I was rather upset to find no awesome pictures of walled gardens included in this post.
The work I do for you people amazes me:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/coast/images/southw...
I Love Walled Gardens
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: I Love Walled Gardens
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is only half-trolling. There are some very good ideas here. I think the author is absolutely correct when he says that the endless tinkering that an "open" system allows is viewed as a useless waste of time by the vast majority of people, and that they aren't completely wrong in that assessment.
An example of a good bit: "It is not productive to spend an hour learning how to change the font on your computer’s clock. Even if while you’re doing that you’re learning about how computers work, you’re wasting your time and getting somewhere trivial very slowly." This reminds me of "computer education" programs that just teach how to use MS Word. Yes, this will get you a job, but you'd be learning at a more fundame…
If he said, "It is not productive for me to spend an hour learning how to change the font on my computer’s clock." he would be right.
He makes these sweeping generalizations about what is or is not productive for other people to do. By his definition all the people "tinkering with" open source Linux, Apache, etc would be "non productive" since perfectly good commercial alternatives existed (and still exist) for them.
Re: I Love Walled Gardens
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This is only half-trolling." Would a half troll be something like a half elf with a troll father and human mother? :-P I believe such a player class exists in the game Arcanum. More seriously, the author drowns whatever valid points he may have in trollish blather. As to the "endless tinkering that an "open" system allows is viewed as a useless waste of time by the vast majority of people," the value of tinkering is…
If I want to play the violin, there are violins designed specifically for letting me play them with little restraint. There are books designed specifically to guide me through learning how to play. Most people would hire an instructor to teach me the basics. That's all possible with a closed system. You can make environments specially designed to encourage tinkering, rather than leaving everything open for intrusion.…
"So it won't kill programming."
Since no one said it would, you are knocking down strawmen. Nothing Apple could do, now or in the future will kill programming. That is obvious.
"This article was submitted three times; the first time I asked that it be killed and the submitter graciously killed it for me. This is not of a tone appropriate for Hacker News."
This is fair. And very gentlemanly of you to ask that a submission be killed for inappropriateness. I read it as a submission on HN and in the context of HN it certainly sounds trollish.
as is "If you're so obsessed with tinkering that you think it's worth fucking around ". On Hacker News, you call people who love to tinker with computers obsessive and label what they do "fucking around" and "non meaningful" (as judged by your Omniscient Wisdom?) and still claim not to be trolling?
Interesting.
Re: I Love Walled Gardens
#14"Instead, they will go to the carefully-screened App Store, and they will search for “How do I make video games”, and they will find a little button that teaches them and gives them a run-time environment in which to tinker."
A small problem: run-time environments are not allowed in the app store.
Re: I Love Walled Gardens
#15trolls love walled gardens?
This is only half-trolling. There are some very good ideas here. I think the author is absolutely correct when he says that the endless tinkering that an "open" system allows is viewed as a useless waste of time by the vast majority of people, and that they aren't completely wrong in that assessment.
They find it useless until that tinkering discovers something magical that they can't live without!
Tinkering is just play. Play has useful evolutionary purposes to the individual and the group. Consumers not finding such stuff useful isn't any indicator of it's actual value to society.
Re: I Love Walled Gardens
#16There is a direct analogy to creative writing.
The publishing equivalent of Apple would have stifled e.e. cummings for his abuse of punctuation. You wouldn't have Jabberwocky because it contained imaginary words. You wouldn't have Joyce because the App^H^H^HBook Store reviewers decided that it made absolutely no sense.
The examples above are all of writers tinkering with English, tinkering with writing, hacking the language to accomplish things that otherwise would have been impossible before. A closed system takes all these away.
You shouldn't dismiss the effect of walled gardens on hackers just because you can't or won't empathize with our bit-twiddling.
