61–70 of 75 posts
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Are those figures adjusted for inflation?
I doubt that 6 years (1977 - 1983) is long enough for inflation to have altered the ratio much.
CPI June 1977: 60.7 $13 million
CPI June 1983: 99.5 $21.3 millionAnother great parallel is from photography: Many film cameras used to be sold with only a fixed 50mm or a 35mm lens. The restriction forced people to think about what was in or outside the field of vision. Today's cameras that have 10x zooms do not force the same consideration, and I suggest that amateur photography has suffered as a result. A friend of mine is a house-painter by trade, and has set himself the restri…
It's not too hard to see why this works if you think about it as a mathematical optimization. You have a very bumpy fitness function in parameter space. When you apply arbitrary constraints on the parameters you are selecting a subspace to examine for local maxima of the fitness function. This is an easier problem to solve than the original global maximization problem.
If I applied the arbitrary constraint that x must be an odd multiple of pi, then I'm not going to get a very good answer to trying to maximise cos(x)...
I appreciate the message, but am I the only one for whom the "fail fast" mantra is becoming grating? It seems like it was originally a good idea: if your startup is dead, let it die. Don't cling to a failed idea. Now, however, it's almost used instead of a plan, or as an excuse not to carefully consider your options. It seems as if it appeals to our innate laziness: "Take a shot. If you miss, oh well, better luck nex…
I never saw it that way, or at least at that scale. I see it as a way to move fast by validating assumptions with evidence and being unemotional about sunk costs. Rather than spending many hours of meetings and design sessions and approvals to try a feature or change, just do it, measure it, and if it's not working, kill it. If it is working, keep it, and nurture it. If you just spent 3 months on an idea that is getting no traction, don't spend another 3 months trying to fix it when you've got other promising things in the pipeline.
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Zoom lenses have been the predominant kit lens for cameras for the better part of twenty years. I think the migration to digital (where the cost of shooting is ridiculously low) has had a much greater impact on the worsening of amateur photography. That coupled with the ubiquity of sharing pictures on the internet has created a perfect storm of shittiness. Professional photographers love to lament about this, and whi…
I would be a far worse photographer than I am now if I did not have a digital camera. I do not have $5000 to blow on film and developer fees (or developing time, not to mention a lack of funds to blow on a darkroom setup) by experimentally learning about fstops or ISO settings, on a multi-day feedback loop, just for learning. I can afford batteries to take several thousand pictures, on a multi-second feedback loop, j…
Having started with a film SLR in the digital age, based on my personal experience I can say that it does not take $5000 of film or developer fees to learn f-stops or ISO settings on your camera, unless you have a spastic trigger finger. I learned the above, as well as the zone system, shutter speed, push/pull processing, metering, and night shooting using about 5-6 rolls of film. I did this on a camera I got for $50 off of eBay. Development time is about an hour (Take it to a lab! Why bring up darkroom costs if you wish to lower your costs?), so you can have feedback in the same day. The fundamentals don't take that long to learn.
Now, learning to color balance is levels harder, but that's something you have to do whether you're on film or digital.
I have since switched to a digital SLR for the reason that it's a pain to get film scanned. But if it wasn't for that, I'd keep on shooting film; my prints from film have been more gorgeous, with more dynamic range and detail, than images from my SLR. I also picked up an old TLR from eBay for $50 that lets me use 120 film. Digital cameras with that kind of resolution still costs $10,000 (e.g. Mamiya).
Finally, there's a certain joy one gets from crafting your print by hand in the darkroom, the sense of mystery as the print develops, that I now miss when I sit in front of my computer and click-click dodge-and-burn my images. Like you, I cannot justify the costs of setting up my own darkroom (although I believe a black-and-white darkroom is relatively inexpensive, depending on how good of a deal you can get on your enlarger, maybe $1000-$2000?), and even darkroom rental locations are fast disappearing. For that I feel a little sadness, like watching whales go extinct.
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I would be a far worse photographer than I am now if I did not have a digital camera. I do not have $5000 to blow on film and developer fees (or developing time, not to mention a lack of funds to blow on a darkroom setup) by experimentally learning about fstops or ISO settings, on a multi-day feedback loop, just for learning. I can afford batteries to take several thousand pictures, on a multi-second feedback loop, j…
This is a myth that needs to die. Having started with a film SLR in the digital age, based on my personal experience I can say that it does not take $5000 of film or developer fees to learn f-stops or ISO settings on your camera, unless you have a spastic trigger finger. I learned the above, as well as the zone system, shutter speed, push/pull processing, metering, and night shooting using about 5-6 rolls of film. I…
Digital.
- Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
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Exactly. The "fail fast" notion is anathemic to most worthwhile pursuits, from school to skill acquisition to sports... I'm not sure why it's suddenly considered a virtue in the startup world.
It depends on what extreme you take it to. For the classic sports example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mMioJ5szc Fail Fast can also be seen as: Perform, get feedback, perform slightly better, get more feedback, iterate until perfect.
I'm struggling with this right now. When building web applications, there are some constraints that are interesting and useful ("the user should be able to do everything without logging in") that might result in great stuff being built, and others ("it has to use this particular technology stack or this particular algorithm") that are less obviously beneficial to the creative process.