Phiwise_

>Given that OS X has supported multi-button mice since 2001, I certainly believe that.

Just a joke, mate.

"Obsolete" is too strong a word, I think. OSX isn't an evolution of the Macintosh's operating system; That'd be Pink, which was even mentioned, and it crashed and burned. OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk, therefore the only change really needed is to replace mentions of Unix or specifically Linux with Linux/OSX as far as the points of the piece are concerned. If Jobs had paid Torvalds to call OSX "Apple Linux" (Or maybe just called it Apple Berkeley Unix) for some reason this would be moot.

I also primarily use Windows and don't have a dog in the fight you mentioned. I might actually dislike Linux more than OSX, though it has been quite a while since I've seriously used the one-button OS.

Why would a high-end car need regular updates? The only thing it needs to do that isn't guatanteed to not change without physical service is entertainment, and it's a safe bet anyone who can afford one has a smartphone they keep updated. Just make the pocket supercomputer do all the work and use the car as an input/output interface. This problem was solved decades ago on the internet, funnily enough by the same guy who founded this forum. Why is the industry at large so bad at retaining good practice knowledge?

If by "these companies" you mean the third party suppliers, then sure, but Amazon obviously loses business when a customer can't trust the branded microphone cylinder they bought to place the desired order for them and make the program profitable. This is especially evident in the failure of Amazon's bid over the past decade to replace the big box supermarkets and grocers: clearly customers aren't pleased enough with the service quality to select it over physically picking their "essential goods" themselves, even when their probable prime subscription partially went to setting the system up. What good does Amazon get in hamstringing its own ability to acquire new markets in exchange for enriching someone else? The argument that they've arrived here out of some rational, intentional economic calculation that they can but choose not to change is clearly penny wise but pound foolish.

Personal fantasies are an exveptionally poor excuse for handing out known bad advice.

"When it happens to you"? Does this happen to all engineers, or even a majority? Isn't the percent who work at google under any circumstances much lower?

>These meals also don't seem all that nutritious. A lot of the entrees are high in carbs but low in proteins and fats

Uh, of course? That's the stuff that keeps on the shelf. The point of disaster preparation is to avoid burning cash on throwing your food out every six months or hitting the expiry while you possibly don't even have running water if you forget when rotation day is. It's not a luxury athletics product; it's meant to keep you and your family supplied with calories for a week after an earthquake takes out the interstate your supermarket gets its deliveries on and there is no food to be had at any price. Do you have any actual experience with disaster planning? This comment is wildly off the mark.

Partially because where WP set up shop, the Utah Valley in the 1980s, was mostly still a rural county with a barely-semi-urban exclave at the middle. Living in the center of Provo let you pretend to be surrounded by actual development while you worked or got your Psych degree, but WordPerfect was building itself on top of apple orchards and alfalfa fields once they went a few miles outside in any direction. The land was much, much cheaper, and the old steelworkers' not-even-ramblers much smaller, than even the neighboring Salt Lake Valley a few tens of miles to the north, which by now had a mostly-developed mix despite being more than a little larger, let alone any of the actually urban metro areas high tech businesses usually tend to spring up in.

Nowadays, though, the place is pretty much built out, and the land prices have spiked accordingly since most of the nearby areas are BLM land. Don't expect a next WordPerfect any time soon.

Spare you the sad tactic of disagreeing with you instead of just assuming your conclusion?

>I often wish he was more explicit about WHAT was developed. (I have watched the mother of all demos, which is truly awesome, but partial information).

Here's one of several demos Kay has done of the Squeak/Croquet/Etoys/Frank systems, all built to extend on the PARC original. The others are good, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prIwpKL57dM

Got censored last time I quoted this:

>Annual Economic Health Check

>IMF Country Focus

>IMF Survey: Soft Landing Ahead for U.S. Economy

>IMF Survey online

>August 6, 2007

>United States should return to potential growth rate near 3 percent by mid-2008

>But housing market problems could still get worse

[0]https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/socar0...

Especially given this article's first paragraph, which contradicts the headline:

>San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly sees more work for higher interest rates to do to slow demand and inflation in the U.S. economy. She said the Fed is ready to respond to both a softening labor market that needs a boost and to inflation remaining stuck above its target—but it’s unclear which scenario is more likely.

>Methods

>We followed 66,692 females from the Nurses’ Health Study (1986–2019), 92,438 females from the Nurses’ Health Study II (1989–2019), and 47,274 males from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (1986–2018) who were free of cancer, diabetes, and major cardiovascular diseases at baseline. The PHDI was calculated every 4 y using a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire.

Into the roundfile it goes!

I don't follow. You agree these people are nothing like the bacteria in the story... and that's why they should be treated like them? And also you need to relay your dislike heated swimming pools I guess?

Even a big fan of using games as datasets for research, I'm so tired of reading policy proposals based on literal fake economies meant for maximizing entertainment only after being buoyed up by some other real and unrelated cost behind the scenes. Why would we expect to learn anything useful in this flat potemkin setting?

Are the proles in your metaphor also capable of indefinitely suspending half of all their starvation-level resource consumption? Are they doing it as stochastic insurance against a population-level extinction event, which they are capable of recovering from? This is a mind-numbingly poor extension of this article's actual contents.

McCarthy warned us about this.

Side note: I really dislike how shortsighted many orgs are with the extreme level of "go to your customer" that led to using the persistent IRC client I used to banter during game nights with my friends a decade ago as an all-encompassing support and outreach forum. Forget forum admins. Forget the future. Forget the "open web". It's dysfunctional right now for me, the current target market of whatever product you're selling or program you're running. I'm alienated from whatever your thing or community is by how badly Discord works for over twenty people, so I don't engage with you, and I must imagine many others feel the same way. Surely someone's aware of this in your org? Was the single-digit man-hours saved by not spinning up a FOSS forum or starting a subreddit really worth this? Who made that calculation? /rant

You've misunderstood me, in a way that doesn't make sense as unintentional. Of course I'm not commenting on the rules of HN. Why would I comment in support of a user who just restates those rules then?

Interesting that people seem to not like your comment. Isn't harassment and doxxing against the rules around here? What's the principle that disagrees with this statement that doesn't also apply to everything else on site?

Perhaps, but only because most jobs done on computers today are by people who also have little if any math or programming ability. Change that and it's a different world to make those predictions in.

Those 5% go on to make an upper-class salary sitting in an air-conditioned office instead of a lower-class salary turning wrenches and stacking boxes. What makes more sense than enabling everyone who can to attain that life?

(Plus every one of them who gets out makes life better for the rest at least by reducing downward pressure on wages, and hopefully also by creating new business opportunities that raise wages further by increasing supply. Rigorous education is almost always a win-win: https://matiane.wordpress.com/2021/09/15/democratic-educatio... )

Why would you assume this? Wouldn't Sal Kan want to design his version of a teacher AI to avoid that behavior?

Did I say it's a "counter-example"? Both are operational dumpster fires. I obviously brought it up in a negative tone with the words "even" and "somehow". Utopia's a business, too. Why are you defending them? Do you even live here? They even did basically this same thing to their cities years back, which you'd know if you did.

This is such a misleadingly narrow headline. Utopia's a decade old and has been a mess from the business side pretty much the entire time. Even Google fiber in Provo's somehow giving better rollout service than they are. I was excited when it was announced as a teen but it's been a long road of failing to live up to expectations for all but a tiny fraction of our residents in the rich parts of our cities. And it's supposed to be a public-good program!

"The Nature of Order" is the four-volume book Christopher Alexander introduced his analysis tool of the fifteen fundamental properties of order in. It's named in the first paragraph of this blog post.

>What drew me to it was video game level-design.

Was it Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design for you, too? I loved that book when I thought I was going to become a game designer. When someone like Schell spoke so highly of Alexander it was plain he had to must be something really special.

