Enter MrBeast. This youtuber has reached new levels of content purely by making capitalism itself the content. With his crew of people and their peculiar views on life, they do a good job at making some quality content for this hyper-capitalist world that they have found themselves in.
Capitalism is the content! Turns out that it's fun to buy things and throw around money!
A lot of the problems are actually structural problems in how companies do the science part of computer science. Structural problems cannot be solved overnight. These things take time, effort and patience to truly figure out and in the process you will fail to invent a light bulb many times over. Devops is probably a necessary evil, but I really wish that situations weren't toxic enough in the first place to require that evil.
Software development is a mess!!!
While the HolyC compiler builds things, it internally keeps a sourcemap (much like webapp sourcemaps or how gcc relates errors at runtime to lines of code for the developer) of all of the functions it compiles.
Insane! Can interactively browse the code like a UI
ll ram is identity-mapped too, so sharing memory between tasks is as easy as passing a pointer. There's a locking intrinsyc too. It has full documentation (with graphical diagrams) embedded directly in source code.
Insane mode
This page lists my salary for every job I've had in tech. I have had this data open to the public for years, but I feel this should be more prominently displayed on my website. Other people have copied my approach of having a list of every salary they have ever been payed on their websites, and I would like to set the example by making it prominent on my website.
I love this transparency!
There's something obviously different about people in the Bible compared to people today -- God talked!
Terry posits that many of our issues stem from this idea that we can no longer talk directly to God, so to heal society and to heal himself we must develop some computing system that allows us to have a conversation with God through the machine - no different from the other conversations with history we're allowed to have with computers.
A busy Wednesday night. Grumpy at Sundown. Panik Flower at the Sultan Room. But you know me—I follow the money. And the only place offering me money was Baby’s All Right.
The Money? From where?
Got caught in the rain talking to Marcus, Avi, Joey, and Maraya
name friends. love this writing style. a little gonzo, a little punk, a little personal, a little "in-group", but not enough to not get a slice of their life
The most important thing is to know that rs exists.
Insane! Entire articles are written to remind us of long-forgotten Unix commands to perform obscure tasks.
It should be trivial for me to write a search query, browse a list of pure functions that does something like this, then invoke the function with an argument and receive a result - without having to explicitly install or touch anything.
The fact that these CLI programs are so difficult to find and have no real searchable docs - and, if you dig into the manpages or something, that you have to then figure out how to install the program - is absurd. All of this should be available in one place and installable in an instant, with a system like the nix-shell system.
Given that we spend most of our waking hours in an alienated, desperate grind to obtain or maintain a life-sustaining job, blaming ourselves for every snag along the way, gospels of reassurance and self-care are precious cargo.
Work doesn't have to be this way - and, to my knowledge, most work isn't. Work is working with people to accomplish a goal, and when people work to build a culture in which everyone acts in good faith, there is no problem.
So of course there are problems...
Siegfried Kracauer, one of the eloquent theorists of pop-culture associated with the Frankfurt School, frowned upon the cinema with its velvet drapes and plush seats, calling it “distraction raised to the level of culture.” In his dour view of things, the urban working masses were lulled into sitting in the dark and gawping at mesmeric light projections while sinister forces shifted the world under their feet.
Is this wrong?
Smartphone culture seems to directly connect adrenaline to observation, encouraging memes and satire and passive liking and sharing over legitimate class organization and action.
The average PhD student of the mid 2000s forwent the easy money of finance and law (now slightly less easy) to live on a meager stipend in order to pursue their passion for Norse mythology or the history of Afro-Cuban music.
Similar arguments are why I'm so skeptical of grad school without practical motivation.
By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, DWYL distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it.
Doing what you love means forgetting about everyone who has it worse than you. Efforts to protest, uplift poverty, share resources, and leverage equity from positions of privilege are easily forgotten if we find out about cool puzzles in haskell or something or start giving out crystals. There is this clear ignorance of the ability to identify and solve real problems rather than declaring, then making, what you "know" people want.
If Donald Trump has a chance in November, it is because the knowing will dictate our strategy.
Bingo - democrats "knew" Hillary would win, so nobody voted or cared.
These days it is difficult for anybody in a position of liberal power — whether in business, or government, or media — to avoid having openly gay colleagues, colleagues whom they like and whom they'd like to help.
I'm missing the point here. People are gay and comfortable enough with their identities to talk about it. Is this a problem?
It's a shame. They might be receptive to his concerns about poverty.
This is such a great piece of criticism - incredibly well-researched and well-intentioned. Things aren't this simple, but American liberalist canon reduces things to trivialities and dismisses a group's opinions, perhaps having some legitimacy, as nothing.
The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing.
This is very reminiscent of the conservative chime of "facts don't care about your feelings" - if it is known how to vote, then an ingroup is constructed and the enemy is ignorant, so they're easy to dismiss.
The continuing physicalization of the UI, which Matas helped along by designing iPhone OS 1.0 while at Apple, is important for making computers usable.
Looking back on this in the next decade, design is now staunchly against this! We've been vying for flat designs, without shadows, with easier glyphs that might not be intuitive from 0, but that speak to users who have had access to iphones for 15 years at this point. We've incorporated physics simulation into buttons and such, sure, but 'realism' is far away from what we have today.
Steve Jobs’ remark that design was “how it works” had achieved what seemed like widespread comprehension, and recruiting wars for top designers rivaled those for top engineers.
Design is good! Where is innovation?
How many of you use call/cc and continuation objects (rather than mimicing continuations with lambda's) in large programs? Do "we" really use it to implement coroutines and backtracking and threads and whatever?Is call/cc necessary for Scheme? [Don't shoot. I wrote many papers on all aspects of call/cc but now that we're building large systems we should revisit these questions. I'd love to be wrong here.]
Good observation from Matthias - it's just better to pass a lambda callback and mimic the behavior than to implicitly steal the continuation. Right?
The primitive call/cc is a bad abstraction -- in various meanings of `bad' shown below, -- and its capture of the continuation of the whole program is not practically useful. The only reward for the hard work to capture the whole continuation efficiently is more hard work to get around the capture of the whole continuation. Both the users and the implementors are better served with a set of well-chosen control primitives of various degrees of generality with well thought-out interactions.
Against elegance?
Aggressive hiring is often counterproductive. I don’t mean this on a relative basis. I mean on an absolute basis. Your company might make less progress on your most important thing after your hiring spree.
This is the classic result of "The Mythical Man-Month" - you can't just hire. You need to iteratively hire, re-hire, and re-organize to build a strong organization that's always leveraging its resources in the best way it can.
Make a list of the best people in your company. Note whether they are a manager or individual contributor. Write down what they are working on. Confirm that those people are working on the most essential thing in your company and are overloaded with responsibility. Don’t worry about burning them out. Worry about depriving them of the joy of working on the most important thing and the steepest possible learning slope.1 Tell these people they are your stars.2 Pay them like it too. These first three points help ensure you are optimizing what you are getting from the current team before you look elsewhere for the solution.
Make sure your current team is optimised before starting to look elsewhere. It doesn't make sense to hire externally if a developer is bogged down in some silly work.
every trace of the future seems to have been vanished from popular media.
