A tale of Ghosts’n Goblins’n Crocodiles
There is something noble about developing on a dead platform – it is so completely for the joy of the development, without any commercial motivation.
- John Carmack
When does a platform truly “dies”? A “dead language” is defined as “a language which is no longer in everyday spoken use”. By analogy, a dead platform would die not when it ceases to be profitable or when it is obsolete, but when people stop playing it and caring about it.
Now the question becomes “what draws people to retro-computing?”. Is it nostalgia, the diversity, the creativity, the simplicity, or is it inexplicably fun?
Come for the sentiment, stay for the backstory of an old computer you may have never even known existed.
Yin and Yang: Lessons of Creativity — David Perell
Flow states are the holy grail of productivity. To achieve flow, we need a proper skill-challenge ratio. Skill: Yin (Order) Challenge: Yang (Chaos) We do best when we’re pursuing goals that are a little bit tougher than what we can easily accomplish.
A little bit of disorder makes many things better!
H.264 is Magic. There’s so much amazing stuff you can do with math in the pursuit of distinctly non-math-y endeavors. I’ve always thought compilers, and their cousins the query optimizer, are magic. Computer graphics too. Turns out video compression is also uniquely amazing.
Bonus quote from Revenge of the Intuitive:
Years ago I realized that the recording studio was becoming a musical instrument. I even lectured about it, proclaiming that “by turning sound into malleable material, studios invite you to construct new worlds of sounds as painters construct worlds of form and color.” I was thrilled at how people were using studios to make music that otherwise simply could not exist. Studios opened up possibilities. But now I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
I am, in general, a sucker for the notion of the studio as a kind of musical instrument unto itself. It’s a very maximalist, Romantic-era symphony sort of thinking. I want to be Pet Sounds-era Brian Wilson or Rite of Spring-era Stravinksy when I grow up.
They say never let a good crisis go to waste
We should use the pandemic to reevaluate how we value service, child care, and education labor. It’s apparent we undervalued them. Their value is now explicit for those clamoring for a return to paying people to handle their chores and obligations. So let’s pay them more when we emerge from this!
The burden of navigating urban sprawl to reach our offices, shops, and entertainment is now explicit. Density won’t be the answer for this is in the short or medium term. Perhaps we could value the ease by which we can drive around right now and work backwards from there.
The bit that has worried me is how density is no longer a virtue. Public transport and dense neighborhoods won’t be desirable for a while. What’s the alternative that reduces our environmental toll and increases the cohesion of our neighborhoods?
“Building quality things of substance takes time.” - Rands in Repose, One Thing
Why NetNewsWire Is Fast - I love it when Brent Simmons writes about system design and principles.
Tools for plain-text thinking
Margin is a plain text notation for thinking in lists, notes, and structured data. I have a soft spot for notations for thinking like, e.g. Markdown, TaskPaper, even bullet journaling.
The mark of a nicely designed plain text format is that it works equally well in a well-crafted app, a text editor, and on a sheet of paper. Margin meets that criteria.
The Bremont Argonaut - there’s a lot of “ink” on this watch face, but it doesn’t seem busy. Even more, the marks on the crowns are the real winners.
You could also think about the Apple Watch as the main input device. In contrast to the AirPods, Apple opened the Watch for developers from the start, but it hasn’t really seen much success as a platform. Perhaps a combination of Watch and AirPods has a better chance of creating an ecosystem with its own unique applications?
Bingo.