harrylove

A more accurate analogy is Charles and Henry Greene using tech to construct an intricate rig to fasten the joints in a delicate jewelry box to fit inside the Gamble House. Yes, they could make the rig by hand, but time is a precious resource to people with so much to build.

What Tao and other artists of his caliber are demonstrating is that the tech is capable of building the rig. And the machine makers are incrementally demonstrating that the machine can make not only the jewelry box rig, but rigs to build rig-making machines.

Love love love this. So much wisdom I wish I’d had 30 years ago.

Here’s the tl;dr in my opinion, with my own paraphrase:

Approach [life] with curiosity and generosity, not transactional hustle.

Everything else essentially follows.

Also learn the Heimlich maneuver if you can. It’s easy to learn and you don’t need to be certified. Never thought I’d need it but I saved my brother’s life many years ago. An outlier for sure given about 6,000 people in the US die from choking each year, but still.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21675-heiml...

Imagine what they’ll say 600,000 years from now.

“Humans began to acquire knowledge around the time of Dacro and the Second Wormhole Leap. The farther back we go…”

Should have put a “C.” in the middle of the name. Would have been an instant buy.

On a related note (la), if this floats your ice cream, you might be interested in Ben Houge's Food Opera sound/dining experiments (http://www.audiogustatory.com/).

My daily meditation: “Now when we fought you had the eye of the tiger, man—the edge—and now you’ve got to get it back, and the way to get it back is to go back to the beginning, you know what I mean?”

RIP Carl.

This comment was the best roller coaster I've ridden in a long time. Thank you for the great writing. I can't stop laughing.

This answer unlocked a principle in my thinking about a certain class of problems I’ve been struggling with in a different domain. Thank you!

FWIW, I used Suica on Apple Wallet on my iPhone 12 in July of this year. Adding money to the card required a debit card tied to my bank. Payment failed with a Visa credit card. Additionally, payment only worked during Japan business hours. But as long as there was money on the card, the card itself (on the phone) worked around the clock. The card worked for train travel, convenience stores, and vending machines.

Toyoda Automatic Loom Works had the jidoka system which automatically stopped the loom when a thread broke[0] preventing downstream production issues. Later used in the Toyota Production System.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakichi_Toyoda

Even so, it feels like an off-brand article for The Paris Review, in both content and style. I’d be interested in learning the context.

Your airports have security because your leaders learned the same things on 9/11 that the US did.

I have to imagine that politics and power plays also contributed to these changes, as they did with the creation of Homeland Security, the apparent changes in surveillance, the uptick in militarization of police forces, the apparent changes in our attitudes toward incarceration, interrogation, and torture of suspected terrorists, and so on.

When irrationality takes over, people want to feel safe more than they care about being safe. So, as a politician, if I want to achieve and maintain a high approval rating, I must attend to people's beliefs more than I must attend to their needs.

Thus, if other world leaders enact hardline policies and I am a leader in a country where my constituents are innumerate, illiterate, ignorant, or civically uninvolved, then following the lead of a strongman country is a shortcut to achieving my political ends. And in these cases, if other world leaders make these changes and I choose to do nothing, even if doing nothing is the right course of action, I should probably expect my approval rating to drop.

Isn't that a "No True Scotsman" argument?

I think it's hyperbolic to call it a waste of time. I think the book (and the related books and principles) deserve a critical reading. In the first section titled "Using This Book" he mentions several important details that I think you are missing in your critique.

One, it is meant to be read alongside The Timeless Way of Building. It is not simply a how-to manual.

Two, it comes from experience gleaned in the field working as an architect and builder. It is not simply highbrow art, mysticism, or eccentricity.

Three, the patterns are separate from implementation: "[You] can use the solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice." He goes on to distinguish patterns in which he believes an invariant property has been established from those in which more research is needed. He even states that some patterns are just a guess and shows how to identify those in the description of each pattern.

Lastly, he states there is a danger that people will assume that this one pattern language should stand for all time: "Is it not true that there is a danger that people might come to rely on this one printed language, instead of developing their own languages, in their own minds? The fact is, we have written this book as a first step in the society-wide process by which people will gradually become conscious of their own pattern languages, and work to improve them."

The purpose of the book and its principles is not to recreate an aesthetic through pastiche. You are meant to use the principles in the book to create your own language that works for your context. A pattern that works for me in my environment may not work for you. That fact doesn't nullify the value of the pattern. The purpose of the two books together is to acknowledge that humans have deep feelings about the environments they inhabit. Whether those feelings can be explained or not is beside the point. The point is that we have them. These feelings happen across cultures and time. When we apply those feelings about our environments to the built world, several patterns seem to emerge. Hence, you get the concept of pattern languages.

Alexander takes the bold step of not only acknowledging human feelings but centering them in the discussion about how the world should be built. This point should interest those who are sympathetic to the Agile Manifesto, or to principles of user-centered design, or to product design and product management. This fact is also likely why certain interests are uncomfortable with his work. Powerful interests do not, in general, like to lose power, and change is expensive.

