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Hi, I’m Piper Haywood. I’m a design-adjacent software engineer with a lot of
interests. Read more about me, take a look at my work and background, or get in
touch.

Published Wednesday, 20 March 2024 by Piper Haywood


TEAM RETREAT AT THE EAMES ARCHIVES AND RANCH

Last week, the Eames Institute Digital Product team got together at the
newly-opened Eames Archives in Richmond, CA and the currently-under-renovation
Ranch in Petaluma, CA. Llisa Demetrios – one of the Eames grandchildren, a
founder of the Eames Institute, and our Chief Curator – gave DP a private tour
of the Archives, and we walked from one end of the Ranch to the other guided by
Farm Manager David Evershed, Director of Ranch Operations Benjamin Godfrey, and
VIP (Very Important Puppy) Tipsy. Incredible to explore and meet them + so many
other EI folks IRL.

I won’t share pics of the Archives since my photos either have people in (I
don’t like sharing faces without permission) or are basically low-qual versions
of the much better photos you can find on the website. And I won’t share much
about what DP got up to discussion-wise, hoping to share our progress in a
different format elsewhere soon.

But here are a few snaps of the Ranch as well as some of my favorite tidbits +
moments.

Looking west to the Turnbull barn at the Eames Ranch in Petaluma, CA

Read more

agriculture, Ambrook, Bay Area, California, Charles Eames, Eames, Eames
Archives, Eames Institute, failure, Letterform Archive, Petaluma (CA), Photolog,
Aside, Ray Eames, Richmond (CA), sheep, sustainability, Temple Grandin, Work,

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Published Tuesday, 12 March 2024 by Piper Haywood


STILL WHITECAPS

Why do whitecaps seem almost still when you’re 1000 feet in the air looking down
at the ocean?

Ephemera, ocean, plane, Aside, whitecaps,

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Published Wednesday, 28 February 2024 by Piper Haywood


WORDPRESS AND AI, WOMP WOMP

Read “Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools” on 404 Media.

What a huge bummer. Instead of writing a ton more here, will point you to this
post by tante which reflects my thoughts.

Will probably keep my self-hosted WordPress site for a good while longer, but
that’s becoming more convenience than enthusiasm.

AI, capitalism, Ephemera, Link, Tumblr, WordPress, WordPress.com,

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Published Wednesday, 28 February 2024 by Piper Haywood


INEXACTLY BENCHMARKING ELEVENTY VS ASTRO BUILD TIMES

The Eames Institute team is checking out some frameworks and static site
generators for a project, and I wanted to see how Eleventy and Astro compare in
terms of build time.

Zach Leatherman’s 2022 article “Which generator builds Markdown the fastest?” is
probably the most thorough resource I’ve come across along these lines, and I’d
recommend checking that out if you want to do some serious comparisons.

But I was curious about a “real world” test in 2024, so I decided to do some
inexact benchmarking using a Markdown export of this blog. A caveat up front:
I’m much more familiar with Eleventy than I am with Astro, which will likely be
apparent when I get to the incremental build tests later in this post.

For Eleventy I used eleventy-netlify-boilerplate with zero modifications, and
for Astro I used the blog template as described in their docs with some small
modifications along the lines of this wordpress-to-astro repo to get categories
and tags working. I didn’t want to use wordpress-to-astro directly since it was
last updated two years ago, but it is a good reference point.

My blog has 770 posts which were exported to 770 Markdown files. With a
paginated feed, categories, and tags, the total number of built pages is around
2550.*

Based on an average taken from 10 builds, Astro took 10.07 seconds and Eleventy
took 4.29 seconds to build.

Incremental builds can speed things up significantly since the only built
content is that which is relevant to the modified files.

Eleventy has supported incremental builds since December 2022 (I believe!), but
it doesn’t yet support it on a CI server. There is an open issue for it which
looks like it has traction.

To test incremental builds, I added and removed the same single tag on the same
post 10 times.** Based on an average taken from 10 incremental builds, Eleventy
took 2.17 seconds skipping 777 files. I would have expected it to skip more, but
this might have to do with not being able to incrementally build paginated data.

