There’s a balance, sure - I’m asking you what you put on the long side of the ledger.
Regarding houses - American architecture starting around the 40s divorced itself from its locale, but a great deal of older houses were built to be long-term dwellings, and this is reflected in their architecture, where they sit, how the wind and sun move across the structure, the materials they use, etc in a way that still generates value today. They may be harder to run a CAT5 through, but they’re a hell of a lot easier to keep cool in the summer.
For these monks and their church that may not be the point, for medieval churches it very much was. God was not something that a small group of people in the church believed in, God was a fact to those living in those places at those times. You’re right that folks here have a different world view, but you can’t understand the cathedral without understanding the world view of those who built it.
And - “this building has no point whatsoever apart from how the monks see it” is true for everything and every viewpoint.
Yes, I’d agree with this. I’d almost say it’s the exception that proves the rule - it’s such an exceptional project in the modern sense that its presence highlights the absence of others.
I suppose things like the Svalbard seed vault are similar secular efforts, as is the Long Now’s clock, although that feels somewhat more self-indulgent than these others. I’m interested in others, if you can think of them.
You indeed do, and I support that. I wonder, though - setting aside the catholic notion of God and the associated church embedded in this project, how do you think of future generations? How do you think about things beyond yourself? How do you consider the impacts of your actions on the future?
I’m not being facetious with these questions, nor am I making an accusation - I think it’s a genuinely interesting question for the modern world, and it’s what I’m circling around here more than the notion of glorying god: the cathedral was a gift to the humans of future generations, one whose sacrifice indicated the value its makers placed on the wellbeing of its recipients. How do you think of your actions in that light? Do you?
A great deal of monastic pursuit was in the interest of slowing down, focusing, applying one’s entire self to something, and recognizing the greatness of god and creation, so yes, anything that encouraged focus and contemplation would have been privileged on those merits.
If the monks in the year 1k had CNC machines, they’d have built bigger and more elaborate cathedrals. The act was the message. The gothic cathedral was impossible by medieval standards, and that was part of the act of building it.
And, to your point, yes, if the monks followed the construction with a hundred years of prayer and sacrifice to consecrate the building, indeed the building would carry a more powerful emotional resonance than it does now. The sacrifice is the point, the effort is the point. It’s an act of devotion, not just one of construction.
This is both incredible and I think… “misses the point” is the wrong phrase, but maybe omits something both subtle and crucial in the process.
A gothic cathedral is both an incredible work of art and also the work of hundreds or thousands of hands over decades and centuries - you are looking not just at the final product, but at the love and commitment it took to make that work of art, the long-term dedication and belief that it should exist even if we don’t live to see it exist. You’re looking at an expression of love not just for God and for art and beauty, but for future generations and people we’ll never know. The time and effort isn’t an unfortunate part of the process, it’s intrinsic to what we feel when we witness the cathedral - a connection to others, reaching both ways.
I understand why the monks have developed this technique, and I don’t disagree with them - the act of building a gothic cathedral is outside the capacity of modern society. I’ll never begrudge someone a hack to preserve some beauty in this machine we’ve created. But I can’t help but feel like they’ve created a facsimile of a cathedral - they’ve created the palace at Disneyland, not Notre Dame.
Except when those employees also have command of armies, at which point history has shown that swapping them out before they get too comfortable is key for keeping a republic a republic.
Gibson is a trend spotter. He doesn’t look at technology, he looks at people and culture (he is notably interested in fashion). It’s easier to see what’s happening when you pay attention to who’s doing the thing and what they’re doing, as opposed to what it’s being done to.
Yeah, I think the key here is that you have to know what the limitations are. UUIDv7 does _not_ provide you with sorted and ordered IDs by creation time, it provides you with _kinda sorta_ sorted and ordered IDs by creation time. That's probably fine for a lot of use cases, but if it's not OK for yours (forensic accounting, risk mitigation for banks, whatever), you can't use it for that. You're right it's not a technical problem necessarily, but when the marketing material describes something without an asterisk, people who are unaware that what's being described is impossible at the limits can make bad system design decisions based on that promise.
It’s more than that - it’s that if price is your only signal, it’s always going to be cheaper as a producer to ignore long-term sustainability, which means the companies which do so will “outcompete” the companies which plan for the future, leaving you with a market full of companies utterly incapable of handling an adverse event when it comes around. It’s not just greed, it’s a fundamental problem with how the market compresses signals about companies and products.
It’s currently in your interest to do so, or so you believe. That’s fine. Understand that may change, because, again, you are an individual and not a nation state, and specifically not the nation state you’re pledging allegiance to and putting your safety in the hands of.
The United States government needs to make tradeoffs. They are as you list.
The Chinese government also needs to make tradeoffs. You can imagine what they are.
You as an individual also need to make tradeoffs. In doing so, you ought be sure to remember you’re not a nation state, you’re an individual human being.
(You may decide “I find myself one small being in a world full of nation states, and given that, I trust the US government to keep me safe, and therefore will align myself with its interests,” at which point “ban DeepSeek” is in your interests as well as those of the US government, but you shouldn’t get the two confused, lest you miss the moments those interests diverge.)
This has the delightful and surely unintentional side effect of all but ensuring all federal agencies who want to use LLMs have to direct their budget to one of the domestic frontier labs (OpenAI, xAI), so that’s a nice big fat pipe of taxpayer money that’ll be going to backstop those cats while they deal with the fact that they’re getting their lunch eaten by competitors who didn’t decide the way to build a sustainable future was to incur future debts to the tune of a sizable percent of the GDP of a G20 nation.
I mean, spec sheets and all that, they seem like they'd be good, but they're just insanely predatory as a brand at this point. I learned it the same way you did.
I have a Sony Bravia that was ludicrously pricy but seems to have been made by people who genuinely love what they do. It's got rough edges, but it's a very well-behaved product. Among other things, you can basically disable all the Google Home stuff and have it run as a borderline "dumb" TV.
(I'm aware of Sony's history here. Ain't no saints in this business, I'm afraid.)
“Why would Samsung do this?” Because they are a deeply, deeply consumer hostile brand. Do not buy Samsung consumer products, no matter what the feature set and price tag look like. They are not trying to provide you with a good or service in exchange for money, they are trying to take as much of your money as they can.
I could, or you could open your mind to the idea that the reason opentype wound up being as complex as it is is because the problem space you’re trying to solve is more complicated than you think it is. There is a working reference implementation which does the thing you think can be done more cheaply, you’re just throwing popcorn from the cheap seats here.
And you've now gotten 92% of the way there. Iterate a few dozen more times to get up to 97%, 98%, 99%, etc., and eventually you'll have rewritten OpenType.