I think the author's categorizations are flawed. Social media still runs discovery of video creators. Some people bridge the gap to mainstream success, get signed to labels, etc. and abandon their social channels. Others continue to use those channels.

The creators in the latter category likely haven't received the institutional support they'd like because - as the author says - they just don't have qualities that beget institutional support or traditional marketing techniques. They stay DIY creators.

Again - Sex Pistols? Look at Lil Nas X. Look at every rapper besides Drake in the last ten years coming up off of SoundCloud hits and TikToks; half of them are fiercely label-independent and still demand mainstream recognition.

There are no examples of modern creators cited in this article. There are so many examples that can be used.

Again - this gap is actively being bridged. A24 is obliterating Marvel. Euphoria picked up most of its cast off the street and made average people (with great talent) superstars. This is imagined and projected by the author. Mainstream media events have had to accommodate those popular on social media to stay relevant, not the other way around.

Have you seen how people worship Charli D'Amelio? The Kardashian family? Where have you been?

No, and I don't think it's the case that she is 'less famous' in any way; fame from social media looks so different from industry-produced fame that it's hard to compare.

There are tons of counterexamples.

Lil Nas X bridged the gap here, as have so many other 'creators' that have found endorsement, sponsorship - read MONEY - from traditional, pre-social-media institutions.

Anyone working with technology will know who MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips are.

This article is written from the author's perspective. The author may be someone who consumes media from 'traditional channels' - television - and it's true that these people haven't broken through in that way. If you ask someone on the street or index the billboards in Times Square, though, CNN and the real world tell different stories.

I've noticed this from DAW reviews; It's good to think of music as a tool - and to extent, these grooveboxes are mashed together to make new by plugging them into modular setups and such - but most of them are of poor build quality, running shit microcontrollers and underpowered tech, have little to no memory, and the companies pass this all off as 'limitation' that 'breeds creativity'.

I call bullshit. You can make a two thousand dollar product as big as an Elektron and have the budget to throw an 100 gig SSD in and a Beaglebone off the shelf. that's less than 100 bucks for some brilliant, capable hardware that can hold anything. The screens have 20 pixlels? What the hell?

Teenage engineering understands. They provide actual brilliant value in packages that nobody else can make. They fit a niche and make the best product in that niche. Their pricing model isn't great now - but the next generation of their products has the potential, I think, to go beyond what's okay.

This is another theme throughout the work - a constant reiteration that Apple is American.

I haven't grown up with a strong American identity or with any sort of great faith in my country of birth. I grew up with immigrants mostly, kids whose parents brought with them these intricate legacies, carrying some sort of struggle or journey, spoken or unsaid, that ends with them settling down in the United States. I couldn't see the same story in my upbringing - America is just where I was born and was growing up. Everyone seemed to be going with the flow.

The political climate I've grown up in has a lot to do with this, but Jobs' political climate seems quite unstable; from Vietnam to Clinton to now 9/11 and Bush, where my American political consciousness kind of begins. I want to know where this American faith comes from. Should I have it? I don't even live in America anymore.

Such a good line. Here's what it accomplishes: - Defines a shorthand - 'genius' - for the people helping at the Apple store - Reiterates the job title, addressing them by name, associating them with this lofty word - they're geniuses! - Claiming that he, himself, cannot do what they do. He doesn't see them as lesser than him for working retail; he sees them as better at their jobs than he ever could be.

Jobs has the most impressive marketing tact I've ever seen, read or heard.

The populism in his speeches is another really important observation. Every person he mentions, every topic, every idea begins with a categorization that (1) carries with it a very specific meaning and (2) that you can relate to. 'American' is patriotic, is innovative, speaks to the employee. Maslow isn't addressed as the 'scientist' or 'researcher' he would be in any news publication; he's an American. He could have been any of us.

This speechwriting reminds me so much of JFK's campaigns - but whereas JFK dumbed down and maintained that level to make all of his work accessible and craft a strong, general mission, Jobs is an expert at easing you in - sneaking you up to topics that are more and more technical.

You can look back two paragraphs and discover that you've just understood this hierarchy of needs. He snuck you in by calling the developer an 'American', then developing the idea not by explaining to you, but by emphasizing words like 'simple' and 'human' and 'people' and deliberately using language so simple that you haven't even noticed the idea you've grokked - and though you may not be able to speak in the terminology of the field, you know know a bit more about what that thing's got going on.

(This specific section isn't the most technical topic, but other speeches here use those very same tricks - and those tricks allow him to convey complex ideas and huge dreams as matter-of-face. The ability to ideate,'dumb down', then 'build back up' and to make the idea yours - that takes brilliance).

