stephth

Either way it doesn't seem very constructive - or gentlemanly - to downvote an informed - and depending on the reader informative - comment.

True, he doesn't seem afraid to take big leaps. Brilliant, visionary essay. But I don't think it's unrealistic. In my day to day (game dev) I spent very little time optimizing (and very rarely need to write any sort of bit shifting), but instead a huge chunk of development is spent slingshotting variables through loops into abstracted rendering directives. The hardest part in my job is by far understanding and visualizing program flows in my head. From the essay:

Wait. Wait a minute. Were you trying to answer those questions by doing arithmetic in your head? The computer somehow drew that picture, so the computer must have calculated all those scaleFactors itself. Are you seriously recalculating them in your head?

Sadly, yes, very often I am. Depending on the mood I also use a convoluted combination of notebook + pencil, breakpoints, printf statements, and/or isolating the problem by working on a separate program with the problem simplified. And having aids - like some of the great solutions suggested like the timeline and other state/flow displays - would give me tremendous gain today, if they could be integrated in my toolset. I'll give you that I imagine it being quite a bit more challenging technically to make it work with my C/C++/Objective-C environment, but with other more dynamic languages - like Javascript or as suggested: Clojure - I imagine it to be much easier.

This article is by the way, most likely the best argument I've heard so far for me to move to a higher level language. I like how Bret Victor talks about language (and API - see the autocomplete argument) choices as enablers to better environments; I think we instead usually think of language choice as something that mitigates how hard this work is to begin with with the tools we have (see the time and energy we spend in in this community on language choice). If I had access to tools offering this level of abstraction but had to adopt a language that I didn't particularly like, I think the latter would then become be the least of my concerns.

http://www.armellecaron.fr/art/index.php?page=plans_de_berli...

I later discovered the writings of Eckhart Tolle. According to him, we are diseased in the sense that we identify with our mind/ego, instead of realizing what it actually is: a tool. Part of the problem is we often don't know what exists underneath. We are 100% convinced we are our mind. But obviously we're not - if we were, we wouldn't be able to observe it. Once we realize we're not our mind, we're free of its control. Until we do, we're in a way, severely ill. We're actually not disfunctional in our true nature - but we're unenlightened.

At least that's what Eckhart Tolle says. I personally find it disarmingly logical - and reasonably easily provable within my perception, not to mention deeply liberating/changing. Finding out you can stop your thoughts and not only still be aware, but become the most aware you can be, that's quite a doozy of a realization.

If the designer knows what she's doing, she just needs to know all the relevant factors.

I would rather not show you specific examples and risk generalizing his work, but I don't want to drown your interest under perhaps too many choices, so I suppose I would point to his different advertisement pieces for Shiseido (interactive and print) as an introduction. (Search for images with the terms John Maeda Shiseido and crawl your way in.)

If anyone is really interested in his work (and if you do UI-related work dare I say, you probably want to be), I'd recommend the book "Maeda @ Media", it's a great guide through his earlyish work and process.

This story is now on page 4. Incredible.

There is no cultural study involved here, someone is making a series of videos where she reads tvtropes pages.

That's what I meant. You clearly don't care about this study (yes, it's a cultural study) or about its author.

Beats me how someone who doesn't care about something can be so invested on it, and I usually don't try to give advice to strangers, thing is, I'm tired of seeing people like you hijacking debates about misogyny, by completely missing the point from the top of a pedestal of "I'm beyond all this" yet injecting negativity in the discussion with a disproportionate amount of energy.

Maybe I'm projecting a way too big and way too ugly pattern on you, which might be unfair. But then, tough luck man. You're all over this thread (17 comments, you must be going for the record) basically pounding the same key.

If you want me to post less, why did you also directly ask me questions?

You might find it liberating to not reply to every reply, even if they contain critiques and/or question marks.

What do you mean it's a "big deal"? Is it a "big deal" because people are talking about it? Are you not cool with that?

Someone is doing a cultural study and is getting attacked for it. Some of us think that's worthy of our attention.

You've written 11% of the comments of this thread (13 comments out of 117), and they are mostly angry/poisonous. If you don't agree that this has importance, why don't you move somewhere else? You'd do a favor to this thread and trust me, yourself.

I just stumbled into it, I recommend watching the video.

But I don't think there's one process that's better that the other - outputting new works frequently vs working many years on the same work - and this article felt quite biased against the latter. It never mentions how a work can remarkably stand out in beautiful ways when the author takes the time to let his work grow and evolve during development, even if that means giving into to obsession to details. Think of Kubrick's 2001 or The Shining, Valve's Portal 2. To turn like they did, these works could not have been rushed out. Or think about how the quality of Stephen King's Dark Tower arguably declined once the author decided to accelerate the writing of the last volumes (V, VI and VII) (on the side of that argument, Stephen King has recently stated in interviews that he's thinking about rewriting major parts of those last volumes, like removing himself as a character).

