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Anil Dash

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ANIL DASH

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.


WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE 2021 M1 MACBOOK PRO

I've spent a couple weeks using a new 14" Apple MacBook Pro daily (as a
replacement for my last machine, which was a similar, but rather terrible, 2016
MacBook Pro) and thought it might be valuable to share a few observations that
might help you assess whether it's a useful

Nov 11, 2021 • 5 min read


BURNERS, POLLUTION, CONTROL & PRIVACY BY A THOUSAND CUTS

The key to protecting people's privacy on the internet isn't in trying to stop
users' data from being sent to different services, it's in poisoning the well by
having user data be so inconsistent, disconnected, spurious or expensive to
collect that today's surveillance infrastructures (often referred to as "ad
tech"

Sep 29, 2021 • 6 min read


COOPERATIVE OVERLAP

One of the biggest sources of miscommunication is people having different styles
of communication, or different norms about the right way to express emotion or
context even if there's agreement on more straightforward aspects of verbal
communication. Things like "ask vs. guess" cultures are one common manifestation
of this, and

Sep 25, 2021 • 4 min read


THE SPREADSHEET OF PRINCE RECORDINGS

Recently, a motivated Prince fan created a spreadsheet that attempts to catalog
the entirety of Prince's thousands of recordings over the course of his career.
Beginning in 1973 as a then-15-year-old Prince taped his first few tracks, and
going through (so far) the end of the 80s, it's a remarkable

Sep 17, 2021 • 5 min read


TWENTY IS MYTH

Every year, for twenty years now, I've written an observance of this day.
Sometimes it's for myself, sometimes it's for the small cohort of folks who've
checked back in with me on this day every year since then, a group which has
shrunk a bit over the years. But this

Sep 11, 2021 • 11 min read


GETTING EMBEDDED

Amongst the many new publications that's popped up in the current newsletter
boom, I've been enjoying Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci's "Embedded". One of the
biggest reasons why is the recurring feature "My Internet", which details the
way one person uses all the common aspects of the internet that we

Aug 15, 2021 • 1 min read


THEN, NOW

Here are some before-and-afters from a set of photos my parents took on a visit
to Manhattan in 1985. I tried to replicate the angles as best I could in the
modern photos. MacDougal StreetSixth Avenue

Aug 11, 2021 • 1 min read


THE CODE BEHIND THE CODE

The Konami Code is one of the longest-running inside references amongst both
gamers and coders, acting as something of a shibboleth for a certain kind of
nerd. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. I never owned a
Nintendo Entertainment System, didn't care about most Konami games,

Aug 4, 2021 • 1 min read


VERIFIABLY TRUE

After a pause of a few years, Twitter announced today that they're going to
resume allowing any user to request the blue verification checkmark for their
account. The social and technical dynamics around Twitter verification remain as
fraught and fascinating as they were in the earliest days of the service,

May 20, 2021 • 4 min read


NOT FOR TOURISTS: ATTRIBUTION, PROVENANCE AND HARM REDUCTION

Anytime a big new market pops up, people rush in to stake their claims and make
their fortunes. Our culture loves creation myths, especially in technology.
Fables about lone geniuses are ubiquitous in the tech industry, with their
fundamental falsity doing nothing to undermine their utility for most people in

Apr 5, 2021 • 5 min read


DESIGN CHOICES OF BREATH OF THE WILD

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the greatest games ever made,
and one of the breakout hits of the Nintendo Switch platform, which is on its
way to becoming one of the 10 most popular video game consoles of all time. But
now, years after

Feb 25, 2021 • 3 min read
prince


HOW PRINCE WON THE SUPER BOWL

On this day in 2007, Prince won Super Bowl XLI with a soaring halftime
performance that climaxed with the skies opening up to honor his guitar solo. It
is not just the best-regarded halftime show ever, but was to that point the
most-viewed musical performance in American history. Prince’s

Feb 4, 2021 • 7 min read


GETTING COMFORTABLE WITH ROBIN BYRD

It is almost impossibly difficult to explain Robin Byrd to anyone who was not an
adult living in NYC toward the end of the last century, though everyone who
recognizes the name immediately responds with unbridled enthusiasm. This comes
up in conversation for me from time to time because I

Jan 27, 2021 • 3 min read


THE WAR ON CARS!

