GuiA

"We must learn to welcome whatever comes to us and trust that we will be able to make the most of it."

It’s hard to beat trucks and minimum wage drivers (and everyone’s hoping that the “driver” part of the equation will be removed sooner rather than later)

If we’re going super future, drones seem more plausible.

Printing is a craft, and practicing with others is a great way to get better, have fun, make new friends, all that good stuff!

In San Francisco, we are blessed to have Harvey Milk Photo Center (harveymilkphotocenter.org), one of the largest public darkrooms in the world. Once this is all over, drop by and make some prints!

(feel free to shoot me a line! i am a long time member there but otherwise not affiliated)

Granted, everyone in the world is suddenly moral and of utmost integrity and everyone gets used to this new reality. The economic upside in lying/cheating is now so high that a few minutes later the world is back to exactly what it was, except for the first few persons to decide that lying wasn't such a bad idea, who are now a few billion dollars richer.

> Religions, for all their faults, and for all of their misguided morality, at least had morality frameworks that were more or less unified and teachable

This is your daily reminder that the Catholic Church is the organization with the most identified pedophiles in the world. (I'd have written "convicted", but they work really hard - and are really good - at preventing that outcome).

If you’re a programmer who doesn’t know any CS at all, you probably have a lot of room to improve.

Kind of like a chef who only uses frozen foods and then doesn’t understand why things taste weird.

Can you murder your competitors in this 1 square mile? Can you steal their inventory? Can you hijack their equipment? Can you threaten their employees? Can you force your employees to work overtime till they drop? Can you dump all your industrial waste wherever you want in that 1 square mile? What about animal/human testing?

That was not much more than one second of thinking but that’s about what this idea deserves.

It doesn’t hurt that doing it makes you feel like you’re doing something useful, it gives you a shiny deliverable, ... but in the end there likely are better ways to answer the kind of questions you really want to answer, and many of them involve making the actual thing vs making things that only serve the planning of the making of the thing.

Surprisingly, it has a very decent battery life - 20 hours without the backlight, 12 with.

Because while we should totally condemn the former, it seems that we’re discussing the latter here, and it’s hard to get riled up about.

They hate him cause they ain’t him.

At the same time, turning boring results into something fit for publishing can be very time consuming - more than the research itself, and at the opportunity cost of attacking juicier problems.

So if your goal is to utterly revolutionize a field, and you are very confident in your abilities to do so, it’s not the worst strategy in the world to just chase the ideas you’re most excited about and forgo the traditional bureaucratic paths.

It’d be nice to see the authors of this manifesto make a small program (image editor, chat client, etc) that embodies the values they have in mind.

Still have mine for LocoRoco and FF Tactics.

Much like a kid might say they want to be a footballer or musician - what they really want is the fame and recognition of being a footballer, not the 6 hours of intense training every day for years without any fame and glory. We see this much more in tech than we did 10 years ago, because now everyone wants to be a rockstar CEO hacker startup founder making a $1 billion exit at 19.

And in fact in some cases you can suck it up, major in CS, get a prestigious tech job, and then after a few years burn out because you realize you never really liked CS/programming in the first place, you just liked the social stickers that were on it. I’ve seen it happen many times in my career. Often these people will pivot to being PMs or some “tech lite” function and be much happier for it.

The fact that people suck at knowing what they really want doesn’t make the observation any less valid.

What that means is that you have to get really good at knowing what you actually like and enjoy - not what you enjoy on the surface of it not for its own sake, but for some values attached to it.

The “encoding problem” for Asian languages is real, but it goes back earlier than that, as it emerged with typewriters. See Thomas Mullaney’s “A history of the Chinese typewriter”, and Nanette Gottlieb’s “Word Processing Technology in Japan” for more. By the late 90s/00s it wasn’t a significant primary factor (that is if it was a factor, it was due to cultural inertia, and not lack of access to technology itself).

I think the problem here is looked at backwards. It’s not that Japan sucks at software - it’s that the US/North America got extremely good at software in the last 20 years (by a combination of factors that feed into each other, as always: the best research labs are in the US, the tools are built in the US, the companies that make use of them for competitive advantage are in the US, the economic context most favorable to founding such companies is in the US, etc). The rest of the world is catching up, but the gap is still visible.

The market didn’t really care for them.

Which makes sense. People already have a phone, they don’t want an additional thing to carry around. People want a flagship phone, not a worse phone that’s more expensive because it can play some exclusive games.

The Nintendo switch was the right form factor, but only Nintendo has the IP to pull it off. If MS or Sony were to make a Switch-like, it’d fail much like the nvidia shield has.

So yes, if your goal is to make money/get an audience rather than purely documenting (nothing wrong with that), you’re much better off making a 10 minute YouTube video than writing a 5 page article.

Not anymore ;_;

> I don’t know who seeded this meme that Americans pay low taxes.

Great question! It comes up all the time in conversations with my friends/family back home (France). They all have it in their head that I must pay 10% in taxes or something, but it’s really roughly the same when you scale for income differences etc. In fact depending on how you model it, I could argue that I proportionally pay more taxes than I would in France at a similar career level.

A $7M villa, on the other hand, would be only ~230 years of labor for a US solider paid $30k a year.

A pound of pork at Safeway today is ~3/lb. 100 pounds would be $300, which would be quite a meager yearly pay.

My main takeaway is that pork has likely gotten much cheaper, but not seaside villas.

It’s not that crazy, and it’s based in empirical observation and consistent with our biological/medical understanding.

Soup kitchens are funded with private donations more often than not these days.