Later works, including his series on The Nature of Order go deeper into his exploration of these principles, even the possibility of an objective evaluation of beauty. And yes, there is a bit of woo going on which can make some people feel uncomfortable. We are all capable thinkers. You can decide for yourself which ideas resonate and which do not.

Personally, I found that his ideas changed the way I experience the world, including giving me the ability to evaluate the kind of home I want to live in and how to optimize that home to increase my own happiness. I may not ever get the chance to build my own home. But I have a voice. I participate in society. I believe the world could and should do better than optimize itself for money. I believe I am not unique in finding the books useful.

(edited for clarity)

I love seeing the world through new frames like this. I think it's refreshing, and forces a rethink of what I think I know.

At the same time, without a critical examination of the idea, these things have a nasty habit of becoming the next pseudoscience, like Myers-Briggs, learning styles, growth mindset, and the like.

Identifying yourself or someone else as an Asker vs. Guesser to explain behavior is about as helpful as identifying yourself as a Sagittarius or Capricorn. Fun to think about occasionally, but no basis in fact.

Agree on all fronts. Would also add Oh My God just for the Busta Rhymes inclusion.

If I had to pick one ATCQ track that satisfies the condition, I'd pick "Jazz (We've Got)" which has a couple of samples from "Green Dolphin Street" plus the drums from "Don't Change Your Love".

The parent comment is quoting a classic bar from "My Philosophy" by Boogie Down Productions[0].

[0] https://genius.com/376131

FWIW, whatever issues the BF franchise had in the past, BF42 is super fun today, and stole me away from multiplayer Halo Infinite, which is also pretty great.

Okay, they really did themselves in by mentioning examples because all I can think about now are some of my favorites they didn't mention. One of my favorite breakdowns of not only drums but also the writing and recording process is Donald Fagen, Walter Becker, and Bernard Purdie talking about the drums on "Home At Last" off the Aja album[0]. Not going to debate if Aja is actually a rock album in the classic School of Rock sense but, my god, what a great track and drum part.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ldtieSEyQM

Counterpoint[0]: I have a master's degree in composition and I don't play any instruments at a decent level of performance. I would say the requisite skill is knowing how instruments sound, how they sound together, where their limits are, where the golden sounds and techniques can be found, and how to notate all of that so you can reproduce it accurately. If you can read a piece of music and know what it sounds like without needing to hear it played, you'll be fine. And that's also a skill you can learn, just like performance. The rest of composition is experience, artistic vision, and luck, just like every other job.

[0] wink

They could have nailed it if each paragraph was numbered and the last sentence was a summary of the rant combined with a helpful reminder that persuasive copyrighting for heated cup holders requires a deep understanding of the target audience.

There’s probably quite a few kindergartens that could benefit from having something like this installed.

Agree on gaslight as the intended word. Ghost light also has a theatrical origin, still in use today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_light_(theatre)

The next few stops on this train will be interesting.

1. The first round of plugins that will connect CGPT to the cloud platforms in order to run code directly. Because there’s no need to copy/paste on my own machine. With cloud costs so cheap, why wouldn’t I just ask Chat to spin up running code over and over until it works? Token limits will continue to fall, as will AI costs.

2. The round of plugins that translate my questions/search into prompts that can do #1 for me. Because I don’t need a quarter-inch drill (running code), I need a quarter-inch hole (an answer to a question). Now we’re not only in the world of serverless, we’re codeless. (Can’t wait to hear people complain “but there’s code somewhere” while the business goes bust.)

3. The services that run autonomously, asking questions and gathering answers on my behalf. Because it benefits companies to know my preferences, take action to acquire goods for me, measure the results that I share, make inferences, and perform the next step without me asking, sometimes without me even knowing. As long as I’m happy and keep paying the bills. Or I should say, as long as my bank AI keeps paying for me. Now we’re in the agent cloud.

4. Then…

This reminds me of that standup routine from Billy Connolly where he talks about archaeologists finding the remains of an aircraft disaster 400 years from now in the middle of mountainous terrain, seeing people in life jackets and believing there must have been a river nearby.

Short-sighted employers will probably cut staff. The other more likely scenario is that teams will be asked to produce more work faster by letting AI handle the boilerplate. Creative directors and producers will run a lot more experiments with fresh ideas and then use the expert skills of their teams to produce a cohesive, polished product.

The end result may be that we get a ton of mediocre, high-fructose-corn-syrup art at first. The hype for that will last about three months. We’ll also see an increase in typical fare from big studios as they figure out how to monetize long-tail content. And then occasionally there will be a true work of art or a new form of art we haven’t seen yet.

Supply and demand.

I think The Nature of Order vol. 1: The Phenomenon of Life is what you’re looking for. Going back in time, The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language show the roots of The Nature of Order series. To look at a recent case study, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth.

I also recommend looking at works by Salingaros and Mehaffy like Design for a Living Planet, Principles of Urban Structure, and Unified Architecture Theory.

Looks interesting. Doesn’t explicitly state up front, but this is the resource page for the Beautiful Software seminar. https://www.buildingbeauty.org/beautiful-software