898 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
    1. Being offered a role that requires relocating when your boss knows moving isn’t a viable option for you

      This should be illegal

    1. There should always be an option to add GoatCounter to your site without requiring a GDPR consent notice.

      Goated

    1. LLVM became at least as good as GCC, and a less risky decision for big companies, and easier to use to build new languages

      Yup. - Managed by org with strong and consistent funding - More accessible to workplaces - More contributors, inside and outside the company, because of these - Better software

    2. those freedoms don't actually mean shit to the average end user. only programmers care if they have access to the source code, and most people aren't programmers.

      How do we empower people to make this privilege worthwhile? I don't think the problem is that people don't care - everyone has opinions or issues about glitches, problems they face in the software they use every day. The problem is that the barriers to entry - 0 to programming and modifying an app - are so, so great

    1. the series received a five-minute standing ovation following the screening of its first two episodes, which is considered a normal to lukewarm audience reaction

      The premiere is evaluated based on how long people stand and clap?????

    1. A research lab. We built quarterly prototoypes exploring machine learning capabilities. I designed and built the front-end for experiments exploring capabilities like summarization, sentiment analysis, and prediction. I also led design for the branding and print reports.

      What a beautiful work environment! I dream of something like this.

    1. I’ve tended to end up on less opinionated/purist tools that adopt many of the ideas they’ve pioneered with dwm and particulary dmenu

      The engineering behind these tools is brilliant, but most people want good defaults moreso than they want to be able to build software from scratch.

    2. tabbed - a generic tab primitive

      This is how all tabs should work! Everything in the operating system should be indexed with the same tab/window primitives. Imagine how much easier navigating an operating system would be...

    1. Museums are an important aspect of English culture, and almost every city and town have extensive museums and art galleries

      Where'd they find what to put in the museums? There aren't so many British artists...

    1. Create APIsExport your code as public to create an API endpoint.Email yourselfSend yourself an email as easily as you log to the console.

      Really baller

      Text message and call next

    1. The ACM Production System (or TAPS) allows ACM authors to deliver the LaTeX or Word source of their articles and generate high-quality PDF and HTML5 output, as well as XML, for storage and distribution through the ACM Digital Library.

      dystopian

    1. mold is so fast that it is only 2x slower than the cp command on the same machine. If you find that mold is not faster than other linkers, please feel free to file a bug report.

      legend

    1. Physical whiteboards physically encourages revision. Cross things out, erase them.

      Interesting! Wondering to what degree uses use photos to 'diff' whiteboards vs. living with losing everything but the end result. GIt and file corruption has made me paranoid of losing anything and everything in my life.

    1. Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (1977)

      Goated. The Oregon Project changed the world. I don't think U of O is the best campus, but the fact that Alexander could point to a system that worked - well enough - helped broadcast his ideas on a world stage.

      I don't think that prescriptivist community design works as well as we'd like it to, though, especially with such rapid technological advancement. There has to be some central vision or respect for how the environment changes. Considering the current needs of the community doesn't necessarily accommodate future needs. (Yes, some of the patterns have provisions for this - and I know they're suggestions.)

    2. ‘Design’ remains synonymous with maximizing control.

      Disagree

    3. User-centered design

      Descriptivist

    4. he clean, geometric forms of Brasilia do little to support the inherent messiness of daily life for real people.

      Brasilia wasn't designed or built to support people! It was designed to broadcast a modern, futuristic nation with a space-age seat of governance.

      There are images of tanks rolling through the city a few years after its construction. Turns out that building an international arts reputation doesn't work when you don't respect your local population. World powers have to be built from within. American coups everywhere in South America didn't help. Sorry Brazil.

    5. The mid-20th century saw the apex of high modern design. This paradigm was characterized by a hubristic disregard for context, history, and social complexity in favor of an imposed rational order and universal standardization. “Rational” in this paradigm describes a state of superficial geometric efficiency as conceived by the designer.

      Was context and social complexity disregarded? This really depends on where you're looking. This is an extremely common cricitism of Soviet - and welfare state (like Sweden) - architecture during the time, building these huge, monolithic buildings throughout a city very quickly.

