Substrate

Using my phone and computer might feel like nothing more than the static of passing time, but all the micro-decisions I make as I search and swipe and scroll are secretly valuable commodities. Every time I touch a device, I leave a trail of digital DNA that can be used to reverse-engineer some version of me that is used to sell me things. There is a context for each of these. But there is no one explanatory key to unlock the cryptic, boring mess of the whole. For everything that lives on my computer and phone, the only common denominator, really, is me. Something I’ve noticed in my Instagram feed lately: the influencers seem exhausted. It’s not like leveraging authenticity is a new thing, but what strikes me about this version of the trend is how much explanation the smallest acts of self-conscious unraveling involve. The caption-to-photo ratio is off the charts. It takes a whole essay to comfortably give up some of the rough work it takes to be a person. The kinds of digital particulates and residues that turn up in our devices aren’t the things we might normally stake our identities on, but the fact of their being recorded imbues them with new meaning. I read the minor riot of imperfections in my Instagram feed as a heartfelt backlash against the toll it takes to both produce and consume mediated lives. More cynically, I might call it a race to vulnerability in the new competitive landscape of monetized self-exposure. Either way, I get where the impulse comes from — I indulged it only a few paragraphs ago. It’s not like I’m really showing you all the curiously boring stuff that’s in my phone; I’m only telling you about it. And I’m making sure you know that I know how boring it is, before you reach your own judgments. Despite my better knowledge, my devices still feel like private spaces.

Reactive Programming in Swift. Contribute to ReactiveX/RxSwift development by creating an account on GitHub.

I usually get where I’m going by leaving where I've been. It wasn’t simple sadness that made me cry, but overflowing appreciation

Bijan Stephen, the Verge: Records should have good art. For albums as diverse as London Calling, Horses, and Fear of a Black, the images on their covers were as recognizable as the music on the wax. While Apple Music isn’t a record label (yet), it did recently decide to add original art to its playlists. […]

I was — and still am — that girl. I am the girl who can’t stand in line for coffee without repeating my order to myself in my head, over and over, until I’m finally at the cash register. I am the girl who sometimes takes too long to respond to texts, DMs and emails because I am drafting out a decent reply. I am the girl who teachers consistently push to “participate more” because I don’t raise my hand enough in class. I am the girl who struggles in conversations with people I haven’t met before — and even those I have. I may be the quiet girl, but I have plenty to say. Just let me gather my thoughts first.

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions. But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.

[December 21, 2011]

“the point of assigning some data set the status of an "emotion" is to try to intervene and dictate how people process their own feelings, so that the emotion can be alienated from the person experiencing it, processed by an outside party, and sent back to the person as a command”

Blue-green deployment allows you to upgrade production software without downtime. You deploy the new version into a copy of the production environment and change routing to switch.

That’s the sort of stuff I often write about, too. I’m not writing groundbreaking stuff, but I am trying to make some connections I (and you) might not have otherwise made. It might sound obvious when you read it, but my hope is by writing it down, by giving it a name, whatever obvious thing I write about becomes just a little bit more tangible.

Welcome to the MacStories Shortcuts Archive, the official repository for shortcuts created by Federico Viticci and the MacStories team. Since the original release of Workflow in 2014, we’ve created hundreds of automations to help readers use their iOS devices more efficiently. The goal of this archive is to offer a complete catalogue of our old

RxSwift resource sharing can be hard. Learn about share(), which lets you define streams that share resources among their subscribers.

Shortcuts are not making Siri smarter, in fact they are dumber than pretty much anything Siri has done to date. Shortcuts put the burden on the user to do the legwork of synthesising data sources and integrating the apps into the voice service.

Peter Bright, