One characteristic that differentiates contemporary design from all our grandparents’ houses is transience rather than permanence. Design immediately following WWI was largely about calm and comfort; the emergence of the den, cottage-cozy, spaces for reading, listening to the radio, etc — stability, calm, people wanted everything the war wasn’t. Immediately following WWII was different in different parts of the world but especially in North America there were all these industrial manufacturers wanting to sell The Future, and you get on the one hand gleaming kitchen-forward spaces and two car garages and rooms for entertaining. Less built-in bookshelves, more built-in HiFi. And on the other hand, the sort of refuge or counterpoint, more integration with nature, more natural materials, exposed timber and vaulted ceilings and giant windows, frank lloyd wright. And in all these cases, the ideas were rooted in stability and permanence. The space was designed for its uses and its inhabitants.
More recently, it’s less about the buyers and more about the sellers. Design is optimized for flipping, which means fast market movement, which means generic. Yes there is always cookie-cutter, especially in postwar housing boom. Modern markets have just embraced that more fully. Offices don’t embody the tenants identity, or if they do it’s the same as all the other companies “in the space.” Everyone wants to look like Google, at best, otherwise it’s about commodity layouts, finishes, and styles… platforms for cubicles and bulk furniture purchases that can be amortized over the lease. Housing is similar… design for a family that will scatter once the kids leave home and the parents retire elsewhere. Or the inverse… design for Airbnb until the owners are ready to retire and move in or sell off. In any case the inhabitants are a secondary consideration to returns on investment. Design is a cost center to a financial concern.
Unless you’re rich enough not to care about any of this, in which case there’s finally time and space and money for design, but none of it really matters
Yeah this is all very regional too. Row houses in London and brownstones in New York or whatever won’t have front lawns as a function of density, but may have back yards or gardens, which may or may not be a function of producing your own food, which is all tied up in different experiences of war, while certainly countryside estates are for form more than function, while post war housing in the midwestern US was in part a build-on-your-lot market with houses literally ordered from a Sears catalog…
There’s definitely more to the story and there are myriad factors.
I guess I mean treat it as a clear first class feature. Right now most browsers treat it as an arcane error. I’m thinking more “This is the first time you’re connecting to this site. Do you trust it?”
And later if something changes, then they can do the whole DOING SOMETHING NASTY! thing, which is effectively the experience today
I don’t know much in this space, but I find myself wishing there was a dead simple self hosted CA solution and also that trust on first use (à la ssh) was A Thing for self-managed root certs in client implementations. TOFU is such an elegant, good-enough solution for these use cases. Fixed deployment is always still an option, but in this day and age it feels so much like we are unnecessarily still dealing with solved problems
I’m so almost here. The thing holding me back is projects that don’t do their own migrations reliably. Through no fault of their own, perhaps, though at this point I would argue LLMs should eliminate any good reason not to have alembic integrated or something. And even Home Assistant is bizarrely averse to fully automated system wide updates. Updating system and core and addons all independently is bonkers. But yes, the simplest implementation is often the best
I just caught myself thinking Pantos shouldn’t have answered the phone. Not in a blame the victim way, more in that never answering the phone is just good opsec at this point. The phone, the door, just don’t talk to a cop without a lawyer. They don’t come to you to be helpful to -you-.
Except in this case in a broader sense, we know about something we wouldn’t have otherwise
Who benefits from all this brilliant deal making who doesn’t already have plenty of money? If we are going to invent money out of paperwork maneuvers, you’d think we could invent a way to fund healthcare and schools.
I might argue that generating and decoding an actual NTSC signal, as the OP project does, would be true in ways that a generative model based on all of that would not be.
One of my favorite artifacts of the pre-platform era of the web. Valuable stuff presented clearly … all clearly handmade with care. Not a monetized journey conversion experience in sight
I’ve also moved all mine to Europe. There are ample alternatives to us-based commercial cloud.
The regulatory environment is different, so it’s worth understanding the ramifications as far as what’s expected of you if you’re operating in a different jurisdiction. It’s nothing that can’t be handled, but some may find they have to care about things they haven’t before
It’s a great exercise for shoring up independence from extractive providers
Maybe I should have AI write up an article too. Honestly, it’s not just rare, it quietly matters
I’ve been finding it difficult to hand things over to an LLM completely, and I wonder if this is part of it. I’ll let it help me organize at the beginning, and then I’ll have it come through and refactor or review, but the crafting part is where I want to spend my time. I love hitting tab but it seems like every time I do, I get this sensation like I’ve sort of time-warped into the future by a few seconds, and I wonder what I’d have written if the LLM hadn’t done it for me. At which point I’ll never know.
Great for generating volumes of output. Less great for going into a flow state and coming out with something that looks like I made it, something that I see my hand in
And yeah, maybe it’s because I never quite get into a flow state when I do it this way. Hmm
The language of drama and import without meaningful substance. Words statistically likely to be used in a segue, regardless of the preceding or subsequent point. Particularly effective when it seems like you’re getting let in on a secret. Really fatiguing to read
A writing teacher once excoriated me for saying that something was important. “Don’t tell me it’s important, show me, and let me decide, and if you do your job I’ll agree”
I don’t know how a completion can tell when it needs to do this. Mostly so far it doesn’t seem capable
It does seem like an LLM’s ability to see a constraint and just say “I’ll write a quick helper to work around it” kinda wrecks some older-world assumptions. We know how to deal with remote human attackers, remote bot attackers, and to some extent local human attackers, but local self-coding bot attackers lately needs more attention than it used to. It’s not even the same category as malware
I’ve been guilty myself of building containers where everything runs as root on the assumption that the container was the relevant domain
If LLMs are involved, I can’t tell whether OS level security is suddenly more relevant, or suddenly utterly obsolete
More recently, it’s less about the buyers and more about the sellers. Design is optimized for flipping, which means fast market movement, which means generic. Yes there is always cookie-cutter, especially in postwar housing boom. Modern markets have just embraced that more fully. Offices don’t embody the tenants identity, or if they do it’s the same as all the other companies “in the space.” Everyone wants to look like Google, at best, otherwise it’s about commodity layouts, finishes, and styles… platforms for cubicles and bulk furniture purchases that can be amortized over the lease. Housing is similar… design for a family that will scatter once the kids leave home and the parents retire elsewhere. Or the inverse… design for Airbnb until the owners are ready to retire and move in or sell off. In any case the inhabitants are a secondary consideration to returns on investment. Design is a cost center to a financial concern.
Unless you’re rich enough not to care about any of this, in which case there’s finally time and space and money for design, but none of it really matters