arstin

Yeah I've done this for almost a decade now---read everything by an author I connect with then move on based on that experience---and I can't recommend the habit enough! It was a bit problematic in grad school since I'd spend all my time on one person at the expense of much else I had to read, but long term it was absolutely the better move.

Why is this practice so effective? I think it's partly because when we read we basically let another person directly poke at our mind for a while. And when you have a rich and subtle writer who really gets in there, over time you build up a whole different perspective. And when the writers you obsess over are all connected in some way, you can assume the same "perspective" (the same basic assumptions about what is significant, what is not) and naturally deepen your understanding in one area or another in a fairly unified way.

Yea, I love using ebooks for light or SF novels. As well as journalist-y nonfiction (especially ones structured as the story of the writer learning that subject and consisting mostly of vignettes talking with experts). Basically anything I'll just blow through and never look at again.

I never use ebooks for most of what I like to read though. Or cookbooks!

Just to add my own "limited experience" in support of this article, I've ran into the slow text input problem many times, but never once solved it by getting rid of arrow functions in render. It just doesn't seem to matter that much (not saying a dedicated text input component shouldn't try to get all the details right...whatever they might be).

In my experience a choppy text input has actually been a problem with the redux architecture, or layout, or some wild child components, and so on.

Milwaukee Ave I guess? Yea as someone who bikes everywhere in Chicago, I hate going down Milwaukee on a bike too (partly because of all the bikers, definitely the pedestrians and cabs, partly the cars on a relatively narrow strip). At peak times Elston is faster and less stressful for a trip of decent distance anyway.

While we're complaining though, cars need to use their effing turn signals. I always check the signal as I pass through a line of cars at an intersection to let them get over in front me, but usually they'll just cut me off. So far no real issues, but I do have a policy of slapping the car hard as I can as I jerk around it. They're still full enough of that weird baseline road rage/driver anger to cuss at me rather than apologize though. (For those who don't live in Chicago, we have bike lanes on most main streets now, and my complaint is about cars turning into bike lanes without warning...)

I also follow the "red light stop, stop sign yield" rule. I'm as annoyed by bikers who just zip through stop signs as everyone else, but when riding attentively and respectfully, I believe the Idaho stop safer and more efficient for everyone, not to mention waaayyy more considerate of bikers (who, until recently, have just been given the finger by norms, laws, and infrastructure in America).

I must admit having a hard time relating to all the complaints over js churn and the new world of...compiling code. I hated website dev in the past, hated using jQuery, hated being driven insane by the css cascade, hated wasting all my time on arbitrary and stupid browser incompatibility bugs with magic arcane solutions.

I develop apps---not traditional websites---so I know this colors my experience. But every single tech change that I've made the past 4 years has been motivated by a real need. (Of course this assumes I have control over the tech: I'm grateful that I've only been forced to work on one Angular project for work!)

I started using React in December 2013 after a shootout of the competing view libraries at the time because I didn't like having to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out how to change someone else's (or my own!) wild jQuery code, and I always inarticulately felt like I was fighting against a natural flow when using the old MVC frameworks. I now haven't churned my basic framework for almost 4 years. And don't expect to for many more! (I know that to an extent I got lucky: it's easy to forget now how much shit I got at the time for using dumb React lol compared to Angular). Ember is fascinating, I'm glad Preact, etc is around as a backup...but churning would solve no problem for me, and most jobs I'd get (for years now) require React, so why worry about changing?

I've been a redux user for over 2 years now. I eagerly switched over the codebase I was working on because it solved a need I had: getting rid of a bug-prone, undocumented state solution of my own design which everyone else had to figure out for themselves. I expect I will switch out redux one of these years. But haven't seen anything to motivate it yet. Mobx-state-tree is very interesting, but until I see the benefits are worth the switch, why churn?

I did really hate having to worry about babel, webpack, etc since it distracted from writing actual product code, though ES6 was just so obviously better than old JS that it was worth it. But now create-react-app and its siblings make the dev environment a matter of typing a single command. Contrary to this article, it points out errors that could easily have gone undetected in the the old world of wild web dev. No churn here. CRA all the way. Until I run into a need for something new.

