The frequencies are alive with music in Brazil. Among the broad (and excellent) variety of local music are three stations that play an eclectic variety of foreign music from around the world. One station features a lot of rare or more unusual recordings of music from the 60s through the 2000s. Sure you’ve heard Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” a million times on the radio but you probably haven’t heard the version by Heartbreak Klub, an Australian rock-pop band. Or one of the live recordings of “Going to California” with John Paul Jones’ extended mandolin solo.
It’s great because they stream online so when I’m back home and don’t know what to listen to, it’s always an option.
I know that some think this is just some cold hard straight talk but this style of individualistic thinking lacks empathy. And more practically, it’s a trap.
In context, the “doing things” and “opportunities” that we’re talking about are jobs, careers. So by promoting the idea that one must work harder or longer to get or keep a career that they’ve already built sounds like a path to opt-in servitude.
It seems like no one else is bothered by the fact that more and more we are being forced to interact with third party companies - companies with which the consumer has no direct relationship - as a precondition for doing things in daily life.
To eat at a restaurant you give a phone number and suddenly have an account with Resy. Renting an apartment means signing up for a service to access the move-in documents and then another to unlock the door.
These services rarely benefit the consumer. I’m not sure why it bothers me so much. Maybe it’s the erosion of agency. Maybe it’s the over-complicating of what should be a simple activity. But it’s becoming more frequent.
There’s a cold reality that we in this profession have yet to accept: nobody cares about our code. Nobody cares whether it’s pretty or clever or elegant. Sometimes, rarely, they care whether it’s maintainable.
We are only craftsmen to ourselves and each other. To anyone else we are factory workers producing widgets to sell. Once we accept this then there is little surprise that the factory owners want us using a tool that makes production faster, cheaper. I imagine that watchmakers were similarly dismayed when the automatic lathe was invented and they saw their craft being automated into mediocrity. Like watchmakers we can still produce crafted machines of elegance for the customers who want them. But most customers are just going to want a quartz.
I’ve supported the EFF for a long time. I think what they do and stand for is important. But I can’t help but feel utterly disillusioned with all of it now. Each press release just reads as naïve to me. At one point it felt like there was a real possibility that their viewpoint would be thoughtfully discussed and actioned on. But now…I don’t know. The lack of notable “wind” doesn’t help and all the trends just don’t give me confidence that the tide will turn any time soon.
Maybe the part that makes me most sad is that for those of us who have been doing this for, well, our entire lives, it’s just not the outcome any of us envisioned but it’s the outcome that (almost) all of us have been party to even if in some small way.
This goes beyond just web design. In Japan, UIs in general steer toward being information dense. At first glance they look positively ancient. And while they take some time to become familiar they seem to be first and foremost, functional. Frankly I wish we in the west would focus more on function and sticking with it instead of hopping to whatever the UI/UX trend of the day is. It seems to me that the more focus there is on UI/UX the worse the experience gets.
These comments kill me. It sounds a lot like the “job creators” argument. If only these pesky regulations would go away I could create jobs and everyone would be rich. It’s a bogus argument either way.
Now for the more reasonable point: instead of being adversarial and disparaging those trying to do their job why not realize that, just like you, they have a certain viewpoint and are trying to do the best they can. There is no simple answer to the issues we’re dealing with and it will require compromise. That won’t happen if you see policy and security folks as “climbing out of their holes”.
I wouldn’t suggest anyone take this piece serious; you would be doing yourself a disservice. A strange thing I’ve noticed about street view. Whenever I show up to a new place that I’ve viewed on street view I remark on how different it feels from what I expected. Maybe I recognize the konbini on the corner and know that it marks the left turn I need to make. But never have I felt like street view was even close to actually being there.
> Not that it would have been logistically feasible back then, but I do sometimes ask myself if Pearl Harbor could have been prevented if enough Japanese statesmen had gone to vacation in New York.
