gyomu

> the Signal founder stole the show with an opening chat laying out a case for reclaiming the "magic" of software development that's been lost after 20 years

How to tell you’ve been in an industry for more than 20 years.

Spend time around excited young programmers, and you’ll find the magic is still there. It’s just different than it was 20 years ago. I remember the people with 20 years of experience back then telling me how awful everything was, but I was having way too much fun making things to give them much attention.

Anecdotal but this happens to me on LSD. While the experience can be sublime in many ways, people’s faces appear much uglier and distorted. Like every imperfection gets magnified.

Much like the person in the article, I also have poor face recognition skills in general.

Design is about navigating ambiguity, and finding which fine lines to walk when resolving tensions inherent to opposing constraints in any sufficiently complex problem space. There is rarely a single best solution to such problems.

Originality certainly has a role to play in there - many (most?) iconic products were strikingly original. Would the iPod have been a better designed product with a D-pad (or other standard button arrangement) over its scrollwheel? Or the Wii with a standard gamepad?

Originality and novelty (particularly when it comes to visual aesthetics) are forces people respond to, and great designers know how to channel those forces in constructive ways for their work.

If you want to read more about that room and the context in which it existed, I recommend reading Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ “Small Fry”.

I paid all this money to get to a beautiful surf spot, and you’re telling me I have to paddle and stand up on my own?!

UIKit has a few frustrating details, but overall it stands tall above the competition.

For a long time the main downside was that you had to deal with Objective C, which is a turnoff for some people.

Swift solved all this, and writing UIKit in Swift is mostly a joy. Sadly now SwiftUI is the new shiny thing, and it’s a major downgrade in most dimensions save for a few.

A cross platform framework that reuses UIKit conventions and supports all modern languages (C++/Rust/Go/Python/Nim) would be the dream.

> * 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.

i don't speak Thai or Mandarin, so I can't speak to the other 2, but this one is a pun (combining tsundeoku, pile up, and dokusho, book reading) that survived in the language due to its catchiness.

A bit like "hangry" (hungry + angry) in English.

I have a hard time interpreting the existence of those words as an indication that Japanese culture really values not reading the books you buy, or English speaking culture is irritated due to hunger more so than other cultures.

They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.

The original pop-up implementation (which pop-up blockers aim to prevent) breaks the application content/OS boundary, this does not.

You don’t want that boundary to be broken, because that makes for less usable and less safe systems.

It’s a vector display.

Perhaps one of the most widespread device that used a vector display was the original Asteroids arcade game.

There’s a functioning machine at the Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco (at least there was last time I went there), I can’t help but stare at it (and give a mini display history lesson to friends) every time I go. Those lines are just so crisp and bright and beautiful.

I'm a photographer dealing with many terabytes of files (numbers go up fast when you're shooting 100 megapixel RAWs).

As far as I'm concerned, having a stack of redundant external drives is a feature, not a bug.

I can easily plug them to a collaborator's computer when network is slow (which is almost always).

If one fails, no big deal, I can just swap it out with another one bought at a local store.

We're really spoiled, SSDs are tiny and super fast and relatively cheap these days. I remember lugging around 3.5" drives...

I always get a laptop with the minimal amount of storage, the money you'd spend upgrading is better spent on drives. That way if it fails, I can buy a new machine, plug in my existing drives, and I'm ready to resume my workflow in 30 minutes.

No single point of failure.

Same with SD cards, much better to have a bunch of 64 GB than one single expensive 512GB.

(of course, I have a nice beefy storage array at my home studio)

Now if software would catch up...

The installation he had at SFMoMa, in the side entrance, was really great. The space now just feels naked without it.

Yes, that’s inherent to the problem statement. Any guidance on “how to become a gold medalist Olympic athlete” would suffer from the same limitation.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t insightful things to say about building a Google or becoming a gold Olympic medalist.

This is why you want a trusted secure hardware boundary.

The Apple Pay payment flow on iOS/watchOS requires you to double press the power/side button to authorize a transaction, which userland apps can’t intercept.

