Rubbish drivel. It's a trend nowadays for people to write longform articles purporting to lay bare some great truths but really are just an excuse for the author to regurgitate some recent things they read. It really rubs me the wrong way.
First of all, the unnecessary mention of "mostly white male". I'm So. Bloody. Tired of this trope being injected into every article at every opportunity. I get it. Life unfair. Move on. It's like how every NYT comment section will mention Trump within the first two comments. Give it a rest already!
Then, the vague-at-best connections between minimal art and Minimalism as a response to the excesses of Boomers. It's really not that complicated. Grow up in a house of hoarders, and you're well on your way to embracing minimalism.
Lastly, this whole "Your bedroom might be cleaner, but the world stays bad". Yeah! Minimalism doesn't promise world peace! It's just a way to make your own life more manageable and sane!
Just because a piece is longform doesn't mean it's good. Reading this article was a terrible waste of my time.
You had a desktop computer, which makes life much easier for you. As someone who was (and will soon be again) in the market for my one and only computer, the iPad is a non-starter. It's SO limited.
* Software development, with the best will in the world, isn't really possible on it.
* No quick ways to open up multiple windows, alt-tab between them, snap them side by side etc.
* No mouse support (Admittedly, I tried them a while back, but by all accounts, the mouse support until this update was still bolted on).
* Shitty af file system (Admittedly another thing that is moving in the right direction).
* Woeful stand. The previous folio was a joke, especially at it's price. It was unstable, lacked a trackpad, and personally, I hated the typing feel.
It was all rather disappointing, because I was so tempted by it. A sub-1 kg setup that one could pack in one's bag and forget, with a proper aspect ratio, with touch support, with great battery life, with the Apple quality etc.
Even better, one of the guys involved with the code has a fantastic Youtube series on the Finite Element Method [1]
I used it in grad school, he's a great explainer, and he's addressing the talk to an audience of computer science students. It's long, of course, but it's spot on.
Indeed, paper maps are alive and well in the field of hiking/camping. It is a terrible experience trying to navigate even on the biggest of phone screens. Even the stuff one can print at home is, maybe, on an A3 sheet of paper, hopefully in colour. A vast improvement over the phone, and still not unwieldy. But to me, nothing compares to those huge mapsheets that fold accordion style. You can take in SO much more of your terrain and locate yourself so much better in your surroundings.
One of my favourite things to do while out hiking is to sit with a compass and a map and try to identify peaks and glaciers. I could do it for hours.
ETA: Everything I've heard about CalTopo makes it sound like God's gift to us.
One of the things that really gets in the way of comprehension for me are typefaces with too much personality. These cutesy italics etc. really seem to affect my ability to get on with the job at hand.
This is why, despite trying, I've yet to find something that can outdo Consolas on Windows. I tried Fira this and that, Source code pro and a bunch of others from Google Fonts. They all are inferior to Consolas in my eyes. They'll either be missing the slotted '0', or look crowded in small sizes etc.
In principle, hostels have everything. A fridge, a kitchen and so on. In practice, though, you have to label all your food because there is one fridge for 50 people. You need to share the kitchen with everyone else too. Privacy is limited. Noise is biblical. Fucking party dickhead bros everywhere ruining everything. Creaky floorboards and noisy doors. I've done hostels all over Europe, and while there are exceptions, the exceptions tend to cost a bit more too.
Hostels are OK when you're young and broke and very adaptable. I used them a lot, and am grateful they exist. But they do NOT fulfill what the GP is asking about.
You say "well duh", but PG makes no effort to eliminate any "type" of large organization. He claims with no equivocation that working for all large organizations sucks. Surely you must admit that there must be smart people in many, many other large organizations, and not the exclusive domain of us super-smarties here at CERN! And those people see something of value in their circumstances and cannot be justifiably lumped along with caged lions (I know this metaphor causes uproar every time this article comes up, but he chose it not me!).
Also, as to your last point, if it is in refernce to what I was talking about Polio, it _is_ endlessly interesting. UN gets a bad rap for being bureaucratic to the point of statis, but in fact, some of the hardest working people I know are employed there.
Here's more about Polio to whet your appetite, with the MASSIVE caveat that this is second hand, non-expert knowledge vomited out off-the-cuff.
Polio has been eliminated virtually everywhere on Earth with the exception of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. There are some other places where vaccine-derived (kind of, there is more to it that I don't fully get) Polio sometimes rears its head when ineffective propagation occurs, specifically in Syria, where the war zone threw the entire operation into chaos. But mainly, it is problematic in the three countries. The trouble is, big parts of these regions are inaccessible, and therefore we don't know the details of how bad the situation may be, and how many households are unvaccinated. So one big challenge is how to make sure these countries (with Taliban controlled regions for example) get the distribution sorted.
Further, Polio was unprecedented in the sense that W.H.O. (and others) managed to set up the VERY complicated infrastructure of mobile testing labs, vaccine distributions, but most importantly, door to door canvassing through the enormous amounts of hard work of poorly-paid LOCAL volunteers (MANY women) who go door to door, month after month, conducting surveys and understanding the plight of the local populace. They are the ones who could tell us, down to the household, who had been vaccinated and who hadn't. On a global scale. Imagine the complexity.
And because this infrastructure was in place, OTHER departments could use it too, for instance to study Malaria rates etc. All on Polio money. But now with funding soon to be sunsetted, the issue is how we can maintain the good of the program: the door to door stuff, the mobile labs etc., with no Polio funding?
Other things are complicated too, such as health ministries not being fond of their for-years-guaranteed Polio funding going away. This is perhaps ok in non-corrupt countries, but in less fortunate countries, their representatives must argue for greater share of the funding for THEIR government, knowing full well that that money could maybe be better used elsewhere.
