drzaiusapelord

The USA just had the losing president incite a riot at the capital to stop the rightful winner of the election from taking power. On top of asking multiple foreign governments for election help and pardoning his cronies who helped him with this. In response his party has put in hardcore laws limiting the right to vote for many liberal and disenfranchised communities.

The USA lied to start a war in Iraq that killed at least 200,000 people. The US started and led and funded War of Terror has killed 900,000 people (Brown University). Nearly all these deaths were Muslims.

The USA has intense income inequality and the police regularly murder its citizens with impunity.

The current president is at best a mislead old man or an active oppressor, responsible for much of the law that keeps communities of color in debt and unfairly jailed by draconian crime bills that targeted the PoC community.

The US media is almost exclusively corporate and owned by a handful of corporate entities most own by billionaires who use such media to push views that benefit them politically and economical.

The USA is rife with conspiracy theories and has a very low vaccination rate compared to its western peers for reasons above.

The USA is best seen as an oligarchy where the wealthy get what they want from a legislative agenda perspective and are almost always above the law. Trump's only signature piece of legislation and the GOP's top priority was a significant tax cut for the wealthy that was permanent and a lesser one for the middle class that expires.

The USA has nearly 30m uninsured people compared to their western peers who all have some type of universal health insurance system.

The USA is destroying women's right, especially the right to choose and access to birth control and the morning after pill.

The USA has an incarceration rate of 639 inmates per 100,000 people, which is the worst in the world. This almost twice the USSR's rate. 40% of these inmates are black in a country where 13% of the population is black.

I think a lot of Americans are in denial of the everyday corruption here.

>There's a reason so many Russians fled for the USA

I'm not sure how true this is. We didn't see significant migration from the Eastern Bloc until their economies got much much worse. Communist nations that did well economically had low levels of migration. The same way largely Democratic, yet poor, Crimean Ukrainians welcomed corrupt Russian annexation because it meant being part of the powerful Russian economy ($3k gdp per capita vs $10k). In other words, people welcome an oppressive state if it means more money. Flights for freedom are often propaganda. Flights for money are often the truth. My parents fled their country to go to the USA solely for economic reasons. "Freedom", mom, apple pie, and baseball are laughable bullshit to the immigrant community.

>and not vice-versa.

The USA had 2x the GDP capita than the USSR during 1980s migrations. Again, this was purely an economic flight for nearly all immigrants.

This is also how the USA keeps down communities of color. A white suburban kid with drugs is "boys will be boys." A black urban kid with drugs is "throw the book at this thug." A white terrorist must be "understood" and sympathized. A minority terrorist is a monster that must be exterminated. A white applicant is a "good culture fit." A black applicant is "urban" and "challenging for our corporate culture." A white missing girl is an urgent emergency. A black missing girl is a "streetsmart" young-lady probably off with friends.

etc,etc.

All corrupt states do this and the USA's corruption is easily at Soviet levels.

This is I think the second piece I've read about Atari that mentions how much cheaper ram was just a short time later. I think during the development of the 2600, ram prices dropped an incredible amount but the design was set and plans on a new gen system were seen as way too forward thinking. At the time, the idea was this was a set appliance like a tv or radio, at least early on, that could last a decade or even decades and the idea that it should be regularly replaced as technology advances was something that industry hadn't fully grasped.

So to me, its tragic the home console market got so hot before ram got affordable because it was a limitation in game design. I wonder what the 2600 would have look like delayed a year or two and taken into account cheaper ram and other components. I imagine it could have had Colecovision-level graphics, which would have been a huge step up. Currently, its hard to view those old 2600 games as anything but overly simplistic and kinda ugly.

Battlezone with more ram would have been something else too, instead of just a dumb tank shooter. Three years later the Star Wars vector game was released and the difference between the two is like night and day. One feels like a technology demo and the other like a full-fledged video game.