I wanted to test the same content change in Astro… but it isn’t clear to me that
there is an apples-to-apples comparison. Astro introduced an experimental
Incremental Content Caching feature in v4.0 (not sure if this is supported on CI
servers). When I added experimental.contentCollectionCache to the config, there
was no difference between basic build times when I made a content change. I’m
not sure if this is because having all of my content in Markdown makes the
caching a mute point, or if it’s something else. If anyone has further context
on how best to test Incremental Content Caching in Astro, would love to know.

For what it’s worth, running astro dev is extremely quick, just 125ms before
it’s ready.

I’d be curious to do a similar benchmark using WordPress’s REST API but am not
sure I’ll have the time… Will update here if I do.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* I give a rough number because the Eleventy boilerplate and Astro template
generate a few additional pages, but the page total difference is in the single
digits so I didn’t waste time evening them up perfectly.

** For my own future reference in case I do further tests: Add and remove the
tag hello from this post.

Astro, benchmarking, development, Eleventy, Input, Markdown, static site
generators, Work, work,

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Published Monday, 19 February 2024 by Piper Haywood


DIA BEACON VISIT

We visited Dia Beacon for the first time, with B. Great place. This is Dan
Flavin’s untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1b from 1978. B’s favorite was Louise
Bourgeois’s spider, I think, or maybe Arena by Rita McBride. It was fun
stumbling across Occasional Papers’ Explorer in the book shop.

🌱, art, Dan Flavin, Dia Beacon, Ephemera, Louise Bourgeois, New York, Video,
Rita McBride, sculpture,

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Published Friday, 16 February 2024 by Piper Haywood


“…WHO AM I? WHY HAVE YOU BROUGHT ME IN TO THIS WORLD?”

B’s first snowman, about two feet tall. We couldn’t find much else for the eyes
and mouth, and I can’t stop laughing at it.

🌱, Brooklyn, Ephemera, existential crisis, NYC, Photolog, Image, Prospect Park,
snow, snowman, winter,

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Published Friday, 16 February 2024 by Piper Haywood


“‘AI’ IS PRETTY MUCH JUST SHORTHAND FOR MEDIOCRE”

Just read through “You sound like a bot” by Adi Robertson in the Verge. I hadn’t
really put my finger on the right word for my feelings about AI until reading
that article but that’s it: it feels very mediocre.

If you want to get a rough overview of how the average frontend engineer might
feel about a JavaScript framework, ChatGPT is useful enough. If you’re willing
to ignore the questionable origins of the training data in use, Midjourney can
be useful for rapid image generation for an early storyboard.

But as of right now, the output always feels meh, “yeah ok”. Never really
surprises you with a unique perspective, or an unexpected visual language. That
vibe is only becoming stronger as AI developers continue to sand off the “rough”
edges on their products.

Maybe that will change. As Robertson says, “Maybe the schism between artists and
AI developers will resolve, and we’ll see more tools that amplify human
idiosyncrasy instead of offering a lowest-common-denominator replacement for
it.”

That’s not happening any time soon. One reason is that artists have been given
about 1,000 reasons to distrust AI, and I think that it is only widespread
artistic use and input that could actually lead to that sort of breakthrough.

Another reason: spewing mediocrity is a pretty strong sweet spot for AI. AI is
useful as a summarizer so long as you take the response with a grain of salt and
follow up on sources. Case in point: Elicit seems pretty cool! Listen to this
ShopTalk Show episode with Maggie Appleton for more.

Anyways, maybe we’ll eventually get to the point where AI has that human
“spark”, who knows. Maybe it’ll happen next month and I’ll eat my words. Until
then, as most of the content we experience online becomes more grey and sludgy,
the personal will become far more valuable.

In Anil Dash’s article “The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again” for Rolling
Stone late last year, he says that “the human web, the one made by regular
people, is resurgent”. He places a lot of emphasis on the breakdown of the
content silos we’ve relied on for so many years, which definitely seems like the
major catalyst for the shift. But AI’s growing mediocrity will be the force that
drives it home and really makes the human web stick.

(Related side point: clearly I need to read Filterworld by Kyle Chayka.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Edit 21 Feb 2024: Maybe I should eat my words sooner? OpenAI just came out with
Sora. Which is impressive! But… IDK, it still feels meh somehow? Maybe it’s just
because it’s still early days, we’ll see.