Here's some other posts on Alexander's work:

Beautiful Software: Christopher Alexander's research initiative on computing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34011469 Dec 2022 (40 comments)

Do You See a Pattern? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=972023 Dec 2009 (30 comments)

“A pattern language” explained (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18644150 Dec 2018 (22 comments)

A Pattern Language (1977) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27458721 Jun 2021 (22 comments)

Christopher Alexander: An Introduction for Object-Oriented Designers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4965552 Dec 2012 (19 comments)

The Timeless Way of Building (1979) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10164427 Sep 2015 (19 comments)

Toward a Theory of Design as Computation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032648 Jul 2014 (19 comments)

Some Notes on Christopher Alexander (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22869481 Apr 2020 (18 comments)

A City Is Not a Tree (1965) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21916408 Jan 2020 (17 comments)

Christopher Alexander – Patterns in Architecture (1996) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17480178 Jul 2018 (17 comments)

Christopher Alexander: A Primer [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24033936 Aug 2020 (11 comments)

Notes on The Timeless Way of Building (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525259 Jun 2020 (10 comments)

Fifteen Fundamental Properties (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40340220 May 2024 (10 comments)

A City Is Not a Tree (1965) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970090 Jul 2015 (7 comments)

Finding meaning in The Nature of Order - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38009174 Oct 2023 (5 comments)

Christopher Alexander’s Distribution of Towns - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9443072 Apr 2015 (4 comments)

The Origins of Pattern Theory: Christopher Alexander at OOPSLA (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11334395 Mar 2016 (4 comments)

Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9020588 Feb 2015 (3 comments)

The Fifteen Fundamental Properties of Wholeness (good design) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4965528 Dec 2012

Empirical Findings of 'The Nature of Order' [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14502297 Jun 2017

Plus everything that has been described using the phrase "pattern language", and a lot of the word "pattern" in reference to software design: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

>Presumably a building serves purposes other than being seen. Though these were posed by an architect, "residents", "occupants", "users" etc are never mentioned -- only "spectators".

This is just an artifact of compressing 1500+ pages (iirc) into the length a blog post. Alexander was (RIP) one of the most fanatically human-focused designers of his field. His visual description of strong centers and spectators was usually hyper-literal; users look at the building while they use it, so its look should facilitate its use. In the large this means the form of the building should help direct the user's attention towards what they're using it for, meaning anything from shaping a courtyard to keep occupants flowing smoothly and prevent disorientation to positioning furniture and light sources and windows to keep the user unimpeded, mentally centered, and comfortable (He even leaned in to an early version of iterative design, encouraging constructing models, and then doing the real construction in phases with the architect on-site, to reassess and dial in things like room size and window positioning)[0]. In the small it means designing features and ornamentation of the construction to avoid either the extremes of cold flatness or excess-born noise, meaning elements should be on the one hand artistic and interesting to look at, but at the same time subtle and undemanding while they're in the periphery of whatever you're actually doing in the building.

Alexander seems to have started his work on A Pattern Language, whose subtitle is "Towns, Buildings, Construction", out of exasperation with what he saw as a fashion of buildings designed to look good in the magazine perspective drawing instead of feeling good to the user , and city plans designed to geometrically impress from the scale of the district blueprint instead of the person on the street. Language of "the spectator" is in reference to his attempt to shift this perspective back to where it belonged.

[0]I believe this was during TNoO, but even in A Pattern Language and its companions The Oregon Experiment and The Timeless Way of Building he encouraged using techniques and materials that would enable a great deal of post-construction rennovation, and for organizations to devote as much money to enhancing old projects as to building new ones.

I guess you haven't read any of TNoO?

What are you talking about? It's an index. The data starts proportional at 100%. Says so on the scale. Did you not read the page? 0 would imply there is no dev jobs anywhere in the country. The industry could go through the worst crash of all time and still get nowhere near that value. Saying it's not at zero contains no useful information. 70% of normal operations is pretty dire for switching jobs compared to ordinary expectations is the point I was obviously making.