dulse

Just downloaded, it looks great. Great design, really pleasing to use and look at. Lots of small attention to detail that makes it feel nice (eg, calendar picker with large trailing dates into future and past selected month).

One note: I'm interested in just using for time tracking for personal productivity, but it feels more like it's built around use cases for consultants / free lancers (eg, client name being required when creating project). Not sure if my use case is your target, but if it is might be nice to have a global setting to turn off the 'client / freelancing' features so i get something a little more streamlined and limited to better capture how I want to use it. Might diverge from what you're going for, but wanted to pass along how I planned on using.

Cool idea, good job on executing so quickly (2 weeks!).

Small note: this is totally fine for the MVP you have, but I found sorting items alphabetically to be annoying. Why would I want to see things that happen to start with letters nearer the beginning of the alphabet first? As you iterate, might be something to think about. Maybe price point or popularity would be more helpful ways to organize the stuff.

"A curry is not an idea, even if its creation is the result of one. Meals can evoke emotions, but only very roughly and generally, and only within a very limited range — comfort, delight, perhaps nostalgia, but not anger, say, or sorrow, or a thousand other things. Food is highly developed as a system of sensations, extremely crude as a system of symbols."

I think this is really wrong, but I feel like this is a good pointer to where we are heading in fine cuisine. The false dichotomy in the article is between Old Masters and organic markets/good risotto). But a better apples-to-apples comparison would be between contemporary art and contemporary cuisine. If you compare the emotional experience between an Alinea or El Buli vs. something like Dia:Beacon, it seems like it's getting much closer. I would absolutely describe the experience of eating at Alinea as "emotional" and full of ideas.

The interesting thing is that art isn't just about emotion - it can involve emotion, but it can involve a lot of other things too. What I look forward to is cuisine that can be self-critical, hostile, sarcastic, naive, quiet, empty, etc. What would the Agnes Martin of food look like? The On Kawara? The Merlin Carpenter?

I think we're generally getting more sophisticated in our cultural appreciation for lots of reasons, including the internet allowing much easier dissemination of sophisticated ideas and the flattening of accessibility to good cultural curators. Unlike this author, I don't think food is replacing art: it's just thriving alongside. There's a rising tide that's raising all the cultural boats. I'm really bullish on contemporary art for this reason.

I'd be interested to see a list of the best philosophy books for non-philosophers. I'm not a philosopher or close to the field, but I always thought Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions was a big hitter. Not so much for an individual essay but the combination of essays - What Is it Like to be a Bat? and The Absurd are both classics in my mind. Basically every essay in that short book is great, completely understandable to the lay-person, has the potential to be deeply influential to one's everyday beliefs, and is philosophically rigorous.

Philosophical Investigations is beyond my ability to follow as is Heidegger (I think it's a common complain against continental philosophy in general). Kripke's Naming and Necessity is something I can understand, but I don't really feel the 'oomph' to the insight that there can be a posteriori necessary truths and apriori contingent truths. Obviously it's a deeply important fact, and an astonishing breakthrough. But it doesn't hit me in the same way as Nagel's Absurd, which attempts to break down and dismiss existential dread. I don't think he succeeds, exactly, but it feels important and deeply insightful.

I think the point he makes in the middle is a good one, even if he oversimplifies capitalism's claims. Increasing market utility under capitalism says nothing about increasing the quality of life of the market agents - it says nothing on the role of happiness or quality of life in a free market. And you can see many instances of (especially deregulated) capitalism spin out profound and unethical unhappiness (e.g., the US meatpacking industry in the early 20th century). The point he is raising is that there is an essential disconnect between the things that we as human beings care about (eg, quality of life, improving the world, raising families, aesthetic pleasures, knowledge) and what agents in capitalism care about (eg, profit).

As for the conclusion, I agree he does sort of get in the weeds a bit (what kind of education does he see as training consumers? I never took a class on that...). But he seems to be getting at the idea that part of the role of education in capitalism is empowering free agents to make ethical, informed purchasing decisions so that the free market veers toward good. If we aren't educated on broad topics and don't have autonomous free thinking, we might not believe in global warming and therefore not create a market for electric cars; or we not care about the ethical treatment of animals, so disregard organics and keep our cheaper Tyson products.

Go problems feel super compelling to me. Typical problems can be boring "counting" exercises, but I find it hard to beat something like the ear reddening move: http://senseis.xmp.net/?EarReddeningMove

There is a great series on youtube on fantastic moves from professional games with commentary in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ9Oexs59CE&feature=relmf...

They are really beautiful in part because they become tesuji through a confluence of factors that reverberate across the entire board. It can be hard to see for amateurs (including me) but once you give them the right context and insight, they become startlingly brilliant.

Also, it's interesting you find it hard to make a critical mistake in Go - this feels very common to me. For example, a decision like deciding to defend a group instead of sacrificing it (which comes up all the time) often snowballs really quickly.

I love that perhaps his most insightful and quote-able interview ever was to Playboy in 1985.

It's amazing to me how incompetent otherwise sophisticated companies are at handling public relations. It's not rocket science, and it's not about who's right.

This post comes off as smug, half-hearted, and insulting. Why are they joking and making light of the technical director's unprofessional conduct? Why are they trying to parse how the customer's twitter comeback wasn't justified? Why are they separating the latter part of the post as the "more serious note," thus implying the first half isn't serious? This is serious for the company, whether they know it or not.

After reading this post, I come away thinking the company doesn't take this situation seriously, they don't take their customers seriously, and they wouldn't handle my problems seriously if I were a customer. They should have 1) Made a direct, unmitigated apology; 2) Clarified what their company stands for regarding terminating accounts with specific policy improvements, not a promise to review the policy; 3) Left the excuses for Jules out of it; 4) Left out the legal threats to people e-mailing the company (the blog post isn't about the company's problems, it's about the customers' problems); 5) Titled it "An Apology" or "A New Direction" or basically anything besides "Moving On..." which sounds like a command being issued in conjunction with an exaggerated eye roll.

Why don't these firms just hire a pr/crisis consultant to help? If they suspect the crisis could cost the company more than a few thousand dollars if not handled correctly, it's a no-brainer. The best-case scenario is that they lose a few thousand dollars improving their public image; the alternative could be losing a chunk of their user base.