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I find the small (relatively speaking) homes of some of the big architects more fascinating than the big flagship buildings. Another example is Louis Kahn's Esherick House: https://archeyes.com/the-margaret-esherick-house-by-louis-ka...
(But yeah, as someone else mentioned, many of them probably demanded a special fortitude of those who chose to live in them.)
I always assumed that part of what made "the great architects" great was their skill in combining lofty visions with practical engineering, making houses that were at once artistic statements and durable, comfortable living spaces... utilizing the strengths of different materials, built on sound engineering principles and so on.
But these architects seem to be more interested in the experience you get when _visiting_ the house in its environment, rather than the experience of actually living in it, and these houses are famously often impractical, hard to maintain, and in need of constant repair. That makes them less interesting to me.
This is my favorite kind of website. An individual going into depth on a topic they're passionate (in the true sense of the word) about. Another example is Dan's Motorcycle Repair Web page [1]. A collection of such websites would be awesome.
Looks interesting, I wonder to what extent they really want to make cars DIY-able again (as they state). On the one hand, they mention servicing is "easy" — just turn to their partner repair shop chain! On the other hand, there's Slate University and mention of repairability. I haven't followed development of this at all, so I'm genuinely curious. Hope it's not just "you can swap in and out our proprietary modules".
I have a theory that these environmental regulations at least to some degree defeat themselves. They make engines more complicated, so more fragile and harder for an amateur (edit: or any professional who isn't their own brand repair shops) to service. They encourage smaller-block engines with turbos and compressors which makes the engine more short-lived. They produce stuff like throttle-hang and gear selection recommendations optimized for driving economy, not engine longevity (or driving experience, for that matter).
On the whole, they seem to be contributing to this movement of taking power away from the end consumer and making your product more and more like a subscription (this goes further than the car industry, of course). I do realize that it's important to cut down on pollution! And maybe this kind of stuff has been studied... although I imagine it would be very hard to do accurately.
Imagine if a car manufacturer would provide service guides, easily-accessible part diagrams and competitively priced spare parts. Imagine if they optimized for longevity and if the handbook that came with the car had more technical details than it had warnings about how doing any kind of maintenance yourself will result in a) your death and b) a voided warranty. That would be pretty nice.
I agree with this article. I just want to add one thing: the author mentions companies in general, CEOs and the media as culprits. I'd like to add the people working at those companies.
Few of those might be actively looking at graphs and deciding to make the product worse for the sake of short-term revenue increase. Yet every act of enshittification takes people to make it happen. Those who "just work here", who may be slightly uneasy with adding another popup or displaying more ads but still do it, actively contribute to the problem. That's a decision they make. Even if those employees feel they are doing this only to keep a roof over their children's head or something along those lines, it's worth pointing out there's a choice being made.
This is especially worth mentioning as I think there are rarely actual evil masterminds — most enshittification is a result of tens, hundreds, thousands of people incentivized to repeatedly do things that are just a little bad.
Speculating here but I'd say a big part of the reason Dan Luu has as big a reach as he has is that he isn't the kind of writer who'll change his style to accommodate the audience that just wants to do a quick scan.
Somewhat unrelated but Apple are mainly focusing on Apple Intelligence in these new announcements.
The first version of OS X I used was Mavericks. In hindsight, that was the last great version of OS X for me — the last version where it seems the priorities of the people deciding the direction of development where somewhat aligned with mine.
Many have written about the decline in usability and attention to detail in OS X since then — I guess Apple Intelligence represents this shift in focus perfectly: a black-box interface that may or may not do something along the lines of what you were intending.
I agree that the mainstream web is becoming increasingly useless, but at the same time, there are counter-movements: search engines like Marginalia, decentralized communities and federated protocols, open-source projects and businesses, "the indie web".
"Small Discord servers, Telegram groups and mailing lists" aren't the only places good stuff happens on the internet, though it might take some deliberate effort to find the right ones.
Yeah, and it's not just the drivers. It's that everything is about money first and foremost in the sport. That seems to be what happens with any sport once it grows big enough.
