davidthewatson

There should be an ACM award for retro-computing like this. I miss Aperture so much that it's difficult to express.

I dislike photo editing deeply, but for some reason, the Aperture design just made sense to me, being a person who could never grok photoshop.

I'd suggest books like:

https://equalityfiles.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/thomas_sza...

and any of Byung-Chul Han's philosophical books over the last ten years, though The Burnout society is probably the place to start.

My favorite thing about these books is that if the title piques your interest, it's a quick read because of the aphoristic style keeping the aforementioned short.

Agree with the sentiment, but I'm sad that meaningful words like fortnight that once colored language are mostly archaic.

Mike Meyers deserves credit for trying to keep such language alive 30 years ago:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108174/characters/nm0001439

+1 I'll buy your book. What's it called?

Thanks for your response.

This reminds me of doing updates via SSH on a train speeding across Philly ~2009 on the G1.

I'm curious what software enabled the device management? I worked on device management software in a few forms.

Right! That's why I used the term alert fatigue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

The misclick point is beyond truth, particularly given the storm of marketing that is mobile web.

Been there, done that.

The paradox is that every device I use interrupts me non-stop with modal dialogs ad nauseam.

But the production delete? You said,"drop", we said, "gone".

Either production database deletes need to adopt alert fatigue or the ops are already so fatigued that it doesn't matter.

I found IHP straightforward:

https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/

despite not remembering much haskell!

This assumes you can get past nix for the install.

I find IHP well-designed. I just wish the licensing scheme were more transparent.

I'm sad because I run rust on hyprland and love the idea.

Does anyone know why "it doesn't work on Wayland"?

I think you need an absurdist lens to not get lost here. Camus had a point.

Think about it, I could say I'm going to adopt a modal diet, which is really what monk mode is, a modal diet of information attention.

How would my modal diet work? One day, fasting, the next day, a steady stream of alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, and processed food.

Consistency is key.

As technical people, we know this from reading the history from Pirsig (ZMM) to Nielsen-Norman:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/modal-nonmodal-dialog/

Asceticism has never scaled, much like the hacker news post today about intimacy not scaling, or the fact that modality in design was more about making it easy for implementors than making it easy for consumers.

Monks have been and will always be ascetic. There's nothing ascetic about taking a time-honored tradition and using it to mis-label the behavior of people who are overwhelmed by water they cannot breathe but cannot ignore.

"No pointers, no cry" was worth the price of admission. There are features and benefits here that seem magical. I may be misunderstanding, but does this mean that you could compile directly into containers like podman? That is, is the NIR parse able as a container image?

To the credit of the poor adjunct who taught my freshman psych 101 course in college, and assigned reading Thomas Szasz as part of it, what I've learned is that Thomas Szasz, while outspoken, was not wrong:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Coercion_as_Cure/hYdLS6...

Direct, RCT is non-existent, emergent, or difficult at best.

My vote for off-topic, but close, and on point is something like this:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001048252...

I get flow on on my underpowered, by today's standards, cheaper than an iphone, left-field linux box on a daily basis.

Having switched Android and iPhone ecosystems every 2 years since the introduction of the G1, I've yet to see a single smart phone that could produce a flow experience for me, for exactly the same reasons everybody from Bret Victor to Alan Kay disparage regularly: tapping on glass is not the path to enlightenment, unlike the flow I get on hyprland.

Long story short, the sad backstory to the point that rubenerd makes about the crackberry is this:

Danger had this nailed with the HipTop not much past Y2K. That continued with the Sidekick II. I don't know the whole story, but somewhere in those years between 2003-2007, when I had stood in the Micro Center parking lot in Palo Alto gazing at Danger's headquarters with my Sidekick in hand thinking, "what the hell happened?", Andry Rubin exited stage left from Danger and began working on what would become Android.

The rest of it is the sad, sordid history we have now. One thing's certain though, I know many people, who'd go out and buy a sidekick tomorrow if macrohard, et al would just release the damn thing from its decades old, horribly common in the US, great-thing-killed-by-corporate-acquisition prison.

The HipTop and/or Sidkick deserved a better future than being killed in a series of acquisitions that pain everyone I know who experienced the device. It was ahead of its time, transformative, and had none of the issues that I've moaned about on everything up to and including my iPhone 12 mini and Pixel 6a.

Good point. I can relate.

I worked in Ruby on Rails and our particular culture of Rails was not the purity that DHH encourages, but a kind of hipster collection of things like Cucumber, where the intent diverges from reality. That is, we understood the design intent of the DSL barrier-lowering interdisciplinary facade to non-technical people writing tests.

However, that is not what happened in reality. What happened in reality is that only techs wrote Cucumber tests and they struggled mightily with abstractions that had good intent, but bad ROI, given their misapplication.

The constant cacophony of unforeseeable DSL interactions was that team's annoyingly persistent foot-gun postmortem.

It's worth noting that the pattern you describe here is an emergent property of programming languages that changes with the era:

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Sadly, the culture of programming language choice in commercial contexts has changed a lot in twenty years, but you can replace python with rust or elixir because programming language choice is a good proxy to understanding insight, intuition, and intelligence.

