111–120 of 297 posts
If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar. That’s the simple long and the short of it. Some kids learn guitar. Some kids fantasize about learning guitar. Apple makes machines that en…
I have total respect for Alan Kay but I hope he stops criticizing other people and actually shows his vision through his own execution (and by execution I don't just mean invention of a prototype but actual productization and distribution) If you're building something visionary and are not the one who's making tons of money off of it, you have two solutions: 1. IF you're interested in making money: Try to figure out…
As Steve Jobs reportedly was fond of saying, "Great artists ship."
I have total respect for Alan Kay but I hope he stops criticizing other people and actually shows his vision through his own execution (and by execution I don't just mean invention of a prototype but actual productization and distribution) If you're building something visionary and are not the one who's making tons of money off of it, you have two solutions: 1. IF you're interested in making money: Try to figure out…
> and actually shows his vision through his own execution As Steve Jobs reportedly was fond of saying, "Great artists ship."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is painful that most desktop apps never even got branching undo/redo.
I'd heard vim does, but when the situation came where I needed it, it turned out I'm fine with just moving back in time.
I certainly agree I can get by without it. It does seem like daily I will pull up the tree, though, to walk up and down the history to make sure I understand what the last thing I did was.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is painful that most desktop apps never even got branching undo/redo.
I'd heard vim does, but when the situation came where I needed it, it turned out I'm fine with just moving back in time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of things worth doing that are not profitable. If anything, the people who made the profits where standing on the shoulders of giants like Kay; I think we can afford him some space to be grumpy over shitty execution and lack of vision. It's a matter of perspective; what you call cool things, Kay would call consumer bull crap; and I tend to agree.
If you're not building something for people, what are you building? Art? I'm fine with that, but just because you're making art, doesn't mean everyone else is an idiot. Also I think it's very condescending to think that others didn't have vision. Lastly it's cheap to criticize someone else for "shitty execution" when you yourself have the ability to show with your own execution but you clearly haven't. It's easy to t…
If, like Alan Kay, you think we need a major overhaul in software construction and are in the San Francisco Bay Area, let me know. I'm part of a group that meets on Saturdays once a month and we work on side research projects toward that end. My email is in my profile.
Disappointed many comments have disassociated this from where we are now.
Thank you Alan. Excellent read.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deconstruction is a way of viewing reality which comes naturally equipped with a process for disassembling ideas (the "deconstructive process") as well as a process for viewing ideas as the synthesis of other ideas (the "constructive process"). The core is this: all semantics are relative, all observations surface-level, and all truths buried in the raw materials. But since the materials are themselves relative, all…
I am far from an expert in Deconstruction, but I am an expert in mathematics and have read a fair amount on the foundations of mathematics. I find your description technically correct, but highly misleading. The vast majority of mathematicians will agree with "no one true foundation". However, unlike the bulk of postmodern/deconstructive work, they are then perfectly happy to say "this particular foundation is good e…
Deconstruction changed the way we think about what we read, see, and hear, and taught us to question the assumptions inherent in the same. It gave us the spaghetti western, cyberpunk, and arguably punk rock itself (and it definitely influenced hip hop and dub).
Always remember that postmodernism is "defense against the dark arts" for the left. The techniques of playing shell games with symbol and meaning were devised by the right and by corporations and weaponized against us; postmodernism exists to make us aware of these techniques.
But I didn't really bring up the Derrida fan to argue about deconstruction or postmodernist thought.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What should embarrass us so deeply and why? HTML and CSS are some of the most generative, enduring, and transformative technologies ever. I wouldn't fund anyone who doesn't recognize how great they are!
HTML & CSS were good for the early web, when it was a simple document layout platform. They're not ideal for building rich UIs and applications. Just because they've been extended to allow that doesn't mean they are the best tool for the job. Similarly, Excel is abused to do all sorts of things it's not intended for as well, when there are better options for databases, financial applications and data science.
That difference means that it's orders of magnitude easier to "abuse" Excel to do some things it wasn't designed to do than to do the same with HTML. I seriously wonder if the reliance on HTML to this day is not a kind of "job security" thing for web devs (like myself, btw)...