Similarly the camera activity indicator on iOS appears somewhere on the screen that regular apps can’t display pixels to (the Dynamic Island, on most recent iPhones)

I think we tend to overestimate the purposefulness of things humans do.

Why do so many artists draw anime girls and post them on twitter?

Cause they’re bored, cause they want to practice their skills, cause they want to impress their friends, cause they’re horny, ... Probably the same here.

Knowing how to build effective scaffolding, in the right sequence, that continuously enables tighter and faster iteration loops on a project is a huge meta-skill that contributes to why the high end of experienced engineers are orders of magnitude more effective than others.

Yep. I once had the CEO of an early stage, venture backed SF startup I worked for confide to me:

“you know, every time we interview a woman in her late 20s/early 30s, I just have to wonder if she’ll take maternity leave 6 months in to working with us. As a startup we just can’t afford that”.

Of course the public face of the company was all about fighting inequality, supporting diversity, etc.

Yeah, Bret always seemed quite defensive about Dynamicland being his Next Big Thing, incubating it in semi secret, sharing things only when they're ready, trying to follow some top-down timeline of the next 50 years, etc.

I guess he genuinely believes(d?) that he's building the next printing press or something like that, and therefore any tiny bit of interference could be detrimental to his grand vision.

For a while there were many, many more people excited and interested about Dynamicland than there were opportunities to actually try it and experiment with it. If you were genuinely excited about the vision, but 1) didn't live near Oakland and 2) didn't know people there who could let you in, there was no way for you to interact with the project. It's always a shame when that energy just dissipates without becoming productive.

In my opinion, if Dynamicland had been open source from the start, shared with as many as possible, so that enterprising teachers/librarians/hobbyists could've had deployed it themselves, maybe it'd have had a greater chance of truly morphing into something big.

More like what folk.computer is doing now, although maybe it's a bit too late now that that initial lift is gone.

But what do I know, I'm just a guy on the internet.

Speaking as a French person living in Japan, I can believe that France was #2 or #3 in the early 2000s, but it’s been degrading for so long that it’s probably way behind Korea/China/etc nowadays. Incessant delays, frequent breakdowns, extremely high prices, small stations closing down, impossible to get tickets for holidays and weekends unless you book weeks/months in advance… the lack of civility you often encounter from fellow passengers is the rotten cherry on top.

I hear from German friends that Germany’s train system has encountered a similar fate.

If only it were just the trains - but our government has gutted similarly education, healthcare, … it really is disheartening.

You're right, most people just need basic word search and replace, which pretty much any text editor supports.

Supporting regex covers that extra mile that some advanced power users might need, since you were referencing obscure grep flags.

What kind of search and replace are you doing that is akin to EUV lithography?

> if I wanted to do a simple find-and-replace on my 2021 M1, I'd have to use something like grep (a tool originally written by Ken Thompson in 1973—a half century before my laptop was built) and look up flags and syntax I inevitably constantly forget. We should have been past this at least 15 years ago.

Pretty much any text editor worth its salt has find and replace, regex compatible, features. Even the extremely rudimentary TextEdit on your MacBook supports it.

The fact that foundational tools like grep still work over half a century later is a feature, not a bug, of our field.

How many cloud based services (most if not all of which rely on those foundational half-a-century-old building blocks, by the way) that are pushed to customers today will still be around in half a century?

I’m on a 12.9” iPad :)

I highly recommend the novel “Independent People” by Halldór Laxness, which your comment reminded me of.

I love many things about Procreate, but their palm rejection is terrible (ie inexistent) compared to every other drawing app which means the canvas often zooms/rotates wildly while I’m drawing (maybe cause I’m left handed?), making it super frustrating to use; they’ve ignored requests to address it with eg canvas lock for years ;_;

https://folio.procreate.com/discussions/3/6/13198

https://folio.procreate.com/discussions/3/6/13105

The cliché quote of “if Henry Ford has asked people what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse” is a cliché for a reason. Most people don’t know what they want - that’s why good product designers who can identify, synthesize, and execute products are worth big money.

