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I found inspiration for this pitcher's glaze design in the night sky. Whenever I feel lost, I know I can always look up and be under the same night sky, no matter where I am. Whenever I feel alone, I know I can always look up and feel connected to humanity, everyone else looking up at the same sky. Whenever I feel all is lost, the vast darkness in the night sky reminds me there are so many possibilities out there that I haven't even thought of yet. My studio practice is on a partial pause for an unknown amount of time right now; every piece I make is stuck in the greenware stage as I continue to save up to buy kilns and build out the glaze and kiln area. In some moments, this pause feels like a rare opportunity to take time to make more experimental and labor intensive pieces, but in other moments, I am overwhelmed by the feeling that pieces without a completion timeline on the horizon are just not worth doing. It's easy to bask in fleeting bursts of inspiration; it's harder to push through the periods where nothing feels worth doing. It's especially when the waves of anxiety about the unknown future of my studio practice and the waves of anxiety about the direction of the US government and the future of my country come at me at the same time. I try to ground myself, to keep myself from spiraling. I name things I can see, smell, hear. At night, I look to the dark sky. When I can, I reread Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark: Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone. May we all find hope in the dark and choose to act.
When I was glazing this v60-style cone, I was thinking of rising sea levels, eroding beaches, and melting ice caps. Trying to tackle large challenges like climate change is overwhelming in the best of times, and these are not the best of times. There are many things we can personally do to reduce our carbon footprints and fight climate change, but If we want to have any chance to succeed, we need to join together and organize. If you're new to organizing, connect with local groups already doing the work you're interested in, and don't forget to look for groups pushing for change outside of just the national stage. Creating more dense walkable, transit-oriented communities is one of our strongest tools for a sustainable, climate friendly future. Generally, the bulk this work in the US happens at the state and local levels. In addition to the climate benefits, it's essential work to keep communities together and fight displacement. I personally spend a lot of my spare time organizing locally around this issue to help ensure NYC and New York State stay places everyone can thrive. I focus especially on pro-housing policies and improving transportation options and reliability so climate-friendly, less car-dependent lifestyles - and New York's relative safety - can be for everyone.
Clay shrinks as it dries and even more as it's fired, so it's useful to have a way to estimate the final size of in-progress work - especially if you're making multiples or trying to fit pieces together. One way to do this is with shrinkage rulers. I figured I'd design my own shrinkage rulers and provide a way for folks to make them themselves since ceramic tool costs can add up. To make your shrinkage rulers: Download either the colorful printable shrinkage rulers or black and white printable shrinkage rulers. Print at 100% size. (These files are both 400 dpi.) Verify that the 0% shrinkage standard ruler at the top matches the size of an existing regular ruler you have. This quick calibration step will make sure nothing out of scale during printing! Cut out your rulers. Optionally, laminate or cover in packing tape to help them last longer. To use your shrinkage rulers: If you're using commercial clay, look up how much your clay is estimated to shrink. If you're using a blend of clays or custom clays, you'll have to calculate how much your clay shrinks. An easy way to do this is measure the length of a wet piece right after you form them and again after it's been through its glaze firing. You can then calculate the estimated shrinkage rate: Pick the shrinkage ruler that corresponds to your clay's shrinkage rate. If you're between shrinkage rates, you can estimate with a nearby size. Remember that shrinkage rates are estimates, and a piece's actual shrinkage depends on many variables, including how wet your clay is and how close it is to it's original composition (this can change with repeated recycling). Measure your wet piece with the shrinkage ruler! The length shown is the expected length your piece's dimension will be when fired. The fine print: Reminder that shrinkage rulers only give estimated lengths! You're welcome to print these shrinkage rulers for yourself or your business. You may use the printed shrinkage rulers privately, even in commercial applications (I hope they help your ceramic art and business!), provided you do not redistribute or resell the shrinkage rulers themselves in any form, digital or physical. Footnotes If you're working on a jar or something else that needs to fit together tightly, it's better not to rely on shrinkage rulers to get a perfect fit. In my experiences, you ideally want to make the vessel and the lid as close in time as possible and have them dry together and fire together through as many phases as possible.↩