AI, average, Ephemera, Input, mediocrity, Link, technology, to read,

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Published Thursday, 1 February 2024 by Piper Haywood


VISIT THE EAMES ARCHIVES

The Eames Archives is open! 🎉

Visit the Eames Institute website to book a tour.

The new Visit page on the site hints at our major overhaul of EI’s digital
presence and tooling, currently in progress under the direction of Eric Li. More
to come…

Charles Eames, development, Eames, Eames Institute, Output, Link, Ray Eames,
website, Work, work,

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Published Tuesday, 26 December 2023 by Piper Haywood


ON THE SECOND DAY OF CHRISTMAS…

🎶 On the sec-ond day of Christ-mas 🎶
🎶 My true love* gave to me: 🎶
🎶 A dou-ble_ eye in-fec-tion_ 🎶

* My son. I was going to also write, “At least he’s not sick!” But that is false
as of the wee hours of this morning, poor little dude.

Merry Christmas! 🎄⛄️❄️🎁❤️

🌱, Christmas, Ephemera, illness, parenting, Aside, toddlers,

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Published Monday, 18 December 2023 by Piper Haywood


BELL RINGING AS ABSTRACTION, EXERCISE, AND COMMUNION

Can’t remember how we got talking about it, but another member of the Brooklyn
Conservatory Chorale told me that she’s very in to English Change Ringing.

I thought I hadn’t heard of it before, but I have heard it, many times since I
lived over there for 10 years. Listen to an example from St Paul’s on YouTube. I
didn’t know it had a name, guess I always assumed it was sort of random.

If you listen to it closely you can start to recognize patterns. And if you live
in the US, you might realize how this sound feels somewhat historical, not
something that we hear frequently even in places with lots of churches. It is
somewhat-to-very rare in the US depending upon where you live (see map of North
American bell towers).

I started poking around online. For a concise description of English Change
Ringing, you can’t beat the one on the New York Trinity Ringers website. Would
love to go hear their bells some time.

But for a wonderfully in-depth presentation, it’s worth reading the article
“Campanologomania” by Katherine Hunt published in issue 53 of Cabinet magazine
in spring 2014.

(Incidentally, how have I never come across Cabinet before? “We believe that
curiosity is the very basis of ethics insofar as a deeper understanding of our
social and material cultures encourages us both to be better custodians of the
world and at the same time allows us to imagine it otherwise.” Spot on. I hope
they’re not done for… The last issue was winter ‘21 / spring ‘22, and the last
event was in late 2020 as far as I can tell.)

In the article, Hunt goes through the origins of English Change Ringing as
almost a drunken group pastime on idle bells, to a sort of obsession by folks –
men, really – of many classes, to something that was seen as somewhat lowly due
to the physical exertion it required, to the qualities it shares with modern
twelve-tone music and the invention of the dumbbell (quite literally a dumb
bell).

It’s hard to describe how physically in-tune the bell ringers must be to achieve
the many permutations in a multi-hour peal. Hunt says:

> While change ringers must understand the shape of the particular method they
> are ringing, they do not follow written notation for each and every change.
> Nor do they memorize the individual changes. Rather, the practice relies on
> the ringers internalizing the patterns of the method, perhaps by looking at
> notation that shorthands the whole method, showing only the key moments at
> which the permutations change course in order to exhaust all the possible
> orders. Ringers know principally by doing: they anticipate when two bells will
> have to swap places in the following round, and they feel their way as a group
> through the ringing of all the orders of the rows. Change ringing’s linguistic
> potential may have been exploited by Stedman and Mundy, but in the bell-tower
> it is a sweaty, communal, and profoundly corporeal activity.

That reliance on communality reminds me of many Musarc performances, though
those are of course much more contemporary and experimental (and choral, not
bells!).

Anyways, clearly there is something very attractive about this to me… The
trouble is the meeting lengths and frequency, it would be really tough to get
involved at this point in my life. Maybe something for when I’m 50+.

***

Side note: I was about to post a link to Outhwaites of Hawes, a traditional
ropemaking business that started before 1840. The building is their workshop and
also effectively houses a museum. It was lovely to walk through there and see
the rope being made, including the incredible ropes required for change ringing.
But sadly, it looks like they closed almost exactly a year ago.

bells, community, England, English Change Ringing, Ephemera, exercise, math,
music, NYC, Aside, rope, UK,

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