Styling solutions are something I have actually churned. But because I knew I wasn't committing, all css-in-js library code I write is in two or three "ui library" files. The app code itself only uses a jsx prop interface. So swapping these libraries on a mature app takes an afternoon at best. Though for the first time I now expect that I'll stick with Glamorous. I expect I'm going to stop churning here because I'm aware of no problem I personally have that Glamorous does not solve, unlike previous css-in-js libraries.

I don't know, this guy's rant just put me in the mood for ranting lol. Anyway, I'm glad this guy found his real interest now might be as an animator and UX designer and I wish him the best! Those are important contributions too, possibly more important.

Exactly. Academic publishers especially have slashed all the editorial work they traditionally did and now contribute nothing. Unless you want a shitty $150 printing of a book. They are utterly parasitic on other people's money: grants, libraries, university salaries (and the weight of a book publication in promotions)...

When I was in grad school I got a thousand dollars or so to copyedit and typeset a prof's book. He had to pay for it out of his grant. The publisher (Springer) literally did nothing.

This situation was neither inevitable or accidental. I forget a source, but a few decades ago some business types realized academic publishing was a captive market, so bought up a bunch of presses and started exploiting it more and more.

I never heard of this Kastrup fellow, but it's pretty hard to want to keep reading about an issue so delicate with so heavy-headed a first page. For example, here's a thing he claims we know "about the universe irrespective of theory or metaphysics", an "empirical fact", he declares, "accessible to anyone through simple observation":

"There is subjective experience. This is the primary and incontrovertible."

This statement is a fine way of starting a conversation and far from a silly thing to assume as a first pass.

But what happens if we try to square his claim that what he is presenting "avoids any a priori metaphysical assumption or bias" with the need to clarify what he means by "subjective"? Is subjectivity a means of knowing (from the inside)? The phenomenal aspect of consciousness (a rug appearing redly)? A way of categorizing facts (the domain of what can be seen from a perspective)? All that matters for now is that any of these responses will result in his first Grand Fact being completely different. And, further, that any answer will involve theoretical machinery, however implicit it is to most people.

What if we then step to the next word and argue that the concept of "experience" is both dispensable (we can do all explanatory work without it) and adds to confusion (by muddling causal and justificatory dimensions of our behavior) and that we should replace it with a family of more restricted concepts? So much for incontrovertible.

And what if we keep going with the second clause of the statement and counter that nothing, in general, can be primary and incontrovertible (that all concepts must earn their keep in explanation)?

It would be tedious---but easy---to do this for every one of the "facts of nature" which ground his pretty pompous exposition. It's easy to think this sort of response is just being clever, but being comfortable with everything being up for grabs and being more modest about what we are actually doing is really the only way an issue as hazy and messy as consciousness can be seriously approached. The playfulness used by Dennett or Hofstader, for example, is not just superfluous or "mere rhetoric", but essential for the stage of understanding we're at.

An aside: I was only scanning for modest evidence that the author was aware of and responsive to the complexity of the issue to see if it was worth my time to read further, not that he actually explicitly addresses every possible move! Also, his substantive position, as far as I glean it, can still be interesting. FWIW I personally have idealist sympathies (appropriately construed) and think both subjectivity and experience do earn their keep...so far.

I only had one one set theory course so can't vouch for the details, but this seemed like a well done article on a subject that could easily have been more eyeglazingly superficial or obscure.

Given the kind of paper this is, I assume the names should be understood as an endorsement. Sorta like signatures on a petition.

I doubt anyone would disagree "the world's foremost authorities" on classical lit need to know greek/latin.

But carefully reading and comparing several translations while following centuries of commentary can surely make one an expert on, say, themes in Greek epic poetry. I mean, if it doesn't then I'd just want to introduce into our conversation a distinction or two in the area of "knowledge use" and just stipulate which branch I'm intending by "expert"...

(This doesn't really matter for the previous point, but I actually think this just follows from agreeing with you and then taking even more seriously "how much interpretation happens".)

When I make a recipe I like, I've gotten in the habit of rewriting it with consideration for minimizing time and dishes preparing. Like, if I know the meat has to brown for a few minutes before adding garlic+ginger+peppers, I'll say to start browning meat, then chop g+g+p together. Or if I know vinegar needs to be used in three different mixes, I'll start a bowl of each mix at the time vinegar is first needed so I only need to worry about it once.

It's good to write this yourself since you work it into your head...and also because such instructions could appear a bit batshit if you didn't write them!

