http://zachholman.com/posts/shit-work/
Some people still like shit work. They can spend an hour moving Twitter accounts to special Lists, and then at the end of it look back and say “Boy, I spent an hour doing this. I really accomplished a lot today!” You didn’t. You did shit work.
Thomas Carlyle:
There is practically nothing that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper — and he who considers only the price is that man’s lawful prey.
From the book by Daniel Kahneman:
This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.
The next Steve Jobs will totally be a chick, because girls are No. 2 — and No. 2 always wins in America. Apple was a No. 2 company for years, and Apple embodies a lot of what have been defined as feminine traits: an emphasis on intuitive design, intellect, a strong sense of creativity, and that striving to always make the greatest version of something. Traditionally, men are more like Microsoft, where they’ll just make a fake version of what that chick made, then beat the shit out of her and try to intimidate everybody into using their product.
Brent Simmons on the horrible experience of reading on the web:
I think it was in the Space Merchants (or maybe in The Merchants’ War) where this future was predicted: lower-class people would be subjected to a ton of advertising — accompanying every moment awake and asleep — while upper-class people would be insulated.
It seems obvious now, but in the ’50s I don’t think it was. And now we’d add that it’s not a class thing entirely — technical proficiency is part of the equation. If you’re technical enough to figure out how to install AdBlock (the most popular Safari extension, it appears), you’ll cut way down on ads. If you go even further and edit your hosts file and make your browser use an ad-blocking CSS file, you’ll cut down even further (and you’ll opt-out of a bunch of tracking too).
If enough people do this, publications will have to show more ads, just to make up for the ad revenue they’re missing from me and you.
I worry that this is already be happening.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/
I prefer “developer.” It implies not just that you write code, but that you spearhead an entire product from conception to shipment.
The CIA used the codeword “PIZZA” when discussing where to meet with the agents, according to U.S. officials. Two former officials describe the location as a Beirut Pizza Hut.
Insanely clever work by Paul Haddad of Tapbots fame. I haven’t run it on my library because I have some different ideas about what a Compilation is than Apple, and also because I just don’t have the nerve. But it reportedly works fine.
http://cl.ly/C3kK
UPDATE: The latest version allows for updating selected tracks only. I’ve been using it here and there and it works pretty well.
http://thomasmaier.me/lionbuttons/
Nice work by Thomas Maier.
http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_july
Nice story by Miranda July for the New Yorker
http://duncandavidson.com/blog/2011/10/dennis_ritchie?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Java is safe. Python is clear. Ruby is expressive. Perl is the complex master of strings. Nothing beats C at its core game, however. It’s one of the reasons why I am quite fond of Objective-C (a superset of C). And, it’s why there has been a copy of this book on my bookshelf since I was in college. Other books have come and gone, but this one has remained.
The machines and the software you use everyday—from the smartphone in your hand all the way up to the complex servers that make up the World Wide Web—bear the mark and influence of Dennis Ritchie. It’s impossible to overstate that. Thank you Dennis.
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/11/steve-jobs-on-mock-turtlenecks-and-jeans/
Jobs shares the story of his signature wardrobe with biographer Walter Isaacson:
“So I asked Issey to make me some of his black turtlenecks that I liked, and he made me like a hundred of them.” Jobs noticed my surprise when he told this story, so he showed them stacked up in the closet. “That’s what I wear,” he said. “I have enough to last for the rest of my life.”
http://www.danhaseltine.com/blog/2011/10/9/frail-revisited.html
Dan Haseltine describes the process of turning Stephen Mason’s guitar demo into one of the most beloved Jars of Clay songs.
I have not had many moments like this in my life. I have not had any moment since this one time. I dreamt the lyric to frail. It was almost a complete idea in my head. I woke up and wrote the lyric on a blank page in the back of a book I had been reading. I tore the page out and took it in the next day when we were writing.
1. Demonstrate from the top that high quality and attention to detail are prioritized and appreciated above everything else, including being the first to market, having the most features, or having the most aggressive prices. If you can get those as well, that’s great, but quality will not be sacrificed to do so.
2. Instill these values in your staff. If you can’t, hire a staff for which you can. Better yet, hire a staff for which you don’t need to.
3. Aggressively pursue simplification, elegance, craftsmanship, and the highest-class user experiences in the product line. Ruthlessly cut or hold features or entire products that aren’t good enough.
4. Make it pretty.
How not to bring good design to a platform
Skip steps 1–3 above.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/steve_jobs_solved_the_innovato.html
Everything — the business, the people — are subservient to the mission: building great products.
Released under the Apache 2.0 license.
It hasn’t been a good week for computer visionaries.
More than 24 hours after the announcement that the iPhone 4S would be coming to Sprint, their home page still has no mention of it. And this is the device they say they are betting the entire company on?