Solstinox

Please don your skeptic hats before reading this article. I'm mainly fascinated that companies with such extraordinary claims can survive or even get enough backing to exist.

I think I'll spend that money on fancy notebooks and fountain pens/nice pencils. 0 latency, smell really good too.

Doesn't explain why the UX is bad. There are great user experiences from 40+ years ago that hold up.

The people who design/build consumer software often eat their own cooking. Feedback cycles are rapid and short.

The people who design/build enterprise software rarely eat their own cooking. Feedback cycles are infrequent and long or non-existent.

It's uncertain whether Tesla has won. Less uncertain is that a lot of the existing manufacturers have already lost.

People are filling the religious vacuum with scarier stuff.

Brand is intimately connected to real-world performance. If they don’t fix their plane, the new -8 brand will eventually follow the MAX brand.

Epic's intent is clear. No need to ask why.

Apple's handling of the situation is baffling. "Let's martyr the smaller company!"

What the f*ck is going on at Apple?

Outside of building synths, the most useful notion in this book that I recall is that a piano gives a smoother quality to string instruments. Nice orchestration trick.

Tim Cook was a masterful operations guy with an MBA™ in the early 2000s. Rather than compete for manufacturing with the big, established, and expensive manufacturers in places like Japan, he partnered with little nobody Chinese manufacturers like Hon Hai (now FoxConn) to make Apple products like the iMac and iPod. Brilliant!

Like all masterful operations guys with an MBA™, he either forgot or ignored an ancient adage. In his case it was, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket...and don’t put all your baskets in one boat.” At no point did he or anyone at Apple question the narrative that China could merrily support their supply chain without any hiccup into eternity.

Apple reaped the rewards for 20 years, and now the lack of meaningful hedge could undo all of it...with one Tweet or two.

Huge, complicated companies like Apple don't see the world as you or I do. They see the world through whatever sensors they're equipped with, and they respond to what those sensors are fed by other parts of the company. They are fed a collection of proxy metric for reality.

That's why they behave in funny, distorted ways, like pissing off their developer community and acting baffled that the community is getting irritated.

Rule #1 of All Coding: Keep it simple. If it's not simple, simplify it.

Once you've got that rule down, pick a popular language (Python's good because you can ask questions and get answers), pick a simple program that'd be useful to you, and then figure out what you need to make it work. Then make it work, applying rule #1. Rinse and repeat.

A quick, cheap, non-invasive test that is less accurate (in the direction of more false positives) would be far more effective than a more accurate but slow, expensive, and intrusive test.

I guess Microsoft may drop ~$30 billion on this poisoned chalice out of goodwill.

If you have a big enough starting pool of people engaged in a mostly chance-based activity and they all have low odds for success, after a few iterations you still end up with a hefty number of people who look like they've got it all figured out.

Neat! With real writing it’s nice to be able to use the random variations and patterns in writing as landmarks.

I always thought that would be useful on a screen.

I didn’t know that either, thank you! It works with triple-click paragraphs too.

Double click text to select a word. Triple click text to select the whole paragraph.

For decades I assumed that there’s some weird fluky behavior when trying to select a word and accidentally selecting the paragraph.

I’ve not dabbled with Google’s music offerings because they don’t seem like a musical company in the way that Spotify/Apple are. Terrible reason, I know.

You’re wedged in quite a spot with this. You’re like a think-tank, but not. Companies can easily partner with some university to get their students to do this sort of thing for close to free, but many don’t. So you’re basically consultants, but presumably without domain expertise working on the easiest part of solving a problem: brainstorming.

But no one is a prophet in their own city...so getting ideas from the outside looks nicer...

I could see quite a big market of bozos for this if you market it right.

Is it true that we (not HN, but US as a geopolitical entity) have ever believed in a global internet? Seems naive. We’ve believed in the American internet purveyed by America to the world. Countries like China deployed their firewalls precisely because it is largely an American internet out there. Banning TikTok as delivered by a frenemy that sees us as its key rival for the next two hundred years makes more sense with that context.

It’s fun to do this across a variety of basic states.

Drunk vs. Sober Tired vs. Awake Hungry vs. Satiated

Amazing how dramatically each changes your perspective.

You know what’s worse than having to work with JIRA/Confluence/Bit Bucket, and such? Working with people who keep changing systems every 6-12 months. A crappy system used fully is better than system surfing to find the Holy Grail™.

You mean double-edge, right? I thought straight edge was basically a shaving knife you can sharpen...

Equity is an interesting goal because it’s ephemeral. The pattern of history is: ...insane inequity, a brief moment of equity gained through violence, a long march back to insane inequity, insane inequity, a brief moment equity gained through violence...

...and get better sleep.

The default 80/20 example everyone uses for Pareto misleads you about the nature of the insight. You can observe any combo, and they need not add up to 100%. It could just as well be “12% of the effort gets you 100% of your results, and the other 88% gets you nothing.”

Apple/Schiller are good, maybe even the best. That doesn't mean they anticipated, planned, or engineered individual conversations between two people.

The nature of lofty awards, fellowships, and titles is political, social, and if the former allow, merit-based.