Things I Like
-
So that’s what I learned. That’s why the experiment was a failure. This is the era of the quantified self and radical transformation. And I’ve made charts and counted and poked around. I can tell you the top 20 words for each of my years, the number of times I wrote about weight loss, the first time I started thinking about being a father. My basic self is just this single, continuous, thread — quantifiable, in the form of actuarial tables, bank account statements, square footage owned, number of children. But counting things doesn’t change them.
-
Crucially, if a server can render links into a tags, like Ember currently does on the client, it would be possible for a user who did not receive JavaScript (for whatever reason) to navigate around the website. It might be possible to get forms working as well, by running all the validation and submission logic on the server instead of on the client. If this effort could be made at the outset by a framework maintainer, then every developer using that framework could immediately transform an app that only worked on the latest web browsers into a progressively enhanced experience compatible with virtually any web client—past, present, or future.
-
The culture of busyness and hyperproductivity is so ascendant, that it is hard to raise questions about whether speed itself should be the ultimate rationale for innovation. Is ‘the best’ technical design always about maximum efficiency in the sense of being economical with time? This instrumental philosophy is certainly at the heart of engineering, in which the latest, fastest and most automated systems appear as, objectively, the best.
-
Is it just me, or are new web UI technologies continuing to try to solve the wrong problems?
-
I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking to people about magic and technology, and honestly one of the biggest reasons I do this is because I see magic disappearing from the internet all the time—or worse, magic being invoked toward entirely the wrong reasons and mostly questionable business models. Twitter bots aren’t the magic of alienated labor or the magic of manipulation. They’re honest magic, they’re chaos magic, they’re real fucking magic. That kind of magic has a way of persisting online, regardless of the vacillations of markets and platforms. For now, we have it in our Twitter bots, and for now, I’m just so happy it’s thriving.
-
So I went back to my old job and tried to care about it. I was not successful. On one hand the company does not need me; there are thousands of other engineers that are as good or better. On the other hand, if I succeeded beyond anybody’s wildest dreams the net effect is that some extra billions of dollars would go to one billionaire instead of a different billionaire. It was hard to see why I should bother, and still is.
-
A really great twenty post series about a guy instant messaging with his cat while at work. Hilarious and also touching.
-
We now have a true Single Source of Truth for our theme tokens which can be used by a wide variety of platform and devices. We also have an internal repository of assets (like icons and fonts) that we keep updated in one place. The style guide pulls from this to display all the icons in our style guide.
This system, along with what I've researched and learned about Marriott and Lonely Planet, sounds fantastic! I'm hoping to find the time soon to dig in and get a better sense of how it works.
-
We need to deal with our resources differently, in terms of how we waste things. We have to move away from the throwaway habit. Things can, and must, last longer. They must be designed so that they can be reused. We need to take more care of our environment. That means not only our personal environment but also our cities and our resources. That is the future of design, to take more care of these basic elements. Otherwise I’m not sure what the future of our planet will be. So designers have to take on that responsibility, and to do so we need more support from government. We need political support to solve the problems with our environment and how we should shape our cities. As designers, we shouldn’t be doing this for ourselves, but for our community. And the community needs support, not only to interact with each other democratically, but it also needs support to live democratically.
-
So let me repeat: don’t use an icon if its meaning isn’t a 100% clear to everyone. When in doubt, skip the icon. Reside to simple copy. A text label is always clearer.
-
These are super great experiments with CSS gradients. My bachelors is in fine art and I studied color theory and Rothko is one of my favorite artists, so it is also fitting that I love these. Not as great as the paintings, but for a digital representation, pretty great.
-
We can choose to remain small. We can choose to devote ourselves to something, and to those we serve. We can choose to do our small things in small ways and which, over a period of time, can build upon themselves.
-
And that's what the browsers on devices like phones, game consoles and smart watches are like. We'll sometimes use whatever's closest to hand. It might not be the best tool for the job, but if it can still do a good enough job, so what?
-
In my research, I found humility in a surprising place: the headquarters of I.B.M.’s Watson team, the people who built the computer that trounced the “Jeopardy!” champions. I asked the lead engineer of Watson’s health team, Eric Brown, what the equivalent of the “Jeopardy!” victory would be in medicine. I expected him to describe some kind of holographic physician, like the doctor on “Star Trek Voyager,” with Watson serving as the cognitive engine. His answer, however, reflected his deep respect for the unique challenges of health care. “It’ll be when we have a technology that physicians suddenly can’t live without,” he said.
I wish more start ups would devote their energy to the health care tech field. It desperately needs smart people (just like government tech does) and it is hard, but wow, the wins could mean saved lives and that would be pretty cool.
-
They could have been any of us, anywhere—whoever flies or rides a train or takes a bus or in any way entrusts her life to strangers, as we all must regularly and routinely to get through this world. That sense of investment in calamity—it could have been me—is true, of course, of accidents and targeted acts of terrorism as well. But to be told that a scene of mass death is the result of an accident or terrorism is to be given not only an explanation of the cause but also an idea of how to reckon with the consequence–through justice, or revenge, or measures meant to prevent a recurrence.
I've got to admit, this plane crash this week, and the seemingly deliberate act that caused it have me confounded. And I honestly can't stop thinking of the last moments for the poor people on board. Horrifying.