I'm continuing my clay body reviews series with two very heavily grogged "sculpture" clays I've used. Note that I currently practice in a community studio that glaze fires to cone 6 in oxidation, so my observations reflect that. Standard 420 Sculpture: Cone 6: average shrinkage 8.0%, absorption 1.5% Light straw when fired to cone 6: more yellow/beige than most white stonewares so the color is something to consider in your final vision (or engobe in something else) So much grog that it’s best described as working with wet sand, non-derogatory I've made complicated open coil-based structures with this clay that have been formed across many studio sessions over a couple days, and they've survived without cracking! Wet clay attaches readily to leather hard and even slightly dry clay. Wrapping my works in dry cleaning bags until done and dry before bisque was enough - I was worried I'd have to make a damp box, but not with this clay! The grog is white and grey, and it comes in a variety of sizes, including some that is visually rather large. The grog really shows if you sand to smooth the surface. I typically dislike how this looks - the result ends up looking more like concrete than clay. If you use this for functional ware or anything you move around a lot, you'll certainly want to sand the bottom since the groggy surface is extra rough to protect tables and counters. Burnishing alone doesn't usually make this clay smooth. Can be thrown when very soft, but your hands will feel scratched if you're not used to it! Angled slab joins join readily, and support coils press in quickly and easily. Some members of my studio prefer to make plates with this clay because the high level of grog significantly reduces warping. I personally prefer to make plates with clays with far less grog that I dry very slowly. High palpable grog content means a weaker object, and I prefer more strength in objects that are handled frequently. Can be marbled with 798, but needs to dry slowly. Standard 420's straw color shows in the unglazed section of this planter's drip tray, and there's also some flashing from the glaze near the edges. I sanded the base of this piece so the slightly rough surface of Standard 420 wouldn't scratch tables, and you can see the contrast between the sanded bottom (outside) layer where the varied grogs are revealed and the rougher surfaces of the other layers where they are still covered by clay particles. This handbuilt planter was made of Standard 798 over multiple studio sessions. The sculptural coil structures attached readily with my regular slip and score process, and it dried evenly enough to not crack with my regular process of drying under a single plastic dry-cleaning bag. This coiled wall art piece was made out of equal parts Standard 112 and Standard 420 wedged fully together. There's still ample grog in this hybrid clay body to work the same as the Standard 798 planter's coiled structure. Standard 798 Black Sculpture: Cone 6: average shrinkage 10%, absorption 1.0% Dark brown when wet, fires to a gorgeous black at cone 6 when unglazed. Clear glazes will make this clay look brown, so you need to use a black like Coyote Black or Amaco Obsidian to preserve the black color if you want to glaze it. So much grog that it’s best described as working with wet sand, non-derogatory. The grog is white, and provides a lovely contrast when on the surface or sanded to be revealed. Like 420, you'll probably want to sand the bottom of anything you'll pick up and put down more than once. Very similar working qualities to 420 - a true joy for handbuilding! Can be marbled with 420, but needs to dry slowly.
Starlit sky on a clear night / the milky way / eternity / clarity / raindrops sticking to window glass
More in programming
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop in Brooklyn. I have a warm drink, and it’s just started to snow outside. I’m visiting New York to see Operation Mincemeat on Broadway – I was at the dress rehearsal yesterday, and I’ll be at the opening preview tonight. I’ve seen this show more times than I care to count, and I hope US theater-goers love it as much as Brits. The people who make the show will tell you that it’s about a bunch of misfits who thought they could do something ridiculous, who had the audacity to believe in something unlikely. That’s certainly one way to see it. The musical tells the true story of a group of British spies who tried to fool Hitler with a dead body, fake papers, and an outrageous plan that could easily have failed. Decades later, the show’s creators would mirror that same spirit of unlikely ambition. Four friends, armed with their creativity, determination, and a wardrobe full of hats, created a new musical in a small London theatre. And after a series of transfers, they’re about to open the show under the bright lights of Broadway. But when I watch the show, I see a story about friendship. It’s about how we need our friends to help us, to inspire us, to push us to be the best versions of ourselves. I see the swaggering leader who needs a team to help him truly achieve. The nervous scientist who stands up for himself with the support of his friends. The enthusiastic secretary who learns wisdom and resilience from her elder. And so, I suppose, it’s fitting that I’m not in New York on my own. I’m here with friends – dozens of wonderful people who I met through this ridiculous show. At first, I was just an audience member. I sat in my seat, I watched the show, and I laughed and cried with equal measure. After the show, I waited at stage door to thank the cast. Then I came to see the show a second time. And a third. And a fourth. After a few trips, I started to see familiar faces waiting with me at stage door. So before the cast came out, we started chatting. Those conversations became a Twitter community, then a Discord, then a WhatsApp. We swapped fan art, merch, and stories of our favourite moments. We went to other shows together, and we hung out outside the theatre. I spent New Year’s Eve with a few of these friends, sitting on somebody’s floor and laughing about a bowl of limes like it was the funniest thing in the world. And now we’re together in New York. Meeting this kind, funny, and creative group of people might seem as unlikely as the premise of Mincemeat itself. But I believed it was possible, and here we are. I feel so lucky to have met these people, to take this ridiculous trip, to share these precious days with them. I know what a privilege this is – the time, the money, the ability to say let’s do this and make it happen. How many people can gather a dozen friends for even a single evening, let alone a trip halfway round the world? You might think it’s silly to travel this far for a theatre show, especially one we’ve seen plenty of times in London. Some people would never see the same show twice, and most of us are comfortably into double or triple-figures. Whenever somebody asks why, I don’t have a good answer. Because it’s fun? Because it’s moving? Because I enjoy it? I feel the need to justify it, as if there’s some logical reason that will make all of this okay. But maybe I don’t have to. Maybe joy doesn’t need justification. A theatre show doesn’t happen without people who care. Neither does a friendship. So much of our culture tells us that it’s not cool to care. It’s better to be detached, dismissive, disinterested. Enthusiasm is cringe. Sincerity is weakness. I’ve certainly felt that pressure – the urge to play it cool, to pretend I’m above it all. To act as if I only enjoy something a “normal” amount. Well, fuck that. I don’t know where the drive to be detached comes from. Maybe it’s to protect ourselves, a way to guard against disappointment. Maybe it’s to seem sophisticated, as if having passions makes us childish or less mature. Or perhaps it’s about control – if we stay detached, we never have to depend on others, we never have to trust in something bigger than ourselves. Being detached means you can’t get hurt – but you’ll also miss out on so much joy. I’m a big fan of being a big fan of things. So many of the best things in my life have come from caring, from letting myself be involved, from finding people who are a big fan of the same things as me. If I pretended not to care, I wouldn’t have any of that. Caring – deeply, foolishly, vulnerably – is how I connect with people. My friends and I care about this show, we care about each other, and we care about our joy. That care and love for each other is what brought us together, and without it we wouldn’t be here in this city. I know this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip. So many stars had to align – for us to meet, for the show we love to be successful, for us to be able to travel together. But if we didn’t care, none of those stars would have aligned. I know so many other friends who would have loved to be here but can’t be, for all kinds of reasons. Their absence isn’t for lack of caring, and they want the show to do well whether or not they’re here. I know they care, and that’s the important thing. To butcher Tennyson: I think it’s better to care about something you cannot affect, than to care about nothing at all. In a world that’s full of cynicism and spite and hatred, I feel that now more than ever. I’d recommend you go to the show if you haven’t already, but that’s not really the point of this post. Maybe you’ve already seen Operation Mincemeat, and it wasn’t for you. Maybe you’re not a theatre kid. Maybe you aren’t into musicals, or history, or war stories. That’s okay. I don’t mind if you care about different things to me. (Imagine how boring the world would be if we all cared about the same things!) But I want you to care about something. I want you to find it, find people who care about it too, and hold on to them. Because right now, in this city, with these people, at this show? I’m so glad I did. And I hope you find that sort of happiness too. Some of the people who made this trip special. Photo by Chloe, and taken from her Twitter. Timing note: I wrote this on February 15th, but I delayed posting it because I didn’t want to highlight the fact I was away from home. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
One of the biggest mistakes that new startup founders make is trying to get away from the customer-facing roles too early. Whether it's customer support or it's sales, it's an incredible advantage to have the founders doing that work directly, and for much longer than they find comfortable. The absolute worst thing you can do is hire a sales person or a customer service agent too early. You'll miss all the golden nuggets that customers throw at you for free when they're rejecting your pitch or complaining about the product. Seeing these reasons paraphrased or summarized destroy all the nutrients in their insights. You want that whole-grain feedback straight from the customers' mouth! When we launched Basecamp in 2004, Jason was doing all the customer service himself. And he kept doing it like that for three years!! By the time we hired our first customer service agent, Jason was doing 150 emails/day. The business was doing millions of dollars in ARR. And Basecamp got infinitely, better both as a market proposition and as a product, because Jason could funnel all that feedback into decisions and positioning. For a long time after that, we did "Everyone on Support". Frequently rotating programmers, designers, and founders through a day of answering emails directly to customers. The dividends of doing this were almost as high as having Jason run it all in the early years. We fixed an incredible number of minor niggles and annoying bugs because programmers found it easier to solve the problem than to apologize for why it was there. It's not easy doing this! Customers often offer their valuable insights wrapped in rude language, unreasonable demands, and bad suggestions. That's why many founders quit the business of dealing with them at the first opportunity. That's why few companies ever do "Everyone On Support". That's why there's such eagerness to reduce support to an AI-only interaction. But quitting dealing with customers early, not just in support but also in sales, is an incredible handicap for any startup. You don't have to do everything that every customer demands of you, but you should certainly listen to them. And you can't listen well if the sound is being muffled by early layers of indirection.
