31–40 of 131 posts
I'm always blown away by the vision behind stuff like HyperCard. It was all about giving non-techies the keys to the kingdom. But looking at today's tech landscape, with its walled gardens and app stores, I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.
It feels a bit like he wrote his own obituary with this.
I find myself pining for a lot of the "old days" when anything seemed possible and it was open and exciting. You could DO surprisingly, not a lot, but everything still felt possible.
Now everything seems trapped in advertising dominated closed box. Login and live in this limited little space...
The internet is still there, I can still put up a site that isn't covered with ads. I wish I could surf just that internet and so on.
> It was exciting working at Apple, knowing that whatever we invented would be used by millions of people. I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is good and helpful. And that it's disappointing when that thing isn't used by anyone. It's even worse when it turns out it's just not that useful. But in the end, everything is replaced anyway. So I guess it's fine.
> I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is good and helpful. I want to double down on this - I’m lucky enough to have worked places where I truly believed the world would be a better place if we “won,” and not on the margins, and it really, really makes a difference in quality of life. I’ve worked at other places, too, and the cognitive drag of knowing that your skills and efforts - your ability…
I've also wasted countless years on pursuits I still think were good but overall never truly helped make the world better. This was less bad and seems inevitable.
I'm always blown away by the vision behind stuff like HyperCard. It was all about giving non-techies the keys to the kingdom. But looking at today's tech landscape, with its walled gardens and app stores, I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.
It's really hard to extract computing from the capitalistic, consumerist cradle within which it was born. Every other human creative practice and media (poetry, theater, writing, music, painting, etc) have existed in a wide variety of cultures, societies, and economic contexts. But computing has never existed outside of the immensely expensive and complex factories & supply chains required to produce computing compon…
on some level it is just human nature to want to consume than create. just is. its not great but lets not act like people havent tried to make creative new platforms for self expression and software creation and they all kinda failed
I'm interested in how to do "good" journeys vs non-good ones...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All traditional practices of use of psychedelic substances emphasize the importance of preparation, having the right state of mind, right stimuli / environment, and sitters in un-altered state of mind nearby. LSD is not known to permanently alter brain; for that you need psilocybin.
You had me up until your last clause… If you understand that LSD doesn’t permanently alter the brain, why do you think PY “permanently” alters the brain? It does alter the brain (like LSD; see the plethora of research on PY altering neurogenesis and functional connectivity [0]), I’m unsure of what you mean by “permanent”. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07624-5
For psilocybin, there is plenty, e.g.: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8376772/
I think this was the hook that got many of us to admire Apple as a company (and more broadly, to get excited about computing as a discipline/industry). For a long time, that was arguably (one of) their primary mission.
I suspect to what extent it could still be considered to be the case today would be subject to much debate.
I was wondering recently about where the original sin of “light mode” came from. Guess it was him! > The Apple II displayed white text on a black background. I argued that to do graphics properly we had to switch to a white background like paper. It works fine to invert text when printing, but it would not work for a photo to be printed in negative. The Lisa hardware team complained the screen would flicker too much,…
I was wondering recently about where the original sin of “light mode” came from. Guess it was him! > The Apple II displayed white text on a black background. I argued that to do graphics properly we had to switch to a white background like paper. It works fine to invert text when printing, but it would not work for a photo to be printed in negative. The Lisa hardware team complained the screen would flicker too much,…
The real sin is having both.