better living through wired

2024.11.27
Catching up on old WIREDs - the part usually most worthwhile are the essays at the front (and the six-word sci-fi stories at the back) Paul Ford is one of the more reliably good writers, here he was writing on Mounjaro and Ozempic, and contrasting it with his earlier very geek-forward approach to losing 100 lbs, which he then gained back.

I have zero moral qualms about any better living through chemistry, but it seems like there's always a side-effect or two or three, or some long term un-good-ness. Often it's a worthwhile or necessary trade-off, but still, you have to be thoughtful about it.

And of course, the usual round of "possible side effect" disclaimers for any drug are so annoying, so often you'd think if you experienced them "could be the drug, could be life, could be something else. Plus those "possible side effects" are like the Terms + Conditions, you get so used to tuning them out that you don't know what real and/or likely problems they might be concealing.

(What's interesting is the other positive side effects claimed for some of these new diabetes/weightloss drugs. Like sometimes you get hope that they're making up for some evolutionary biochemical dead-ends we're stuck in...)
Oh wow - by coincidence, it's the 30th Anniversary of HotWired, WIRED's website. (I have a copy of Hotwired Style: Principles for Building Smart Web Sites that I picked up a few years ago for that retrovibe.)

Here are some quotes from an oral history of the site...
In my defense, while I had a role in inventing the cookie, I would not have combined advertising and cookies. In fact, when somebody proposed, "Hey, you could assign a cookie to somebody, serve that ad from a third-party site, keep that cookie so you can follow where they go across different sites," my response was, "Yeah, if you're a psychopath."
Brian Behlendorf
I remember talking to people and they'd be surprised at Webmonkey: "Isn't that proprietary? Don't you have this advantage because you know all this? Why would you give all that away?" We were like, "No, no, no, everybody's got to know how to build the web." Back then, I felt like no websites were competitive with each other.
Jeff Veen
We thought the internet was going to be good for people. We were wrong.
Jonathan Steuer
I still feel like literally anybody with an idea can start hacking on the web or making apps or things like that. That's all still there. I think the nucleus of what we started back then still exists on the web, and it still makes me really, really happy.
Jeff Veen

Here is a good example of the kind of "LOL fire the science guys" thinking DOGE is going to bring on us.

There is real danger in fucking around with the idea that expertise doesn't exist, and finding out......