The Revenge of the Text Interface and the Standard Interface
If you had told me five years ago that the most popular interface for the most powerful applications on earth would be the command line, I would have sighed and said, “I wish.” But that’s exactly what’s happened.
Applications like Claude Code:
Claude Code session inside of tmux
and OpenAI’s Codex
Second-mover Codex CLI looks pretty similar to Claude Code
have made the terminal-only experience feel universal, elegant, and desirable to a generation that grew up on iPhones and fat Electron apps. What’s going on here? Above that, what’s going on with the standard user interface with File / Edit / … Help?
MA(t)GA: Make American (Trains) Great Again
As I’ve mentioned before, in high school I encountered the industrial erotica of Ayn Rand and thought long and hard about whether or not it was bunkum1 . While her philosophy is incomprehensible to me now, her aesthetic lasts and can be loved quite separately from her philosophy (see: BioShock). Her aesthetic was the apotheosis of Art Deco or 1940s Manhattan. And, to be fair, it was pretty great.
- Art Deco Skyscrapers (Hell yeah)
- Latent fetishization of a semi-religious “elect,” authoritarian class (oh…no, nonono)
- Horny, small-chested, wealthy women in fabulous gowns2 (Hell yeah)
- Horny, broad-chested, poor men, sweating and making an industrial paradise (Hell yeah)
- Romance between the two3 (Hell yeah)
- TRAINS! (Hell yeah)
Yes, TRAINS!.
Atlas Shrugged imagined a world where trains were the load-bearing4 strut to the economy. The lady that ran the trains was the nation’s most iconic industrialist; the magnate that could make a better rail was the only peer to her (Yes! They boink!). They show altruistic liberals what’s what.
So here’s my question: Why aren’t the partisans of MAGA (who don’t give a shit about the environment, or, like Rand, about sexual consent) advocating for trains to be expanded all across this land?
Flying is a semi-bestial experience these days. Why not move in grand vitesse
luxury for a few more hours with satellite telcom uplink and get where you’re
going with nary a wrinkle in your Brooks Brothers? And you mean to tell me
you’re going to let the shithole countries distinguished trading partners
lay more rail than us, or France and Japan run faster trains than ours?
If the MAGA paradise age was 1955, it should be embarrassing that there were more routes back then than there are now. Head on over to your local rally and let’s get us some trains!
The Prescience of Rush's "Test for Echo"
In September 1996, my suite-mate Justin came home crowing about the song “Driven” from Rush’s latest record. Justin and I had bonded early during our acquaintance, some six weeks prior, over our mutual fandom of Rush. He was telling me that the new song, “Driven,” was heavy, a return to the harder-edged sound of their first album, already ancient then at some 20 years of age. Shortly thereafter, the album with the “inukshuk,” an Inuit marker of “a human was here,” entered the suite. And while I liked “Driven,” it was “Test for Echo” that spoke to me then and still speaks to me now because it, like Max Headroom, gave voice to the dawning sense that all this stuff was happening way too fast and the chief casualty may be humanity’s humanity.
With thirty years of living in my head rent-free, I still think of it often.
Here we go — vertigo
Video vertigo
Test for echo
It’s simple, but it describes everything afoot then and it prefigured the daily now.