      Honestly, I think large, cheap, and hastily constructed apartment buildings work, even the soviet ones. Sure, they fall apart - but everything has a lifespan and buildings are no exception. it's okay to build for two, three, four generations if you understand that the dynamics of your city will change significantly during that time period - you'll be able to more easily reroute and reconstruct the city around new ideas that better fit the population then. Building monolithically was fine for rapid growth.

      (Note: The American 'Projects' are the biggest example of large-scale socialized housing failure. The lack of lighting, cramped spaces, and lack of public safety in those places has made them terribly unsafe for everyone involved. America doesn't know how to respect poor people)

      Many of these 'imposing', 'universally standardized' buildings can and have been retrofitted to fit Louise Sullivan(?)'s four part division of a building - repurposing the first floor for shops, for example, and clearing space for a courtyard in the center. Architecture isn't a finished product; buildings can be modified and transformed with the times.

      The car, also, dramatically changed the urban landscape. How do we build cities to acknowledge the universal access that a car provides? Why might cars be good and bad for cities? I don't think anyone fully understood the problem at the time.

      The tradition that was respected during the time wasn't ordamentation. Most of the buildings are plain, 'brutal' (haha), and a bit ugly. The respect for public parks and spaces, though, learned from the British work very deliberately crafting nature - first the grounds of palaces, then the public garden and park, was translated to so many spaces across America and Europe. Brutalism, functionalism, and modernism had an understanding of how to leave space for people.

      Sure, if we knew more about the smartphone and the car and the bicycle as modes of transport and communication that could be planned for, we would have. I don't think the era was particularly transformative - but I think cities, like Stockholm, that rapidly expanded with these principles in mind were left better off for the future.

    6. the long-tail problem

      New customer, new feature, new customer, new feature, more general... soon you have an everything machine.

    1. It is very clear that the EMFs & Heat from your phone (if you leave it in your pocket) contribute to a reduction in sperm quality and testosterone.

      Oops

    1. Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder, who credited Mr. Masnick as an inspiration for the creation of Bluesky, a Twitter clone that embraced that approach.

      Instead of supporting FOSS alternatives, creating your own capitalistic, for-profit solution adn trying to strongarm it into a robust ecosystem. Nice

    2. Mr. Masnick suggested that Mr. Zuckerberg consider decentralizing.

      King

    3. a laptop with a slide-out second screen

      how???

    4. Mr. Masnick has written more than 51,000 (often lengthy) blog posts, adding more several times a day

      Holy prolific. Goals. This is someone who loves their work and loves opinion. That's way more than 10,000 hours

    5. A wall of text, heavy on hyperlinks, it has not evolved much since its founding.

      It's beautiful. You just don't understand

    1. For the first time, in 2023, the organisers have implemented sustainability requirements for participating fashion brands.

      This is so good! Explains why they don't have the showing of previous years though - lol.

    1. Stine Goya held a show on her own street, Eckersberggade in the Kartoffelrrækkerne in Copenhagen.

      Like LaRussell in the bay - rebellious. Bring it home. Control the thing yourself!

    1. Scanning books is pretty clearly fair use. What you do with that later could violate copyright law, but I don’t see anything that Prosecraft did that comes anywhere even remotely close to violating copyright law.

      Boring. Anti-accelerationist.

    1. This case raged on for several years until it ended up in the Swedish supreme court in 2016, where the court sided with BUS, declaring that Wikimedia did not have the right “to communicate photographs of works of art permanently placed outdoors from its database to the public via the internet. Whether the disposal has a commercial purpose is irrelevant.”

      NOOO

    1. is a dedicated CrossFit practitioner

      Oop - whatever keeps you going

    2. Certain elements of the “Whole Earth Catalog” haven’t aged particularly well: the pioneer rhetoric, the celebration of individualism, the disdain for government and social institutions, the elision of power structures, the hubris of youth.

      What's wrong with that?

      Many of the issues in San Francisco today are caused by overbearing government, not avoidance of it.