No this is because the profit incentive demands new features regardless of the privacy violations of the customer. China's faults are the same we have, out of control capitalism causing social harm, workers abuse, and violating customers.

This feature, and one used by many other conference companies, is for proximity detection of zoom rooms. Other implementations are bluetooth beaconing, but ultrasound is reliable and BT is often disabled by corporate security due to all the vulnerabilities it has and are constantly being discovered for.

Meanwhile the NSA has meetings where powerpoints titled "I hunt sysadmins" are a normal thing. And where your Cisco is intercepted, hacked, and shipped to you. Or where the previous president offers pardons to criminals doing his bidding and culminates with an attempt to murder Democratic senators to stay in power at the capitol on 1/6. I don't think you want to play "my country good, other country bad" unless you want to be corrected.

I mean that was 40+ years ago, all the leadership who ran the company like that are either long retired or passed away.

Atari is now just a trademark that gets sold left and right. I don't know why this is happening but no one from the 80s is making this call. Those people went from cradle to grave engaging in anti-worker action and giving into the worst and most perverse incentives capitalism has to offer. They retired wealthy and all of this awfulness paid off. This is why modern video companies are run similarly. As a dev or artist, you're not getting ownership either. You're work for hire and will be treated as such.

The division asking for this author is Atari XP, which sells rare and unreleased games, which is most likely looking for this author because this might have a copyright claim. The profit incentive drives this question, not any sort of altruism. Atari XP doesn't know the contract signed by this person and Atari and if they try to release this game commercially they could be sued if they infringe on his rights. If there's no contract at all, then this author would probably have the full life of copyright on their side.

If this person is found and also found to not have a claim, then this game will be released with the creator getting nothing that isn't specified in the contract. This is not done for the love of old video games, but to create and maximize profit. Doing things like this is how the leadership of Atari XP got there and maintain their position there and how they will advance their careers past it.

The author remaining anonymous stops Atari XP from monetizing this old work and might be intentional to keep this game from being published. If published it will enrich some company they havent had a relationship with in decades and most likely don't care for (Atari ex employees seem very bitter about their time there).

Or considering this person has never spoken up all this time all this time, perhaps they passed away long ago, well before most of HN was even born. The hypothesized copyright would move to their heirs, who may be entirely unaware they own this game.

HN is absolutely a far right wing bubble. Some of us are here despite that.

There's such a poetic justice that Sheats, who was a world-class player, also helped design The Who’s Tommy pinball game.

Yep also you signed a hefty EULA with Lenovo allowing just this. Lenovo uses the google home software modified for its product. This is the same problem android phones have. Google moves on and OEMs don't bother to keep up. Or OEM's contract end and they don't want to pay to renew. These hit the market in 2018 so they were most likely licensed in 2017, so that 5 year just expired and now they can't use whatever google service anymore.

That doesn't make it morally right, but legally, this isn't a case that's going to work out. If cases like this did work, the tech industry would collapse because every ambulance chaser would sue over any tiny software change.

HN has a lot of "both sides are the same" centrists and libertarians. They don't realize there there is still a tiny thread of pro-worker pro-middle-class democratic action in the US government. I have no idea how much longer it can survive, but people like Wyden, AOC, Bernie, etc fight the good fight and that goes against everything centrists and 3rd party types believe. Everyone is a republican to them and when shown otherwise, they either nitpick with whataboutisms or just clam up.

There really arent any. Hate speech isn't "true" regardless of your basement phrenologists Roganism's that this race or that ethnicity is "inferior" to a white person due to skull or brain size. Or doctored studies that purposely dont take poverty and other things into account.

The other category is libel/slander which is properly protected in the UK where a real burden of proof is put on the person making the claim, meanwhile in the USA, "news" shows lie with impunity, and almost always for the benefit of the oligarchy.

