Yes, I think this is what seems to be missed by everything I've read about Gehry in the mainstream. As I said in another post, I worked in the Stata Center at MIT for five years. It was indeed a fun space to walk around in and explore, but it failed to satisfy as a workspace.
I worked in the Stata Center for the first five years and it was just a very poor office building to work in. Even setting aside the leaks and other construction defects, individual working spaces, traffic paths, and communal spaces were not well-separated leading to a lot of distraction. There was also various useless corners due to sharp angles.
I much preferred working in the previous building, CS and AI lab building, NE43. It looked like a punch card from the outside, but had a very nice design with small offices (with closing doors) ringing a common space. The primary downside is the square footage per worker was decadent by today's standard.
Oh wait, we were talking about Frank Gehry, right? His museums looks cool but he should never have been allowed to design an office building.
Two random anecdotes: when the concept drawing were first shown to the graduate students, someone asked what the swooping walkways above the main corridor were for. The answer they gave was "lightsaber battles".
When we first moved in, there was a seminar room that made some people physically nauseous due to its sloping walls. For a time, they were trying to use masking tape on the walls to make the effect less pronounced. Some of the grad students tried to name it the "vomitorium", but the name never stuck. Fortunately,, once the room had a full compliment of chairs, furniture, and a projector screen the effect seemed to be much less pronounced.
This is yet another very good critique, but it's long past time that we stop paying attention to Uncle Bob.
Not only are his ideas about how to write software patently bad, but he is willfully obtuse when asked to provide nuance or discuss trade-offs. John Ousterhout's dialog with him, published as "A Philosophy of Software Design vs Clean Code" gave him every opportunity to think critically about his own suggestions and he just doubles down.
Thanks for taking one for the team. I had zero expectations for Clean Code second edition after reading Uncle Bob's dialogs with John Ousterhout. I thought Ousterhout bent over backwards to give Uncle Bob the benefit of the doubt and discuss the tradeoffs and Bob just dug in on his bizarre dogmatic approaches.
- Archive: Anything you have a feeling might be useful
- Delete: Anything you’re pretty sure would be useless in the future
This has always been my strategy, though some might say I'm closer to "archive almost everything". I still do a lot of deleting, though. Deleted mail tends to fall into the following broad categories:
- security alerts and passcodes
- notifications for events happening in a different systems (e.g. Venmo payments, bank alerts, etc.)
- receipts for non-durable things like restaurants
I guess I could try to move these more forcefully from email versus phone notifications, but this still is really low priority and it's kind of better to just deal with it in a batch at the end of the day.
Yes! I just bought a dealer-certified three year old Kia Niro with 24k miles for $22k. The current new version of this car has an MSRP more than double that price. There is no world where the difference between these cars is worth $25k. In my head it's more like $10k-$15k max.
I bought my Kia EV6 at probably the worst time (fall 2022). EVs were in high demand, dealers were adding markups, and my credit was still reeling from just buying a house. As a result, I owe way more than I could buy it used lol. Not that I would (and ignoring the ramifications), but it would cost me less money to just let it get repossessed and go hunt it down and buy it from the used dealer that buys it at auction.
Lots of stories like this. I bought mine 2023 while subsidy was still there and Tesla just dropped prices. Yes it depreciated solid 25% but that equates to gas savings. Buying new would cost more now.
Agreed. Any complex mechanical device like a car can be "ridden rough", regardless of whether it is gas or electric. I feel like with gas cars there are a lot more moving parts to get stessed, while electric it's mostly about how the battery was treated. Having bought multiple used cars, including a used EV, it seems like a wash to me.
I read the TeXBook over 25 years ago when I wanted to learn about how mathematics was typeset. It gave me a lifelong appreciation for and love of the art of typography.
The downside is that once you know, you know and you will see lots of bad typography. Though I genuinely think digital typography has continually and gradually improved over the decades. The typography you get "out of the box" is much better than 20 years ago. Also, high dpi displays rock!
Agree these are advantages:
Mailing lists are simple
- Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly
- Mailing lists interoperate
- They're asynchronous
- They're portable
- They can be freely interconverted
- They can be written to media and read from it
Disagree these are advantages:
Mailing lists require no special software
- They impose minimal security risk
- They impose minimal privacy risk
- They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up
- They scale beautifully
- they're relatively free of abuse vectors
- They handle threading well
I still use mailing lists, both at work and personally, but they are 1970s technology and it feels like it. We could build mailing lists for this century that keep these advantages and fix what's broken, but there's no business model in it.
What makes them “feel like 1970s technology” to you, and—more importantly—why do you say that like it’s a bad thing?
Most of the opposition I’ve seen to using mailing lists for technical discussion has basically come down to “young people think email is old and gross” and my position is that people reacting that way have some self-reflection to do and to get over themselves.
What makes them feel like 1970s technology: everyone has to manually manage their own archive and pay storage costs for media files, there is no way to share history (if you want), there is no integrated search, differences in clients mean that people have different experiences of the same message, there are no affordances like reactions that allow people to easily interact with a message without sending an entire separate message.
But maybe I should have said late 80s, early 90s tech. In the 70s, if you were communicating with others on a computer, you were almost certainly using the exact same software on the exact same time-shared system, where at least there was a symmetry of experiences (but no multimedia). The explosion of email clients happened in the 90s, mostly.
Oh no, people have to consider how they engage with others’ writing! They can’t just push a “like” or “thumbs down” button! There will be social pressure against it if they try to just send around picture or video memes instead of writing something thoughtful! And worst, everyone gets to be in control of their “experience of the same message,” by using the mail client that works best for them!
All of the reasons you say mailing lists are, let’s say, “dated” are actually benefits of using them, especially when using them for engineering purposes.
I agree that the available features can steer the online community culture and behaviors, but it's not determinative. I don't see why online communities should give up useful features just because other communities use them in a way you don't like.
I've been using mailing lists for about 30 years now. In the days before social networks, there was tons of forwarded crap and email chains, such that debunking them was a cottage industry. This behavior eventually moved to Facebook and Twitter which is perhaps why email lists seem more civilized these days, but I don't believe its the features that are driving it.
I mean this is precisly why email is best. Being an open standard, it's not a business. Nobody owns it, nobody can. Those are fundamental to its strenght.
Sorry, I disagree. The lack of a business model means a lack of competition and a weak market. For years I've been looking to find an email list hosting solution that works for a small family, sports team, friends group, etc. There is next to nothing in this space besides Google Groups. There are a few hosted mailing list solutions, but they have enterprise features and pricing.
$240/yr is a lot to just have a couple of family mailing lists. Even for creating mailing lists for youth sports teams, local civic orgs, and things like that it's really high.
Minimal privacy risk is such a BS "advantage". You put your email out there for everybody to read it. So privacy with mailing lists does not exist
If I want to remain anonymous, I need to register another email address, which is a massive pain in the ass to register AND then to read or reply to the mailing list.
With a forum I register, chose an anonymous nickname and can participate and get updates into my normal inbox anonymously.
Possibly the most common open source mailing list software, mailman, has had configuration options to address both email address and header exposure for at least 15 years
At least with email, you're in control of what shows up in your inbox as well as message routing with filters of your choice