I love any kind of advocacy for safer, more humane streets, so it was a real joy
to get to guest on the wonderful The War on Cars podcast. Doug Gordon went deep,
really pushing into the connections and surprising resonances between what makes
communities safe and healthy in both

Jan 15, 2021 • 1 min read


DULE ROCKERRR

Duleshwar Tandi, better known these days as Rapper Dule Rocker, is one of the
most successful and influential rappers to have ever come out of the Kalahandi
district in Odisha, where my family is from. I jumped into his catalog of videos
this weekend and was blown away not just

Jan 11, 2021 • 2 min read


THE DEATH CULT STAGES A COUP

A while back, when I wrote out in plain words that we have a politically
dominant death cult ruling America right now, I worried about the risks of
saying my opinion so straightforwardly. As you might expect, I did get a good
number of people saying I was exaggerating, or

Jan 6, 2021 • 2 min read


MAKING THINGS, FAST

These days, I'm a hobbyist web developer. That used to be a common thing people
did; it was like having a crafting hobby, but with web pages. Over the last
decade or two, though, making a website became either something done by
professional developers using incredibly complex tools, or the

Jan 5, 2021 • 2 min read


EXPLORING MOYNIHAN STATION

Over the weekend, we had the chance to explore the newly-opened Moynihan
Station, the massive new expansion to Penn Station that's been in the works for
decades. Though it ostensibly serves as a welcoming and modern new facility for
Amtrak and Long Island Railroad passengers, it's very clearly also meant

Jan 4, 2021 • 3 min read


RECOMMENDED: TED LASSO

Ted Lasso, the standout series of Apple's new Apple TV+ streaming service,
rightfully earned a place on many people's lists of the most-recommended new
shows of 2020. But what's best about it is what makes it so different from most
other highly-acclaimed shows, especially "prestige" TV. You'll see lots of

Jan 3, 2021 • 1 min read


KEEPING TABS ON YOUR ABSTRACTIONS

I was delighted to discover Omar Rizwan's TabFS, a brilliant hack that lets you
see your browser tabs as folders and files on your computer, because it's
incredibly clever on its own, but also opens a view into how a shift in metaphor
 can totally change the way we see

Jan 2, 2021 • 4 min read


EVERY DAY IS A FOLLOW FRIDAY

In the early days of Twitter, there was a pleasingly low-tech tradition called
"follow friday" (which people later denoted with the #FF hashtag), wherein
people listed other accounts that they suggested you might follow. It did a good
job of providing a manually-curated form of discover on the platform until

Jan 1, 2021 • 1 min read


A PERSONAL DIGITAL RESET

About once a year, I do a little digital reset to help make my online life a
little more pleasant. I’m not advocating that anybody do the same as me, but I
hope that sharing some of what I do might help inspire you to manage the
technology in

Dec 31, 2020 • 7 min read
nyc


NINETEEN IS WHEN THEY FORGOT

The slogan, for people who weren’t in Manhattan that day, is “Never Forget”. The
people who were not here, who were never here, call it “9/11”. But the people I
still check in with, the friends who trudged home covered in ash, never call it
that. It’s

Sep 11, 2020 • 12 min read


WHAT WINDOWS 95 CHANGED

Twenty five years ago today, Microsoft released Windows 95. It was undoubtedly a
technical leap forward, but its biggest, most lasting impacts are about how it
changed popular culture's relationship to technology. For context, when Windows
95 was released in August of 1995, only about 30% of American homes had

Aug 25, 2020 • 4 min read


I’M ASKING MY FRIENDS ON THE LEFT TO VOTE FOR JOE BIDEN

With authoritarianism at our door, the policies that progressives are driving
for will be dependent on whether the fundamental institutions of democracy are
protected at all. I believe every vote needs to be earned, and every candidate
needs to be worthy of that vote on the strength of their policies.

Aug 21, 2020 • 5 min read
Anil Dash © 2021