Why don't we dream anymore? Our futures seem to be more present and less aspirational. We don't have big, visual, concrete missions to work towards like NASA.
s enthusiastic as I am about more tech wealth pouring into cultural initiatives, the regranting programs that are now so popular are just like software platforms: they outsource your own agency to some imagined future actors.
I'm actually in favor of this. To me, this is what makes capitalism work: someone with a valuable resource to provide (time, expertise) can trade this for a goal and vision, as provided by someone with money and passion.
Alternatively, someone with passion can be provided with money to make things happen. This resembles the US venture system and has become increasingly federated with the continued development of microgrant programs.
hy I’m obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are things made out of belief.
Brands are levers that founders wedge onto employees, and that employees use to craft a world for others to unite behind
With its focus on existential AI risk as a chief cause area, EA even has an eschatology—a theory of the end of the world. As far as newly designed cultures go, EA is the closest thing we have to a new religion.
blah blah basilisk cult
Julie Rice said “we realized that connection should be its own product. We are modern medicine for the loneliness epidemic.”
Cycling therapy? To what end do companies need to facilitate this and attempt to craft community brands?
“The State”, he wrote, “has an interest in the primary school as a civilising agent.”
The "civilising agent" was applied throughout the British empire to subjugate native populations, replacing their culture with British state-administrated education, because state and education can be used to define culture.
After the DTC era, brands have become present in every part of our lives, ambient, diffuse, meaning things to us. Sports, music, health, sleep, and person-to-person communication have become interpenetrated with brands.
Many of these products construct inclusive communities wherein access and ownership are the same, explicitly attempting to craft a culture around their product or convert a culture to their social system. You own a fitbit, or a whoop strap, or an oura ring, or some apple fitness device, and are now a member of this exclusive community - some 'ingroup' defined entirely by device ownership or paying for some subscription model.
Before Stripe, you had to forge relationships with payment networks. Before Alibaba and Shopify, you had to think about logistics. Now with these platforms, it was becoming easier than ever to start a brand.
The federation of branding, empowered by platforms, is becoming the federation of culture itself - where brands strive to create culture and subculture is, in part, defined by brands (as brands signal taste, and taste defines such a subculture).
If Uber could disrupt cabs and Twitter could disrupt the New York Times, why couldn’t Allbirds disrupt shoes?
This model was taken to absurdity, and to a degree still is - do we need more consumer goods and services? Convenience and marketing sell Allbirds, sure, but do they contribute?
The dropshipping, federated consumer economy needs a restart. Why can't we have shoe repair programs like applecare? Clothing repair programs? People like applecare.
Inevitably, codes get passed from one cluster of friends to another. One code traveled from an old friend to a tattooed and multiple- pierced crowd to the women's crew team at Mills College before it eventually fell into disuse.
Social permission floating through the inheritance of access codes. This is really interesting!
Catastrophe requires multiple failures – single point failures are not enough..The array of defenses works. System operations are generally successful. Overt catastrophic failure occurs when small, apparently innocuous failures join to create opportunity for a systemic accident.
This is what makes model checking for complex systems so important... we can't prove them or model them, but we can create high level specifications, ensure with some level of confidence that these specifications align with a real-life model, and that that real-life model has some integrity.
Should learn more about how software systems with multiple complex components are modeled - like airplanes and pete.
after all of that, after everything, predator drones .-. _, .-. ,_ .-. '-._'--' \_| |_/ '--'_.-' '-._ \ | | / _.-' `-.^| |^.-' `\=/` ` run linux
This is the kicker - despite the will of pretty much everyone involved in the free software movement, software is now - instead of used to promote the access of people to personal computing - near-universally used to further profit and state-building (a proxy for profit) incentives.
i refused to use discord for years - but instead of furthering freedom, i hurt myself. the severence of many meaningful relationships. most of my old friends simply moved on without me. if you don't have vocal chords, people forget that you exist.
I tried this as well - as principled as you'd like to stay, isolating yourself from products motivated by profit and venture funding today really just means isolating yourself from others who prefer to use products with network effects that are presented as easy to use. These are the products people use, and these are the social networks people use to stay in touch with one another, like it or not; if you're impossible to find, nobody will talk to you anymore.
Why does the website still look the pretty much the same today as when you founded it? There’s even a new CEO. What’s going onBecause that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day.
life goal how do we make software as simple as possible today
I don’t like banner ads. They slow things down, and they’re often kind of dumb. That’s a decision I made at the end of ‘97.
slay
I allow myself to buy as many books as I want. But I have no car.
as life should be
“I don’t respect the stock market at all,” he said. “Once you’re public, you’ve lost control over the company, and you have to maximize profits for the shareholder, and then you become one of these irresponsible companies.”
This is what makes venture funding a death trap. Losing equity means sacrificing principles.
As a pioneering rock climber in California’s Yosemite Valley in the 1960s, Mr. Chouinard lived out of his car and ate damaged cans of cat food that he bought for five cents apiece.Even today, he wears raggedy old clothes, drives a beat up Subaru and splits his time between modest homes in Ventura and Jackson, Wyo. Mr. Chouinard does not own a computer or a cellphone.
This is how life should be lived. Why are my clothes new and sensitive [in particular, shoes]? They should be hardy and last forever.
they didn’t get a charitable deduction for it. There is no tax benefit here whatsoever.
fire
unconventional spin on capitalism
In what way is Patagonia's structure an 'unconventional spin on capitalism'?
the most cohesive teams are not only the most prolific, but also the most satisfied. And all the work I was doing with teams laddered up to the same purpose–cultivating more of that “we’re all in this together feeling.”Because for ambitious organizations that pride themselves in cultures of autonomy and distributed ownership, that feeling is fuel.
Sure - but what is the best way to cultivate this?
Wireframes and prototypes are used for designing magazines too—but there’s an important difference. Unlike the web, editorial systems are designed for variation, not prescription. They are a starting point, not a final deliverable.
Wireframes, like anything else, should be used to inform - not restrict. Concretely, individual articles should have the power to override or customize their pages and personalities - otherwise the website doesn't feel complete!
Everyone else wants to know what Airbnb did, too.
Our user interfaces are so homogeneous. Incredibly painful. No personality. A product should be showcased the same way it's used, not with splash pages and screens and screenshots. The strange full page trailers or Wall Street SVG human characters or whatever cute parallax scrolling animations need to go.
What would design look like if its aim weren’t profit? The answer is hidden in the margins of the MOMA show: a device that makes water potable—something you can’t buy at the design store but which might actually save your life.
Where are these?
We need to expand our repertoire (to borrow a term from Diana Taylor) of urban intelligences, to draw upon the wisdom of information scientists and theorists, archivists, librarians, intellectual historians, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and others who think about the management of information and the production of knowledge. 33 They can help us better understand the breadth of intelligences that are integrated within our cities, which would be greatly impoverished if they were to be rebuilt, or built anew, with computational logic as their prevailing epistemology.
Like Alexander's system, we need to use a variety of different resources and specialists - in particular, the residents - to craft a city and continue to help it adapt. This practice of perscribing particular models and expecting the city to adhere to these models doesn't work - the city can't run the same way forever, for various sociopsychological reasons, and it will continue to adapt. To force some reductive computing model onto it is to leave people behind.
