I read every book written by Robert Caro—now there was an author who loved em-dashes!
I enjoyed his use of them so much in his writing that I started using them in my own book that came out in 2017. I freely admit—without hesitation—that my own use of em-dashes is due to author Robert Caro's influence.
There is much amusement at the idea that tech-weenies today are freaking out that the appearance of em-dashes in text is a surefire tell that so-called "AI" generated said text.
Who fucking said my "book flopped financially" -- please, point that out. Oh, wait, you can't, because you just made that up. Fucking hell. This place sucks.
Fuck that site. Offers people links to free PDF downloads of my book that I worked on for 32 years and finally got published by Pantheon Books in 2017. I didn't work all that fucking time for criminals like these to just break copyright law and make the book available for free. Fuck Anna's Archive, and I hope they go down in legal flames ASAP.
Well Wizardry was written by two PLATO gamers at Cornell, a university that had a PLATO terminal or two connected to the U of I system. Very much inspired by PLATO games like Oubliette and Avatar.
Sadly this article is, per the tradition over at Ars Technica, quite misleading.
Bottom line: if you want to understand the actual history of the online world, don't read Ars Technica. They don't get it, they've never gotten it, and you're just being fed mythology and selective history in the same mold as WIRED before it.
They should know better. The author of the article absolutely has no excuse. But still, they actually public "architect of our online age" when that is NOT what Ward was at all. He was a latecomer. The online world was already booming in 1978.
Used to run ads in 1988-90 in ComputorEdge for my first startup (Coconut Computing; we ran the COCONET online service in San Diego then). Didn't they change their name to ByteBuyer? We used to call them ByteBuyor to pay homage to the original name.
Nah the original assessment was too many San Diego tech workers would rather go surfing or play networked first-person shooter games than get something momentous done. There was always something more important to do than do the work and build the thing and make a difference in the world. I did the San Diego startup scene for 25 years. I worked at MP3.com; employee 12 I think. I also started 3 companies in La Jolla, was very active in the SD startup scene for many years. There are great engineers there, don't get me wrong. But the work ethic is simply different than SV, which is just the way it is, not gonna change. I don't think I'll ever do another startup in San Diego though. Elsewhere, sure, but not there.
After getting to know the Boulder-area TechStars people, I tried to get a TechStars "chapter" going in San Diego back in 2010 and like so many things about the startup world in San Diego, it just wasn't going to happen. The San Diego M-F 9-5 lifestyle always was more important than taking over the world. Plus, in general I found mentoring San Diego tech startups to be essentially pointless: nobody listened, nobody cared, so why even bother. Finally I found the core TechStars organization to be a bunch of cats, un-herdable, no "there" there. I never liked the whole "star" thing as it reeked of "rock stars" and was a little too "bro" for me. Bottom line, it was screamingly clear TechStars was never going to compete with YC (which I've never been a fan of either, but at least they're organized and determined and focused), so no surprise when it never did.
Any Tesla owner can relate to this, given the wide variety (read: no consistency, no standards) of toggle buttons the car's UI utilizes.
For one, the HVAC. One button, showing temperature, which upon touched the system will react differently to depending on how you touch it and for how long. Touch it briefly, you get a little popup. Touch it slightly longer, and (hopefully, not guaranteed though) you get a bigger panel with full HVAC controls. Touch and hold for a couple seconds, and (hopefully, not guaranteed though) you turn off the HVAC if it's on. ALL WHILE YOU ARE DRIVING AND SUPPOSED TO WATCH THE ROAD. And if your hand/eye coordination is slightly off (and hey, when you're driving, going over bumps, etc, it very likely is) if you mis-aim by even a millimeter, you may touch another button and not realize it and do something unintended.
Another disaster: Tesla's entire connect-a-Bluetooth-device UX is one of the worst mishmashes of disastrous UI design I have ever seen in a shipping product, at least the 2012-2022 Model S implementation. Just one example, a button label down at the bottom right that still says "Connect" long after the device is already connected, but meanwhile elsewhere on the opposite side of screen, up top at the left, that says "Connecting..." then indicates the connection is made. All this in a UI that you only have a split second to glance at because it's in a CAR and you very well might be DRIVING. The Tesla Bluetooth UI could fill an entire chapter of a book on UI, it is so magnificently bad. Maybe I should write it.
I enjoyed his use of them so much in his writing that I started using them in my own book that came out in 2017. I freely admit—without hesitation—that my own use of em-dashes is due to author Robert Caro's influence.
There is much amusement at the idea that tech-weenies today are freaking out that the appearance of em-dashes in text is a surefire tell that so-called "AI" generated said text.
Read some books, get away from the computer, eh?