Its a better system than the USA's and by far. Right-wing types, who also dominate this forum, dislike it because it limits the lies and racism and islomaphobia they so deeply identify with, and is reinforced to them by the dishonest right-wing media they consume which has almost no limits on dishonest or hateful speech in the USA. So its an ugly cycle of extremists radicalizing new extremists for political gain (read: faithful GOP voters) by the billionaire owners of these media outlets who gain from these narratives both politically and economically.

My take is that you're still in the easy period because babies are just still, well, babies. As they age into children and go to school, academics, socializing, etc matter and their own existential dread of the universe, etc come into play it gets much much harder. My son and I talk about death a lot because he's shocked by it. I try to explain to him what money means. Also you're building both a loving parental but also a peer relationship -- not a parent to baby one, past ages 4 or 5, with someone with their own interests, strong personality, mental health issues, hangups, habits, etc. This is a relationship that cant fail and you can't ever walk away from. This relationship only ends on your death which will badly hurt your children just like the loss of your own parents hurt you.

Especially not only as their parent guiding them through this universe, but also knowing the economic and political system they are inheriting is terrible, unjust, unequal, racist, and dishonest and how they'll have to come to terms with that just like we did, if we ever did. And finding ways for them to avoid getting crushed by this unjust wheel we called capitalism by doing your best to get them into good schools, tutors, pulling strings on their behalf, guiding their interests, etc.

Those are all pre-modern people before the invention of vaccines and antibiotics and who had terrible health and suffered by now preventable childhood diseases. Their 35 is not our 35. Shakespeare, I believe, wrote about joint pain, aging, and losing his memory and mind at 35, which is not typical of a modern 35 year old. Substance abuse and artistry go hand in hand and a lot of these artists were addicts and drunks who badly damaged their brains. Many of them had mercury poisoning from medical treatments of their day and other edge cases not common today.

Not to mention these people were elite global competitors, so if they felt less sharp at 35, that means they were merely just the top 1% instead of being the top .1%. They still were amazing thinkers and producers after 35.

Just off the top of my head, Stanley Kubrick's career peaked with his decade plus long Lolita, Strangelove, 2001, and Clockwork Orange period in the 1960-70s, which was around his 30-40s. Then nearly 20 years after Lolita, well into his 50's he made The Shining, which is considered an important American film, perhaps not as groundbreaking as the others, but something miles ahead of his younger competitors. So even as these people supposedly age out of their peak years, these super high performers are still amazing. The Oscar winner that year? Kramer vs Kramer, a largely forgotten piece of art and "safe pick" that played to social issues of the time. The best screenplay? Breaking Away, a completely forgotten movie. The Shining is still a beloved classic, cultural icon, horror master-class, an iconic actor's defining role, and a movie studied in film school religiously today and for the foreseeable future.

Then almost a decade later in 1987 at age 59, he directed Full Metal Jacket, a lesser work, but considered one of the best anti-war films, arguably stealing or matching the crown from beloved critic favorites like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, long after the 60s and 70s fad of anti-war movies faded away and Vietnam a now faded memory and during the right-wing, pro-military, pro-interventionist foreign policy Reagan administration. This was a bold and provocative move you'd associate with a younger director trying to get attention and not a man close to retirement. So even "old" Kubrick was competing on a world class level and doing interesting and challenging things.

A genre horror film from a famous director who hasn't delivered a great film in a decade? An anti-war film in the late 80s on the tail of Top Gun? Both of these genres were fads once and decidedly uncool at the time of their release. This on paper sounds almost foolish, but in practice, an artist of his calibre pulled off something very special in both cases.

For modern people, career peaks are mid-30s. The "wisdom" of two hundred old plus composers and poets is a nice toilet read but isn't scientific at all. Science has its own ideas about aging:

The journals Psychological Science, Science Direct, and Harvard claims various mental peaks come later in life. New vocabulary peaks at 67, learning new information at 50, concentrating at 43, learning new faces 32, etc.

https://nextluxury.com/mens-lifestyle-advice/what-age-do-men...