Re: I Love Walled Gardens
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I want to play the violin, there are violins designed specifically for letting me play them with little restraint. There are books designed specifically to guide me through learning how to play. Most people would hire an instructor to teach me the basics. That's all possible with a closed system. You can make environments specially designed to encourage tinkering, rather than leaving everything open for intrusion.…
"So it won't kill programming." Since no one said it would, you are knocking down strawmen. Nothing Apple could do, now or in the future will kill programming. That is obvious. "This article was submitted three times; the first time I asked that it be killed and the submitter graciously killed it for me. This is not of a tone appropriate for Hacker News." This is fair. And very gentlemanly of you to ask that a submis…
I originally wrote this in response to Alex Payne; I emailed him an off-the-cuff response, then decided it might be worth revising a little and publishing. He wrote: Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. I disagreed with the sentiment. So, not killing programming, but killing the hacker era.
On Hacker News, you call people who love to tinker with computers obsessive and label what they do "fucking around" and "non meaningful" (as judged by your Omniscient Wisdom?) and still claim not to be trolling?
I'm in the community because I think people here know what they're talking about, not because I agree with their life views. In a past life (by which I mean last year) I got engulfed in a huge and marvelous debate here over that. I don't like the hacker mindset here and I think the entrepreneurial one we see here is sadly limited in scope. A lot of the things HN really enjoys I find a little disturbing and sad.
I'm not pretending my opinion is Omniscient Wisdom. Your saying it makes the both of us looks silly. I don't come from quite the background a lot of this community does, and my worldviews are slightly different, but I don't lash out at people that disagree with me — unless it's a debate happening about something I wrote, in which case I maintain the tone I started in the article to help and elucidate things.
If we want to make this a discussion of the worldview in question, and of exactly what I believe about what, then by all means we can have that, but the fact that your attitude's more snark than it is polite engagement suggested to me that you're more into shooting me down under false pretenses.
Re: I Love Walled Gardens
#18trolls love walled gardens?
This is only half-trolling. There are some very good ideas here. I think the author is absolutely correct when he says that the endless tinkering that an "open" system allows is viewed as a useless waste of time by the vast majority of people, and that they aren't completely wrong in that assessment.
Fortunately it's not up to you or the vast majority of people to decide what is or isn't a waste of time for me or anyone else.
If it wasn't for a lot of people investing significant chunks of their lives in something they were passionate about there would be no systems at all today.
Re: I Love Walled Gardens
#19There is a direct analogy to creative writing. The publishing equivalent of Apple would have stifled e.e. cummings for his abuse of punctuation. You wouldn't have Jabberwocky because it contained imaginary words. You wouldn't have Joyce because the App^H^H^HBook Store reviewers decided that it made absolutely no sense. The examples above are all of writers tinkering with English, tinkering with writing, hacking the l…
Bullshit. If somebody broke UI rules in as brilliant a way as Cummings did it, Apple would accept the app. Meanwhile, publishing companies reject poets with shitty punctuation every day. The fact that Cummings was published has a lot to do with the fact that his punctuation was awesome. (Also, Cummings wrote more typical sonnets before he started experimenting, so there was precedent.)
If you want to be experimental, be it online. Nobody can deny access to your HTML5 creations. In fact, Apple's one of the biggest pushers of compliant modern web browsing.
Re: I Love Walled Gardens
#20“But Rory, programming is my passion. I was willing to spend that long learning how to code.” No, I think back at them — programmers are not given the satisfaction of hearing my voice. No, you were willing to spend that long because you had obsessive-compulsive problems mixed with an antisocial attitude. The fact that he's pretty clearly trolling in the passage above doesn't make it less worth reading, as it does dis…
Can I jump in here and issue a minor clarification? I am not a troll. I am a creative writer. I care much, much more about whether I'm writing in interesting and fun and amusing ways than I do about any pretense of formality, particularly in this piece. (I alternate between phases of more serious writing and more tongue-in-cheek. This is very much the latter.) I don't like the suggestion that the instant a piece of w…
It's not that it's unserious, it's that parts of it were clearly written to get a rise out of people. Maybe "flamebait" is a better term.