Things I Like
-
While we’ve been streamlining our processes and perfecting our machine-like assembly techniques, others have been watching closely and assembling their own machines. We’ve designed ourselves right into an environment ripe for automation. Applications like Squarespace (and soon The Grid) are here and are clamouring for our jobs.
-
Right now there's a profound sense of irreality in the tech industry. All problems are to be solved with technology, especially the ones that have been caused with previous technology. The new technologies will fix it.
There was so much to quote in this piece, I had a hard time to pull just one. And having been on the outskirts of the VC world for a while, I am tired of it. Tired of the idea that technology can solve everything and everything must scale at exponential rates to be worthwhile. I disagree with that notion. Small ideas, small things that help people, community, and more, are very much worth our time. But the piece is amazing. And I choose the web that connects knowledge, people, and cats.
-
And that, in turn, is important, because humanity’s search for exoplanets—planets beyond the solar system—has just begun. So far, we’ve found 1,932 of them. Some are gas giants, a few seem to be rocky worlds in their star’s habitable zone. What seems likely, though, is that there are many worlds like Pluto: small, round, and distant from their suns.
-
It is true: we will be able to do more stuff if we focus on managing our time, but in today’s business environment, we don’t need more repetitive, synchronized activity like we did in the Industrial Revolution. We need more thinking, more creativity, and more problem solving. A focus on time will undermine all of these. It will make you feel more overwhelmed and miserable too!
-
For most people, the big question isn’t “when did you start drawing?” but “when did you stop drawing?” Virtually everyone drew and doodled at one point in their lives. For artists and non-artists alike, drawing is about more than art—it’s about the very art of thinking.
I just finished a project that got me drawing every day. It was the first time I had drawn daily since art school. And it was fantastic. I saw myself improving, experimenting, thinking as I looked back at each day and drew something. And, I'm just two days out from finishing the project, but I'm still drawing daily, just on a wider variety of surfaces.
-
Our dominant operating systems, our way of working, and our common approach to developing, auditing and debugging software, and spending (or not) money on its maintenance, has not yet reached the requirements of the 21st century. So, yes, NYSE going down is not a big deal, and United Airlines will probably have more ground halts if they don’t figure out how to change their infrastructure (not a cheap or easy undertaking). But it’s not just them. From our infrastructure to our privacy, our software suffers from “software sucks” syndrome which doesn’t sound as important as a Big Mean Attack of Cyberterrorists. But it is probably worse in the danger it poses.
If you've worked on any large scale, older software, then you know that this article is dead on. We love building things in our industry, but we really don't like maintaining them very much. And that means, we have a lot of creaky software all over the place running our many of the things we depend on.
-
So the team that started by performing bug fixes on a sprawling, struggling mass of code ended by writing critical, efficient infrastructure for the government. Yet what the MPL team accomplished philosophically may be even more important: It helped teach government bureaucrats how to think about building websites in 2015.
Really well written article that is mostly about communicating. A team of tech folks learning how government works while the government folks learned how to make software.
-
A pretty funny comic about JavaScript frameworks, if you are a developer, you'll probably laugh.
-
Early on, my mother exposed this myth — casually, just after piano practice and before dinnertime. Adults too were making it up. Adults were winging it. It has been an invaluable insight that’s guided me my whole life.
-
Getting a puppy, the comic Louis C.K. observed, is a "countdown to sorrow." Inscribed in the act of welcoming this adorable fur ball into your home is the moment of its death a decade or so hence. Grief over a pet can equal or exceed that of a human family member, studies show. This is canine neoteny's cruel flip side: Yes, your dog gets to be an emotional adolescent into ripe old age. But when he dies, it will feel like losing a child.
I really love this article. I found it when I watched (and cried my eyes out watching) a video about a man and his dog at the end of the dog's life. I still miss my girl, every day, even after a year and a half since she's been gone.
-
It’s about the users. It’s about finding ways to make our content available to them no matter how unpredictable the path that lies between us and them.
It's about users! 'nuff said.
-
Small steps move us forward. They may not be the amazing, overnight success stories we hear about, but that's because you don't hear about the thousand small steps that contributed to that overnight success story.
-
Some will point out, correctly, that even educated people can still be racists, but this shouldn’t remove the spotlight from anti-intellectualism. Yes, even intelligent and educated individuals, often due to cultural and institutional influences, can sometimes carry racist biases. But critically thinking individuals recognize racism as wrong and undesirable, even if they aren’t yet able to eliminate every morsel of bias from their own psyches or from social institutions. An anti-intellectual society, however, will have large swaths of people who are motivated by fear, susceptible to tribalism and simplistic explanations, incapable of emotional maturity, and prone to violent solutions. Sound familiar?
-
The post-work proponents acknowledge that, even in the best post-work scenarios, pride and jealousy will persevere, because reputation will always be scarce, even in an economy of abundance. But with the right government provisions, they believe, the end of wage labor will allow for a golden age of well-being. Hunnicutt said he thinks colleges could reemerge as cultural centers rather than job-prep institutions. The word school, he pointed out, comes from skholē, the Greek word for “leisure.” “We used to teach people to be free,” he said. “Now we teach them to work.”
This is a long, but really fascinating article on work and what would happen if there is no work in the future. I've read and thought a lot about work in the past several years. I'm not sure that I agree that if we have no work we will become like the people on the spaceships in WALL-E, I would like to think it would be more like Star Trek, where we still do things, but we don't have to worry about earning wages or the basics of life. What I found most fascinating is how people in Youngstown have a revitalization of culture and creative pursuits, because they have the time for it now.
-
But I’ve also come to see writing as a material in itself. Something we can play with and manipulate. Something that can change over time as questions come up in the design process or an idea evolves. Writing can be a tool for talking to ourselves when we’re still figuring things out. A sort of mirror or feedback system. A way to understand and articulate design.
Over the past several years, I've come to love words more. I've also realized that words in design/applications/etc are so very important, more important than we often think. And I love the way Nicole talks about this, using words in design and as part of the process.