So yes 35 is not only a good age, its the start of a peak, and a 35 year old modern worker has still another two decades of high performance waiting for them.

Yep this. The average rate of return is 10% so this is someone who can make $50k a year just off this money alone. The real median wage in the USA for workers who worked full time in 2020 was $56k. This person has enough money to nearly replicate the financial success of your average American via a do-nothing secondary income. Your average American retires with only $200k saved up by age 65 as well. $500k is a lot of money and its bothersome that its being played up here as being unsuccessful.

This person is doing very, very well and I suspect "I only have half a million dollars sitting idly by" is a humble-brag as that is obviously a lot of money.

Also 35 isn't 65. This is the prime age for most business people, artists, writers, etc. This is typically a professional and creative peak that lasts, at least, another decade or so. A person this age often has the drive and vitality of youth but the wisdom of someone older. Its no wonder so many great works are created by people around this age.

I think this post says a lot about the demographic here who lean towards worshipping money to the point where having half a million is being "unsuccessful" and being merely 35 is being "old." Capitalism does a great job of making people feel bad about themselves because they arent mega millionaires and commercial media sells images of youth because promoting anti aging things like makeup, drugs, surgeries, fitness, etc is so profitable. Hiring managers also discriminate on age because working young and naive people like dogs and leading them to burn out is "good business sense," while dealing with an older person who knows this con and understands class struggle and the dishonesty of management and the perverse incentive profit demands is "bad business."

My advice is that forums are a very, very poor place to get therapy. Go see a professional if you feel depressed. Forums like these are just echo chambers full of people with similar unresolved issues or with coping mechanisms that aren't healthy. And egotists who just want to tell you their life story, knowing full well stories aren't healing because if they were, we could cure all our malaise with just biographies of people who struggle.

So, no "fitness" or "hobbies" or "kids"[1] isn't it, maybe some of those things is part of it, but there's a lot more a human being needs who has lost their way in an ultra capitalist and competitive society. Part of it is seeing the forest for the trees and a professional can help them get the rational self-awareness they seem to lack, as well as address their emotional issues.

[1] If you are not dying to have kids then you shouldn't not have kids. There is a lot of toxic advice here about having children to "fix" things. Children should not be born as a way to fix yourself. It is 100% valid to not want children. I say this as a parent. Its a grueling and hard life compared to not having children, and if you have difficulty in life and don't even want kids, do not have them. They will not magically suddenly fulfill you or make your life easier. In fact, in many ways they will make things much harder for you in literally every avenue in your life. The world does not need more unwanted children or children used a marriage or personal emotional fixers.

This is such a good point. /r/decaf has a lot to say about how life changing quitting caffeine is.

Game theory and personality dynamics strategy applies to C-levels too! For some industries, companies, etc you want to be a Holmes type of total confidence. It depends who your market is, and by that I mean the VC's you want to attract. If they go for the "arrogant boy/girl genius" schtick then that's what you do. If they want a humble intellectual, then that's what you do instead. Conversely, you may alternate between the two depending on your audience. Maybe you're humble in HN comments, but maybe a monster in VC meetings. Look at Elon's larger than life "boy genius" PR persona. It works really well. He may not be a total fraud like Holmes, but his shoddy car AI has killed at least a couple people in cases where if the car had a lidar-like system, that truck or whatever would have been identified instead of seen as part of the sky.

Also Cruise wants to license to automakers, not make their own car, so they have to act like trustworthy partners in their PR. Elon has his own car company and instead is antagonistic and belittling to automakers because he thinks there's a competitive advantage to it. Any positive sentiment towards his competitors is potentially lost sales for Tesla. Capitalism encourages zero-sum thinking and rewards zero-sum strategies.

CEOs are marketers and salespeople primarily and as such know how to play different roles for different situations. They code switch just like everyone else. The role isn't for everyone in tech because a lot of tech people don't have the people, political, and acting skills for it.

tldr; capitalism doesn't work well with honesty, in fact it works best with dishonesty. You don't have a personal relationship with a CEO or company, you're just absorbing marketing delivered via executive personalities. Personalities are perfectly valid marketing tools in capitalism. Take that as you will.