As well as changing the way I organise my writing, last year I made some cosmetic improvements to this site. I design everything on this site myself, and I write the CSS by hand – I don’t use any third-party styles or frameworks. I don’t have any design training, and I don’t do design professionally, so I use this site as a place to learn and practice my design skills. It’s a continual work-in-progress, but I’d like to think it’s getting better over time. I design this site for readers. I write long, text-heavy posts with the occasional illustration or diagram, so I want something that will be comfortable to read and look good on a wide variety of browsers and devices. I get a lot of that “for free” by using semantic HTML and the default styles – most of my CSS is just cosmetic. Let’s go through some of the changes. Cleaning up the link styles This is what links used to look like: Every page has a tint colour, and then I was deriving different shades to style different links – a darker shade for visited links, a lighter shade for visited links in dark mode, and a background that appears on hover. I’m generating these new colours programatically, and I was so proud of getting that code working that I didn’t stop to think whether it was a good idea. In hindsight, I see several issues. The tint colour is meant to give the page a consistent visual appearance, but the different shades diluted that effect. I don’t think their meaning was especially obvious. How many readers ever worked it out? And the hover styles are actively unhelpful – just as you hover over a link you’re interested in, I’m making it harder to read! (At least in light mode – in dark mode, the hover style is barely legible.) One thing I noticed is that for certain tint colours, the “visited” colour I generated was barely distinguishable from the text colour. So I decided to lean into that in the new link styles: visited links are now the same colour as regular text. This new set of styles feels more coherent. I’m only using one shade of the tint colour, and I think the meaning is a bit clearer – only new-to-you links will get the pop of colour to stand out from the rest of the text. I’m happy to rely on underlines for the links you’ve already visited. And when you hover, the thick underline means you can see where you are, but the link text remains readable. Swapping out the font I swapped out the font, replacing Georgia with Charter. The difference is subtle, so I’d be surprised if anyone noticed: I’ve always used web safe fonts for this site – the fonts that are built into web browsers, and don’t need to be downloaded first. I’ve played with custom fonts from time to time, but there’s no font I like more enough to justify the hassle of loading a custom font. I still like Georgia, but I felt it was showing its age – it was designed in 1993 to look good on low-resolution screens, but looks a little chunky on modern displays. I think Charter looks nicer on high-resolution screens, but if you don’t have it installed then I fall back to Georgia. Making all the roundrects consistent I use a lot of rounded rectangles for components on this site, including article cards, blockquotes, and code blocks. For a long time they had similar but not identical styles, because I designed them all at different times. There were weird inconsistencies. For example, why does one roundrect have a 2px border, but another one is 3px? These are small details that nobody will ever notice directly, but undermine the sense of visual together-ness. I’ve done a complete overhaul of these styles, to make everything look more consistent. I’m leaning heavily on CSS variables, a relatively new CSS feature that I’ve really come to like. Variables make it much easier to use consistent values in different rules. I also tweaked the appearance: I’ve removed another two shades of the tint colour. (Yes, those shades were different from the ones used in links.) Colour draws your attention, so I’m trying to use it more carefully. A link says “click here”. A heading says “start here”. What does a blockquote or code snippet say? It’s just part of the text, so it shouldn’t be grabbing your attention. I think the neutral background also makes the syntax highlighting easier to read, because the tint colour isn’t clashing with the code colours. I could probably consolidate the shades of grey I’m using, but that’s a task for another day. I also removed the left indent on blockquotes and code blocks – I think it looks nicer to have a flush left edge for everything, and it means you can read more text on mobile screens. (That’s where I really felt the issues with the old design.) What’s next? By tidying up the design and reducing the number of unique elements, I’ve got a bit of room to add something new. For a while now I’ve wanted a place at the bottom of posts for common