Well we kind of know what the answer is. Toward the end of WW2 when the US was drawing up the list of cities to bomb, Kyoto got removed from the list at the insistence of the Secretary of War. He understood the cultural importance of the city, likely because he had travelled there. I’m surprised the author hadn’t read about it on Wikipedia.
But back to my point. Sitting and staring into my magic 13-inch rectangle starts to make me feel like…nothing. A formless gel of facts and trivia. Travel makes me feel like a human being again. Travel may not be education but I do think that, when done well, it is wisdom.
Aside from just plain bad luck, the things you list don't happen in isolation. Humans have fought bloody wars over land for as long as we've stood upright. Do you think we'll all neatly organize into the remaining habitable land?
I’m inclined to agree. The goalposts will move once the time is right. I’ve already personally witnessed it happening; a company sells their AI-whatever strictly along the lines of staff augmentation and a force multiplier for employees. Not a year later and the marketing has shifted to cost optimization, efficiency, and better “uptime” over real employees.
I think there is too much associating taste with quality. We can see it in many of these comments and in the post as well:
> And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence.
And I say, maybe. But more than quality I think taste is a way to discern what’s unique and novel. In my mind it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be “excellent” because, as the post mentions, everyone’s “excellent” may be different.
Why do I think this distinction is important? Because if taste is about seeing the nuances that make something interesting instead of what makes it “good” then getting to good taste promotes open minded exploration (healthy exploration) over status seeking.
I love this car already. It has character, a personality. It’s the friend who’s kind of a pain in the ass but someone you usually have a good time with.
Reminds me of the car I learned to drive manual on. It would only start when the drivers side door was open. So if you stalled the car the process was: open door, clutch in, start engine, clutch out and go, close door. You learned not to stall…
> There are no guardrails, no warning signs, and definitely no liability waivers - just you, the weather, and whatever route the sheep decided made sense.
I absolutely love places like this; places that treat you as a discerning, rational adult. The sense of being responsible for yourself feels freeing. It is an invitation for you to experience something entirely in your own way.
Even as a jaded person I’m surprised how many people read this and immediately go to statements about hypocrisy, having no integrity, or bad leadership. Get a grip! Real life doesn’t always let you be a crusader. It’s called choosing your battles and it’s something that most of us have to do almost every day.
Nothing in this advice suggests being two-faced. Nothing suggests lying or being deceitful. What it does suggest is to try and do the least bad thing in a set of less-than-ideal circumstances, most of which are outside any of the rank-and-file’s control.
Edit to add: nothing says you have to publicly agree with an unpopular policy while disparaging it in private. Staying quiet is an option and probably the most sensible one.
> Instead of the clear, itemized pricing system that passengers currently rely on, airlines could hide fees until later in the booking process…
They call what we have now “clear”? Where when looking at a page of flights I don’t know how much the multitude of economy/economy+/economy++/premium economy/business/business++ seats will cost until I click on each flight? Where every carrier offers slightly different variations of these seats such that I can’t cross-shop on Google Flights?
Is that the clear and transparent system the airlines are complaining about?
But good gravy that troubleshooting path got expensive real fast. Replacing the laptop and the camera? Why not start by trying something other than Photos? It doesn’t even need to be a paid product; the Olympus software is free not to mention a good baseline since it - of all the applications - should be able to import photos without corrupting them.
Edit to add: delete on import seems pretty risky. My workflow is to import and only delete from the camera after 1) the imported photos are backed up 2) I’ve done a first pass culling.
You’re only looking at the most recent couple of years. Going over the entire set and Tokyo shows up toward the top frequently. Having lived there for a short while I would agree - Tokyo is very livable. I think it’s because the city is composed of smaller “cities” and the concentration of goods and services is distributed among neighborhoods.
It’s great because they stream online so when I’m back home and don’t know what to listen to, it’s always an option.
For those interested - https://itapemafm.com.br/