Imagine if we didn't have these policies. The Parthenon would be a hotel for dogs, the Colosseum a parking lot, and the Rosetta Stone some rich guys footrest.

This should be seen as a risk for anyone buying properties this old, just like any other risk in business. I wouldn't be surprised if there's insurance for this.

I think FB and a lot of VCs are going to learn that virtual worlds are boring, if not awful, unless they're tied to an addictive game loop. It'll be six years since the Vive came out, possibly the first "realistic," open-ish, mm tracking, high performance, modern VR set and there's still no killer app for VR. Worse, the VR market has decided its all nonsense anyway and is fine with buying headsets that just run mobile phone chipsets because that performance and graphics is "good enough" and no one is demanding a photo realistic world to lose yourself in. All they care if the games are good enough, that is to say if the loop addictive.

Those pushing out past games in VR are brave and I'm thankful they are there. Maybe Meta will figure it out, but I'm skeptical.

This is exactly the corporate kiss of death I've seen over and over. If I can't use your product/community/whatever without being assaulted by the sexual fetishes of others, then it's just ultimately chase away customers who don't subscribe to those fetishes. Now your growth and future outlook is just much less than a competitor.

A common con in capitalism is to sell people on "free-speech" and "anti-corporate" agendas in your capitalist corporate product. I think most sensible people see through this, but there's a segment who just take to it pretty well and they tend to have marginalized and very questionable ideas about politics, race, religion, age of consent, boundaries, and justifiable terrorism.

Every "free speech" equivalent to the big players has failed and badly. Voat can't touch reddit. Parlour can't touch twitter, etc.

The real problem with these companies is that ultimately they want growth and profitability, thus when they try to expand out you now have the "Nazi Bar" problem, where the marginalized end up owning the establishment and chasing away everyone else.

Good moderation, protection of minorities, protection of LGBTQ people, protection of women, curtailing all hate speech, strict penalties, etc is the formula for success whether the tech libertarian crowd likes it or not. This is why your company has HR policies like this too. Once you let in the first Nazi into your bar, its over.

Those aren't really arcades they're bars with arcade machines, and pool tables, and jukeboxes. They're just bar distractions. People go to these for the alcohol and socializing and to cater to a specific market. The games are often a secondary excuse to visit.

When I was little the arcade market was crazy. There was one in every mall, every shopping center, and even modest sized strip malls had them. Then you'd had random stand-alone ones here and there that were significantly bigger. Every mini-golf place had an attached arcade too. I think I grew up within short driving distance of several. Now there's a couple barcades, one nearby another a longer drive, and none of which anyone under 21 can visit.

Its not a healthy market and nor one that is actually buying video game cabinets. I don't think Ive seen a remotely new cabinet in any of these. Just old classic stuff being kept together with hope, elbow grease, and baling wire. The barcade exprience leaves a lot to be desired as games people like are very old and the maintenance budget and ability of those barcades isn't impressive. The few times I've gone I'd have bad joysticks, bad buttons, machines not registering quarters, hardware locking up, and CRT screens that have aged into displaying burn-in and seemingly a lot dimmer and with more "ghosting" than I remember. They're cost centers to these bars, so they just aren't able to take care of them well, assuming spare parts are accessible (or affordable) for bar economics.

Yes these things won't go away soon, but its a small and shrinking market. SEGA can't justify the rents on those spaces which is a bad sign in otherwise arcade friendly Japan. So the transformation of arcade games into bar toys is almost complete, which is not a healthy sign for this industry. Google says the arcade industry CAGR is projected to be almost 2% during 2021-2025. That's just really terrible and the sign of a stagnated industry and perhaps one entering its negative growth rate period sooner than we might assume.