There are 2 things to differentiate - product vision, and learning how to listen to feedback.

The former, designing new products that solve people’s problems, is a craft that has no silver bullet. It requires a mix of experience, intuition, technical know how, observing the landscape of existing alternatives, knowing how to anticipate technical/economic/sociological evolutions, etc.

The latter is about making sure that what you designed does what you intend it to, identifying what confuses your users, what gets in their way, etc. This is where all the classical methods of user observation/testing/surveys/etc can be useful. This sounds easy and obvious, but it is anything but - i have met my fair share of designers who stick to their principles and are unwilling to budge when reality conflicts with their ideology, companies that inexplicably never fix bugs that most of their users encounter and rage about on the support forums/social media, etc.

The two are very different skillsets, and it’s hard enough to be good at one, let alone both.

The article uses Intuit as a case study; the dynamics of how to do genuinely great work when your business involves selling an antidote to a poison you lobby for is an exercise left to the reader.

Sony and Nintendo are Japanese companies. From the article:

> Japanese companies would be able to run dedicated game stores on iOS devices, as well as use payment systems with lower fees from Japanese fintech companies.

It’s not hard to read between the lines. This is all about letting domestic gaming companies like Nintendo and Sony make more money from those mobile platforms.

The techie demographic likes to get lost into arguments about the technology and philosophy of computing platforms, but as far as the EU and Japan are concerned it’s just realpolitik to give their domestic companies a leg up.

If you're coming through Tokyo and enjoy photography, make sure to check out the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. It doesn't get as much attention as all the other art museums in Tokyo (Nezu, Mori, National Art Museum, etc) but it's a fantastic venue with frequently rotating exhibitions. They often pull out old photographs arranged around a specific theme from their collections, and it's always a delight.

Japan is definitely up there with France, England, Germany, and the US in having shaped the foundations and history of photography in a major way.

https://topmuseum.jp

How so? I’m genuinely curious as a current Tokyo resident.

The main issues Vancouver seems to face are:

Affordability and Housing Crisis: Tokyo is a remarkably affordable city given its status. There’s housing stock at pretty much every price level.

Homelessness and Street Disorder: not a problem in Tokyo

Drug Addiction and Overdose Crisis: not a problem in Tokyo

Traffic Congestion and Transportation: public transportation is stellar in Tokyo. Traffic can get pretty crazy at rush hour, but I hear that’s been the case for a long time and it’s not much of a problem if you use the aforementioned fantastic train system.

FWIW, I left San Francisco after close to 15 years due to the issues above. Tokyo has its problems, but they don’t seem to be in the same category.

If earth suddenly had to be evacuated and I was limited to grabbing the ten best people to save, [Bill] Watterson would definitely be in there. There is a point where you stop rating people — you just rate them among the best. Can I say that Mozart is better than the Beatles? I can’t. I can just say that they both have gone above the cloud layer and are up there near the sun. They both are on that short list of things that are essential. Watterson is an essential.

— Brad Bird, Academy Award-winning director of Ratatouille and The Incredibles

Pointers were a turning point in triggering my love of learning and improving myself. I remember learning C as a teenager, and all the resources warning me that once it got to pointers it’d get weird and hard.

I was mystified at first, but it was winter break and I decided I’d stick to it until made sense. I don’t remember if it took a few hours or a few days or the whole week, but when it clicked I felt so satisfied, and like I could take on anything from there. It was a really transformative moment.

I remember reading an interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of the notoriously hard Dark Souls series, where he mentions having a similar experience with playing guitar and learning bar chords - and infusing that notion of satisfaction from overcoming big difficulty humps in his games.

It’s a really powerful feeling.

I did that with a few interns/junior people and they turned out to be disappointing rather than predictably satisfying.

I still agree with you, because I want to believe it pays off in the long run. But it definitely comes at a real short term cost.