    1. Brand was born in Rockford, Illinois, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He studied biology at Stanford University, graduating in 1960.[2] As a soldier in the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he later expressed the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing.

      Why did so many highly educated, bicoastal, clearly wealthy and smart people join the U.S. army after their educations? Some were inspired by their time in the army - like Herman Melville, Joseph Heller, and apparently Stewart Brand - but for someone of this status to join the armed forces today would be practically unheard of outside of some West Point trajectory. I'd love to know more about, and somehow experience, the attitude that the American people had about the US military then.

    1. Many YouTube creators build their massive audiences through sociopathic stunts, and it’s not surprising when the creators turn out to be sociopathic in real life.

      To me, this reveals that the author largely consumes traditional media sources, eschewing the communication streams that people use. This is true, but no different from traditionally mainstream come-ups - look at the Sex Pistols' stunts that shot them to stardom (as cited below). Look at Marilyn Manson. The bad examples are exceptions, not the rule.

      Traditional media outlets have slow, aging customers and are losing numbers. Their job is to criticize change and sensationalism. Crime is bad, so of course it's all they cover.

    2. Why hasn't a decade been enough time for DIY online video creators to turn their view counts into mainstream stardom?

      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.

    3. For every actor in a Hollywood film, we assume exceptional dramatic skills, or at least, natural beauty.

      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.

    4. Internet stardom bestows no glamor

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

    5. But would anyone say that Bella Poarch is “famous” the way that the Seinfeld gang are famous?

      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.

    1. They think that technology is something that you write a check for and buy.

      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.

    2. Apple is a very visible American company

      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.

    3. I’m not a Genius, but I’ll stand behind here.

      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.

    4. An American named

      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).

    5. You’re going to see us be doing a lot of things like that. Today is just the first of many things we’re going to be doing with you.

      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.

    6. I’ve discovered just how conniving some of these folks can be just to push their agenda—including pretty severe obfuscation of facts.

      This sounds just like Intel

    7. they all become part of the sedimentary layer that is the foundation for new innovation.

      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.

    8. I bet many of you have had some of these intuitive feelings about what you could do with your lives. These feelings are very real, and if nurtured can blossom into something wonderful and magical. A good way to remember these kinds of intuitive feelings is to walk alone near sunset—and spend a lot of time looking at the sky in general. We are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture our intuitions. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true.

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

    9. some of the smaller companies are more hip on the web, getting more hip to the web sooner, and so they actually look better than some of the large companies do right now

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

    10. Therefore, I have changed my position 180 degrees - - we will freely help [Engineer 1] make his processors much better for 3D graphics.

      Oh. Drawing the line there is how you lose.

    11. Steve,I am firmly on [Engineer 1]’s side on this one. He is taking your offer to help us very seriously, rounded up the best technical people and was ready to go when you introduced a brand new element into the discussion: money.

      Is drawing the line here how you win or lose?

    12. I want to build products that are inherently smaller than any of the products on the market today. And when you make things smaller, you have the ability to make them more precisely.

      Teenage engineering

    13. in addition to allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.

      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.

    14. with Macintosh, you can write memos that are Times Roman or Helvetica, or you can throw in an Old English if you want to have a little fun for a party, you know, for a volleyball announcement.

      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

    15. Speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen“Computers and society are out on a first date.”

      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?

    16. In another age, Steve believed, the people on the Macintosh team would have been writers, musicians, or artists. “The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter,”

      Dream workplace

    1. GUI applications will need a 2D vector graphics context.

      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.

    1. 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.

  2. Jul 2023
    1. 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.

    2. everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience

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

    3. sociopathy is a design philosophy

      Huge claim. How is it?

    1. Today’s online culture is far more inventive and daring than the arts

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

    2. So far as I’m aware, nobody in art — and the same goes for the literary scene — is even trying to be avant-garde. Much of the art world is actively and outspokenly opposed to the idea of aesthetic progress or provocation, and has turned backwards, into an arrière-garde. Dead artists, forgotten artists, and traditional mediums and styles are favored exactly because they are implicit rejections of the present and the future.

