My first exposure to Prince.exe was in the computer lab at school, which has a tiny set of DOS games, including digdug, space invaders and some typing game.
I remember when I was around 6 or 7, a boy a couple years older (and therefore, seemingly infinitely wiser) sharing the folk advice: "Play the other games first, don't play Prince of Persia too early or it will ruin all the other games for you"
Loved it. This is some necessary background that helps me contextualize a few other oddities of the time period that I have had floating in my short term memory
- Miyamoto Musashi (d. 1645)
- Tsujigiri, random slashing of bystanders
- the Great wave off Kanagawa, painted towards the end of the Edo period
- Shinobi evolving from mercenaries into secret police
That's debatable. Every best-practice arose to solve a real problem within a context, and is only "best" if that context applies.
If you apply best-practices without a regard for that context, you end up with a dull, cargo-culted checklist of must-haves to beat people over the head with, without deriving any true human value.
The compiler of this artifact is making a judgement call[0] of what best practices apply somewhat universally (to every "decent website"). I haven't yet been convinced of their standing or judgement to make that decision.
[0]: Charitably, I'm assuming they have, rather than, e.g. delegating the judgement to an opaque model's weights.
- Do you really need to keep your children in school or contribute to their higher education, when you can just let them roam free on the streets or better yet, work down at the factory and earn their keep?
- Do you really need children at all, when an AI digital pet might satisfy that need much more economically?
- Do you really need expensive dental crown implants or dentures, when you can whittle yourself some chompers out of beechwood and call it a shuccshesh?
- Do you really need to own a home in a neighbourhood that is safe and close enough to your place of employment, when you can rent in a rough area of town and spend hours commuting on public transport?
Yeah, giving the article more charity, I see it as "Reddit for hackers" really adapting the aesthetics and norms of Reddit, so that hackers who are Redditors have a sense of comfort. Whereas if we'd designed from first priciples for hackers, we might arrive with something more irc-coded[0], perhaps.
[0] Or my personal favourite, a MUD-style environment!
I think one lesson I'm taking away from the article is that we're not so much seeking "weird for weird's sake", but expanding that weirdness into direction that's useful, to specifically highlight the novelty of something.
I love my Flipper Zero, even though I have barely used it much. But I'm much more excited for the busy.bar which I think is from the same team. I'm hoping that gets ready to ship soon!