I also cleanly distinguish the "shopping list" part of the recipe (which has it's own standard structure organized by pantry, fresh, spices, and unique ingredients) and the "cooking" part, which provides measurements in the cooking text without needing to refer to the ingredient list. It's a small thing, but I really hate scanning ingredient lists every time I need a measurement in the middle of cooking.

Obviously "fake news" has become used for content in which truth isn't really a dominant virtue...especially when it's being overridden by "strategizing political upsets"...and especially when that's tied to just making a shitload of money manipulating people.

Traditional editorials like, say, in the National Review or NYT, may well be wrong, but at least they're trying to be right. Likewise, the "independence" of fact-checking orgs doesn't lie in being "non-partisan" so much as making speaking truly an overriding value.

(I'd concede that Breitbart in particular probably isn't a paradigm example of a fake news outlet, but it's obviously on the spectrum.)

Good points, especially how unplanned interactions have become interruptions. Slumping through life looped into a slab of infinity glass used to be an absurd dystopia...

Sure, most interactions never develop into anything lasting, but you only need one to click every few years...or even a lifetime!

Excuse a slight tangent, since it was on my mind today: I'm sure I'll be defensively sniped at as an "extrovert" here (lol), but I do think we have a duty to each other to be outgoing, warm, forbearing...to make every effort that others feel at ease. Techies will sometimes make icky demands like that a social interaction must be "useful". Yes, looking random people in the eye and talking to them...even when they're not giving you anything...is tough. I know well that it can be among the hardest and most draining things. But I, anyway, believe we're obliged to learn to do so well and to suffer through it.

Resolving to take on this incredibly modest, day-to-day responsibility of making others feel acknowledged and at ease---of trying to bring out the best in everyone---should surely be one key step in addressing your own loneliness.

Obviously part of this skill is respecting the extent to which others want left alone. And I, for one, prefer to spend most of my own time far away from people. Please don't snarl at me for not understanding "introverts"! :) But the point is of course tied with how tech can affect what people in fact expect and want and how tech can adjust the "cost" of an interaction (smartphones, public spaces optimized for laptops inside and cars outside...and on...and on...).

This frontend code.

  const ProfileImage = ({ user }) => <img src={user.avatarUrl} alt={user.name} />;
  
  const query = gql`{
    user(id: 3) {
      name
      avatarUrl
    }
  }`

  export const ProfileImageWithData = graphql(query)(ProfileImage);

You can ask for data in the structure the UI expects and only get exactly that data, letting the GQL client handle batching network requests for needs distributed across the whole app, caching, UI updating, etc under the hood. Also does a great job of decoupling product and data management code.

I really hope that there will be a shift back to supporting these sorts of skilled trades over the next generations. Is it too wishful to think it might happen as "industrial revolution" style jobs continue automating away and perhaps if UBI can provide a basic net? To some extent we're seeing it emerge already with "millennial artisanal X". Besides providing economic opportunities, this sort of work would also help some with the spiritual malaise which will no doubt continue to spread over the next century.

As software engineers we are blessed with the opportunity for depth in craft much more than most workers nowadays, but we still live a fairly nerveless existence, with the tips of our fingers being just about our only meager contact with the world while the rest of our body atrophies.

I've started learning woodworking with old hand tools, but so far it's just made me appreciate more just how skilled these old woodworkers were.

8/mth really isn't that much. If you go to grad school for history or something you have to learn to crush whole libraries. It's a developed skill like any other, hard but achievable. Personally I closely read one dense, rich book a month or so, then alongside that another dozen or two with varying levels of thoroughness. For example, I spent about two afternoons on Happy City, but it took me several months for just Vol 1 of Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena.

Personally I've found over the years that this balance between reading a very small number of books closely and a whole lot casually has worked well and has led each set to complement the other.

I'd not worry about "retaining" in the sense of being able to mouth all sorts of facts and figures and arguments and story details several weeks later. Sometimes this stuff is important, but for me anyway I only "retain" in this sense when I take the further step of taking notes after finishing a chapter, etc. Most books aren't worth that IMO given you can just pull them off the shelf when you need to look something up. But books can affect you in other dimensions, especially in slowly enlarging your perspective in ways you hardly even notice.

(But I mean, if you literally couldn't talk -at all- for a few minutes about a book you read last month, that's a different story!)