      Dean Kissick is an excellent cultural commentator

    1. we should be pushing for the re-funding and the reviving of our regulatory agencies

      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?

    1. Impact: Processing web content may lead to arbitrary code execution. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited.

      This is why you should not use webkit

    1. Not long after I became my professor’s research assistant, I told him that I sometimes threw up what I ate. A junior at Cornell, I had just turned twenty. X, as I’ll call him, had hired me in conjunction with the “work-study” program, which was available to students who received financial aid. He was almost a decade and a half my senior. He was also married, but his wife was teaching and living elsewhere. X himself was on leave from another élite university. It was 1990. George H. W. Bush was in the White House. And you could still smoke cigarettes anywhere you wanted to.

      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)

    1. we don't do the bulk of our design work with or in Figma when developing Basecamp or HEY for the web. That's all done directly in HTML and CSS, as it should be.

      The medium is the message, again

    1. this quota has had long-term consequences for the industry, and the declining presence of songs by women at country radio has resulted in fewer opportunities for women to build their careers

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

    2. In 1996 the Telecommunications Act went through its first major overhaul in just over 60 years. Amendments to the law loosened ownership regulations: not only could a single company now own more stations, but it also was allowed to purchase multiple stations in a single market (depending on its size).

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

  3. Jun 2023
    1. Swedes, in general, rarely talk to people we don't know.

      How do you meet new people?

    1. In NYC everyone stares at their phone and tries to avoid all social interaction.

      Have you been to NYC?

    1. I once had to walk through the city wearing a shirt with a very big stain. I thought at first it would be embarrassing, but noticed soon that noone was looking. Then I started to find it odd and turned it into an experiment. While trying to make eye-contact with as many as possible, during this 40-50 minute walk, through busy squares and lonely streets with just me and another person meeting, I didn't succeed once. Not a single person even glanced at me.

      What have I gotten into?

    1. 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?

  4. www.actsnotfacts.com www.actsnotfacts.com
    1. Tell the time with a new poem every minute, composed by ChatGPT and direct to your bookshelves. Featured in The Verge, the New York Times, NDTV, and Private Eye.

      go viral

    1. they're unable to use US-based cloud providers thanks to GDPR

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

    2. The EU has pledged to invest €2bn via the European Data Strategy in a European High Impact Project

      lets goooo

    1. If the shell originally outputs a grid that is 10 rows by 10 columns and the user proceeds to resize the screen (or split a pane) that makes the grid 5 columns, then internally the vector is re-written to account for this new horizontal constraint: the grid becomes 20 rows by 5 columns both on screen and in storage. Today, every resize in Warp requires re-writing every grid currently displayed on the screen from the top down, row by row.

      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.

    1. When you have a reference type it's an ARC pointer into a shared heap (or its weak partner), period.

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

    1. failed to sufficiently differentiate it from Go and establish its own niche.

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

    1. it’s hard to see customers paying up for the headset as an effective replacement of those products

      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.

    1. With visionOS, apps can fill the space around users, be moved anywhere, and scale to the perfect size. They even react to lighting and cast shadows.

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

    1. boatshrink water resistant canvas with UV resistant thread

      Sounds like a cool material - wondering where to get it

    1. ou can place physical items you will need on a specific day (tickets for the concert), reminders of things you possibly want do on a specific date (remember, the calendar is only for things that have to be done on a specific date/time), or the notes from the lecture you didn’t really understand (“I will want to review these in a week when my subconsciousness has chewed on it for a while”). Every day when you get up, you open the folder with the current date.

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

    1. the ideology of the “cloud” age

      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

  5. May 2023
    1. I currently have 71 browser tabs open.

      Awesome idea if this is accurate

    1. ;; It's likely to surprise you for other sequences because it's ;; about *indices* or *keys*, not *contents*:

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

    1. “I can’t believe this is possible. It’s a phone on the windshield!”, I said. “Yup”, replied George. “And there are about 10 of us in the company”.

      Note to self - get faster.

