I'm from the other side: a rural stay-at-home father who writes Python, Scheme, and C# (among others) on the side. I wouldn't live in Silicon Valley for the world. I have an email address with FastMail under my HN username.
I don't think you're looking ahead far enough. It's true that people's attention spans have declined, but I can't imagine that is a permanent condition. Giving sustained attention to interesting things is an essential feature of human minds, and I'm certain we'll regain that ability over time. I see signs of it even now. And when you say, "…current magazines are really bad and vapid and cheap," you're describing the unsuccessful response by many publications to pressure from digital media: they cut quality. A resurgence of magazines will require that they recognize that error and correct it, publishing magazines that show depth of thought and quality writing and printing — all the things that are discouraged by the "quantity first" attitude of digital media. I think the time for a resurgence of print periodicals is coming soon.
There have been experiments to increase the volume and flexibility of the recorder, e.g. Mollenhauer's Modern Recorder[0], sometimes called the Harmonic Recorder.
From your mouth to God's ears! The shawm is beautiful, and David Munrow was a genius whose suicide was a public as well as a private tragedy. But one of my favorite musical memories was of an amazing shawm player with the Newberry Consort — I have no idea who he was — who simply flooded the hall with brilliant, ringing tone, not a hint of stridency to it. It was unbelievable to me that the instrument I had up 'til then only ever heard played badly could sound so stunnning.
Think about how differently you might feel about such an instrument if, like Don Ehrlich of the San Francisco Symphony, you were faced with either finding an instrument that you could play with your carpal tunnel or losing your position. That melty-looking viola might get awful pretty in a hurry.
Carleen Maley Hutchins made a new 8-member family of violin-type instruments[0] which included a somewhat larger instrument tuned like a viola but played on an endpin like a 'cello. It sounds pretty good[1] and improves the ergonomics of fingering and shifting (though not so much bowing), but it has not seen much adoption because a) it has the "looks funny" factor, and b) it requires the violist who trained on a standard instrument to learn a new technical approach to both bowing and fingering.
The situation is similar with violas. There's a maker[0] who builds wildly asymmetric violas that have pretty good sound and are ergonomically excellent — very easy to play — but they're generally unwelcome in orchestras because their unorthodox appearance is distracting. Instrument makers consistently report that players will imagine all sorts of sound and playability problems when they try out an ugly instrument. I'm sure the author's guess about flute is correct: people like an instrument that looks right to them and to the audience.
I don't see anything in this design approach that is inaccessible to people living in and embracing capitalism who still want to preserve in themselves a healthy humanness. People are free to manage their own desires in whatever way they choose; consumption and Jones-chasing is optional. Making an honest, useful, tangible object is both a practical and a spiritual good, and too important to be held a political hostage.
I don't know, they seem pretty determined to. I'm surprised at the complete breakdown of journalistic independence, right when news outlets are in a financial position where they should be trumpeting that sort of justification for their existence.
> Western leaders have stopped short of directly accusing Russia
I'm going to stop short of directly accusing anyone, but I will say that any motive for Russia to eliminate their economic leverage against a powerful NATO nation escapes me, whereas eliminating that leverage is in the apparent interest of every NATO member nation that wants to see Russia weakened, except Germany. Accusing Russia of this particular act of destruction doesn't make any sense.
They said said the blockchain is "easier", not that cash is untraceable. It would require the participation of innumerable businesses to properly track cash; as it is, they function as a huge network of crypto tumblers.
It's obviously click-bait, yes. But they were pretty restrained, for Vice, on the "America is bad" angle, and they kept to the numbers. I'm tired of the tenor of "Look at the stupid Americans!" in the general run of click-bait articles too, but this was better than I expected.
I notice a lot of detracting responses here, but most aren't saying, "You're wrong." They're saying, "It's wrong of you to express these things unambiguously." Why is it that we let the urge to pretend gender and sexuality aren't real prevent us from addressing the problems we have with those matters? It's not an adult way to act.
What I don't see discussed in here is why we should care what phone teens, particularly, have. Teen preferences are largely built on what's popular right now; it's not as though I'm still wearing untied high-tops and carrying a boom box. Do we have any evidence that this particular early preference carries on to adult life, when it's they who are making the purchase with money they have earned? Do we think teen technology preferences have influence on other age groups?
I hope it's communicated well to users who aren't readers of Signal's blog. I have relatives who use Signal, and they rely on its fallback-to-SMS feature, possibly without fully understanding it. I'll make sure they understand and are aware of this change, but others may be in the same position.
The problem with letting users choose the view is that the chosen view affects how they write. If I can see it's obvious in my tree view who I'm responding to, I won't point it out, and then someone who uses the firehose view won't be able to follow the conversation.
I don't think we need to have an argument about what makes a true free market to agree that it's not what we have between China and the US, between the EU countries and Russia, or between the OPEC nations and the rest of the world. I'm not engaging in philosophy here.
I'm not sure that the writer has a clear idea of what free markets are or what peace is. You couldn't by any exaggeration describe the trade situation between China and the US since 2008 as a "free market". Nor could you describe the system under which EU members buy Russian fuel as one; as long as governments pursue political goals by economic means, the market isn't free — and I don't think I'm moving the goalposts in saying that.
And peace doesn't require that the Russians and Chinese become our friends; it requires that they recognize that trade would be a greater loss than any gains from war could recompense.
That being said, I think you're ascribing to intent what is attributable to worldview: people of that sort see history in terms of the advancement of the Gospel, the ongoing Communist revolution, or the progress of industrialization, and they communicate it as such.
Now do... the entirety of human endeavor. Whenever we discover a way we think is good, some of us decide we should impose it on others by force. The Puritans were nothing special in that regard, though high school reading lists tend to focus on them.
> Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in the bud because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by lack of brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your own ideas as aggressively as any competitor would to get good ideas.
I vouched for this comment based on this paragraph. I have watched this play out in press releases over and over: an innovation is presented as the next huge revolution in X, where it is actually a great improvement only in section 3.5.227 of X, and overextending it to try to revolutionize the entire field kills the innovation.
Playing Dvorak's American Quartet was one of the best musical experiences of my life, and I'm grateful to the natural environment around Spillville, if it could enable Dvorak to produce such a work. There's nothing American about the music, by the way; it's just as satisfyingly Bohemian as the rest of Dvorak's music, even if he was self-consciously using a pentatonic scale, and may have tried to sound American. I think he was so perfectly steeped in his own culture and his own sound that anything he wrote came out sounding like him and his place. (And by the way, best viola melody ever.)
I'm not bullish on plant-based meat taking over the market from real meat; I don't think that's going to happen. But I can see plant-based meat substitutes taking a place as a now-and-then substitute. The Boca Burger is a good example, because it's not meat, it doesn't really pretend to be meat, but it's good food in its own right, and it can serve the same function as meat in a meal despite fooling absolutely nobody. I serve them to my kids and eat them myself when we're in the mood for something that fills the gap of meat but want a lower-calorie choice.