On the other side of the equation, you have to deal with the funding agencies: the Gates etc., who would love nothing more than to be able to see the fruits of their labour paid off as soon as possible, since they've been waiting for a decade. Patience is an ever-scarcer commodity, and it's hard say that I don't sympathise with them, given how many resources they've invested into the project.
And WHO is liable for everything it states, so all outreach must be carefully vetted. So you need a big PR team/lawyers etc. There are just endless complications. W.H.O. has to manage ALL of this, and that is exactly why they require a big staff.
This stuff is not limited to just the UN btw. All big companies face such challenges. By contrast, PG's article seems more to be desigend to caress his ego rather than express something truly useful for the world to consume and learn for.
Yep, like all the actions at the bottom of the screen where you could most easily reach them, unlike iOS which places the back button (gesture notwithstanding) at the top left!
One of the Windows Phone's designers had a really insightful article [1] about how they designed windows phone fundamentally for a technology native who doesn't need shitty metaphorical leather textures on his glass screen calendar. It is where the famous movement against skeumorphism started (and thank god for that!). WP was doing flat design before it was cool.
On an old MSDN post (maybe?) I remember reading that the inspiration for the Live Tiles was a user whose central interest was to use the phone as liitle as possible to do his task as quickly as he could before he rapidly replaced the phone back into his pocket to get on with real life. I remember creating a new calendar entry in WP7 took three taps from start to finish, not counting typing out the title. There weren't many other fields to fill besides the Title of the entry and the time/date, and it set a default reminder time of 15 minutes before start time. Perfection. Before facebook and the rest dragged the carpet out from under them, you could get your twitter and facebook feed within the contacts app so you could get it all in one place.
Edited to add: I'm on a bit of a love fest venting session so here's more. WP designers recognized that OLEDs were amazing, so they made the phone White Text on Black from the get go! Thus, great battery life. Further, all the icons were also uniformly coloured, making the whole experience so cohesive. All the apps also looked like all the others, so the learning curve was nonexistent. They recognized how little juice engineers of android could suck out of their bloated multi core processors, so they made their phones work phenomenally well on even shitty, single core processors.
I fucking loved windows phone's early verions. It's a shame they've gone away. But an even bigger shame that they had no confidence in their original designers, and ended up adapting the hideous, appalling, atrocious, fucking retarded hamburger menu before they went away.
What a myopic comment, and dripping with unwarranted vitriol.
The world absolutely _should_ work that way. Companies _should_ have half a brain to realise that selling bottled water is bad for the environment, that fracking causes earthquakes, that sugar is the root of all dietary evil, that tobacco is carcinogenic, that overfishing causes unspeakable damage to ocean life, that SUVs are colossal wastes of space and fuel...
All the companies doing the above are providing wildly popular goods and services. And a lot of them are perfectly legal too.
Your suggestion implies that all this is just dandy, thank you very much, so take your hemp clothing and your vegan sandals and your do-gooderness off of my property and gtfo acting as a "self appointed guardian".
What kind of extreme libertarian hard-on does a man have to possess to believe that all of this is how society SHOULD work?
I deeply resent this sentiment that you have to take the good with the bad of a free market society because there is no alternative. Of course there is! Regulate these idiots into the ground! While this is clearly a pipe dream, that's a long way away from the statement that this is how society _should_ be.
Honestly, if iMessage were to ever come to Android, it might have the best shot. No one understands google's offerings anymore, whereas Apple has already a strong presence.
Funny. I just finished watching his Bloomberg interview, where Emily Chang seemed to be at pains trying to ask him why he wanted no women in tech. His responses seemed vastly more nuanced than the transparent questioning tactics of the interviewer.
Yeah, my understanding leads me to believe that he used the company's official "Air your grievance here" forum for posting the memo. So, he acted exactly in the manner that the company required him to. Google's case will probably focus on the result of him voicing his opinion, rather than the fact that he did in the first place. Still can't say I agree with them firing him. His memo was considerate enough to have not lead to a kneejerk firing.
Yeah but in certain circles, those non-icing-heavy websites might actually signal greater authenticity. I LOVE college professor websites that are full of great technical info, but look like they've not been designed at all.
Completely agree with you. What I particularly despise is the absurd lack of discussion on the amount of packaging waste. Why doesn't that make these piece of shit things non-starters?
Excuse the vitriol, but it absolutely makes my blood boil, the fucking Keurigs, these idiot juicers, Blue Apron, and that one company that even delivers a box of clothes each month? WTF?! I buy clothes every two years, and even I could do better.
Also, even if they offered to collect the packaging, and recycle/reuse it, it's a needless complication to an issue that shouldn't exist to begin with.
Why isn't a low-tech, low-carbon footprint life celebrated more? A french press/moka pot coffee, a mixer to make your juice (because, you know, you take the time to peel the motherfucking fruit beforehand), and cooking your own god damned food on a frying pan.
First of all, the unnecessary mention of "mostly white male". I'm So. Bloody. Tired of this trope being injected into every article at every opportunity. I get it. Life unfair. Move on. It's like how every NYT comment section will mention Trump within the first two comments. Give it a rest already!
Then, the vague-at-best connections between minimal art and Minimalism as a response to the excesses of Boomers. It's really not that complicated. Grow up in a house of hoarders, and you're well on your way to embracing minimalism.
Lastly, this whole "Your bedroom might be cleaner, but the world stays bad". Yeah! Minimalism doesn't promise world peace! It's just a way to make your own life more manageable and sane!
Just because a piece is longform doesn't mean it's good. Reading this article was a terrible waste of my time.