Yea it can be. But really depends on both the book and the reader. And what you're trying to get out of it.

Some readers are excruciatingly slow, so 1.25 just makes them sound normal. Other readers speed along, so 1x is like 1.5x on other books.

Some books need to be played at 1x if you're gonna follow the intricacies. Others with neither dense logical argument or thick, nuanced soul, like bestseller nonfictions where you have a sequence of little stories to illustrate "what studies have shown", can profitably be listened to quite fast, especially when also allaying their boringness with a Geometry Wars or Kingdom Rush addiction. (You might say, why read them then? Personally: as an excuse to play Kingdom Rush.)

If I'm not too into a part I'll even go faster than 2x to pick up the gist unto it catches my interest again.

Really, it's just like normal reading. Any displined reader has different speeds depending on the how much time the material is worth (Adler's How to Read a Book gives a nice model).

Yea my experience with biking in Chicago is that at least cabs are clearly marked as such so you know they might cut you off at any moment and you'll cuss at each other. Uber drivers will just stealthily swerve into your lane and full stop.

Plus the GPS systems here will take you down these speed bump residential roads and do crazy contortions to drop off on a one-way road.

On the flip side though, when I first moved here a cab was like $20 each way just from like Broadway to Kimball. Now it's...$4.

I think his article Intelligence Without Representation is particularly worth reading at least once.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/representation.pdf

Yeah, I also like to use redux with a clear separation between actions that change state and those that don't. (For example, reducers only take actions prefixed by DATA_ or UI_, all other actions...the bulk of them really...don't have anything to do with changing state and are handled by other processes. But because of this I don't bother with action creators, so what do I know!)

A conceptual appeal of mobx to me is that this distinction seems baked in. The original mobx didn't click with me like redux did ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but if MST gives transactional updates and support for redux dev tools (right?) could be worth trying.

If my favorite part of redux is structuring flows with redux-saga, does mobx-state-tree have a solution for me?

For example, this is nice:

  // On login, spin off the auth process. If an error or a logout happens, clean up.
  // Be sure to cancel any pending auth request! 
  // Then get ready for a new login.

  function* loginFlow() {
    while (true) {
      const {user, password} = yield take('LOGIN_REQUEST')
      const task = yield fork(authorize, user, password)
      const action = yield take(['LOGOUT', 'LOGIN_ERROR'])
      if (action.type === 'LOGOUT')
        yield cancel(task)
      yield call(Api.clearItem, 'token')
    }
  }

(Genuine question...idk!)

Heh, right now it's 10F and my hands are bloody and busted open from getting extremely dry and chapped after a few hours in the cold. Lotion would absolutely help right now...if I happened to own any! Alas, I am a tech nerd!

Likewise, this time of year I'm reminded by nature to buy a bottle of really good quality moisturizing shampoo. My experience has also suggested any conditioner you can buy at Walmart is a scam, but for certain heads and certain climates, spending more on the good stuff makes the difference between your hair being anemic or healthy. I switch to nice shampoo every winter and year after year the difference is night and day within a week or two.

Fabric softener on the other hand...what a waste!

Thanks. Perhaps. I'll check him out more. I do like people who try to pull together diverse threads. The black magic article seems kinda interesting.

But my personal taste in "meaning of life" stuff these days is more the free spirit and cutting judgements of "The Education of Henry Adams" than a heavy-handed ology of meaningness. I'm suspicious of how tidy all his little categories are, how little self-awareness is exemplified (as opposed to mentioned), the seeming lack of humor despite being about a topic as complex and open as the living of life. Again this is just from a skim and I could change my opinion quickly.

If only the process of our life wasn't time-bound! There's so much to read that we can't help but look for signals, especially ones in an introduction which is designed explicitly by the author to get people to continue reading the book and which takes as its subject the book as a whole.

It's not a matter of merely "not liking a sentence", it's that the author makes false or misleading claims to bolster his own standing (like the one quoted), fails to display a mastery of the relevant material, and gives enough clues in style and substance about the kind of book this is for me to know, from past experience, that it won't be my personal cup of tea.

What really matters:

I won't be reading this book given what I've seen so far, but I don't intend this as a general criticism.