Jobs' speeches always tie in the marketing - none of them have an explicit call to action, not do they list explicit demands, but they convey these grand schemes as things he would like to work on - together with you.

This sounds just like Intel

Technology can make a foundational impact, but it, inevitably, ages; half the point of technology is to encourage people to beat it, to build the best product possible and watch your peers build a better one ten years later that surpasses your wildest dreams of what your product could be.

Culture and art, though, can last forever; a good story can be a good story regardless of the era it exists in, and a piece of self-expression is beautiful no matter where it comes from, what time period, what age. Beautiful art is beautiful art. Technology helps define the medium that expresses the art - but the piece itself can leave an impact forever. Art is as populist as an corning glass bowl - dirt cheap, born once, and will last forever.

Hard to say whether this is something he really believes or something he thought might sound good in a speech.

This is, unbelievably, still possible today. Move fast and build off of WebGPU. You win.

Oh. Drawing the line there is how you lose.

Is drawing the line here how you win or lose?

Teenage engineering

This is Jobs' whole schtick - it has been from the beginning. First technology provides a need, then it allows people to express themselves in new ways. Once people can express themselves with technology, they become attached to the medium. The world turns.

This is what makes fonts - and emojis - so important and why they were prioritized in the Mac. Fonts are art, they're self-expression, they're brilliant

Beautifully simple. He speaks so simply and in such a matter-of-fact manner. He reminds the audience of the concept, how old it is, and how important they are today and will be to society. He explains the computer in such simple terms that they can be easily understood by anyone in a paragraph. He leaves the correct things, the things that his audience has agency over, unsaid - he follows the progress of the computer with 'pick a year', for example, or plays to the ego of Americans, indirectly stating; 'do you want the US to win? Do you, as a designer, want to drive this? This is the future whether we do it or someone else'.

He promises that the computer will invent a class of genius that has never existed before. Who wouldn't want to be a part of that?

Dream workplace

Confused. Modern graphics use the GPU regardless of what they're drawing - we're tracing rays, not putting pixels on the screen anymore - so any sort of GUI still demands a 3d drawing context. This library itself uses the GPU.

The introduction is brilliant. Context is revealed at precisely the right moments. Emotions are conveyed through the hands, bouncing between the two characters to tell their stories. The scene is so simple. I'm truly impressed.

Pessimistic summary -

The author has wanted to be an internet celebrity and projects his desires onto others, assuming that everyone shares this problem.

This article was written in November 2022, precisely as Meta tanked, and feels like a bit of a hit piece - but Meta stock sprung back up to numbers higher than it fell from on that Nov. 10. The piece attempts to discredit social networking and social media as 'billions of people' seeking worldwide attention.

The author projects their personal experiences attempting to become viral on social media onto other social media users, assuming that the technology is an addict-fueled, overstimulated race to the bottom. This may be true for a subset of users - indeed, 'youtuber' is a popular career choice for surveyed young children - but this content, these videos, have to be about something, and people really seem to want to fill niches and be seen by others.

Who is 'everyone'? Most people I know share to and for friends.

Huge claim. How is it?

Unreadable?

Today's metacultural articles are too short and less inventive than the arts

Dean Kissick is an excellent cultural commentator

Monopolies - hello?

How do we refocus public opinion with data - not socials - when social media has become where most people get news, and that news has become so distributed?

This is why you should not use webkit

Why is Illinois three capital letters (no abbreviation) but Minnessota is four properly cased letters with an abbreviating dot? Confused by the formatting here.

Great setup. Ominous enough to set the scene phrase by phrase, detailed enough to help the viewer start imagining the circumstances, then ending the paragraph with time. Then place. Then a social quirk - and bang, a transition into a social scene in the next para. I don't have to read any further to know that Lucinda's good. (I will though - of course)

ugh

The medium is the message, again

Tik-tok democracy has the power to turn this on its head

Why was this allowed? Investigate the motivation behind it. This is... unfortunate.

How do you meet new people?

Have you been to NYC?

What have I gotten into?

Huge reality check. So many brands in the music space exist to make poor or middling devices amongst many competitors. Products are mostly nostalgic and they aren't doing interesting things. This is true for so many other industries too; how can I justify using Adobe, for example?

How is it possible for FOSS software to catch up here? What did Blender do right and how can I help replicate it?

go viral

Insane that today companies have to choose between convenience and breaking the law

lets goooo

This seems kind of absurd? Maybe I'm understanding this incorrectly, but rendering a terminal in a different way shouldn't manipulate the data displayed in the terminal. That seems like the renderer's responsibility, not the data store's.