I like python, but if the broad preference mattered, we'd all be running J2EE apps today. My reasons for choosing python around Y2K were as philosophical then as they are now.

Where your argument goes awry is that what matters is how the programming language catalyzes better interdisciplinary team communication. Code tells a story that, the easier it is to read, the clearer the story gets, and that pays unforeseen dividends in development, deployment, debugging, and distribution.

Computer optimization is straightforward by comparison to scaling human commercial endeavors.

“Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.”

― Donald Knuth

User agency is a good way to think about this but like any real, useful metric, it's difficult to measure real impact, and this leaves you needing a proxy.

The other problem is that David Foster Wallace said over a decade ago:

“As VR pornography becomes a reality, we will have to develop some real machinery inside our guts to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure,”

the implication for dating apps in particular, but I fear this extends more generally, is that a major part of dating, physical interaction, has been replaced with mediated experience for a significant part of the population.

The question that arises is whether a better alternative exists in the real world absent technology?

I was working in C++ on OS/2 at the time when a resource editor was hard to find and that chasm from the command line to the GUI was what made the jump to commercial software development feel like the Khumbu Icefall.

I worked in a small software development sub at a big bank and they needed a rolodex. I agreed to do it in my spare time if they'd buy me a legal copy of VB 1.0. I did the prototype in what feels like a glacial week today, but they followed through with lunch and a shrink wrap copy.

If there's a death of GUI or IDE development tools it's the same for all of them with the possible exception of the outer edge of Jet Brains and VSCode. Put simply, they don't scale like command line tools since you're dragging a 200 ton freight train of GUI bloat behind you where it doesn't deliver the impact gravity that the train does.

HCI or GUI should scale like APIs do, but they don't, particularly now that resource editors are everywhere, and we're about to replace highly paid drag and drop mouse typists with nearly autonomous agents.

Humans benefit from visual affordances like VB because VB lowers the bar, or the barrier to entry. GUI development would still be stuck in the late 80's if Cooper hadn't made it possible for the inmates to overtake the asylum with their drag and drop tools.

Thanks for your comment.

Indeed, smashing the catcher at home plate was common whether initiated by the catcher or the base runner. For over one hundred years, MLB has debated whether there is any place for violence at home plate between base runners and catchers, intentional or otherwise. It is a complex question that has been answered by rules and player attitudes with little consensus between rule makers, players, and spectators, which, of course, closely mirrors society at large.

I love baseball and golf and have participated in both, but only as a young player. To me, spectator sports that aren't the Tour de France, F1, or WRC are just not dense enough with action to sustain my interest, even if that action is enabled by wheels and sources of power that may not be human.

This tension between safety and freedom is a theme that has played a role for at least as long as the publication of Trevor Melia's book, "Lucifer State", more than four decades ago. I'm out-of-my-depth in classics but I'd be surprised if there weren't a much older reference to this tension in antiquity. The role of that tension in modern society most certainly divides the room whether we are talking about art, sports, or life itself.

I'm happy to see someone mention peewee, having used it for numerous startup prototypes since its inception.

Coleifer does not get enough credit IMHO:

https://github.com/coleifer/

Peewee has been solid since I began using it a decade ago. Coleifer's stewardship is hard to see at once, but I've interacted with him numerous times back then and the software reflects the mindset of its creator.

Only Americans could invent a more violent form of golf while not realizing that baseball and golf feature watching grass grow as a spectator sport.

The post-modern labor dichotomy between robots and human robots is mirrored on the hiring side in ATS and HR, respectively.

Sadly, this is not new:

https://medium.com/@jannaq/the-robot-takeover-is-already-her...

To me, the most compelling telling of the Grothendeick story is this:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201707/the-mad-g...

A different telling of another profoundly gifted character is this:

http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1638/divinity-in-th...

The state of mind where new ideas are born is a liminal state that integrates disciplines effortlessly. Think Herb Simon, Marshall McLuhan or Arthur Koestler.

I'd agree with that assessment.

Given this:

"The Hidden Fee Disclosure Act, HR 4508 , requires that providers give patients transparent cost data from price comparisons before providing treatment. The text of the bill explicitly addresses the role of pharmacy benefits managers, which play an integral role in the cost of prescription drugs."

We've known the role PBM's play in a government-endorsed organized crime scheme that shamelessly adds cost to what consumers pay out-of-pocket without insurance or a prescription for at least a decade.

Ask yourself, what is the point of insurance and prescriptions when I have access to deadly drugs like insulin OTC at Walmart without a prescription or insurance for $25 per bottle?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_von_B%C3%BClow

I pay less than $10 per box for a box of a hundred new, name-brand, Becton Dickson insulin needles on Amazon without a prescription.

After this, Optum RX, United Healthcare's (UHC) wholly owned subsidiary PBM takes my doctor's 90 day script and charges me $40 for the same quantity. I'm pretty sure that's not what value-add means in business propositions.

You don't need a degree in forensic accounting to figure this out.

People laugh when I tell them I'm on a quest to reverse type 1 diabetes. Given insulin-dependence and its related costs accruing to technology, I don't know any better way to impact US healthcare.

