Nevertheless, you are still Wright to have your own say, and it is delightful to have commonality, no matter how "trivial."
4,674 karma · joined March 4, 2021
On Saturdays, we would play until about 11:45, lock the club up, and go to the theatre, where they would show The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight. It was semi-wild. A few people would be there in costume, and lots of people would shout out the most famous lines.
I enjoyed it, and ended up making a minor contribution to the atmosphere: I started brining a water pistol along, and when there was rain in the movie, I'd fire it upwards, waving it randomly so other patrons would get a little sprinkle.
People liked that kind of thing!
Absolutely nobody else could make the word "elocution" sound so luxuriously redolent of desire.
Ridiculously unimportant trivia: The Flintstones borrows heavily from The Honeymooners, was the first animated sitcom, and was also the first animated show aired in prime-time.
Fred and Wilhelmina are in bed together. Fred tosses and turns, unable to sleep. "Fred, what's troubling you?"
"You know Bjarne from the bank? Well, a balloon payment is due tomorrow on my loan, and I don't have the cash flow to pay it."
Wilhelmina thinks for a bit, then reaches for her phone. "Betty? Yes, this is Wilhelmina. Sorry to call so late. Would you tell Bjarne that Fred can't make the loan payment tomorrow? Yes, that's all. Good night."
Fred states at Wilhelmina, aghast. "What did you do THAT for?" She smiles. "Now it's Bjarne's problem. Let him toss and turn, you can go to sleep."
Trump pardoned him in 2020. Consequences are incredibly elastic for people at the top of the food chain.
Perhaps similar:
One of the reasons the Vickers VC10 was so successful in the 60s and 70s was that it could operate from short runways, high ambient temperatures, and high altitudes compared to other jets of its era.
It was far easier for carriers like BOAC to fly those into Britain's former colonies than it would have been to magically expect all those colobnies to update their airports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_VC10
p.s. As a boy, I flew to West Africa in 1970 on a VC10. Now I know some of the backstory.
The goal is longer, thinner wings than usual. Long and thin wings are far more efficient—think gliders and the U2. But beyond a certain width, those wings become incompatible with existing airports and other facilities for handling commercial aircraft. So the idea is to mount folding extensions that are extended for flight, but likely fold when being hangered or navigating taxiways.
Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.
He was right. It was a service issue, and when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, the mainstream happily ponied up 99 cents a song because they could type the name of that song and then listen to it on their phone, Mac, or Windows computer right away.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
People write code differently when they know that it will be reviewed by people who will not only comment on it, but also form long-term impressions of the submitter's competence and fit based on the code that is reviewed.
And three interpretations to consider:
0: The default: That person is irrationally attached to being wrong. Best to walk away, argumentation will be futile, and I have a life to lead.
1: Whoa! Sometimes that person is me.
2: If they didn't reason themselves into it, how did they get into it? What if their position represents their values, not some perfectly architected strategy for maximizing some hypothetical measure of rightness? In that case, if I wish to discuss it with them, I should be talking about their values and my values and where they intersect, rather than arguing right and wrong?
I have personally found all three of the above useful at one point or anther.
https://neonrocket.com/2014/05/rescued-from-the-ashes-i-dont...
In my own case as a designer of desktop apps, my Swipe File was not just digital screen shots of parts of apps that I admired, but I physically printed them out as well so I could spread them on a desk, floor, and walls when brainstorming.
That word "Swipe" also inspired the name of a design store catering to creative professionals in my home town, Toronto:
An outsider community forms in a down-market neighbourhood. Lacking money and power, it makes its own culture. That becomes "hip," and those with money start buying property in that neighbourhood, displacing the very people who made it hip to begin with.
As with "hackers," so also with artists, musicians, bicycle messengers, dirtbag rock climbers, frisbee players, &c. &c.
https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
A short must-read for people designing (via prompt or any other tool) user experiences. It is timeless (so far!)
I have tried editing using only incremental search, and it was awful right up until the moment when I reached for it first instead of wanting a mouse or arrow key and then remembering I was only supposed to use incremental search.
From that moment on, I sailed along just fine. Does that mean it might have "won?" Certainly not, but all the same... Success in software design is absolutely not any kind of meritocracy outside of the tautological "If it won, it must have merit, winning is the metric for merit."
1. In the 90s, I had a struggling one-man Mac ISV, and would do gig programming on the side. I did a lot of work for boutique investment banks, and also for a "consulting" firm that did about 75% of their business with the finance industry. The owner of that firm praised me, but didn't like that if my business took off, he'd lose me.
"What would it take to get your commitment to this firm?"
50%
"Where will you get the money to buy half my company?"
A loan from the firm?
When the dust cleared, the business loaned me the money to buy in, and I paid it back with 50% of my profit sharing payouts. This is not some weird financial alchemy, a lot of partnerships are run this way.
———
2. My Duathlon racing buddy was a mold-maker, very specialized and good at his trade. He worked for an elderly entrepreneur who had built his mold business up over decades. Said entrepreneur sent his own kids to university to become "professionals."
What to do about succession when he was ready to retire? My buddy literally photocopied my own arrangement, bought 50% so the business would have a successor it could count on, and bought the remainder when the founder retired. He is now a comfortably wealthy automotive sector entrepreneur.
———
The huge LBOs in the news always seem like space-age deals, but little LBOs for succession purposes are remarkably common.
If the market can remain irrational longer than a fundamentals-driven investor can remain solvent, is it irrational to bet on the market remaining irrational?
I was reading a book about paying yourself first, "The Richest Man in Babylon." He spotted that and we had a short conversation about money, in which he recommended another book about personal finance, "The Millionaire Next Door," an enormous amount of which is about not buying into the Upper-Middle Class Trap.
I walked directly to a bookstore, bought it, and while I am not wealthy, what I do have I credit largely to that book. Yes, it's a book that could be a podcast episode or series of blog posts. But no matter how you consume the wisdom or where you get it from, consider this my heartfelt endorsement.
And yes, The Volvo V90 Estate in my garage was purchased used. And even then... We vacillated over spending that much to replace our XC70 Estate, also purchased used.
When there is a boardroom battle over control, I think almost any take is fair. Sculley kicked him off Macintosh. Steve then tried to oust Sculley, who gave him a "window seat."
Sculley had the Board's support, and Steve resigned rather than quietly sit in the corner playing with "New Product Development" toys. The Board refused to accept his resignation and encouraged him to rescind it, but no they didn't give him meaningful authority, so he carried on to Plan B and negotiated the right to make "Education" computers.
Did he jump? Was he pushed? Yes!
And back to the point I was making... His trajectory had something in common with Raskin's trajectory, right down to raising money from Canon.
———
p.s. Fellow OG Mac developer here. I still have the SE/30 I used to write a classified ads app for QuarkXPress and Aldus PageMaker back in the day. I would describe classified ads software in the 90s as, "faster horses about to be eclipsed by automobiles."
“Intuitive Equals Familiar,” a classic from Jef Raskin, the man who started the Macintosh¹ project at Apple:
https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
———
¹ Only to have Steve take it away. Jef left and created the Canon Cat, an opinionated computer that eschewed the WIMP interface in favour of anchoring n incremental search. Steve would also leave and create NeXT, and Canon would invest in NeXT as well.
ChatGPT, write me a 2010-style Hacker News front page essay about how software maintenance is just like automobile maintenance, and why nobody wants low-value maintenance work to be arduous, failure-prone, and boring.
Same problem.