    1. Despite being a ordered list, this is not "the best bookstores", or any such similar thing. I visit different stores at different times depending on the mood I'm in, and I'm always happy to be in a bookstore and happy that these bookstores exist, even the not-very-good ones.

      : )

    2. Ratings and rankings are a fundamentally fraught way to interact with the world, but I think fundamentally worthwhile. They're a way to take something that is important to you seriously, to make space to really deeply consider what exactly it is that brings you joy.

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

    1. Last week I asked Twitter if anyone would pay for visual design critique as a service — I love helping people fix small visual bugs in their designs, but would a business pay for this? Going from that initial tweet, to a quick pricing survey, to a payment link, took just two hours, and then within a day eight businesses had signed up 1.

      Great idea. I want to do this!

    1. (a small photo from your smartphone is likely to be 2-4 times larger that the entire memory of this machine)

      20 - 40x now!

    1. It seems to me that the consensus among Rust programmers is that any safe code should be safe under any usage.

      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

    1. 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."

    1. FreeType is written in industry-standard ANSI C and should compile easily with any compliant C or C++ compiler. We have even taken great care to eliminate all warnings when compiling with popular compilers like gcc, Visual C++, and Borland C++. Apart from a standard ANSI C library, FreeType doesn't have any external dependencies and can be compiled and installed on its own on any kind of system. Some modules need external libraries (e.g., for handling fonts compressed with gzip or bz2), however, they are optional and can be disabled.

      Beautiful discipline

    1. we could introduce incremental s/map

      Someone's tried SolidJS... : )

    2. incremental computation solves this problem beautifully! If you make your default font a signal, then only components that actually read it will subscribe to its changes:

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

    1. GLFW does not expose attributes of the default framebuffer (i.e. the framebuffer attached to the window) as these can be queried directly with either OpenGL, OpenGL ES or Vulkan.

      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

    1. s, in a nutshell,

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

    1. Disable friend recommendation systems for children in default settings, so that children are not automatically recommended as ‘friends’ to other users, and vice versa.

      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.

    1. Mayor Eric Adams and Sen. Chuck Schumer announced plans last year to convert vacant newsstands into charging stations.

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

    2. 132 million app-based food deliveries over the course of 2022

      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...)

    1. While that first dose of a new recreational substance might give you great pleasure, your previously naive brain quickly learns to sense an assault on its equilibrium and fights back by neutralizing the effect of the entering drug, making it impossible to get the first feeling back.

      Pseudo-scientific...

    2. I was still devoting my life to climbing—beavering away 60 to 80 hours a week to accomplish the next thing, all the while terrified of losing the last thing.

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

    3. satisfaction is one of the core “macronutrients” of happiness (the other two being enjoyment and meaning)

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

    4. I told her

      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

    1. the notetaker control the narrative

      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.

    1. If your head is exploding at how divorced from reality this sounds, that’s kind of the point. When Ms. Holmes uses the messianic vernacular of tech, I get the sense that she truly believes that she could have — and, in fact, she still could — change the world, and she doesn’t much care if we believe her or not.

      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.

    2. I didn’t expect her to be so … normal?

      puff piece

    3. her baby, Invicta (Latin for “invincible”)

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

    4. Lance Wade, a lawyer for Ms. Holmes, said that his client “made mistakes, but mistakes are not crimes.”

      If this is your only defense, this case is insane

    1. Wikipedia's copy1. Addresses elephant in room - “little awkward” 2. Makes YOU the hero - “you can defend independence”

      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.

    1. when I have a lengthy compile loop, I have to wait long enough to lose the thread of what I was doing

      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

    2. As someone who is always thinking about how AI can help edit code or prose, I can't help but see the inability to have a "working buffer" as a complete non-starter.

      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.

    3. How can we make it easier for users to provide all of this context?

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

    4. When I go up the mountain to ask the ChatGPT oracle a question, I am met with a blank face. What does this oracle know?

      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.

    5. The only clue we receive is that we should type characters into the textbox. The interface looks the same as a Google search box, a login form, and a credit card field.