They can volunteer and have their application approved or denied for "reasons." Note I'm discussing the mandatory conscription law only where what I said is entirely correct.

Define "own servers" because this discussion is about controlling the entire stack, and eliminating things like ME or PSP. FANG runs on AMD/Intel, so they don't own their own stack. They have to contend with the AMD/Intel product.

Buying a beige box to put an intel chip is not "your own" servers in the context of this discussion. I'm not sure why you're so rude and confrontational here. We're discussing how Apple has top to bottom control in its consumer devices, not some weird discussion about datacenter packaging. Servers run on AMD/Intel and as such are stuck with the elements of those platforms AMD and Intel dictate. That's not having the entire stack to themselves.

Yep GSM standardized on some of the Hayes AT commands and added many new AT commands. Considering GSM was published in 1990, that means they were working on it in the 1980s when these commands were regularly used. I imagine there's no strong incentive to update these commands and they keep getting migrated to whatever new voice and data protocol cellular systems tend to use when it comes to modem interfaces. I guess no one wants to sell an incompatible modem to OEMs, so these old AT commands will probably always be with us.

I remember seeing this a few years ago in some mifi device or something and thinking "Wait are those old modem commands?" I realized, well, that is a modem being used, so they probably just reused old protocols because why not?

List of commands for those interested:

https://www.electronicsforu.com/resources/gsm-at-commands

Be also aware the conscription law applies only to Jews & Druze. Arab citizens are not required to serve (for "reasons"), so if your car repair shop or shwarma joint is run by Arabs, then there are not veterans there.

I'm skeptic this is what they're populating their datacenters with. These are niche products for smaller businesses. I meant they are not powering their cloud with these products.

Apple's icloud is partly their datacenter running a mix of systems/hardware and renting out Amazon and Google cloud units, which are Intel/AMD.

Apple cant do this on its servers either, considering it has no server product.

Google has this stack control in Android, Google Home, Chromebook, etc trivially if it chooses, if it doesn't have that already.

Microsoft can do this on its Cortana smart speakers and Surface Pro X running their (Qualcomms) ARM cpu.

Also I imagine bulk buyers can get Intel ME disabled if they don't want it on their server. AMD PSP can be disabled in the BIOS I believe.

Comparing a phone to a server doesn't make too much sense. A phone is a consumer product like Android or Home and a server is a business product. Apple runs its cloud on Intel or AMD like everyone else.

Right, but there's a difference between someone who went because they had to and got out, and career types.

I think we're up for a revision because it needs some kind of breakaway feature. At work we keep seeing laptops with broken ports because someone tripped over the charging USB-C cable and instead of it popping out, the lateral force just breaks the port. Now I'm super paranoid about it and miss the magsafe connector. My Air just has USB-C and I think that decision may have been a step backwards in some ways.

Otherwise its excellent and probably will last a long time, but for charging laptops, its a little concerning.

Not technically but an Israeli cybersecurity company like this isn't exactly two guys in garabge bootstrappy capitalist success story you're making it out to be. It most likely is filled with spooks, has deep connections with the Israeli intelligence services, and is full of ex-military. In authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes spinning off hacking to a private company pays dividends, because they get blacklisted, as a private company, which doesn't greatly affect diplomatic norms. Also it allows Israel to sell exploits to regimes that might be hard to via government agencies. Afterall, it was "private" business that sold them, not the government, wink wink. A bit like so many "private" cybergangs in Russia have impunity to attack the USA/EU and sell and deploy ransomware there because, again, its "not the government, its criminals" but in reality they're defacto arms of the governments there or at least have strong ties to the government, pay them protection money, and often get marching orders from them.

These are great points.

