mathewsanders

Every couple years I’ll go read Magic Inc by Bret Viktor (not a book, just online: http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/) and I always find it refreshing reminder to think about how we can design technology to help us rather than just create a CRUD interface.

‘Sketching User Experiences’ by Bill Buxton https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/980280.Sketching_User_Ex... and ‘Mental Models’ by Indi Young: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/ we’re both very influential to me as a young designer thinking about process and I believe they are still both relevant.

I adopted a one year old stray cat and after a few indoor attempts he seeemed to be okay wearing a harness but trying to get him to go outside was impossible. He REALLY prefers to be inside.

I do have a small 15x15ft balcony with some plants and overlooks some trees. When it’s warm I keep a window open for him to go out and he definitely likes watching the birds and the bees that come by, but apart from that he seems to prefer being inside.

Near the beginning of my career (~15 years ago) I was working at an agency for a lottery operator that was allowed to start online gaming and buying tickets for the physical lottery online.

They had a really great public mission about “responsible gaming” but during one meeting with some execs they let slip that it was all just a joke for them and they didn’t care as long as they got the ticket sales.

It made me feel sick, and I started being a bit uncoorporative on the project until my manager switched me into another project.

So I regret the time I worked in that, and also for being a bit of an asshole on the project instead of just telling my manager I had a problem with that client.

I’m in the same place with my personal laptop, however I did use a work-issued 15” with touchbar for a couple months before changing jobs and I actually liked the touchbar shortcuts for Xcode because it exposed stuff that for some reason I’ve never been able to remember the keyboard shortcut. Everything else (especially changing volume) I remember being a pain in the ass

It’s been a while since I read ‘On Intelligence’ but I think I remember it containing a pretty good primer of his ideas, and references to open source implementation of his predictive algorithm with the invitation to apply it to specific domains because his team had no chance of exploring all the applications.

If tweets were searchable, I was really taken reading this book and I think I made a pretty grand statement that future generations would compare this book to work like The Origin of Species.

Now I’m interested to dig up my copy and read again :)

some people seem pretty pleased with its benefits: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/behold-the-power-of-coco...

Everyone’s probably read it by now, but second part of Seveneves there’s a lot of great non-rocket systems for getting stuff into space (like skyhook also mentioned in Wikipedia article) there’s one part of the story where a bolo-type setup is used for an emergency extraction from earth which still makes me gasp in amazement to think about :)

In conclusion: if you liked the launch loop idea but haven’t read Seveneves then go buy/download it right now!

I was lucky enough to live across the street from a great independent video store[1] and part of the fun was spending 30 mins or so browsing the shelves for 3 DVDs for the week.

When checking out I’d often get some good advice from whoever was at the counter on what to rent next time if I liked what I was getting that day.

As much as I love the convenience of streaming I’ve still yet to find any algorithm that seems to be able to make a decent selection so I’m gonna have to say I’m nostalgic for those times :(

https://www.aliceinvideoland.co.nz/about

My first job in the US ~2011 was in design team at monster.com.

One of the engineers had made a SVN repository for all our design specs and had cooked up a simple intranet page where the latest version of a design could always be shared by a permanent URL but also a history of all earlier versions.

That was my first experience with version control and I remember thinking it was magic. I never found out who made that, so if you’re reading thanks for going the extra mile :)

There was a plot line in The Three Body Problem where aliens sabotaged particle physics experiments to limit human technological advancement while they were making the journey to earth.

Amazing series and even friends that don’t enjoy science function enjoyed reading them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(nove...

When I was 16 (1997) a photographer friend of my parents gave me his old Canon AE-1 (I think released in 1980 or 81) it’s shutter wasn’t working and I took it into the local Canon center where they fixed the shutter, replaced light seal on film door, and even gave me a lens cap for something like NZD$50.

Amazing that companies used to build such sturdy products that they could be cheaply fixed 15+ years after they were sold...

Also sort of amazing is that Canon even had a physical presence that as a consumer I could visit a physical offices and drop of a product in person to be fixed!

> [Hacker News] is an amazing community, built off an early version of Reddit, and run by Y-Combinator (which incubated Reddit way back when)

I just scanned wikipedia, first version of reddit was from 2005, and first version of hacker news was 2007.

I always thought PG wrote the code for Hacker News, does that imply that PG helped write the first (Lisp) version of reddit before Aaron Swartz rewrote reddit in Python?

I read it as 250k x 0.0004 / 100

(which equals 1)

The best job I’ve ever had (most satisfying and interesting, and also good compensation) was a company where everyone in the digital department (a mix of about 150 engineers, QA, designers) were given the same fixed salary.

Additionally, people were pretty much free to set their own work hours (I worked with a great designer who typically left at 4pm, but was never an issue because he always did what was needed - and often went above).

The only possible downside I can think of is that we didn’t really hire a lot of young people (no graduates) so potential for stagnation of ideas (??) however I never saw that have a noticeable effect, and actually at the time the company was quite progressive in its approach to technology.

Our highest ‘executive’ was an interesting mix of someone who could understand and communicate to business, technology and design people.

I’ve often wondered what the secret sauce to this culture was, and how to replicate it...

I’ll see if I can find the source, but I remember reading an article that talked about how in some eastern cultures (Japan) hearing voices wasn’t considered a negative/psychotic problem and instead was considered a neutral-positive experience. The same article also mentioned that people in that country diagnosed with schizophrenia typically heard voices saying positive things, compared to western cultures where voices would say/suggest negative things

Edit: was Ghana and India not Japan, and study was very small sample size. Still a pretty interesting read: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/when-hear...