      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

    1. Software demands a level of participation.

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

    1. “These brands look accessible and action-oriented, like an app on your phone,”

      that's what websites are

    2. if you stare at iMessage’s white sans serifs and blue speech bubbles all day, your subconscious might eventually conclude that this is just how communication looks.

      Is it not?

    3. If there is one style of corporate branding that defines the 2010s, it is this: sans-serif lettering, neatly presented in black, white, and ultra-flat colors. Cobalt, for example. Its goal is noise reduction, accomplished by banishing gradients, funky fonts, and drop shadows, and by relegating all-caps to little “BUY” buttons.

      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!

    1. San Francisco is the Schelling point for high-openness, smart, energetic, optimistic people.

      Is this still true?

    1. it's easier and faster for external tools (e.g. your IDE) to spot incorrect input if it's encoded in the parser; and it's generally easier for users to understand valid inputs from a grammar than it is from a description of type rules.

      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.

  6. Apr 2023
    1. No artificial intelligence was used in the making of this project.

      Why is this important?

  7. thomasorus.com thomasorus.com
    1. Creating my own instead of using other people's tools is a very appreciable exercise of self-discovery. It allows to ask, ala Marie Kondo, if these tools, frameworks, libraries I use all the time as a software developer bring me happiness. And if not, why do I keep using them?

      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)

    1. Today, I will explain to my healthy transplanted heart why, in what may be a matter of days or weeks at best, she — well, we — will die.

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

    1. Thank you to the 400 (!!!) of you who have subscribed to receive my writing in your inbox

      time to start

    1. I met Virgil when he cold emailed us asking to write on the site in like 2006.

      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

    1. Emergent over prescribed aesthetics.

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

    1. Manually using git when you’re in a divergent creative exploration or trying out lots of different things just doesn’t cut it.

      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!

    1. Tasting and feeling Doing nothing is also great when accompanied by very good beverages or food. Good tea or coffee, wine, hot cocoa, and other sensual beverages go very well with the Art. It’s best to take these beverages by themselves, with no food, and without a book or other distractions. Focus on the liquid as you sip it slowly, savoring every bit of the flavor and texture and temperature in your mouth before swallowing, and feeling the swallow completely. Close your eyes as you do this. Truly enjoy this drink.

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

    2. Shut off all distractions — TV, computer, cell phones, regular phones, Blackberries, and the like. Doing nothing is hard when our communications gadgets are calling at us to do something.

      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.

    1. The item, if it’s electronic, requires power. All the time. The item needs to be maintained. Switched on and off, cleaned, oiled, and caution taken not to break it. These are more precious seconds, precious dollars.

      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.

    1. I was in varsity bball in highschool but was in charge of water bottles. Even tho i suck at it, i love it so much i just want to be in close proximity to it as much as i can. U can find me occasionally balling at random courts across brooklyn, wearing air jordan 11 retro ‘win like 82’. I dont have a favorite team in the NBA, but im rooting for everyone who gives it their all (/I LOVE STEPH CURRY). 

      awesomee i want this spirit

    1. Before video became available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the few apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if he’s written books about it. Further, tacit knowledge serves as an obstacle to centralization, as its local transmission provides an advantage for decentralized players that can’t be replicated by a central authority. The center cannot appropriate what it cannot access: there will never be a state monopoly on plumbing or dentistry, for example.

      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.

    1. Howard never removed the sculptures; in fact, he switched out Optimus Prime for an even bigger Optimus Prime, and put the smaller one on the roof of his house.

      awesome

    1. We’re looking for people to help with the C++ rewrite. If you’re interested, please join our Zulip instance.

      April 1... accepting the loss here.

    2. pine for the stable, mature foundation provided by C++.

      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.

    3. First, I consider myself a good enough programmer that I can avoid writing code with safety problems. Sure, I’ve been responsible for some CVEs

      Famous last words

    1. farmers want it free

      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.

  8. Mar 2023
    1. 2. Assess the specific value-gaps that an investor can help fill and determine his or her ability to do so. Beyond the money, what are the gaps that are slowing you down towards success? Are there critical team members at the investment firm that can help fill them? Partnerships or customer relationships?

