggling to see how much coding has changed in the past year. Coding is only one part of software engineering, but maybe the most prestigious one. And it‘s all but gone. I now only write code when it requires fewer keystrokes than the corresponding prompt in the AI chat. It is a bit sad. I liked coding the same way I like writing natural language. Finding an elegant phrase to express something in either discipline leaves me deeply satisfied. Some code, like some words, has an inherent beauty. However, hand coding will soon become a skill only practiced for fun and historical reference. There are more implications than asking an AI to generate the code we would have written by hand otherwise. For example, modern programming languages are designed to minimize keystrokes and avoid code duplication – most developers hate keystrokes. An AI does not care if it has to crank out one or 1,000 lines of code. How will that change software architecture? Do we still need highly customizable generic frameworks? Or will it be more efficient to generate optimized proprietary code? Will new programming languages specifically cater to the AI-powered development cycle?
Swarm
When Foursquare launched its location game in 2009 at SXSW, it was super fun to play: you could “check in” at various places, and if you checked in often enough at a certain place, you could become its mayor – a position without any benefits. The app, called Swarm since 2014, is still around. Many people I know stopped using it, but I still check in if I don’t forget. It has a nostalgic feel for the time when the mobile app world was new and exciting, and the companies that created the apps were small and quirky.
I enjoy changing things up, so I decided to try the smaller iPhone for the first time in a long while. Elke has one, and I appreciate how easy it is to grip when taking photos. I’m hopeful that the smaller screen won’t bother me too much, but it looks like the difference is minimal when I compare the two phones side by side. The Pro Max has the best battery life, so I might run out of power early on days of heavy use. But that’s what power banks are for!
This morning, I walked to the World Trade Center for my morning commute. Just like 25 years ago, it was a beautiful morning with a blue sky and crisp, fresh air. The new buildings shimmered in the sunshine.
For me, it is a faint memory now when we watched the event from our apartment a few hundred feet away on Park Row. One thing that’s remained is the loss of the sense of security I knew growing up. I’m sure that happens to most of us at some point, maybe through the early loss of a loved one or an accident. That makes me grateful that I experienced this moment relatively late in life.
For the first time in many years, we left our place and simply walked north on Broadway. We've always been out and about in the city, but it's different when the journey itself is the destination and you can focus more on the streets.
There are too many vacant storefronts, though the situation gets better in Soho north of Canal Street (after navigating through the street vendors). We missed the quirky department stores like Canal Jean or Daffy's, but they've long given way to brand-name shops. There were also lots of people — it's nice to see that shopping on a Saturday remains popular.
Check out the photos from the Hipstamatic photowalk here.