I’m in 800 sq ft apartment + cat and I would love a robot that vacuumes, but I have a mix of hard floors and high-ish pile rug which last time I checked roombas etc weren’t versatile enough to handle both.

My cat also HATES the sound of the vacuum me and makes me feel guilty every time I use it :(

I had an interesting experience once when I regained consciousness after fainting.

My first memory of that experience was a cacophony of noises, specific images, and what I can only describe as colored static. Then, over what subjectively felt like 10 seconds, I realized at some stage that I was ‘awake’ and the various sounds and images sort of faded until I had one coherent thought and then started to get awareness of my surroundings and then finally opened my eyes.

It was a very unsettling, but also very interesting experience and sort of made me curious to investigate if this is what people experience with hallucinagens.

Another time when I had to make a trip to the ER they gave me nitrous oxide when they tried to reset a broken bone and I had very interesting aural hallucination where sounds became chopped up/echoey. When the gas stopped I asked the nurse how long it had been and she said about 5 minutes but it had felt like 30 mins.

Both of experiences left me fascinated how malleable our perceptions are :)

New Zealand has the consumer guarantees act that requires companies to provide repairs or replacements for goods for a reasonable duration.

https://www.govt.nz/browse/consumer-rights-and-complaints/co...

I used this with my first MacBook when the trackpad stopped working outside the default period.

Rather than being based on a fixed period of time it’s based on the expected quality of the product- because Apple computers are a lot more expensive than competitors it’s assumed that Apple are selling a higher quality/more durable product that should last for a reasonable period of time.

Unfortunately Apple doesn’t have any NZ offices so I had to deal with Australian office that took several letters to convince them they needed to make the repair under New Zealand law.

In the end we negotiated and I got free replacement parts and service under a $100 service fee.

I pre-ordered the Echo so have been using it for a long time too. Interestingly for me I’ve found it’s gotten dramatically worse over the last two or so months for simple commands that I use basically every day (turning off lights, setting alarm)

Here’s a well written, and quick reflection on Saucedrop: a hot sauce subscription service that had sales for 2 years.

I’ve read a lot of post mortums on tech start ups, but can’t remember many for subscription service.

I’m not a hot sauce fan, but I watched this product launch and thought it had found a sweet(hot?) spot for a nice niche business so bummed that it didn’t work out.

I love the Blindsight series... had no idea they were available with Creative Commons license!

Another fiction that uses blindsight as part of the story is 'As She Climbed Across The Table' it has been a long time since I read it, but I think it was used to observe a quantum effect without being affected by [concious] observation. Didn't make much sense to me at the time but it's a book I often recommend to people that think they don't like science fiction.

For a speculative look at how a global network of flying cars might play out 'Too Like The Lightening'[1] was a pretty enjoyable read for me last year.

One of the consequences was that global borders essentially become worthless, and people instead join hives that best represent their ideals.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/05/10/476483675/science-fiction-and-...

He mentions early in the talk about how some people working in VR/AR make a comparison that they're building the tech from 'Snowcrash' which he calls out as wrong model for thinking about VR.

A while later he describes a companies responses to building features after a player virtually groping another player in a virtual archery space.

The model for AR/VR that seems most plausible to me is what's described in the book 'Lady of Mazes'[1] - really recommend people check that out if they find this talk interesting.

[1]: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/lady-of-mazes...

Coincidentally I had this open in a browser tab: https://xkcd.com/256/ (map of online communities in spring 2007 showing Facebook still smaller than LJ)

And the industrial design was fantastic. I remember a kid coming to high school with this walkman (http://www.walkman-archive.com/gadgets/walkman_sony_05_701c_...) after his Dad had visited Japan, I was amazed that it was only fractionally larger than the tape it held. 30 years later and IMO it still looks modern.

Large scale e-ink always seemed like a good medium for digital signage because it works in bright light.

A friend's wife works at the United Nations, and a couple years ago I got invited to have a drink at their bar, I was really looking forward to seeing the e-ink wall display (made of tiles of smaller screens - not an entire surface) but unfortunately it was broken so I never got to see what it was like in person :( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnb4tFK4I90

I just had a quick scan through it but fascinating the depth and breadth of criteria. There's a table with about ~60 different room environments from lounge, galley, to actual workstations and the level that the room should be illuminated, and for workstation rooms, the reflectance of different materials in the room.

Great find!

ps I'm probably the only person here using safari, but the page to load the PDF didn't load for me so here's link to latest revision: http://quicksearch.dla.mil/Transient/72FC2386C1C2425E8298D6C... (2012).

Nice! I've never seen that subreddit before, will dive into that thread.

After posting that comment I spent a while wondering which novel would be best to jump start that sort of franchise and agree it's tricky to condense a novel into a movie. A lot of science fiction probably works better as a mini series or full TV series (could be interesting to have Culture take an approach like American Horror Story where each season is a self-contained story)

You could argue that Star Trek is an 'space soap opera' haha ;)

But I agree, there are some pretty bad films being made under the science fiction genre. I want movies referencing hard science fiction (was wondering the other day what an adaption of 'The Three-Body Problem' might be like) and space operas too (Culture series is dying for a film adaption).

But in terms of science fiction, I think it's great seeing non-space material being made too. Stuff like 'Dark Mirror', 'The Man from Earth', and 'Safety Not Guaranteed' are pretty good indicators to me that good science fiction has gone mainstream.

I Agree. (and I updated my passive wording)