May 2013
3 posts
4 tags
Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet the Segway...
Steve Jobs: I think it sucks!
Tim Adams: Why?
Steve Jobs: It just does.
Tim Adams: In what sense? Give me a clue.
Steve Jobs: Its shape is not innovative, it's not elegant, it doesn't feel anthropomorphic. You have this incredibly innovative machine but it looks very traditional. There are design firms out there that could come up with things we've never thought of, things that would make you shit in your pants.
Tim Adams: Well, let's keep going, because we don't have much time today to-
John Doerr: We do have time. We want to get Steve's and Jeff's ideas.
Tim Adams: The problem at this point is lead time in our schedule –
Steve Jobs: Screw the lead times. You don't have a great product yet! I know burn rates are important, but you'll only get one shot at this, and if you blow it, it's over.
Social Roulette →
Social Roulette has a 1/6 chance of deleting your account, 5/6 chance that it just posts ‘you played’ to your timeline.
And this comes out the week after I post my big ol’ essay on ephemerality in app design. Hrmph.
“‘The best designers are passionate about design, yet dispassionate about their...”
– Jared Spool on Passionate About Design; Dispassionate About Your Design (via pascallaliberte)
5 tags
April 2013
6 posts
The Strongest Careers Are Non-Linear →
Kids should be working in internships in high school. Because the best path to a good job is a bunch of great internships. But great internships don’t go to people who need money. They are mostly for young people. Yes, this is probably illegal and classist and bad for a fluid society. But we will not debate that here. Instead we will debate why kids need to go to college if the internships are...
March 2013
13 posts
If you're worried about Google dropping support...
Don’t worry. Things end. They always have, they always will. Make sure that you can take your data when it does end, and you’ll be set.
It’s a good thing that they’re not supporting things that don’t make them money. Seriously. All good companies do. Maybe Google will become a better company with better products if it does follow that path. Maybe it’ll even...
2 tags
“We need an ethics of quantification, Morozov cries, and I cry with him. When is...”
– From this review of To Save Everything, Click Here, a new book by Evgeny Morozov. In my undergrad I did a lot of work in the philosophy of science, and I came away from it with a deep appreciation for Kuhn. When research paradigms change, the new one isn’t chosen by anything much resembling...
“Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about...”
– From The Story of My App in the New Yorker, telling the tale of how a Christopher Niemann built the Petting Zoo app. It turns out that you very much can treat apps as an artful medium, and that, as usual, the hardest part of making good art is to trim out the bad parts.
1 tag
How many popes are alive? →
IM with @Biz about starting work on twttr, March...
me: Biz! How goes? We're starting work on the twttr
implementation today.
Biz: really?! NICE
me: yeah, i roped
florian in. i think we'll be able to get most of it up and working by
the end of this week. then i'll do the sms and style side next week.
along with ajax stuff.
Biz: two weeks and we'll have twttr.
yay!
me: yeah! should be pretty quick. have all of florian's time
and all of mine.
Biz: oh man that's awesome
Biz: i've looking
longingly at my empty sms on my phone throuhout the panels
Biz: sucks that teen people has the shortcode
me: i know! that's going to
be tough. doesn't help that the code also spells TXT
Biz: hmm
yah
When we don't write a test for that special corner...
devopsreactions:
Submitted by @darioblanco
February 2013
18 posts
People who raise money make different things than...
This isn’t just a difference between research orgs and startup founders. It’s the question I ask to figure out what I want to spend my life doing.
1 tag
“We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news...”
– Deleuze: Postscript on the Societies of Control. Written in 1992, he saw something coming. Control is amorphous and without refrain. It’s present in wars against insurgents and financial crises and downsizings and venture capital rounds and unpaid internships and performance reviews and even...
1 tag
“If we — liberals and conservatives — are not so much bothered by...”
– The Art of Infinite War, by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
1 tag
“But says Plato, love is not found in the past. It comes from the future. Lovers...”
– Romantic Love: Busting The Myth by Mark Vernon
“the success of the first Resident Evil established the permissibility of a great...”
– Highlighted by Andrew Konoff in Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter
“The megalomaniac pleasure of creation,” psychoanalyst Edmund Berger wrote,...”
– Highlighted by Matas Petrikas in Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition
danielwharris:
Socrates, early in Book 1 of The Republic, explaining one of the worst flaws with the modern prison system nice-and-simple-like:
Then won’t we say the same about human beings, too, that when they are harmed they become worse in human virtue?
Indeed.
But isn’t human virtue a justice?
Yes, certainly.
Then people who are harmed must become more unjust?
So it seems.
(335c,...
4 tags
“Narcissists possess shortterm likeability, show enhanced performance on public...”
– From a paper on whether or not business schools are making narcissistic employees. It sounds like, yeah, business schools reward attract narcissists, but more than that, so do short-term transitory jobs. Subclinical narcissists - those who exhibit narcissistic traits but not so much that it’s...
January 2013
4 posts
1 tag
My Podcamp Halifax talk: How to build an...
Check it!
—-
2 tags
“My primary line of inquiry thus shifted from “what do trolls feel about what...”
– The Ethnography of Trolling, by Whitney Phillips.
5 tags
What I learned by getting 126 retweets (or: a...
A few days ago, I finished the best book I’ve read in the past year - The Information, by James Gleick. Not only is it an epic quest through the development of language, math, and computers, but it has dramatically influenced my thinking about social networks, online communities, and the process of developing new technology.
It also got me following James Gleick on Twitter, and when I tweeted...
7 tags
The Optimal
After reading The Best, and The Worst, I realized I didn’t agree with either. Actually, both bothered the hell out of me. One was written by the most insufferable person on the internet (you just know that the germ of his post was hatched at a dinner party where he got to explain how great each of his forks are), and the other was written by someone doing a good job at sounding like the most...
December 2012
12 posts
1 tag
2 tags
5 tags
“The ‘clarification’ is an example of tone of voice being used to obscure and...”
– At the Asbury & Asbury blog, the Instagram nonpology is broken down into the highly obfuscated statements that it really contains. Because of the tone of the text, it avoids sounding patronizing while also making highly patronizing statements. ‘You’re confused,’ says Instagram,... 