Mumford’s city is an assemblage of media forms (vaults, archives, monuments, physical and electronic records, oral histories, lived cultural heritage); agents (architectures, institutions, media technologies, people); and functions (storage, processing, transmission, reproduction, contextualization, operationalization). 19 It is a large, complex, and varied epistemological and bureaucratic apparatus. It is an information processor, to be sure, but it is also more than that.
The city isn't a computer! It's far more complicated, and to claim that it's a computer would be a dramatic reduction of capability. This reminds me of Hypernormalization - it's this attempt to fit the city to a much simpler model, then convince everyone that this simple model makes sense and it works, but in truth the system is far more complex.
We’ve long conceived of our cities as knowledge repositories and data processors
This reminds me of works like the mailing tube systems of NYC - the foundation of the city had all of these physical pathways designed to facilitate communication and transmission of both information and physical belongings! We should bring systems like this - for transporting physical data!
The city is a computer, the streetscape is the interface, you are the cursor, and your smartphone is the input device.
I don't want to be a mouse or have an interface to my city. The interface to my city is my face and my mouth, and I interact with it by walking through it and saying hello to the people around me, not by queuing systems on my smartphone to do X or Y or Z or whatever the hell. I should not have to own a smartphone to live my daily life. Technology should be invisible and not surveil me.
Dan Doctoroff, the Michael Bloomberg associate who founded Sidewalk Labs, wonders, “What would a city look like if you started from scratch in the internet era — if you built a city ‘from the internet up?’”
Like surveillance capitalism, apparently.
Into the ring steps the first hire at New Cities: Ben Huh, founder of the meme-and-cat-pic empire Cheezburger.
This intro goes hard
With the host computer sitting on a nearby desk or in a closet, they could hear the whirr of the hard drive and see the flickering lights of the modem as callers dipped in and out.
I love the idea of hearing a user physically occupy a server; what a beautiful form of presence!
Early on, most people called in from paper-based teleprinters, but these were soon replaced by PCs with video displays and “terminal emulation” software.
Imagine using a computer that printed out its input and output to a physical piece of paper using a physical printer. That would be the dream of Xerox.
Over the past few years, I’ve asked dozens of college students to write down, in a sentence or two, where the internet came from.
Valuable exercise - determine how students find information and what exactly they think or know.
Goldstein — the current CEO — has a particular interest in organized religion, a subject he likes to talk about to Launch House members and in interviews with the press. He seems less curious about the beliefs of these groups, however, and more in the structure of the organizations.
Are we starting cults here? I'm really not sure if this is healthy...
Q: Why bother? You can’t make a new browser engine without billions of dollars and hundreds of staff. Sure you can. Don’t listen to armchair defeatists who never worked on a browser.
Hero. Anyone can do anything.
Throughout this incredible expansion, my own goals have remained the same. Today I’m updating them a little bit: in addition to building a new OS for myself, I’m also going to build a cross-platform web browser.
Hell yes. Raise the bar. Make craft software. Make it better. Make it beautiful. Anyone can make any software.
He chose never to enlighten us, then or later, about his early years (and why should he?) so we made our own assumptions.
This is a wonderful attitude. Obscure the past - ideas are the most interesting part!
To us students in the early 1950s he had the air of an Oxbridge don: self-deprecatory yet erudite, someone who knows his way around, who is used to consorting with the good and the great. That this was not the case – he had not enjoyed the advantages of higher education, let alone a familiarity with the pleasures of the Senior Common Room – was due, not to any deception by Spencer, but to our misreading of his natural reserve and air of polite detachment.
What does broadcasting this appearance say about character? I think I'd rather be unabashedly open and compassionate. Clinging to everything is more exciting.
Yet this was illusory. Already, at the age of 28, he had moved from a two-year spell with London Typographic Designers to his own successful freelance practice; had travelled extensively in Europe, meeting many artists, designers and architects, among them Rudolf Hostettler, editor of Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen, the typographer Max Caflisch and the sculptor / painter / graphic designer Max Bill; had launched Typographica, with the blessing and financial backing of Peter Gregory, chairman of Lund Humphries, the publishers and printers with whom he was to maintain a long and fruitful collaboration; and had recently had a book, Design in Business Printing, published by Sylvan Press
beast mode. the more i hear about this the more i want to go go go!
"When I recorded that verse for the first time, he came in, heard it," Ross recounted, "he told me he thought I could do better. And he walked out." The MMG boss didn't let that moment deter him from delivering something special. "And then I wrote another one, and the second verse I wrote is the one you hear on the album."
Criticism builds. Call friends out if they aren't doing their best.
Each and every declaration of behavior should appear OnceAndOnlyOnce.
Nobody should have to ever write code that someone else has already written.
I kind of wish the Linux crowd had more developers aiming for insanely great, rather than making little tweaks to the OS or churning out more clones of sad old commercial software. -- GeorgePaci
What do we need to do to accomplish this?
most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns.
This is a beautiful sentiment and it's already happening. I can't wait to see it succeed.
Who needs copyright when you're on a retainer?
The internet as a service industry, or a consulting industry, or just a way to rent a friend
How does society now pay for the distribution of ideas if not by charging for the ideas themselves?
This is the crux of the issue. How do we reward authors and creators without aligning cost with idea?
But what is the role of libraries in the absence of books?
Coworking spaces lol........
the proprietary assertions of thinkers have been focused not on their ideas but on the expression of those ideas
in other words - execution of an idea creates a product, and users use products, so users will pay for products; this isn't true for thinking itself, though
If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can't get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?
We still don't really have any idea, do we? So far, solutions revolve around: - collecting user data - advertisement - annoying magazine subscription fees like the pop-ups on this website - donations
The first two I would consider inhumane and combative, and the latter two fail to capture the majority of the value provided (and, therefore, either discourage people from using the medium to communicate their ideas or creating a strange limbo of popular poverty)
In his senior year, he became a part-time resident of New York City's East Village and immersed himself in Andy Warhol's Factory demimonde, cultivating a friendship with Rene Ricard and developing a brief addiction to heroin.[12]
I need to do more. How can I get here?
Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the Structured Coding in the world won't help you solve a problem like that -- it takes actual talent. Some quick observations on Real Programmers and Structured Programming: Real Programmers aren't afraid to use GOTOs. Real Programmers can write five page long DO loops without getting confused. Real Programmers enjoy Arithmetic IF statements because they make the code more interesting. Real Programmers write self-modifying code, especially if it saves them 20 nanoseconds in the middle of a tight loop. Programmers don't need comments: the code is obvious. Since FORTRAN doesn't have a structured IF, REPEAT ... UNTIL, or CASE statement, Real Programmers don't have to worry about not using them. Besides, they can be simulated when necessary using assigned GOTOs.
I love real programmers. I will work with them forever
A real computer programmer said things like "DO 10 I=1,10" and "ABEND" (they actually talked in capital letters, you understand), and the rest of the world said things like "computers are too complicated for me" and "I can't relate to computers -- they're so impersonal".
Where are the line numbers?
Bartleby answers with what soon becomes his perpetual response to every request: "I would prefer not to."