That's right... commodity fetishism manufacturing consent:

https://www.alexanderrea.com/project/mcdonalds-happy-world/

Because what could be more fun than praying for autonomy at speed in a self-driving car while ordering a happy meal?

I'm happy they stopped at the concept.

Given the lack of regulation, I'm surprised we don't have drones dropping happy meals through moon-roofs in traffic like turkeys-via-chopper on WKRP in Cincinnati.

Having held roles with all of the titles you mention, I'd say relax and take the advice of a few here:

    * "do you really want to move to Switzerland?"
    * "Roles are meaningless"
    * "sounds like a signal that they like you as a candidate"

These resonated with me because Switzerland sounds awesome, roles are meaningless, and signal/noise ratio is a great way to think about hiring. Many people have great signal but drag a freight train of noise behind them.

Having held the principal title when I was 27, most gigs beyond that were steps down in terms of title, salary, or benefits. Doesn't really matter as long as the next people hiring you can see your current value given your previous trajectory.

My path is only unusual to the extent that I worked in small R&D labs and pre-VC startups so the value equation of a greenfield prototype hacker is really not what you know or have experienced, but "how fast can you learn because we just made the thing yesterday, QA'ed it today, and would like to ship tomorrow", "how fast can you go from napkin sketch to believable demo" and then "how fast can you ship clean code vs. that mess the CTO dreamed up at 3 AM?"

Your trajectory may be different.

I disagree, while liking the tone of the piece and the style of the writer.

However, the appropriate length that the original commenter refers to is, in fact, a tweet.

The reason is simple: the SOTA in internet criticism is quite old whether you read Neil Postman, Mitch Kapor, Sherry Turkle, or David Courtwright. The Turkle and Courtwright quotes are easy to find being more recent. The Kapor quote from the EFF dates to 1993 and so Google et al have found a way to lose it, and if you can find it, you may not be able to read it.

I disagree.

Liquidity implies the frame of fluid dynamics, just like data liquidity.

Bringing physics to science is as useful in the mind as it is in software.

Good point.

I find myself frequently at an inflection point between the tyranny of time and the need for correctness in communication. The role technology plays and the toll it takes in return is particularly troubling as humans have been overwhelmed by the broad and deep flood of information coming at them in increasingly asymptotic time-scales since the publication of Infinite Jest nearly 3 decades ago, which is roughly where the time scales in Peter Pirolli's research start. See the slides linked below.

That's the phenomenological n-of-1 take. For a more empirical treatement, see Peter Piroli's slide deck here:

https://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/event/180918-...

The self-reflective point that you make is good, but it hides the fact that what we are missing is a set of meta tools around emergent AI that allow us to build scalable collaborations of human-computer sensemaking teams - the kind Pirolli implies.

At this point, even the ability to do that batch mode overnight meaning-making, sense-making, validation and verification feedback loops would be an improvement from where we are since our accusations of scientism vs. anthropo-robotic models of mental disorders could be rendered mute by agents that could actually resolve complex models of evolutionary epistemology.

I feel like we all want the same thing: Truth. However, some of us are more tolerant of what we have now: prototypes, proxies, and n-of-1, back of the envelope verification, validation, fact-checking, if you will.

You should make the point clearer on the sophomoric philosopher's point of view that you refer to. I've read the DFW essay in question, and found it amusing though I'm out of my depth as a philosopher. With this in mind, I asked bard for clarification and it said:

"The consensus among eminent philosophers with respect to David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" is that it is a thought-provoking and challenging essay that raises important questions about the ethics of eating animals. The essay has been praised for its intelligence, wit, and originality, and it has been cited as an important contribution to the debate about animal rights.

Some philosophers have argued that Wallace's essay provides a strong case for vegetarianism or veganism. They argue that lobsters are sentient creatures who can experience pain and suffering, and that it is therefore wrong to kill them for food. Others have argued that Wallace's essay does not go far enough, and that we should also consider the ethics of eating other animals, such as cows, pigs, and chickens.

Still others have argued that Wallace's essay is not primarily about animal rights, but is instead about the nature of consciousness and the meaning of life. They argue that Wallace's essay raises important questions about what it means to be a conscious being, and about the relationship between humans and other animals.

Whatever one's views on the ethics of eating animals, "Consider the Lobster" is a powerful and thought-provoking essay that deserves to be read and discussed.

Here are some specific examples of how eminent philosophers have responded to "Consider the Lobster":

Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, has praised the essay for its "beautiful and moving" exploration of the "moral status of nonhuman animals." Peter Singer, a philosopher at Princeton University, has called the essay a "powerful and important" contribution to the debate about animal rights. Cora Diamond, a philosopher at the University of Virginia, has argued that the essay "challenges us to think more deeply about the nature of consciousness and the meaning of life." Overall, the consensus among eminent philosophers is that "Consider the Lobster" is a valuable and important work that deserves to be read and discussed."

So if the AI thinks eminent philosopher's have consensus on DFW's lobster points, who is it that you are referring to with respect to your phenomenological comment without any empirical evidence? I can't say that bard is perfect empirically but my speculative intuition is that the quoted references are correct without taking time to verify them.