>>It's almost as if Google designed an algorithm update to specifically go after small bloggers. I've talked to so many people who've just had everything wiped out
While at the same time small businesses are being killed by the lockdown
iPhone iOS design used to be excellent.
Since Apple switched to flat design, it was very clear that they were heading toward this path. I wrote about it in 2016:
“ I predict that the technological disparity will increase dramatically. Most of the efforts that Steve Jobs put to “push the human race forward,” by making tech products easy-to-use to everyone, will be wasted.”
At some point page turning as in physical book becomes an anachronism like the floppy disk icon on save buttons. Do you expect your browser to flip pages upon navigation?
I don't expect this will happen. There's a good reason why floppy disks are no longer used, but I would be surprised if physical books ever go away.
Personally, as much as I like the convenience of digital books, there's nothing quite like the reading experience that comes with a printed physical book.
Sure, but how much closer to the physical book reading experience does a page flip animation really get us?
In my experience, what makes a digital reading app pleasant to use are other things: Responsiveness, choice of default fonts, whether or not it allows the publisher to apply ridiculous style overrides (e.g. forcing the background to be light grey even in night mode), not losing track of pagination at chapter boundaries (so that flipping back across a boundary, paragraphs don't mysteriously shift up or down half a page)...
I'll take a reading app that does these things well, but only uses a simple slide animation over one that imitates a perfect page flip, but otherwise botches the concept of a "page", any day.
Glowing in the dark is as much a bug as a feature. Lit screens work best in a dark room, where a reading light is more pleasant when you pause reading to do something else.
I spend an inordinate amount of time either turning lights on an off or trying to use the not quite sufficient tablet screen to do stuff.
An e-ink reader does it better because the front lighting is less glaring and the overall image is more stable. It’s hard to get a phone screen to the right brightness level for reading in the dark, but an ereader will have a very dim front light that you only notice when the room is completely dark.
Kindle Paperwhite 5th gen has both amber and white LEDs and its color temperature can be adjusted. I don't know exactly what light temperature range it has but it feels very "warm" on maximum setting.
There is something about owning a book and having your own hard library. I love to do almost everything on the phone; news, tv, videos, Ect.
Reading from a book however is a better experience than a lit up screen. Audiobooks However have a place as less and less people have the attention span to physically hold something and read it.
User Interface that is easy to imagine as a physical object is easier to figure out. It doesn't matter if the user is familiar with the physical object being emulated on the screen. Because laws of physics are still applicable even if you haven't seen such a physical object in real life.
The human mind is always building models in our minds, based on observations of how things look and work, and then using those models to predict behaviors of things that we are yet to explore. For this to work well, appearance has to imply behavior. Instead of starting with a clean slate each time it would be helpful if we can leverage the mental models we have already built of the physical world. This is where skeuomorphism is helpful.
I don’t have any data to back it up but I doubt that. Schools are still mostly using paper text books. And I reckon school libraries are still the main source of books for kids (who typically don’t have money to buy books). Family members who want to buy you a book as a gift, will do that on paper as gifting ebooks is trickier and less personal.
To be honest, I would bet that the if younger demographics are reading less paper books it’s because they’re reading less generally rather than switching to digital.
True. But piracy is a big issue, and it exclusively happens digitally. I wonder what the numbers would look like if you factored in pirated ebooks/etextbooks.
I don't know if it's nostalgia or what but the flat design seems charmless compared to the Forstall-era skeuomorphic design. And the vanilla sameness and uniformity makes it harder to distinguish things. It reminds me a bit of shelving books by size and color rather than by content.
I recently noticed a bunch of electric street lamps that are clearly modeled on gaslamps - they appear to have little chimney vents as well as wide pipes for the nonexistent gas, and they seem designed to shield the LED/CFL/etc. fixture from wind and rain. Mostly non-functional design elements, and I've only seen a few dozen actual gas streetlamps in cities, but I still find them charming.
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Amazon reviews
Groupon reviews
Sephora reviews
Booking com reviews
This is the beginning..we are entering a new whole world of decentralized power and brand authority. It's interesting to watch how big brands will continue to fight it.
Everyone should remember that the blog Steve Jobs wrote criticizing Adobes security was deleted at the start of the pandemic in June, 2020.
From the blog “Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.“
“Garry Tan is a moral canary in a coal mine. When people hate on Garry Tan, they out themselves as either evil or stupid, because in fact Garry is as close to a 100% good guy as you get”.
—Paul Graham
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1460931338131890180
————
Congratulations Garry! Your blogs were my inspirations when I was running my startup.
I always remember this line:
“The ideal startup team involves really two major roles — builder, and hustler. I used to say it took three roles (designer, engineer, hustler).....In reality, I think designer / engineer can be abstracted to builder”.
Being a good guy probably ranks the least IMO for leading VC. You need to be extremely shrewd and calculative, have a great bullshit detector, need to have solid intuition based on scant data, good general knowledge, well versed in various industries and areas of study, pragmatic and brutally honest. I am probably missing a few more. Speaking generally, nothing against Garry.
Do both. There's nothing preventing you from looking at the numbers, the pitch, and saying "no." In terms of being "good". You can be honest and kind the same as how one can be honest and mean.
I have no strong opinion of Tan, but calling a person who happily worked for (and profited from) Palantir a 'moral canary in a coal mine' seems a bit of a stretch.
By the time of the LoTR timeframe, when have the palantiri ever been used for good? Seems like malevolently misleading things happen even to the evil characters after they use it.
