Why the lucky stiff: when you don't create things...
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i think his main point was that, despite popular opinion, more people will read the longer articles, and more people will take them seriously and remember them. to quote: In short, I think long blogs have better survival characteristics: greater reach and greater impact.
That kind of style works fine with, say, Violent Acres, because you know what to expect. But Yegge also writes semi technical material with the same style! In this regard, Eliezer Yudkowsky does a good job IMHO: long, but succinct.
And in the process discard you discard the layering of supported ideas. Instead you get a fragment of an idea that you have no idea how it was formulated. Real life isn't like this. You have to sort the noise from the signal. An essay is one way you can do this. If all you want are the short "tell me the answer" type posts you are susceptible to relying on others to think for you and hence be manipulated.
http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/4424779/are-crowds-wise-...
I make it clear what data I'm summarizing, but the summary also seems more timeless to me than the data. I can imagine it being derived from other books about the wisdom of crowds. Like this blog post:
In the processing of writing you are filtering your own ideas into words. This for writers is the main benefit. Through writing you clarify your own ideas. The difference between brevity and verbosity between writers could indicate greater skill in writing converting the ideas into words.
Going for a popularist vote rather than forming a cohesive argument.
After you see that metaphor it just becomes a matter of whether you like poetry or just novels.
Oh? How so?
" your tastes only narrow & exclude people."
Again: How so?
(Yes, these are semi-rhetorical)
I mean, I'm all for creating over not creating, but this sounds like feel-good but completely unsupported assertions. The sort of thing people want to believe, perhaps because people want to see themselves as creative.
(Also, are there any people who do not in fact create anything?)
For the second, it's a bit vague to me. I guess if you don't have much in the way of ability, you may start defining yourself by your opinions - which can lead to narrow-mindedness and exclusion because you are stuck in a mindset where your opinion is "correct" and have not experienced the other side of the debate, whatever it may be.
I'm pretty sketchy on my guess on that second one.
"I mean, I'm all for creating over not creating, but this sounds like feel-good but completely unsupported assertions."
You may be right, but I have the feeling that it has more to do with the format of twitter than anything else.
"(Also, are there any people who do not in fact create anything?)"
Unless you're speaking of the obvious physical limitations on "not creating anything", yes - tons of them.
The Mac thing was a cheap shot, though.
As for stereotyping Mac users as "creative" types, though, that has been part of Apple's marketing. I definitely agree that it was a cheap shot, but it's not exactly coming out of nowhere.
Remember, not everybody has 2K to spend in a computer, and if you are a student and do, your priorities are kind of backwards.
You can save a 1k by bying a decent PC, so you have 1k of savings, and one month more of runtime to work on a basement for your idea or startup to flourish. And I Bet you money, that all you need to spend is about 1 DAY in tinckering around, until you make both Windows and Linux as usable as your Mac. If you can survive with 1k a month (I could in Cambridge), you just saved about 29 days to work on your startup, if you had to buy the pricey macbook pro.
And, I have Macos, Windows XP, and a Linux box at home, and i can say that while MacOs is the more polished and better looking than all, it is not necessary the fastes for me. I find myself working much faster in XP or Linux.
And all of those that say you have to spend lots of money $$ into a good laptop in order to be able to get working, well, if you can't code in a $1,000 laptop, you probably can't in a $2,000 one.
And just to note, not every Mac costs $2000. Just like not every PC sells for < $1000. The Macbook costs $1100 (even less if you're a student or have an ADC discount) and an Alienware laptop from Dell costs $2100.
You have to go for MCB Pro in order to get anything usable with macs, for which you have to shell at least 2k. Or go the iMac route. Either way, it is much more expensive than you can get out of pc.
you can turn windows into a unix in a day?
As for linux, I used it professionally for a few years and it is not as usable as a mac. One example is that I had to spend hours getting my sound to work again after an OS update on more than one occasion with linux.
And here is my really awesome opinion, i understand all the hype around OS X, its new, its cool, and it gets you laid(well, that youtube video said so, so it must be true). Lets just forget about the company logo that stays on you laptop. Is their really any real advantage that macs have to linux? One would say better graphic design. My KDE desktop looks pretty enough, i've spent years in xp, so KDE looks great to me. Next is usability. Well, after i tweak my KDE desktop a little i get all the usability i need, i do all the things that i want to do. OK what else does OS X have that linux doesn't? It has better apps. OK, that might be true. I don't know how many apps OS X has, but if they are close to 16000, how do you expect them all to be as good, as the best. windows has the same problem, too many apps, when OS X gets popular enough we will see a big amount of bad apps. So, what do we see? I don't need a mac, linux is good enough. OK, is this the blub OS paradox?
Mac developers are regarded as among the best out there. Look at Adium vs. Pidgin: the one is a much better-designed product. Although, of course, iChat's pretty excellent to begin with. That's one example out of hundreds: I've found that whenever I need something done on a Mac, there's an app that does it superbly.
You're allowed to not use a Mac, and nobody here would pressure you into getting one. But don't make statements when you have no clue what you're talking about. I wouldn't profess to make statements about more involved variants of Linux, because I at least know that I know next to nothing.
When I used ubuntu full time for 2 years I twice had to spend close to a full day getting my sound to work again after I did an apt-get upgrade. Copy and paste didn't always work between apps. There is no photoshop. Flash was buggy on linux back then (i have no idea if it is now) and I had to reinstall flash a few times after updating firefox.
There isn't any major thing one can point to with linux and say "that is the problem". Instead it's a long list of issues that suck time and ultimately productivity.
I wouldn't use that to argue that OS X is necessarily better than other operating systems, but as an individual case to remind you that when you make your OWN case, you're relying not on facts but on arbitrary whims of your own. The rest of us know it: stop pretending like you dictate fact.
And, by the way, your entire post reeked of condescension, a tad ironically.
Since when does using a Mac mean you're an aspiring artist who fails to actually create anything?
Actually, the most pretentious lad I know uses a Windows because he's too artsy to use something that's accepted by the artistic majority.
That would be when someone makes a generalization. I'd suggest that it's always dangerous to generalize when talking about people's lifestyles and habits.
(WAY-oh!)
In all seriousness, though, we do it back to the Linux people. So a lot of this flack is just part of tradition.
But even if they do narrow, the more you look, the more you see... a world in a grain of sand.
It would probably still sound pretentious, self-important and platitudinous, though.
Who would have thought it'd come to sharing fortune cookie soundbites.
I think he meant "confined" rather than "defined".
man I'm really thinking about leaving this site. people ask questions on here and sometimes they don't get past 1... (when they are legit) and things like this... get 11!!
But them's the breaks.
It's not a vote on the True Merit of a submission -- it's just a nod to something you happen to have found interesting that day.
11 points - irony is a wonderful thing :)