The machine rolls on : ) with bureaucracy too stiff to allow for progress. This is very reminiscent of tech work today!
solving a special case of the decision problem for first-order logic, namely the decidability of what is now called the Bernays–Schönfinkel–Ramsey class of first-order logic
Read more - I will certainly need this for class
One afternoon I went out alone with her on Lake Orta and became filled with desire and we came back and lay on two beds side by side she reading, I pretending to, but with an awful conflict in my mind. After about an hour I said (she was wearing her horn spectacles and looking superlatively beautiful in the Burne Jones style) ‘Margaret will you fuck with me?’[3]
What a closing line!
Nostalgia for the days that hard arts like mathematics were romanticised; as other papers state, the writing is so formal and rigid now. A product of the post-WWII structure and industrialisation of the scientific process, sure - but has this been healthy for society?
Senior Wrangler (top of his class)
British descriptors and honorifics - "Head", "Porter", "Wrangler", etc. feel reflective of the disorder of the parliamentary system - they're at face chaotic but reflect rigid historical processes!
Cities seem to exert themselves on people, like a kind of peer-pressure, and they do it so thoroughly I’m not sure the people inside the cities fully know it.
Isn't this what you want? I love the feel of competition in New York - walking around soho makes me want to make more money, dress better, feel cooler. The financial district makes me want to aim for the communities that get me in the towers. Bushwick makes me want to... um...
By then it is onerous to maintain things, and you should want to be more focused (ten hobbies instead of one hundred). Perhaps then you could easily move into a small pad in the city.
Cities provide a different kind of value after skill development. How do we weight meeting young and having children young? Are cities really the best facilities for this, or is it best to meet in a city then "build" (a home, a family) outside? The value of an extended social circle later in life - a strong community of practice that can be cultivated - in a city, with money, seems incredibly valuable to me.
An ideal to me is to live outside the city when young, try to have a home, a workshop, possessions. You can have the space to accumulate raw materials and tools and knowledge, learn through the works of your hands. Have a place to make babies and give them the materials they need to create, too. Instead of chasing night life, use your time to learn what it is you really like to build. You can visit the city often, of course! Just not live inside it.
is the best way to learn to build to do so without distractions? Is it important to have the physical space to build tools? How can this be reconciled with the compact efficiency (close to people, functional public transport, ease of access to commodities) that cities provide? Or is the point to make everything but what you make yourself difficult to access?
After his discharge from the Army, Burke returned to Los Angeles and set up a company with his brother Cleve and two friends from the war, the Marzicola brothers, one of whom had a contractor's license. The four men called their firm 'Craig Ellwood' after a liquor store called Lords and Elwood located in front of their offices.[3] Burke later legally changed his name to Ellwood.[2]
This is fascinating to me - Burke, by changing his name, assumed the identity of his work as his persona!
he Ugly American syndrome still exists. Sometimes you just want to say 'Stop destroying the landscape with your outfit.'
Why are Americans ugly? NYC's SOHO - and much of New York, including the financial district, Williamsburg, and most places in the southern part of the city - feel exceptional in this regard; the American tourists were easy to spot because their style and taste was so poor relative to the average resident of the spaces, and even among the visitors you could easily tell who fit and who didn't.
The extreme sensation of working out has replaced the mosh pits of my earlier years and the sex clubs [eeeewwwww!] for years after that. It's a great combo of discipline, joyous release, meditation, and vanity. Music never sounded as good as it does now, pounding through those earbud headphones into the pit of my stomach as I feel my muscles swell.
Does music sound better at the gym than at the club? How does the gym operate as a social space?
I sense better than clubs - club socialization is ephemeral, impulsive, hormonal, and difficult to hear or understand, while the gym is about self-improvement, admiration, mutual encouragement.
I couldn't imagine having to change outfits every day or having to change for the gym. This outfit takes me to the gym, to work in the studio, and then to dinner with a mink coat over it.
Ideal! Clothes should be used for everything... clothes should be lived in. Not sure about Rick's silk work, but a merino wool tee and some dryskin pants go a long way towards an outfit that's fit for every situation.
Onboarding doesn’t have to stop after the welcome screen
The welcome screen shouldn't exist... Why do we need to prioritize feature promotion (temp. adrenaline hit) over feature discovery (permanent benefit that rewards user ingenuity or navigation)?
the reason for the shutdown is because of the unprofitability of Unit 1.
Why do we provide incentives for unsustainable power and environmentally damaging cars like Teslas, but not to advance nuclear? Harnessing the atom is the only way we'll be able to scale to meet population demands.
The patterns are what got computer people interested in Alexander’s work. In his own words, they were “a convenient format for exchanging—let’s call them—good ideas: context, problem, solution…and that’s fine.”
Interfaces!
Alexander had an unusual way of speaking, in that he rather unabashedly used language that made people feel uncomfortable. He wrote plainly and earnestly about concepts like wholeness, life, and living structure. To him these aren’t nebulous, mystical, touchy-feely sentiments, but actual concrete things that can be treated with rigour, and that’s what his whole career was about.
This is beautiful - to not only use romantic words in regular conversation, and to not only use them but to describe them concretely and with emotion, is a wonderful thing. I will adopt this.
In ordinary housing developments, the architect and builder leave as soon as they have finished their work. They do not stay around to guarantee their work, nor to look after the environment as it evolves. In a cluster this is quite different. The builder undertakes a fifteen--year commitment to be there; he is also a member of the cluster himself, and has a personal interest in making it beautiful because he is going to be there. A healthy environment requires not only that construction of the cluster be gradual, but also that the houses and public land between them always remain in a continual state of construction and repair. In this way, the environment can be constantly improved and modified according to people's experience of how it works for them. This process requires a continual diagnosis of the existing space -- indoor and outdoor -- so that all new building, however modest, will repair the defects revealed by the diagnosis and ensure the gradual improvement of the environment.
We can only learn by using. The status quo for constructing housing is incredibly broken! This is not indifferent from dogfooding software - only by living with what we make can we learn to improve it.
Physically, a cluster will contain about twelve houses, on about an acre of land. Neither the density nor the size are absolutely critical.
Is it important for these spaces to be shared? Is it important for digital spaces to be shared?
Yes - it's impossible to design in isolation. We need immediate peers to reference and inspire us, people we can talk to and who can reassure us.
The pattern language is the instrument which makes it possible for members of the cluster to design their own houses, and for the builder to help them take their rudimentary sketches and make a building out of them. It is a system of instructions based on the most fundamental psychological necessities of buildings, which gives the individuals who use it unexpected creative power.
The pattern language is quite beautiful - giving users the power of a high level description language to apply to design, allowing designers, architects and other employees to implement the interface specified by a client. It's really quite simple to identify emotional and functional need by matching to some of a finite set of patterns, and then simple for the architect to identify a pattern as a need in the home.
This reminds me of home-made software and the imbalance of power that has been established between the user of the computer and the design of the interface; it's not at all true that people know what they want, or that one specific interface can be prescribed to fit all people. Rather, the user must have access to high level building blocks - or "patterns" - that they compose to make their computer a home.