There are obviously many examples of amazing works that were created in a rush of luck and intuition, and of incredibly long processes that turned into failures. But some of the best works in history took years, and grew older alongside their artists before being released. In the end it's about the artist finding the right process for his work and career, whether or not that meets this article's definition of "prolific". Even if the audience has to wait a decade for a work, if the process was the right for that work, it will still be the most beneficial call for the audience.

Here's what I have for what it's worth:

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby
    require 'rubygems'
    require 'systemu'
    Dir.chdir(File.expand_path('~/.gitshots'))
    cam_warm_up_time = 2
    num_snaps = 6
    interval = 0.2
    systemu "imagesnap -w #{cam_warm_up_time} -t #{interval}" do |cid|
      sleep cam_warm_up_time + interval * num_snaps
      Process.kill 9, cid
      exit 0
    end

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby
    num_snaps = 5
    time_int = Time.now.to_i
    num_snaps.times do |i|
      file="~/.gitshots/#{time_int}__#{i+1}_of_#{num_snaps}.jpg"
      system "imagesnap -q #{file}"  
    end
    exit 0

Picturesnap somehow supports sequences but there's no control to how long they should last (would require firing a background task), and snapshots get saved in the running directory (instead of based on the passed filename/path) which would require mving each file. Pull request could be a short and sweet free time project...

We tend to look at macros as dangerous, but this is a pretty clean usage of macros, it's basically a function that turns the arguments into a string. Simple and easy to debug. Don't you think?

Edit: Discussion about that quote: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1103299/help-me-understan...

  NSRailsSync(*)

  //adding a # before va_args will simply make its contents a cstring
  #define _MAKE_STR(...)	NSRStringFromCString(#__VA_ARGS__)

  //define NSRailsSync to create a method called NSRailsSync, which returns the entire param list
  #define NSRailsSync(...) \
  + (NSString*) NSRailsSync { return _MAKE_STR(__VA_ARGS__); }

http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/guides/project-ma...

No XCode. Instead of obscure and impenetrable project files, a convention over configuration Rakefile. Clean and Ruby-like workflows and repositories.

While you can certainly configure an Xcode workspace to program in RubyMotion, we do not provide any support for Xcode out-of-the-box. We do not believe that Xcode makes a good environment for Ruby development (or development in general). Ruby also makes it very easy to write great Domain-Specific Languages that can be used as elegant alternatives to graphical user interface or data modeling tools. [1]

Laurent Sansonetti gets it. I've been writing iOS code for three years and have never been able to figure out how to have a frictionless workflow around XCode, everything about it is convoluted. The idea of automating frequent development tasks with Ruby generators and DSLs sounds exciting and promising.

[1] http://www.rubymotion.com/support/#faq

See this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2135081/does-my-applicati...

But it's possible to edit the ACL from a client. Isn't that a potential weakness?

https://www.parse.com/docs/ios_guide#users-acls

All the repositories are GPL'd, so I'm assuming they meant build in a purely educational setting.

It's a nice move, but why not go all the way and let developers leverage your code in their proprietary code? Insurgent Games only open sourced once they gave up, so they clearly know that open sourcing all your code is not a good idea when you're selling games.

Why not? Worst case scenario, some people use their software without giving anything back. Best case scenario, improvements find their way back into their code. But none of this can happen if the license is prohibitive.

I often wonder about sleep apnea, I need a lot of sleep and have limited energy, nothing drastic but still noticeable compared to others. But I tend to think I don't have it, since in the morning I usually remember having long dreams - and sleep apnea is supposed to interrupt your sleep frequently. Were you able to observe new patterns in your sleep once you started using a CPAP machine?

http://www.omniauth.org (Ruby/Rack)

https://github.com/bnoguchi/everyauth (node.js)

https://github.com/ciaranj/connect-auth (node.js)

Emotions do seem to have a life of their own. They seem like the results of deep and unknown mechanisms that I unfortunately have no control on. The best I can do is know myself better and manage that. For example, stress is an issue, and the only way I seem to be able to decrease my stress is to avoid stressful situations (for example avoiding too much work/responsibilities), instead of being able to deal with them. This means limitations with work load/pressure or certain social situations, where I get exhausted quickly.

That said, I've never studied buddhism or meditation. Could these help me control those deep inner workings?