      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.

    1. Graeber's father, Kenneth, was affiliated with the Young Communist League in college, participated in the Spanish Revolution in Barcelona and fought in the Spanish Civil War.[9] He later worked as a plate stripper on offset presses.

      What a house!

    1. My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in every possible direction, and then leap to the next stalk and do the same thing. And so it proceeded, in a vast circle, with what must have been a vast expenditure of energy, for what seemed like absolutely no reason at all. “All animals play,” June had once said to me. “Even ants.” She’d spent many years working as a professional gardener and had plenty of incidents like this to observe and ponder. “Look,” she said, with an air of modest triumph. “See what I mean?”

      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!

    1. a bird's eye view of the whole week is presented where you can scroll horizontally to go through previous days

      Beautiful

    2. emoji stories: animating sequence of emojis in a flipbook-esque style.

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

    3. We tried to make this indicator a bit more expressive by devising metaphors that were expressive of the activity being conducted at the other end.

      This is valuable

    4. A tiny detail that I have additionaly included is the blinking eye. This signifies that the other party is still on our chat screen and looking at our messages. If the eye stops blinking and become static you can tell that they have left your chat window and might only reply later.

      Is this information important? Why?

    1. One problem with the sensor mounted on the headband is that the lithium battery inside it can stop holding a charge. The casing is extremely difficult to open without damaging the circuitry or connections, and the battery inside is soldered to the circuit board

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

    1. Callback ability - This is shorthand for their ability to contextualize new information quickly. How big is their mental RAM? This may look like someone’s propensity to make connections/references in conversation.

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

    2. , these things are pure enough that there is no way to imitate without actually becoming closer to this idealized figure in some way.

      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.

    1. Microsoft pushed hard for developers to adopt .NET, and Visual Basic was pulled into a ground-up rewrite to move it from a procedural language to an object-oriented one better suited to the new framework.

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

    2. gizmos

      Computing should be silly

    1. Many young people have multiple accounts on a single service. While this can support self-expression, it can also limit parental oversight and remove safeguards in place on child accounts.

      Children should be trusted... this is ridiculous

    1. Every weekday except Friday, this will be my wakeup process: Make tea Fix a bug Write some documentation Deal with all open pull requests, whether that is by merging, rejecting, requesting changes, or solving the use case a different way. Proceed with working on a big feature item.

      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!

    1. our philosophy to scaling is simple, avoiding premature optimization. Even now, one of our most trafficked services today still has a single node.js instance serving 60K requests per hour

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

    1. Spend less time onundifferentiated work

      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!

    1. You must commit to that trust and rely on support networks to catch you when that trust is violated

      Assert 'ignorant optimism'!

    2. Oakland Museum of California: one of my favorite places to encounter people

      go to places to meet people, spontaneously

    1. hide my wires

      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.

    2. Wifi (and bluetooth, etc.) sucker you in by making it seem like they “just work.”

      NetworkManager? lol. I wish this were true

    3. 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.

    1. Research papers use Signifier as body text, while blog posts use Söhne.

      Distinguish content by font

    1. Friends & colleagues: Zaynab Kriouech, Ismail Elaaddioui, Rida Tabit, Ismail Zaidy, Ayoub Oiouja, Zakaria Ouaghad, Anass Ouaziz, Mehdi Ait El Mallali, Mouad Mabrouk, Brahim Hour, Montasser Drissi.

      Everyone should have this on their website

    1. Her kids love their new home.

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

    1. “I have nothing against duplexes and triplexes, just not next to my house.”

      Why?

    2. In Spokane, Wash., home prices jumped 60 percent in the past two years. The increase is fueled by buyers fleeing the boom in cities like Austin. Who will have to flee next?

      Try renting an apartment

    1. An earnest literature nerd, I was studying at Columbia because I wanted to be a writer, which meant being like the writers I read as a high school student — Larsen, Hughes, Hurston. And that meant being in Harlem.

      Live with your heroes

  9. Feb 2023
    1. once termed “Brutalist atrocity”

      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?