We spend just as much time with our computers - if not more - than we do with our homes now, and I posit that the interface of the software plays just as pivotal of a role in the experience that someone has navigating their home. How do we build software that allows users to choose high level patterns and adapt their systems when choosing the patterns?
(An aside - it's insane to me that device manufacturers, especially new ones, are able to re-architect new physical interfaces for the devices but have to stick to the same software. This seems like the opposite of the dream of the computer; we're supposed to be able to run and change anything at any time, so why are we stuck using stock Android on every new device? It's so hard to build software that new innovations happen with hardware reinvention rather than software. This is insane.)
The housing market that we know does not allow people to design and participate in the construction of their houses; they are built for them and, except in unusual cases, have no input at all.
To own isn't just to design - it is to occupy
the mass production does not, in the end, even reduce cost.
If one can't reach economies of scale, and rewards of industrial manufacturing aren't aligned with the rewards necessary to provide well-lived lives at a low cost, then the housing projects don't provide solutions! We can see this now with all of America's housing projects. Undesirable places to live make undesirable lives, and subjecting people to them is criminal.
The world--wide housing problem has three central features.
“[t]he Shrike now looked up and seeing me jumped on the mouse with both feet and flew off bearing it in its claws.”
A lot of the lack of fascination with science - hard research - today, disillusionment with research papers, and the existence of so many 'pop science' publications seems a result of this oversimplification. It's understandable that ideas can be beautiful without embellishment, but it's very possible to present ideas in clear and concise ways and add additional flavor - infusing writing with the passion behind these ideas and discoveries. Where has the wonder, the optimism gone?
If you were an unimportant person, I would feel quite comfortable letting you go your own way. But the fact is that people who believe as you do are really fucking up the whole profession of architecture right now by propagating these beliefs.
Is it important to hold people who spread words with outsized influences accountable? How, and to what degree? How do we create external sources of truth to hold people accountable?
you have to do these others to prove your membership in the fraternity of modern architecture. You have to do something more far out, otherwise people will think you are a simpleton.
This stack of signals is present in any field and can impede progress. It's okay to be boring and make a bet in the past for a safer future!
if you are a feeling type, you would think that feelings are the essence of the matter; and I cannot help thinking, as a thinking type, that ideas are the essence of the matter.
This is a terrible argument!
Much of the social life in the town of Mondragón happens in culinary clubs—hybrids between clubs and restaurants that are managed coöperatively, with logistics handled by rotating committees. New members can join a culinary club only after their applications have been approved in a vote; membership fees are around twenty euros a month. If you belong to a culinary club, you simply reserve the facilities, show up with friends and food, and enjoy full use of a fancy, well-stocked professional kitchen and bar. Members are trusted to record whatever they use, and accounts are settled monthly.
This is beautiful! I'd love to have such community social spaces available to host events. American facilities - and facilities everywhere, really - feel privatized, inaccessible to community members without means - but there are lots of reasons for people without means (like artists) to occupy large spaces and throw events!
My university is full of them, all reasonably smart, all pretending at cool through the hiding in plain site of cultural irony and political cynicism and pretend alcoholism.
Wild take from an academic, but they're correct about the hero evangelism here
The economy doesn't care about intelligence, at all, it doesn't care what you know, merely what you can produce for it. The only thing the English grad is "qualified" for in this economy is the very things s/he is already doing: coffeehouse agitator, Trader Joe's associate, Apple customer.................................................. and spouse of a capitalist.
Not sure if this is entirely true... there are ways to convert intelligence directly into market value, right?
Imagine a large corporate machine mobilized to get you to buy something you don't need at a tremendously inflated cost, complete with advertising, marketing, and branding that says you're not hip if you don't have one, but when you get one you discover it's of poor quality and obsolete in ten months. That's a BA.
Descriptive - but this is not what a BA should be!
People don’t have the tools for using the Web for their homes, or for organizing their private lives; they don't really put their scrapbooks on the Web.
How do we give people these tools? They've existed in small slices of potential - geocities, tumblr, etc. - but do not exist in broad strokes. Social media profiles don't cut it.
In order to operate one of the systems Auger was proposing, the architect would in essence need to become a coder, FORTRAN being the principal language in design use at the time.
Should end users become coders? How can we improve the transitional experience of experts in other domains as they begin to use and customize software to fit their own needs?
In 1972, the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the most salient component of human/computer interaction today, had not been developed.
Not exactly true - this work was living in research laboratories and technical demos rather than deployed as consumer software, and it is unlikely that the author was aware of these relationships - but it existed nonetheless!
The Architect and the Computer
This book looks beautiful - but I can't find it anywhere! How can I purchase it?
Ann had spent some of her childhood in a foster home. She was first hospitalized in her twenties. Two years later she was hospitalized again, believing people were trying to kill her. The pianist strikes a chord with his left hand. A sheltering bubble rises, an 'airhouse' looming like a translucent mushroom, all synthetic creation. She had left high school after two years, worked in a factory, married in her early twenties.
I love the book pages interspersed with lore of the author... the text is enriched by it, but without any direct connection drawn by the author, the user's left to speculate as to how Ann's childhood resulted in the strange work.
AB: Our Noisy World was purchased while I was gathering books for the Carlisle Borough Branch.
To be able to travel the world and collect library books or books to be sold is a wonderful dream. I can only dream of having the opportunity to collect such things in physical spaces. The future is the internet archive, though, and hoarding the contextless collections of PDFs that we can transfer instantly and for free around the world.
Will Saunders: There seems to be a theme of legitimate but almost maverick optimism about the world [in the collection]. Andrew Beccone: Absolutely, for me its the most uncanny characteristic ... the actual amount of optimism that it contains ... that optimism is based in this unbelievable faith in the power of technology taking us into this utopian promised land which we now know is not around the corner.
This is exactly what I love - the vision of the 1950s, the dream of the future, the endless technological optimism and forethought behind early science fiction, early speculative research, early government organisations focused on technology, and such. I want life to feel like this endless pursuit of future opportunity, happiness and success.
People should feel like they're living in the future. We get little inklings of this, but ultimately much of the technology we use is just as abrasive as it is beautiful.
A Programed Text is a piece of paper software run not by a computer, but by a reader who is given a set of precise instructions to perform.
This is fascinating! We have books designed to use the user - the reader - for manual computation?
Sir Thomas Browne and Richard Burton. These once popular, now obscure writers appeared to have consumed and ingested everything in the libraries available to them at the time, absorbing and integrating their readings into sprawling baroque essays that combined a hodgepodge miscellany of antiquity with contemporary reports from the Orient and Americas with discredited alchemical claims and speculative theological elaborations into neoplatonic abstraction made useful in a pragmatic medical and physiological application. In reading "everything", 17th century writers accessed libraries that were not much larger than Reanimation Library.
How did this process work? Is this what I am - a conglomeration of all of these articles I'm reading on the internet? How do I become something more?
These unwitting anthologies dredged up new subjects, sending me back to the catalog for further requests.
I love how the internet enables this, but somehow having a human in the loop with every request - reaching out to a librarian to consult the references to or of a current text - feels more gratifying, like you're taking someone else on this tree of an intellectual journey; they absorb little snippets and have some frame of reference of your train of thought, but never the whole picture.