This has changed, right? I believe that Swift now has an ownership model

Programming language development is just as much about marketing as it is anything else

Why does the product have to be a replacement for an existing product to merit an increase of the stock price? Either my knowledge of investing and market evaluations is flawed or the headset seems significantly more important to me than it does to stock market professionals.

Meta tried this - but they didn't value passthrough and their headset was ugly

Zed glues to Metal instead of WebGPU. Mistake?

Sounds like a cool material - wondering where to get it

We need easier and more expressive software. Software can do this!

I do not understand why "the cloud" has been so romanticized, like "crypto" or "AI" or "LLM" today; it's a poor description of a way that data can be stored by a service you use as a comsumer

Awesome idea if this is accurate

If a developer is aware that a function's behavior will surprise the caller, why is it designed in that way? Fix it!

Note to self - get faster.

: )

I want to know why you've chosen the half star / 5 star system!

Great idea. I want to do this!

20 - 40x now!

Safe code's most important benefit is the cross-compilation guarantee it provides. Unsafe code might be too platform-specific, but safe Rust is must more likely to 'just work' on any architecture by design

Fruit Ninja was tested with random people at a bus stop:

"We didn't want to test the game with just gamers, we wanted to test it with everyone."

Beautiful discipline

Someone's tried SolidJS... : )

Classic functional programming solution: if you want your data to be more expressive, put it in a box! Works every time.

Why not????????????????? This is insane. If a system isn't compatible with Vulkan, glfw should be expected to expose a framebuffer so that you don't have to use external libraries to render. Terrible division of responsibilities

Vonnegut - don't use cliches. They're someone else's words!

I understand all of the risks and am sympathetic - but I've met multiple wonderful friends of mine on the internet, and wouldn't have met them if I hadn't been using a system with a recommendation algorithm that introduced us. We should keep these issues in mind, but also give children the same autonomy to use tools to benefit their own lives as adults.

I hope the charging stations are useful to people who need to fix up their phones too : )

This service can be necessary for people with accessibility issues, but in all likelihood the vast majority of users are people who can't be bothered to get outside. (I suppose that if you never get outside, you'll start to experience accessibility issues...)

Pseudo-scientific...

What makes this desirable? Respect from others? Higher salary? I don't think it's personal satisfaction.

How well does this concept translate between languages that don't share the same definitions? Does happiness mean something different in those cultures?

Campy, heavily editorialized dialogue. I really like the start of this introduction - with a chicken dance / Mick Jagger evaluation of the difference of satisfaction between generations - but to completely project an agenda onto a conversation with your daughter, it feels, goes too far

Why does this matter?

There may be a difference in language understanding here, but this seems like a terrible perspective at face:

The note-taker's job is to ensure that the team is aligned on the narrative and record it; to help everyone in the meeting clarify decisions with enough fidelity to record them with written words.

The role should not carry with it a connotation of power or advantage over others at the company, nor any incentive to sway the outcomes of the meeting towards the interests of an individual participant.

HighSnobiety is dead

Proceeds to leave a wall of text

I don't understand - are we both praising Holmes and discouraging ambition? What happened to questioning the stigma about female founders? It's okay to believe you can do things.

puff piece

I don't think that Holmes was just a character if picking a nmae like this...

If this is your only defense, this case is insane

This copy is a bit weak: "it's ..." makes me want to ignore the sentence before continuing. An attention-grabbing phrase this generic isn't worth continuing to read for.

The tech becomes much faster with local inference : ) latency matters. The solution here isn't complex design - it's to make the inference work so quickly that this isn't even a concern

Again, this is a tradeoff - do you want the tool to be purpose-built for your specific goal (and to build lots of purpose-built tools), or do you want a chat interface that can do anything? It's okay to do some of the work while the technology is in its infancy - right now it's more important to explore than anything else.

Adding this context removes flexibility - flexibility that is necessary for exploration! This is why the tool is how it is now

The chat's 'question suggestions' provide some context here - but without a way to verify that a question is correct, there is no way to know what tasks the work could do for you. Maybe it's okay to invite users to explore - OpenAI themselves don't know how this tech can be most effectively used - but the chat window doesn't do a good enough job with that either.

Disagree. Anyone who uses social communication tools has been introduced to the idea of a chat history with bubbles and a bottom text box. This is fine, mostly! You see the recipient's name, a blank page (or a conversation), and a box in the bottom that allows you to contribute to the conversation.

The author is correct in saying that ChatGPT's chat box is too general and doesn't give any context to what the system could do you for - but this isn't true at all for chat interfaces in general

Other systems don't - this is a consequence of web standards evolving

that's what websites are

Is it not?