Writing like this is essentially therapy and different people respond to different treatments. It may well be that for many science-y/CS folk this is just what the doctor ordered! And I have no interest in undermining that! And even if it is, to my sensibility, messy and lacking in the forceful individual style truly soul nourishing books require, it can still be valuable. Lord knows there are many books which I can rationally pick apart every which way or which just mouth one platitude after another, yet which truly moved me and made me a better person and of which I wouldn't change a thing.

+1

I also don't want to bother with switching languages just to color a border or center align some text. Or have static styles in one place/language and dynamic styles elsewhere despite both setting up the exact same component. And when working as a designer I like seeing the style code literally right there along with the component nesting code, data handling logic, etc. (In my personal opinion, the real benefit of this comes when designing using an inline workflow similar to jsx-style, but that's an argument for among converts!)

From my perspective anyway, generating CSS from JS is just to get these benefits and more without various performance problems. It's a practical compromise given the reality of how browsers work in 2016 and our current tooling. It's treating CSS as something like a compilation target (because it's a standard which happens to already exist) rather than writing the "assembly code" by hand. If browsers provided other ways of interacting with their internal style structs or whatever like setting default styles through json or a special js file then a different solution might make sense---perhaps even one which gives whole new powers!

I think your comment about modeling is a good one. It actually fits with how I view UX design. I think it's no accident that the best UX designers, in my experience, tend to come from a psychology background rather than an art school one. (And also why so many great UX designers can be poor at UI design/branding!)

To the extent coding helps train you to think clearly about complex and---especially in this case---ambiguous things, it probably could help your ability to design. But! I've often been baffled why most developers, who should be good at modeling, are so often unable to transfer those skills to UX design.

The best explanation I've been able to give so far is largely that "modeling" is somewhat equivocal when viewed in terms of day to day work. Think about the very different skills, knowledge, values, habits of mind, etc it takes to construct a useful data model for a relational database, a predictive dynamic model of neuron populations, an evocative persona model of users, and so on. One neat observation here is that if you try to build, say, a persona in a similar form and with similar standards as a database data model it will be a disaster...unable to fulfill it's purpose. (Not disagreeing with your comment about ridiculous persona models here!)

IDK, this is cool to think about and there's a lot more to say but I'll leave it there.

Yeah I can understand that. I've worked with plenty of designers who can't code, and to my taste the only part that can be a little frustrating is when they don't accept that some great ideas really can't be built. But that said, I do think that negative is usually outweighed by the value of keeping the ideal in front of the reality...it's just they need to be sure to also help with what needs delivered in two weeks!

As sort of a joke, I've been on the flip side of that---especially with more enterprise-y Microsoft stack style dev teams---where I propose a design and am told it's impossible and I respond with a detailed explanation of how to build it within their constraints. I think they like that even less! :)

Atomic is has been my choice for a long time now and they keep making it better. It's best used as the UI flow tool, complemented with something like Pixelmator and Sketch for asset creation and visual detail work.

If I have to show other people very early stage ideas I still use Balsamiq for the artificial lo-fi effect, but with other designers who have more control over their imaginations I'll just throw something together in Atomic.

I like the analogy, but I'm not sure how you intended it since I think it can reasonably make different points. It can surely help if an architect knows about material and construction (see, for example, the work of Christopher Alexander's group who relied on knowledge of materials and construction to wildly reduce costs while increasing quality). But it's also plainly true that any architect is going to be dependent on skilled contractors. Might be fun to read or write an article exploring all the nuances of the analogy.

Speaking as a UX designer by title and inclination who has to spend most of his time as a full stack dev by economic necessity, I've come to the view that in an ideal world most designers ought not have to code. It works well for me, since I'd personally get bored only implementing or only designing. But every week I feel the tension between very different demands on my limited energy, ability, and time. I feel how I almost subconsciously compromise my design work to get it to something I can implement in a realistic time, how the fact I've invested effort into the implementation very subtly pressures me to not make serious design changes, how my figuring out a cool coding trick or library encourages me to add it to my design when it's actually a superfluous distraction (see the vast majority of products by UI engineers who care about design).

To be honest, I'm hard pressed to say how being able to build essentially whatever I want has helped my design work, especially now that there are pretty good, quick to use prototyping tools like Atomic. Maybe it has in such a deep way that I don't even notice it, but I'm skeptical! :)

That said, I do personally agree with the author that, all else equal, some coding knowledge is a good thing if only to help in communicating with and empathizing with developers.