20,066 karma · joined October 10, 2011
What does this mean? Where can I read more about this?
Screwing the environment further to make shiny toys that will be thrown in the garbage a few months/years later is not something we should be doing more of. When it's for something like a medical device, it's one thing. When it's for videogames that can run on any general purpose computer, it's another.
If there's any interesting work in that space, would love to hear about it.
If this revolts you on a deep level, then you could try putting some of that energy towards building the community places not owned by mega corporations that those people are lacking.
In this way software engineering resembles traditional craftsmanship more than any other discipline.
This effect is so powerful that even if your business has a strong physical component (Uber, Airbnb, etc) the scalability of software still puts you at a huge advantage.
As a doctor or lawyer, you tend to be limited to a radius around your immediate physical location.
Software is a weird beast that we haven’t really seen any equivalents to in human history.
My grandma worked on typewriters, and then word processors in the 70s/80s. She had no problem doing her job.
She’d been using a Windows laptop since the mid/late 2000’s, and it’s always been a huge struggle for her. She’d frequently enable/disable features without noticing, etc.
Her tablet has been, as they say, like a glass of iced water in hell. She is far from a power user, but there is not a single thing she did on her laptop that she cannot do on her tablet.
The degree of complexity that can be adequately conveyed graphically on a single screen though is fairly constant.
How do we turn it into concrete, short term action?
What’s the 2019 equivalent of smashing curbs for wheelchair access? (https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/)
Pointing that it’s common in other cultures weakens the article’s argument that “East Asians put their family name first because family affiliation was traditionally the most important information about a person, the individual identity coming second.”
Costing him $10k/day to run though.
I have, it does, it's called Oberon, it was glorious.
Copying text from UI elements was also never an issue for me in GTK2 (can't speak for 3, haven't used it much), it was great (although I admit I don't know if there were a few places in the system where I couldn't copy text, it may not have been 100% the case).
When I'm working in terminal apps (more often than you can likely imagine) on Linux I can also expect to copy text everywhere, it's great.
I'd encourage you to use a diversity of computing systems, it'll broaden your perspective and imagination and sense of possibilities :)
It would make sense, and all text in a user interface should be user selectable and offer the same behaviors.
Maybe you need to copy and paste a lengthy error message. Maybe there’s a word you don’t understand you want to look up in a dictionary. Maybe the interface isn’t in your native language and you want to translate it.
The fact that most mainstream computing environments don’t offer this in 2019 doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do, rather that our systems have regressed in some (many?) areas when it comes to usability.
E.g. Courier is on it, but Courier was never more than a design concept video, so considering it a "discontinued" product is off.
Similarly, no mention of the original Microsoft Surface - a 30 inch tabletop computer that shipped from 2008 to 2011.
Then there are also the streets that get blocked off for markets (eg 22nd between Mission and Valencia every Thursday afternoon/evening), also very pleasant.
The more of these the better for our cities.
Working in collectivities with young children, we'd have a sheet of paper with a sun/moon on each side, and every morning at 7 one of us would go in every room and turn the piece of paper around to let them know they could get out of bed and come to the common areas if they were awake.
There are just way too many guns in the US (i.e. "it's just way too easy to get a gun in the US").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
I recently sent a postcard to a friend. She posted about it on Instagram (which I rarely check), but I didn’t get a personal message from her letting me know that she had received it. When I saw her in person I joked about her Instagram addiction, and told her how it made me feel. She’s a good friend, she understood, problem resolved.
There’s always been corporations fighting to take as much as they can from us, whether it’s by selling us cigarettes, trying to scam us on the phone, or presenting us with dopaminergic ad feeds. That’s what they are meant to do, by design.
We share the responsibility to educate our children, family, friends, push for new legislation, create new social taboos. The opportunities to rectify this bad direction won’t be handed to us; we have to create them. Complaining about the good old days is easy but accomplishes nothing (and they weren’t nearly as good as we think to begin with).
The moment we can buy eg a 3ft by 1ft panel that we can just mount on a wall and feels like an actual sunlit window for a few thousands dollars or so, interior design is likely going to get radically different.
(And that’s not to mention the sci-fi dream of a screen that can simulate a window looking out on any landscape, but these are probably way further out)
The core idea is to define your annual expenditures (let’s say $50k), a long term investment strategy you personally feel comfortable with (say 5% ROI), and from there you can deduce the amount you need to save to be financially independent (in this case, $1M).