I dont see why the FBI wouldn't buy Pegasus. Does the above poster think the FBI can just call the NSA and tell it to decrypt a bunch of stuff? The NSA has its own mission and its based on national security interests, not solving the everyday crime the FBI works on. The government isn't just one big club. I'm guessing its likely the NSA isn't going to offer up its best tools to catch someone providing abortion access in Texas or "stealing" academic papers from JSTOR or "pirating" comic book movies. Not only is it a waste of their resources but every time a tool like this is used, the detection of that tool is possible, and with that detection Apple or whomever would figure out what the exploit is doing and patch against it. Now that tool is wasted because some FBI boss wanted a promotion thinking if he impersonated an Associated Press journalist to hack a teenager again like they did in 2007 it would impress some authoritarian higher up.

They can't waste these precious exploits on some culture war, IP enforcement thuggery, leftist organizers, unions, and mid-range drug dealers the FBI regularly beats up, murders (think Filiberto Ojeda Rios), harasses, and spies on. Even the NSA is low-key ACAB. So they just say no and tell the FBI to just let NSO potentially burn their exploits. The NSA and military intelligence has better things to spend it on (think Stuxnet-like scenarios).

tldr; the FBI operates on a level far below these other organizations and are far less important than any of them in the grand scheme of things. They're just well funded cops with all the problems cops bring. They're not getting NSA tools because they don't need them the same way your county sheriff doesn't need MRAPs to drive around in.

I think I'm going to counter some of your points. First off, almost none of the people you list would be considered blue collar, that is to say low-skilled working class under someone else's employ. These people were all elites and almost all of whom ran creative studios where they delegated work to uncredited studio artisans.

Secondly, neuroticism is a big problem with creatives and its not like these people didn't have the exact same motivation and mental block issues, its just they found their own ways around them. Drugs and alcohol were often the answer for many of them.

Thirdly, a lot of them led pretty hedonistic lives. Especially your painters. They led Parisian-style cosmopolitan lives of late nights, affairs, hiding gay affairs from the authorities, dealing with hangovers, not showing up for work on days they felt uninspired. Nearly all of these people were self-employed and sold directly to buyers or were funded by patrons. They didn't have any idea of the 9-5 grind and would probably consider it horrifying. Remember, almost everyone on your list lived in pre-capitalist societies and as such had different economic freedoms and systems than ours, and ones that, for successful creatives, meant that actual "work" was entirely different than what you may think it meant.

Art studios for many of these people were a bit like a corporate setup. They'd dictate an outline and leave reference work and a young apprentice or skilled artisan would do a lot of the painting. The master would show up occasionally to correct them and contribute stylistic tones and outlines. The master's real job, like a CEO, was marketing and he was off wining and dining with society to keep his avante grade status as an elite who is welcome in elite circles. These people's social lives were like Versailles's court. They had a great deal of dealmaking and alliance making to even be seen as a viable and important artist. This business and social skill is as important as the art.

And yes high performers were incredible perfectionists. There's no shortage of stories of a famous artist having violent fits because the work didn't match their vision. Mental healthcare back then was poor and Van Gogh obvious was into self harm for example. Perfectionism is the price of entry, imo. It makes us strive for excellence but weighs us down as well. If you're not perfectionist motivated, you may not be able to compete against those who are.

Yes you can cherry pick the prodigious, but they also have artistic block periods, slow work days, etc. And a lot of the higher content creation came after fame when they could afford to farm it out to the factory studio.

So yes, try hard and get over your fears, but there's no magical state of being a "do-er" that fixes everything. Like everything in life moderation is best and a lot of these guys had pretty pleasant lives compared to the stressed out office worker of today. When was the last time you got drunk or had sex at lunch or decided to take a few weeks off to go to Vienna because you were bored with life? Or you decided to move to another kingdom because a low-level regal wants to farm you out to her friends.

tldr; the modern grind is historically inaccurate if you apply it to the past masters. Leisure lifestyles were far more the norm for creatives back then than grindy ones. The nosleep, work 3 jobs, prance on social, never be "off," live with puritan middle class morals, stimulant driven grind is an artifact of our unregulated capitalism, not history.