actions, or links to related and follow-up posts. As I do more and more long-form, reflective writing, I want to be able to say “if you liked this, you should read this too”. I want something that catches your eye, but doesn’t distract from the article you’re already reading. Louie Mantia has a version of this that I quite like: I’ve held off designing this because the existing pages felt too busy, but now I feel like I have space to add this – there aren’t as many clashing colours and components to compete for your attention. I’m still sketching out designs – my current idea is my rounded rectangle blocks, but with a coloured border instead of a subtle grey, but when I did a prototype, I feel like it’s missing something. I need to try a few more ideas. Watch this space! [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
Humanity's Last Exam by Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and Scale AI
Most of our cultural virtues, celebrated heroes, and catchy slogans align with the idea of "never give up". That's a good default! Most people are inclined to give up too easily, as soon as the going gets hard. But it's also worth remembering that sometimes you really should fold, admit defeat, and accept that your plan didn't work out. But how to distinguish between a bad plan and insufficient effort? It's not easy. Plenty of plans look foolish at first glance, especially to people without skin in the game. That's the essence of a disruptive startup: The idea ought to look a bit daft at first glance or it probably doesn't carry the counter-intuitive kernel needed to really pop. Yet it's also obviously true that not every daft idea holds the potential to be a disruptive startup. That's why even the best venture capital investors in the world are wrong far more than they're right. Not because they aren't smart, but because nobody is smart enough to predict (the disruption of) the future consistently. The best they can do is make long bets, and then hope enough of them pay off to fund the ones that don't. So far, so logical, so conventional. A million words have been written by a million VCs about how their shrewd eyes let them see those hidden disruptive kernels before anyone else could. Good for them. What I'm more interested in knowing more about is how and when you pivot from a promising bet to folding your hand. When do you accept that no amount of additional effort is going to get that turkey to soar? I'm asking because I don't have any great heuristics here, and I'd really like to know! Because the ability to fold your hand, and live to play your remaining chips another day, isn't just about startups. It's also about individual projects. It's about work methods. Hell, it's even about politics and societies at large. I'll give you just one small example. In 2017, Rails 5.1 shipped with new tooling for doing end-to-end system tests, using a headless browser to validate the functionality, as a user would in their own browser. Since then, we've spent an enormous amount of time and effort trying to make this approach work. Far too much time, if you ask me now. This year, we finished our decision to fold, and to give up on using these types of system tests on the scale we had previously thought made sense. In fact, just last week, we deleted 5,000 lines of code from the Basecamp code base by dropping literally all the system tests that we had carried so diligently for all these years. I really like this example, because it draws parallels to investing and entrepreneurship so well. The problem with our approach to system tests wasn't that it didn't work at all. If that had been the case, bailing on the approach would have been a no brainer long ago. The trouble was that it sorta-kinda did work! Some of the time. With great effort. But ultimately wasn't worth the squeeze. I've seen this trap snap on startups time and again. The idea finds some traction. Enough for the founders to muddle through for years and years. Stuck with an idea that sorta-kinda does work, but not well enough to be worth a decade of their life. That's a tragic trap. The only antidote I've found to this on the development side is time boxing. Programmers are just as liable as anyone to believe a flawed design can work if given just a bit more time. And then a bit more. And then just double of what we've already spent. The time box provides a hard stop. In Shape Up, it's six weeks. Do or die. Ship or don't. That works. But what's the right amount of time to give a startup or a methodology or a societal policy? There's obviously no universal answer, but I'd argue that whatever the answer, it's "less than you think, less than you want". Having the grit to stick with the effort when the going gets hard is a key trait of successful people. But having the humility to give up on good bets turned bad might be just as important.