The drivers, incredibly skilled as they are, will also frequently do things like go on the radio during races and complain about their car to their team, i.e. the persons responsible for said car. Not offer any constructive input, just... complain. Often. On the other hand, that's one of the few times they actually show any emotions or say what they think, with all the media training and endless PR events and making sure the sponsor logo on their hat is clearly in view in interview after interview after interview... Yeah, I'm ranting. But it's all just so incredibly blatantly commercial. Again, like any sport once it grows big enough.
(Another commenter wrote about the interesting technical side of the sport: I agree that there would be so many more interesting stories to tell there: about car development, strategy, manufacturing... but whenever these things are touched upon, it's done in a very shallow way, to prevent people quitting their subscription in horror at having to digest some actual information. Instead we get things like PR events with drivers having to pretend they enjoy whatever ridiculous competition they're put in against their teammate as part of their contractual obligations. It seems there could be so much more there... but perhaps this way is more profitable.)
I agree with the article, but was thinking along the same lines.
What if a business actually takes a long-term view: investing in standards and fostering it's ecosystem instead of trying to outmaneuver competitors using any short-term tricks available? What if a company makes a great dishwasher and only change it when they can improve it? Will they inevitably be driven into extinction or bought up by more short-term profit-hungry enterprises? Maybe... but is that really inevitable?
Not arguing with that. In discussions about Electron, there are often comments along the lines of "Electron apps can be fast if done right, just look at VS Code" and that just doesn't hold true for me.
Agreed on the power-user stuff and the courses. I use Obsidian in a simple way, but it's nice that the extensibility and the community is there.
Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
As mentioned elsewhere, users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me. I don't think most of those drive-by open-source commenters have thought about the work that goes into running an open-source project.
In other words, on some theoretical plane I'd like Obsidian to be an open-source native app, but in reality those things haven't bothered me at all. The app is as simple as I want it to be, as complex as I need it to be, and it's regularly improved in a thoughtful way.
I'm not sure... someone else can probably give a better answer on this! Medicine, weather prediction, logistics and driving aids are a few possibilities that come to mind, but I don't know if those are actual ones.
Even if there were no benefits, I think the quote in question was pointless without noting this. But what the quote actually refers to is a "worldview where advances in software and A.I. are the keys to figuring out almost any issue" — I would say it's safe to say that software has had some positive impact in the world.
Some of the reasons put forth by Pinker:
* a poor country prioritizes growth while a richer one can afford to consider the environment
* a richer country has access to more efficient technology
* on the level of individuals, moral (or future) concerns are not in the forefront of your mind until you have your immediate needs for shelter, food etc. covered.
Having just read Steven Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now", I'm skeptical of any article that paints this cynical view of how humans are wasting the earth, living their short-sighted lives with no regard for their future descendants.
The reality is that science, described here as "keeping the whole system of technical improvisation from falling down", is eradicating extreme poverty and disease on an incredible scale. It is also making poor countries less poor, which in turn makes their people better off and, yes, make them contribute less to pollution (it also slows population growth). It seems likely to me that the hits taken by the economy in these circumstances will be felt harder in poorer countries, slowing this positive progress for a while.
The author actually notes that the earth holding close to 8 billion people is only made possible by science. He describes this as "unnatural and unstable". This, combined with the fact that further scientific progress is required for all these people to be healthy and well-fed makes me tend to agree with the poster reacting the the novel Aurora and noting "we don't have anywhere to go back to".
I agree that the article is a little heavy on the author's opinion — the quote above neglects to put the perils of software and machine learning in any kind of relation to their positive impact, which makes it sort of pointless. Also, headlining a section "I don't care", when the (paraphrased) quote is "I don't care why people listen to me, as long as I have a positive impact", is just ridiculous.
I'd say the class name can be semantic whether it's semantic with regards to the components function, its form or something else. It's not self-evident to me that a name given to something in order to affect its form should be semantic with regards to its function, not its form.
As I understand utility-first CSS, changing the classes as in your example is very much what you might do. Why would this make sense? Because the situation where we want to "change how this component looks in the sidebar, but keep it the same as before in the footer", or "show this component slightly differently in a new context, without changing its appearance in its old contexts" is much more common than the situation where we want to change the look of a component everywhere it appears. In this case, utility-first CSS makes it very easy to make all these small, "one-off" changes.
Well, yes. So, in the hypothetical situation where classes are added just for styling, is it a given that the correct way to name it is a way that stays the same when the styling changes?