It's good that this exercise in minimalism has explored - this gives us so many ways to see where we may want to add detail back. We don't want it everywhere!

Is this still true?

People don't want to read ASTs; they want to read what they've written. At the least, errors should make their way back up through the parser with careful location tracking - exposing compiler IR in an error message to the user is criminal.

Why is this important?

Make everything yourself from scratch to - Understand it - Better use it - Anticipate features you want and request them if they don't exist (rather than accepting that they don't)

Incredible intro. Plainly sets the stage. "We" italicised hits.

time to start

The network that Virgil made doing - well - everything is absurdly impressive. He touched so many different communities and facets of life. Great understanding and appreciation for people. That's why he won

Make a tool that's as functional as possible. The design reveals itself.

Git's flow feels too 'choppy' - one branch at a time means you can't compare (yes, you can checkout a repository multiple times from the same local repo, but it's not the same), and there is no natural UI for scrubbing a timeline, viewing visual and interactive differences over time, and so forth. Version control is good - but it doesn't capture exactly what we want out of our histories!

Cooking is meditation. Making coffee is meditation. Maybe it's better that I have a separate room for this now.

Figure out how to make seamless music happen.

• Ambient music is always playing in my apartment when I'm inside.
• I can control it with my DJ controller if I get up and walk across the room but otherwise it plays in the background.
• I can't control or browse music without messing with the physical device. The music shouldn't distract me. This means that it should run on a separate physical device.

Bonus: The music should change depending on my work, my environment, etc.

Pay high costs up-front for things that don't have to be maintained as much. Weatherproof cameras, clothes meant to be worn and beat up, etc.

Pirate

awesomee i want this spirit

This is part of the VR vision - to precisely emulate entering an environment without the cost of the environment or time required of an expert of a field. Unfortunately, when you have to drop thousands of dollars on a headset and the headset is marketed for gaming, this domain-specific mission is kind of defeated.

Surgeons need VR, as do dentists or woodworkers or welders, but the technology has to be both perfect and cheap for it to ever make sense in this way.

awesome

April 1... accepting the loss here.

I agree with this - Rust has a stable tech foundation - tools like cargo enable this - but writing in the language often feels like chasing a moving ecosystem target - different packages are canonical in different parts of the community and types aren't necessarily interoperable between them, leading to a lot of social conflicts such as using package x vs y, rewriting in Rust, etc.

Implementing From<'> or To<'> just doesn't work - you're often not guaranteed that the libraries are the same, so you have to roll your own intermediate interface just to use a couple of libraries - but you wanted to use libraries to avoid the problem of writing that code yourself.

Famous last words

Farmers don't have the budget to pay for subscriptions and there are too many competitors making money off of brokers and throwing things to farmers for free. I get the feeling that farmers are too often taken advantage of in this whole process - the farm as a unit is a complex machine internally, but it really is not respected by distributors or people further down in the supply chain. It's a production surveillance problem like any other - farmers want to be treated as people but the companies that require their materials want to maximize profit.

The role of an investor seems to be: - Providing a network. An investor's name and content can nail deals for you without a direct connection; just being in their portfolio is enough. Social proof - Experienced mentors: partners ideally understand businesses and business deals within the market the startup's operating in, and obviously they want their investment to succeed. - Business skew: investment partners typically have particular interests and want to see businesses take off with specific trajectories or interests of theirs in mind. This can substantially influence the direction of the company.

What a house!

What a beautiful introduction.

• Start with a personal anecdote, providing us with a mood; elaboration on an environment in which to place the essay. I feel calm before even digging into the meat and empathize with the subject - who doesn't like observing nature?

• A character in the story provides dialogue relevant to the text, easing into the thesis through the eyes of someone else. This feels far less forceful than the position paper - it's just something someone else is saying - and yet "all animals play" is the thesis of the work. That brief, fun assertion stays with us throughout the piece!

Beautiful

This is bad and slow. I want to be able to skim and get all of the information right away rather than waiting.

This is valuable

Is this information important? Why?

Make technology to repair. You aren't going to be around forever - make sure the next person can salvage as much as they can.

Good reminder that I really need to work on this - my brain's been too rotted by the unfocused internet.

Calling out traits that are indisputably good and difficult to replicate is a win/win - those who have them are treasured, and those who don't - and cultivate them - have to pick up life practices that make them better people when approaching the end result. In contrast to advice like 'just be confident' - a trait you can mimic in poor or malintentioned ways - these focus on traits that require knowledge and confidence in ideas, things that can't be accomplished without developing core competencies.

Microsoft didn't need to go object-crazy. What was the motivation for this? Following the Java trend + trying to moat people in .NET?