'd search for some keywords in the catalog, and possibly filter by some arbitrary limits such as a date range or city of publication. The librarian would stuff my requests into the library's pneumatic tube system, and about fifteen minutes later the books would begin to appear.
Do this at random! Find things, search for them, and read them briefly. See what happens by breadth and identify subjects of depth.
After a very positive experience with OpenAI/Codex, we're ready to go all in. OpenAI/Codex has literally changed what we believe is possible for the BAERO development team to do. In the past, we would have written new projects in python, while maintaining the perl infrastructure until a particular piece became untenable...and then rewrite that in python. With OpenAI/Codex in our development toolbox, we now have a long list of infrastructure software that we're going translate proactively, with a blueprint for making the project successful.
Wow. This is for a tool that's in beta and has no determinism involved. There is a future here for tools like this to make a real impact.
the port is feature complete and can run the entire unit-test workflow
It seems like there might be reason to shift from one code architecture to another, or some series of software design principles that are idiomatic in the target language but not in the source language, for fear of creating code that's not maintainable or easily understood by those familiar with work in the latter programming language. Does this matter if we're going to hide most of the work behind abstraction boundaries though?
Tested the old code and new code with the same inputs.
How?
Translated the code directly without refactoring along the way. This makes it easier for reviewers to validate that the code does same thing in both languages. It also enables side-by-side functional and performance testing (on a per-function basis).
How do we validate that the code does the same thing? I'm not sure that manual review is sufficient - there are too many "gotchas" here. How can we bring in contracts, tests or other semi-verified methods of confirming that computation is accurate, operating in a (relatively) language agnostic way? Is this even possible?
Codex has its pros and cons: It was great at some translations but very bad at others
How do we minimise the labor of the "developer in the loop" with these translations? To what degree can we automate porting to/from libraries? I don't think writing or simulating a compiler is so difficult here - large language models are just nondeterministic compilers of input text and corpuses of training data to output text, I suppose... how do we make them more deterministic, or verify parts of them, or make process improvements to them?
We leave a lot to these private corporations, and even the governments that we have can be bought off by a lot of these commercial interests.
Do we really solve collective action problems by socializing everything? What does a solution to transportation issues that operates in the private sector - external to governments - look like? How is it funded if not with tax dollars?
the reality is an almost radical dependence rather than a degree of freedom.
Owning more things means taking care of more things, and taking care of things is a huge investment of time and energy. Public transportation lets me rely on others for maintenance and financially invest in a service that pays off for more people than just myself.
Owning a vehicle is not a choice, it is a necessity, and to suggest otherwise would be silly.
Except in major European cities - right?
A vintage sunglasses shop, filled with Balenciaga-clad influencers, is just a block away from a ritualistic circle of ex-marines, who smell of dried blood and are sharing drugs inside a tent connected to a dumpster.
This feels just like San Francisco and my experiences there - disastrous.
There might be no scientific proof of astrology, but that's because there isn't funding for research.
: |
There are, fundamentally, two different methods of determining whether a product meets its specification.
If the specification is perfect then the specification is the product; it's just as prone to bugs as the product itself. We necessarily either allow undefined behavior or claim that the specification is a first implementation of the product, which is then re-implemented as the product itself.
Ultimately, analytic verification and correctness proofs were supposed to replace testing.
Formal verification is vital for critical, core infrastructure and correct software
“Once you see those metrics, those insights, something changes: You realize how much you waste doing nothing, or just multitasking and not accomplishing stuff,”
How do we expose these metrics to people themselves to provide these realizations without demonstrating the value provided - or lack thereof?
During each of those intervals, at some moment they could never anticipate, cameras snapped shots of their faces and screens, creating timecards to verify whether they were working.
I want this but for tracking myself as an art project. Maya Mann(?) explores this!
which companies are going to use it and when, and which companies are going to become irrelevant?
if workers think their work is important they'll do the work need to provide extreme extreme endorphins and positive reinforcement money is an aside and doesn't matter after some amount
“If we’re going to give up on bringing people back to the office, we’re not going to give up on managing productivity,”
paul you need to go home and think about what matters
Tracking, they say, allows them to manage with newfound clarity, fairness and insight.
Removes bias from working processes - rather than who is more liked or respected, can look at more objective measures of productivity and excellence. Results often miss "glue" though - people who step in to teams to serve as vital communicators, filling information gaps and bridging the team together.
TikTok videos offer tips
How useful is TikTok as a disseminator of information? I don't have enough knowledge of or experience with it to really know or understand. Wonder if tiktok recommendation seems to succeed where current search fails, or if we need new search systems to introduce "adjacent ideas" to current ideas and streams of thought to assist with thinking, framing, developing etc.
Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their “inactivity” time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’.
These analytics are fun - but iff they align with personal goals! Competition is so toxic.
the software did not come close to capturing her labor
No software can track perfectly - and none should be used to hold anyone personally accountable. Metrics don't align with stories!
They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin.
How do we ensure that those with demonstrated interest can receive the education? What's the best way to disseminate ideas to the public with definitions and rigor? It feels like technology - new document formats that empower new kinds of internet wormholes, mathematics visualizations, and clarification of how some factors have been experimentally determined and "proven" will go a long way here.
How, though, do we accomplish this without looping those without the time to communicate outside of their communities of practice in the loop?
A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they project literal meanings onto words such as ‘grains’ of space-time or particles ‘popping’ in and out of existence. Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors.
This is interesting! "Pop science" uses these handwavey phrases to distribute and democratize scientific innovation but in doing so loses much of the rigor that makes the ideas beautiful in the first place.
On weekends she would often attend spiritual retreats, and during the week she would edit reality TV shows in a cramped, windowless room, daydreaming about the outdoors.
Clearly her life wasn't aligned with what makes her happy!
Some of her patients at the clinic, which Ms. Lai said served a primarily Latino population, didn’t have access to clean water. Some had family members who had been picked up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some had lost loved ones to Covid.
Healthcare systems and workers so often have to "clean up the mess" when our other governmental systems fail to care about and respect our people. The fact that operational changes to avoid so much downstream damage (and to improve the lives of people) haven't been made is at least in part a consequence of privatized healthcare.
If the US doesn't feel the cost of failing people earlier in the system in a material way (read: budget inefficiencies) they'll never "close the loop" or improve.
Do I actually care about dolls? Do I care about doll values? Not at all. What I do care about is the fact that collective web-based platforms for creating detailed resources like this have become a powerful extra-institutional model. We have these models for the kinds of objects that museums couldn't care less about, and they have the potential to be tremendously authoritative and precise.
I love collecting on the internet! This is something truly inspirational.
A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates is a text created by the Rand Corporation
figures
You spend a lunch break Google-stalking the Bragg family, who blogs and newspapers alternately revere as gods and reveal as fraud (was Patricia adopted? did Paul lie about his real age?), and as you sleuth you realize more and more how the Braggs actually have colored your life—like when your record-store boss got divorced and did the watermelon flush fast, in the beginning it made him crabby but pretty soon it gave him Lite-Brite dreams. Like Dr. Scholl's foot pads, like health spas, like progressive weight-training, hand juicers, the national availability of seven grain crackers—all of which Paul claims he inspired or brought to America.