Based only on your comment, I'm guessing you're unaware of Palantir's work with intelligence agencies even when Tan was there. Also, Thiel's mission from the start was this kind of work.
I served in the Marine Corps. I've had some exposure to Palantir's 'offerings'. It's a fucking nightmare of a company, morally and ethically, and it always has been.
Not to defend Thiel, but don’t you think that his exist from Facebook (after 17 years) because of the stance they took at the beginning of the pandemic is worthy of some attention?
Specially, that Facebook suffocated voices of Trump’s advisors who opposed the lockdown.
“Social media, particularly Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, was actively suffocating voices, including mine, that dissented from the accepted COVID narrative. By August, Facebook told the Washington Post they had taken down seven million posts “for spreading coronavirus misinformation.” Meanwhile, Wikipedia crafted smears and distortions of my background and then locked it to edits”.
—Dr. Scott Atlas, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America
I tried to watch that interview. It's just dry, boring, slow and abstract (to me) but I'll grant you it wasn't what I was expecting.
My issue with Thiel is his hypocrisy: he warns about surveillance AI and how it's evil, which is just rich, since he founded Palantir and holds shares of Clearview.
Someone asked him directly this question and he addressed it in quite a lot of detail, something along the lines of two morally good ideas of extreme transparency and extreme privacy. I don't agree with him though, I personally stand strictly on the conservative/classical-liberal side that there is no compromise that's acceptable with regards to 4th amendment.
Not "mainstream left"? I guess the right, what was once the far right but today is just the right is indeed not "mainstream left". Make no mistake where he stands: he was one of the largest donors of Trump, served on his transitional team and has once written "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible".
There were hundreds of doners to Donald Trump's 2020 campaign, let alone 2016 campaign. If not directly, then through other superPACS including FAANG companies [1].
If your viewpoint is so myopically constrained by a single data point, I don't know what to say.
I find intellectuals from all corners of political spectrum to be interesting. Usually, when people dismiss intellectuals not for their arguments, but by some ostensible thinly veiled morality or the media zeitgeist; it is already an indicator that something interesting is out there. Anyways, all I am saying is that Peter is not evil in any stretch of the definition as the media portrays him. He is just not your typical conformist thinker.
you talk about donating to "both sides" however dems are also a conservative party and hardly a "leftist" organization, your point is not as strong as you make it seem
I am addressing "mainstream left" and honestly, the main point of contention is that we should debate about Peter Thiel, but calling him evil is wrong and extremely misinformed.
Do you remember why Thiel invested in Confinity which became PayPal? Because he thought a digital wallet could lead to “the erosion of the nation-state”. If it's not self evident to you why that's a bad thing perhaps read https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-wo...
Max Chafkin argues that Thiel “has been responsible for creating the ideology that has come to define Silicon Valley: that technological progress should be pursued relentlessly—with little, if any, regard for potential costs or dangers to society.” continued with “Palantir, his second company, popularized the concept of data mining after 9/11 and paved the way for what critics of the technology call surveillance capitalism”.
And of course there was gawker. No, what gawker did was not right but Thiel's reaction was not right either. That's some straight up vigilante BS.
I disagree with Max Chafkin, I've watched probably every single Thiel interview (there is a Spotify podcast of collection of his interviews) and I do not share whoever this Max Chafkin guy is.
> As far back as 2004, Thiel lamented that “America’s constitutional machinery” prevents “any single ambitious person from reconstructing the old Republic.”
As far as I know the 'monarchy' dude is Yarvin. I'd be surprised if Thiel had publicly committed himself to anything so sophomoric, and it would be interesting to see an actual example.
> The extreme left in SF politics (which in SF = the Establishment).
???
kind off topic, but I am curious what other people in SF think about this statement. I don't live there, but I find it surprising and dubious that the extreme anything is also "the establishment", not saying it's not possible but seems unlikely to me.
20 years in SF, and I can promise you that the extreme left is not the establishment here. As an example, we had a relatively progressive prosecutor who tried occasionally to hold cops to account. After an acrimonious campaign, he was just recalled with extensive support from a chunk of the establishment. His replacement, selected by the mayor, volunteered as an active proponent in the recall. Except that it came out later that she received $100k in "consulting" fees from a billionaire via a sister organization to the recall campaign: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/reports-sf-da-brooke-jen...
San Francisco gets a lot of press as being radical, but the government strikes me as pretty middle-of-the-road and wealth-focused. i can't think of a policy here that would be out of place in any other sensibly run city in the US. And we're definitely to the right of places like Copenhagen and Amsterdam. And that goes back a long way; CA's current governor was a centrist mayor here back in the day.
My guess is: the administration controlling North Korea would be considered by many to be extreme (left, right, you pick) but in North Korea they are the establishment.
So too in SF, outside of cali they would be considered extreme (left, right, you pick) but in SF they are the establishment.
Not passing judgment on whether that’s right or wrong just saying that’s what that line could mean.
It's from the twitter thread by paul graham that the OC linked. It was a response to someone asking who dislikes Garry Tan, to which Paul Graham replied:
"The extreme left in SF politics (which in SF = the Establishment)"[1]
>> There simply must be a way to change how Google handles two-factor authentication which does not constantly lock out poor people who use the public library to access their email. It must be possible to make it so we do not constantly reach these dead-ends where Google tells patrons to endlessly loop through “I don’t have my phone” and “Try another way” until their account becomes locked permanently due to too many failed attempts.
Why is Google making it hard for the poor to access their email in these times?
it’s not like google just launched today. They have the data of these users, who use internet from public libraries.
While at the same time small businesses are being killed by the lockdown