Computing should be silly

Children should be trusted... this is ridiculous

Consistent schedule hero. I aspire to be this consistent with my daily plans. Hopefully when I find somewhere that I can live for a long time I'll be able to develop and follow a routine. Trying that now!

You don't know if you have a performance problem until you can observe one; until then, just let it happen

Radix aims to provide the right abstractions for common components over HTML. No default styles, no insane decisions, no large bundles - just good defaults. These should be composable!

Assert 'ignorant optimism'!

go to places to meet people, spontaneously

Wires are beautiful! They help you understand how your information moves. I wish my walls were transparent - or translucent - so that I could see the flow of information throughout the house.

NetworkManager? lol. I wish this were true

Before reading the article: - Plugging things in is awesome. Things work faster. You can use any polling protocol. - Cables are really cool. They allow you to directly see how devices are connected to one another. They make the sharing and transmission of data explicit.

Distinguish content by font

Everyone should have this on their website

bakersfield puff piece - the author + the times have a clear agenda to ship here

Why?

Try renting an apartment

Live with your heroes

Screenshots are digital photographs! They deserve annotations too

Hyperlinks like this drive me nuts! On a news site, linking to 'recent posts' when referring to another specific article, term, or concept is ridiculous, particularly when the tag referenced seems to have nothing to do with the desired end result. I see this often on large news sites and articles. It makes web information impossible to reproduce and retrace when digging through archives, etc., and the cost to keep links updated if the name of the article changes surely can't be that substantial - right?

Awesome way to display floors in a building

Better than colemak?

This really hurts to read... nobody can escape. Don't undervalue money or family.

This is a bit strange to me - we just ignore a function when making it synchronous? Why can't we just call synchronous code from async code without writing functions to explicitly support async?

This gives every single Rust library maintainer the obligation to make every function they write ?async which is insane

Beautiful!

How possible is this when grafting onto Linux with fake file systems today?

The idea of 'taste' is independent of medium

Why specialize?

I grew up with this attitude as well - why is not being 'well-rounded' considered unhealthy?

do anything anywhere - bad to limit interactions, behaviors, etc. don't when possible

More organic forms feel as it they come from a single piece - like materials stay together, and are not fused and nailed but - really - were always the same

Don't create and market tools that create demand and need; make things that satisfy existing problems seamlessly, fitting cleanly into existing ecosystems, reducing problem spaces and complexity.

What are some other examples of this explored?

Boots solve this.

❤️

Awesome name. I miss it

I love the animations to explain probability - something historically difficult to reason about - but I really don't think that the expensive watch story, ostensibly as a relatable consumer purchase, contributes much to the point.

Move to build

To me, the difference is that unlike the brownstones (in Brooklyn, Boston, and Philadelphia, each with their own twists - depending on the city), these are everywhere; there are so many more major cities in America, and architects can design not just for the city, not just for the nation, but often for the world. Homogeneity is beautiful when it's part of a central plan or culture for an area, but to globalize this kind of style is distressing!

This rich, written, familial history is beautiful - I hope I can motivate my parents to pursue this and encourage my descendants to do the same.

Wow - how was this orchestrated?

This dialogue has continued for as long as we've built buildings - to what degree do we give skilled craftsmen the challenge or autonomy to craft elaborate fixtures on their own vs. focusing on large forms declared by the architect that can be crafted with unskilled labor?

This relationship - this interface - between the architect and the construction work is fascinating to me. I love watching construction workers work. I love seeing progress. Why am I not one?

aha

Why not?

Is it?

I would love to know what such an evaluation looked like! How do you test for spacial awareness? This reminds me of that Blokus or Tetris game I played as a child that required fitting items into various spaces. I wonder often why I didn't bother studying architecture after that.

How do we 'de-scale' or 'de-industrialize'?

My guy. king

Food tastes so much better when it comes from someone who cares

Folk craftsmanship - caring about both the designer and the manufacturer. Reminiscent of Benjamin Woodward's work on the Oxford University Museum of Natural History - giving the craftspeople building the museum the opportunity to design the capitals as they desired.

They were contemporaries, but to what degree did they parallel one another? My current understanding is that VkHuteMas was centralized, communist, disciplined, to find and put forward propaganda, while the Bauhaus was at first an anti-establishment organization, standing against traditional architectural practices.

Agreed. Crawling 'forked' the web experience for many people; the crawlers see one thing, search engines preview another, and user clicks open a third, eschewing standards to 'optimise' for each of these three scenarios.

Ideally what is best for the user follows HTML standards and lends itself to the other use cases. Unfortunately, buzzwords have been overused to farm for clicks and ads, so this is not the case.

Why would this be desirable?