This writer (Mairead Case) is so, so lovely - I love the specificity of the vapid, consumerist examples here used to exemplify the insanity of the book. Great summary!
Reading The Shocking Truth About Water is like going to the movies too, to a show in a big box theatre with lots of candy wrappers rustling.
I want a website that feels like this
Pask was fascinated with what was known as Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations, or PLATO—a system of computer terminals across North America and Europe all linked to the same mainframe computer that offered demonstrative learning programs to teach everything from the biology and reproduction of fruit flies to instruction in corporate sales techniques.
Learn more about PLATO! This is fascinating.
the most frightening thing of all is a robot that follows its own "whim" without the nuances of human morality and empathy
equally important is that this robot has agency greater than or equal to that of a human
n 1974, a computer had written a poem: My head thrives on pain Unseen by guilt Not relaxing not seducing Comfort if controlled Corrupts...
He uses the phrase "Turing complete design space", saying that Doom had one, whereas Wolfenstein didn't.
What does this mean?
Oliver Sacks
learn more about him!
I have a wide variety of response templates in Superhuman that allow me to do it in a nice, polite way.
Make an open source email client that provides this flexibility! Ultimately need some abstraction over communication systems like email or texting that's sufficiently flexible but adheres to the underlying protocols.
here are 50 ways to say no to meetings he doesn’t want to take.I know, because I’ve seen his templates. He calls them “Let Downs” and he has one for every occasion: When a person doesn’t fit into his circle of competence. When a person’s business isn’t large enough. When a person is trying to build a venture scale business. And those are just the most common ones.
Build more snippets!
Gaurav doesn’t worry too much about response time. He has explicitly told everyone he works with not to expect a reply from him in less than 24 hours. And that’s only if they email him on weekdays.
How can we build some application or protocol that communicates these social expectations? Would be cool to integrate a cooldown timer. gmail's reminder system is the closest approximation to this that I'm aware of.
Andy and I always liked trying to find opportunities that others had missed. Fill holes in a sense
Making a game requires constraints. Market conditions and unique opportunities supply the best constraints!
In the 80s and early 90s the best sellers on home systems were dominated by CAGs and their cousins (like “walk to the right and punch” or “walk to the right and shoot”).
Game to dominate a market that hadn't been specced into before!
I wanted to build something (a runtime), so the projects were mostly impervious to reality. Any corrective feedback from the world had to get past my preconception that, what ever the solution, it had to involve the runtime I was building.
This isn't the way to build products! Identify the actual user and be honest about it. If it's just me then build something I will use; otherwise you'll pretend that the service is for people it's not actually for, then feel frustrated when the tool doesn't seem to align with those fake standards. Tools with specific technical stipulations that don't impact the end user in a measurable way are built for you and/or for learning.
The principles they defined through experience in id’s earliest days built upon one another to produce a unique methodology and a constantly shippable codebase.
What are these? I'd love to find out!
After decades of gluing together software from a random set of libraries and frameworks, industry wide attacks on the software supply chain have proven this approach is unsustainable, and it's time to shift our thinking on how we write and ship software.
Would love to see this talk. How do we improve our software supply chain and ship sustainably and reliably?
My take is that it's usually fine to build most things in house against a small API surface.
Making an end-user company is a mistake from a technical, software engineering perspective because either you require a significant amount of engineering to re-build the high level interfaces that every company uses internally or you struggle to battle against an ever-growing API surface that you're programming against in addition to exposing a subset of that API to the end user to augment your own.
By contrast, streamlined systems are simple and elegant; they run in the background; they rely on interfaces that have been tried and true, and programming against those APIs often isn't as strict of a coupling as it seems. JS libraries become deeply embedded in work, but "boring" business processes typically program against Unix APIs that won't ever change.
The algorithms expressed in our language are both shorter and faster than state-of-the-art implementations.
This is the kicker. Halide wins on all fronts!
"I don't want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make."
How do I avoid making decisions about what I'm eating? That seems absurdly difficult.
Since there is typically not a new proof, equation, or algorithm pseudocode to point to as an explicitly identifiable contribution, the intellectual value in systems work is conveyed through careful exposition that documents wisdom gained from the design process.
We emphasize that reframing the problem in a particular fashion is the novelty rather than some hard technical work that enables the solution. Hard technical work is often important and vital to accomplishing such reframing, but the reframing itself is what powers so many companies and initiatives today.
Why is this article important?
To assess the contribution of a quality systems paper to the literature and to the world, we assess prose and technical ideation and their impacts; these thought processes translate to making smart technical decisions, organizing priorities, and planning what to work on outside of academia.
Evaluating
I don't think I like this explicit highlighting. Like the paper analogue, it feels like something that users should do to augment existing documents (as I'm doing now with this annotation tool) rather than an assistive technology for reading. I should determine what's most important about the work, not the author!
It's their job to leverage prose and more subtle annotation to emphasize their points; by contrast, it's my job to decipher and distill novel information from the article - information that helps me accomplish some goal, build some additional mental context, or obtain some information to be used elsewhere.
I love the expressive annotations and citations throughout this page. The font and CSS are quite beautiful and do a great job of flattering the text and information without distracting you from the point. (For the most part: I find the references to papers to stand out more than the rest of the text, which is strange to me - the name of the processor and the citation are not the most important aspects of the article by any stretch of the imagination, and do not deserve the same highlighting as other facts and figures... further, the fact that links are highlighted in bright blue by default is a bit of a historical accident - we chose blue as the default link color to emphasize and advertise connections to other spaces, but in documents and prose that now dominate over basic web showcases, the body text is far more important than the inline citations and other characteristics that stand only to support existing content rather than to encourage people to navigate away).
Want to get outside but still sleep in your own bed at night? Try one of my favorite local Bay Area hikes.
Best text I've seen on a professor's professional site!
The next time stdio.h is included in the project, it will skip over all the meat of this file since _STIOD_H_ will be defined. This is very rudimentary but useful!
This is confusing to me. This is how things should work by default, because we know (do we?) that they're both pulling in the same stdio.h. Right? There is likely a case where different libraries depend on different versions and such, but ultimately if you're using external headers it's quite difficult to manage that in the background. Maybe manual escape hatch was better than some sort of structured package management approach here.
write more
note to self
shout out to InKryption
I want to learn more about this person! What's the best way to distribute social identity so that I could?
Six weeks is really not a very long time
When will I have this attitude? Will I ever? This always startles me to read. At this stage in my life I feel like I can change the world in six weeks if I will it.
The error in precision grows as the time value increases, and the inaccuracy resulting from this is directly proportional to the target�s velocity.
Floating point considered bad
solve a poetic form
What does this mean, exactly?
committed humanists might still be sceptical of robots’ capacity to truly write poetry.
The point of poetry to me is that it is human and reflects the ideas and experiences of the person behind it, so to me "poetry by a robot" is meaningless...
fairly good poems
TODO: look into algorithmic poetry in more depth! What is there to explore here?
What Can Poets Do About Robots?
On automating creative work; increasingly relevant now that we have AI systems like DALL-E, trained on the work of artists over thousands of years, that attempt to mass produce generative creative work corresponding to a text-based prompt.