God I miss it. I miss the goal of just cleanly naming things what they are, not how they look.
I think utility-first CSS has its benefits as well as it's drawbacks, but just regarding the statement above: wouldn't you say that when naming things for the purpose of targeting them with styling, what they look like is indeed what they are?
As in, referring to, for example, ".comment" and ".testimonial" in your CSS, when those classes have been added purely for the purpose of styling the elements as what is commonly called a media component, could be considered less semantic than just naming them according to how they look -- as that's the reason for naming them in this case?
(I think these are two different ways of looking at the issue, none of which is clearly the right or wrong one.)
If you expect income, you're not really looking to build a free product, are you? Seems to me, a paywall (or similar) is the honest way; those who get value from your product give value back, in the most direct and transparent way possible.
(I know I'm trivializing the question; I'm not in your situation and I don't know the perfect model for your product. But I disagree with just lumping together "paywalls" and "advertising" in the same category of "non-desirable things".)
As someone pointed out, it probably has to do with controlling the stack all the way from hardware to userspace. Increasingly, Apples UIs run on top of Metal and I get the impression they want complete control, not just "good enough". Which makes sense, it's what makes Apple worth it for many people. I totally get the inconvenience from a developers (or gamers) perspective, though.
Bukowski's books glorify drinking like the movie Leaving Las Vegas glorifies drinking: the trailer may give you the impression they're about getting drunk and having fun, but sit through the whole actual thing, and having a drink is the last thing on your mind.
Sleep is awesome, yes. I don't quite get how people like Jocko Willink (https://twitter.com/jockowillink) function... but at least for me, the hours I sleep are rarely the limiting factor regarding how much I get done, but rather how I use the hours I'm awake.
I like Terminal, but a very specific feature of iTerm2 I wish Terminal had is using one of the option keys as meta, while letting you keep the other for typing characters like "@" on some non-english keyboards.
It seems to me a lot of the people making a living out of art or other "commercially challenging" occupations have cultivated a passion for the business part of it as well.
I don't mean that in a cynical sense. If you view business and making money as a "necessary evil", a taint on the face of your pure artistry, then you're probably going to be miserable trying to make a living. I prefer to think about it as finding a way to create value for others through what you like to do.
Agreed. The article sort of presents these kind of "computer problems" as a barrier to getting started with programming. I don't quite agree -- or maybe they are, but only in the sense that they "filter out" those who don't really want to be programmers at an earlier point in time.
Don't get me wrong; I don't think there's any point in making new programmers jump through arbitrary hoops because "programming should be hard". But I think that today, programming is necessarily intertwined with computing and problem-solving in general, and all the Dockers and specialised positions in the world don't change that. To be a good developer, you need to have some idea about the systems your code will be running on. A program doesn't just exist in a bubble. (This is more true for some kinds of applications, less for others, of course.)
I think it's quite rare that people actually knowingly act amorally -- everyone tends to see themselves as the good guys, or compelled to do bad things by circumstances out of their control. You mention WWII; I have the impression that one of the factors generally considered to be behind the war were the repercussions/aggression against Germany following WWI. Dismissing every German not actively fighting back against the Nazis as "stupid and/or evil" is in my book an example of the mistaken viewpoint I mentioned earlier... but yes, these discussions tend to get out of hand :).
As you mention, sometimes action is required, and that doesn't preclude an understanding viewpoint.
Spot on. And of course, in your example of the "social justice warriors", the same goes for people spewing hate at them, and the people hating these people, and so on...
I think in most (all?) situations when there's a movement among people in a direction which seems blatantly wrong to you, the worst thing to do is to dismiss everyone taking part in this movement as stupid and/or evil. You're not going to improve things and you'll probably contribute to make them worse.
From the article, you get the clear impression that she had a complicated relationship with the sport: she was passionate about it, but afraid of it as well.
I can't help but wonder if she would have gotten closer to her goals if she had been able to see things in a less scary light -- by being taught and supported in a more positive way, or something like that. I guess it's down to who you are as a person, but attitudes can be developed in different ways.
I wonder if there is a distinction between top performers and mere mortals here -- that the top performers manage to find the love for what they are doing even under intense pressure? And, in that case, which way the causality goes...