The Markup published an interview of Dorothy Gambrell by Gabriel Hongsdusit, the visual designer of site. It covers a number of topics including the importance of publishing to your own site even as your audience move towards platforms and how publishing on the Internet has changed since she started writing Cat and Girl in 1999.

The main topic of the interview is Gambrell's response to finding out her art was used to train Midjourney, an AI image generation model. She wrote a beautiful piece about her journey as an artist that captures the struggle to make work that you find meaningful and the fear of that work being taken and abused.

I've included it below under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. The final 6 frames are heartbreaking.

Decoder had a great episode where Hank Green interviewed Nilay Patel, the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, about his experience of building and maintaining the business. It covers a lot of topics like the state of the media nowadays, why creating content for platforms can be a mistake and the importance of distribution channels.

The Verge focused on their website and building a sense of community that attracted people back to the site. There are many media companies that suffered by allowing social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to act as intermediaries between them and their audience. Email and RSS feeds, while not likely to go viral, can provide a more sustainable foundation for businesses to build on.

This does not mean ignoring social media. It builds on the POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) concept promoted by IndieWeb.

A story that stood out is one where Patel was traveling with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. They were going through the list of things that Nadella had done during the day. Patel asked how he got so much done. Nadella looked at him and said:

It's your time. You have to be selfish about it.

Satya Nadella according to Nilay Patel (Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future/Decoder)

This reminds me of a quote:

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

Seneca

Maria Popova wrote a piece on The Marginalian on Seneca and the Shortness of Life that expands on his thinking about this subject.

2023 was a brutal year for layoffs in tech and 2024 has not improved the situation. It can be an incredibly difficult time especially if this is the first time you've been laid off. I was laid off from my first job in tech a decade ago and it's only recently that I've come to realize how much it affected me psychologically.

I came across this series from Joey deVilla, who was laid off from his job as a Senior Developer Advocate for Okta earlier this month. This advice is incredibly important to remember.

If you’ve been laid off — and especially if you’ve been laid off for the first time — you will blame yourself for being laid off. This post is just for you, and it can be summed up as this: you’re probably facing the consequences of someone else’s mistakes.

Laid off in 2024, part 10: Unearned consequences (Joey deVilla/Global Nerdy)

It is hard to reconcile the number of layoffs with the vast profits that the large tech companies have announced over the past few months. It feels unnecessary but it is important to remember that is also a tactic to reset salary expectations in this job market.

I've done a couple of interviews a year to research what the interview process is and how it has changed over time. It is not a process I have ever enjoyed.

Wishing anyone entering the job market all the best.

Sam Kriss wrote a funny review of Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk in The Point. The part that stood out the most was Kriss' opinion of Isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible. After stints at Harvard, Oxford, the Sunday Times and Time magazine—Christopher Hitchens called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America”—Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. bombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Later, he told PBS that he wasn’t really so jingoistic: CNN initially tried reporting on the casualties in Afghanistan, but then they received some pushback. “You would get phone calls,” he said. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, you’re being anti-American here.” So he caved. What else was he supposed to do? Follow the demands of human dignity even in the face of mild, non-life-threatening opposition? Don’t be ridiculous.

Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer (Sam Kriss/The Point)

Scathing.