It’s a stress test intended to elicit biography, resilience, and the real story.
What's my story? How do I best angle it?
Andreessen’s vision of the future, and of his escape route, came from television.
This makes a lot of sense...
in the local parlance.
I can never live in a place like this
express what a program is meant to compute and to verify that the program does meet this expectation
How ergonomic is (uninteractive) theorem proving within a comment form? Are there IDE plugins for this or do these functions result in some verifier runtime error?
the level of attentiveness at his restaurants is quietly, unobtrusively superb; I can’t think of any restaurant groups where the service staff “does” more for the customer without seeming fussy
Get out of the way!
Any API's that have to go in some complicated sequence, do this, then this, then this. That's bad.
Isn't this what is advocated for below when explaining how to compose a pluggable interface without callbacks? I feel like introducing a callback is fine.
xample code should never be sketches. It should be production ready.
Example code isn't cheap or quick - no matter how you represent it, this code sets the tone for canonical project use. If it's not properly written then (1) the library should be simple enough to make the canonical usage obvious, so you've messed up, and (2) you should spend more time using your library to understand how to make it both idiomatic and intuitive.
and they look similar – but it’s not the same.
The real answer isn't to take screenshots of exports; it's to isolate software environments to preserve exactly the conditions in which the original work was produced, storing this information with the work itself. Example: storing a flake.nix and corresponding flake.lock file within a repository, reproducible so long as NixOS is around and runs on the system.
the imperfect information that's like a millstone crushing the job market in the English-speaking Caribbean
What is causing this?
“What are the chances?” I thought. But then I was introduced to the executive from Def Jam who had brought the video in. He looked up from his two-way and shook my hand.
Impeccable - Rubin makes it all happen. The ultimate product manager?
To listen to it is to be imploded into a single molecule, sucked into a vacuum, passed through a portal and exploded into infinity
I want to feel like this.
Replace yourself.
Move to a position hat best fits and respects your capacity and work ethic, and continue to move into new positions. Demonstrate growth and continue to find it.
Often, changing your frame will let you find a solution that solves a much larger problem or eliminates the problem altogether.
Rework ideas! Visualize things in different ways! Redefine roles. Ideally the best design or solution is the one that implicitly eliminates most of the problems.
Changing strategy feels like progress but it usually isn’t.
Reminiscent of the mythical man-month - changing strategy is no different from adding additional developers, reorganizing the team, etc - and depending on your definition of strategy may encompass all of those things.
he company 10x’ed in size and the impact of the relentless focus on doing great work together, and being stewards of company culture, revealed itself over and over again. My work kept getting better. My relationships with colleagues kept getting deeper. The benefits of becoming a better collaborator and communicator extended to my non-work life, too.
How can an environment like this be built? We must both respect the freedom of coworkers and constantly motivate one another towards a goal; to impart the incredible importance that doing more work has to the company. It's cool to romanticise work, actually, because work can change the world and improve the lives of people.
If this state of flow is broken due to software being unresponsive or slow to respond to user input, they are distracted from the task at hand that they are trying to accomplish
Slow software, by this definition, is both technically slow and design slow - if a design flow impedes the user from taking an action ergonomically, it's just as bad as if the program is not performant.
Unfortunately, most programs handle both incorrectly - they don't provide an ergonomic way to accomplish a desired task, and they introduce a ton of computational latency when trying to do so. Latency is bad! But design is lower hanging fruit.
implements film grain as part of the display pipeline.
Saves time and performance relative to attempting to compress the grain! Brilliant.
BBOM
or "big ball of mud" - a software system without a perceivable architecture. (Wikipedia)
Database is very nicely abstracted away which is a good thing; but this also means accessing a property could cause a database hit. In fact, due to the simplicity, a lot of developers tend to forget that they are working with a row in database.
Explicitly obfuscating critical external access information - hitting a database, making a system call, pulling data from another URL - is an anti pattern that hurts the end user.
As a programmer, I need to constantly develop a threat model of the systems I'm combining in my program. Will this database invocation trigger an exception? What about this memory allocation? Can I safely send this packet across the network without disruption?
We need to model not only the actions themselves in our heads, but also two other things: the exceptional behavior that could come from our code and the performance implications of a particular action. If I don't know, then I can't program effectively.
The case can be made that performance doesn't matter until it's profiled, but some operations can be ludicrously inefficient - and those need to be explicitly noted.
Henter had been driving on the right side of the road, just as he did back home. Instinctively, he swerved right. But the other driver, faithful to his own British instincts, swerved left
It's so clear that this inconsistency is a public health hazard and incurs significant mental load - no different from the imperial system of measurement. Why is this okay?
asked Twitter for features
If our platforms were easily modifiable by end users, we wouldn't have to - these communities are deliberately and consistently under-served by technology companies who will never find accessibility to be a priority in terms of the profit margin, so the only alternative is to allow end users to freely modify the user interfaces to the products they use - augmenting existing interfaces with desired features independent of large-scale market demand.
Government regulation to require specific product accommodations might be limiting - but requiring modifiability of interfaces to enable accommodating software development from third parties is another story.
we had a plastic box where you could literally cut and paste pieces of paper with words and pictures on it, and then use your voice to record sounds that then my son could press to play out loud. It was over a foot long. It cost over $3,000
What does our medical system really incentivize? Our government? I really don't understand the misallocation of resources here towards objects that aren't even locally optimal for their ideas
Greg and I felt that creating quality educational software was a public service. We were doing it to help kids learn math. Public schools are too poor to buy software, so the most effective way to deliver it is to install it at the factory.
Today we have 'freemium' website services for this!
I wanted our program to ship with every Macintosh, so I had designed it for all users, even those who know little about computers and hate math. I wanted to make mathematics as easy and enjoyable as playing a game. In a classroom, any time spent frustrated with the computer is time taken away from teaching. Sitting behind a two-way mirror, watching first-time users struggle with our software, reminded me that programmers are the least qualified people to design software for novices.
<3
Most engineers at Apple had been through many canceled projects and completely understood my motivation.
How does it feel to sink a year of work into something that's scrapped and will never be used or seen? I can't imagine working for such a company for this reason. The scale and reliability are promising, sure - but to build something that will never see the light of day, to dream of and work on something for years that people will never use, feels soul-crushing.
I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.
Most powerful coder. The determination this takes is incredibly admirable.
Kansas takes input events from the users and posts them to their respective target morph. Then all active morphs are sent the step message, and finally all morphs requiring redisplay are asked to repaint themselves.
This is really just global messages with DOM diff - difference between this and reactive model is that the latter listens for changes in data while the former explicitly sends messages upon user interaction to directly affect the displayed tree (rather than constructing a dependency graph from data and resolving it whenever a data transformation is committed by a user action)
We can solve these two problems in the benign case as follows.
A facilitator (one of the authors) simply summoned the outliner for the projectile, and added a "come home" method, which set the projectile's velocity to zero and reset its position.
The workspace is end-user modifiable in real time! This is the kind of flexibility we're lacking from most systems and tooling. Web apps don't present interfaces for modification in a transparent fashion (the console would work great if not for all of this transpilation/obfuscation business...)