    1. Typing on the home row is preferred Center row keys are to be avoided (I learned from guitar that the lift of the finger can be easier on it than lateral stretches) Runs of two should be together where possible

      Better than colemak?

    1. Dinkelberg's wife, Emily, destitute and living in an "old peoples' home" died 10 years later July 3, 1945. Her body remained unclaimed for over a week and was about to be donated to a medical school when a Chicago attorney brought the matter to the Tribune.[23] The following day her body was claimed by the A.I.A. and they paid for her burial next to Fred. Her grave is unmarked.

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

    1. The .await in the read_to_string function body is necessary to mark the cancellation point in case the function is compiled as async; but when not async would essentially become a no-op 2:

      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

    1. For example, reading /dev/pointer returns the x & y coordinates of the mouse pointer while writing to /people/robin/inbox sends a message to your friend Robin.

      Beautiful!

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

    1. My feeling is that when we prepare a program, it can be like composing poetry or music. Furthermore, when we read other people’s programs, we can recognize some of them as genuine works of art.

      The idea of 'taste' is independent of medium

    1. Today, our technologies reflect reason and utility and opportunity and self. But this may be an artifact of our time. We could equally imagine building technologies that reflect intuition and purpose and gift and connection. I might say we're already starting.

      Why specialize?

    1. facing resistance from the teachers, who thought his interests were not ”well-rounded”

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

    1. Users can access the full discussion of an RFD at any time by opening a dialog regardless of their current location on the page.

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

    1. he could bend rather than hammer into a form that resembled more the ease of a drawn line than the craft of carpentered assembly

      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

    1. MUJI’s goal is to give customers a rational satisfaction, expressed not with, “This is what I really want” but with “This will do.”

      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.

    1. Recognizing the downsides of a growth culture, many people are looking for alternative economic models.

      What are some other examples of this explored?

    1. I called my dad two nights ago, like I do most Sunday nights. Two months ago, my manager tapped me in to contribute to this top secret and highly impactful project at work. It is the peak of anything I’ve ever worked on in my career by miles and it’s getting launched soon. We talked about updates related to that for awhile and I heard the pride in his voice. It filled me up, the same way it has since I was 15 in high school. I asked him about his week and he told me he had minimal side effects from the radiation, which is good news for now. But he won’t know the full results of the treatment until March. He then perked up and said he started volunteering at my town’s senior center - “You should come visit on the 12th. All the residents are excited to meet you - I told them about you.” “Oh no, what’d you say this time?” I joked. “I told them I have a daughter who has her own show and that she can make anyone laugh.”

      ❤️

  10. Jan 2023
    1. I really did purchase a vintage Omega watch a few years ago, and I really did overpay by $50.

      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.

    1. When he read an article about the planned demolition in Clinton, he uprooted his family from their home in southern California and moved them to Iowa.

      Move to build

    1. “A lot of people’s lives will have been lived in them, 20, 30, 40 years from now. In their role as housing and much-needed housing, people might look back on them more positively,” Ms. Falletta said of today’s buildings. “They may not be valorized as good design, but people’s attitudes will change.”

      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!

    1. In family lore, the loss of Elias’ finger is now understood as a blessing; indirectly, it leads him off the factory floor and into roles where his salesmanship comes to life.

      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.

    1. Brasília was designed, constructed, and inaugurated within four years.

      Wow - how was this orchestrated?

    2. Costa also stressed that Brazilian (and Niemeyer's) architecture was based on unskilled work which allowed for a crafted architecture based on concrete, expressing a tradition of (Brazilian) church builders, as opposed to (Swiss) clock builders.

      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?

    1. they have been fed with this bad kind of boring grey socialistic approach where everything looks the same. Just look at the colours.

      aha

    2. It felt crazy but also amazing to see what good design really can be and you don’t see that in Sweden.

      Why not?

    1. These motives must be rational and must serve the utmost human need - the need to orient in space.

      Is it?

    2. Students are selected based on their visual spatial coordination. In 1927 Ladovsky established his black room - a laboratory for testing spatial perception (of angles, volumes, linearity etc.) using tools of his own design.

      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.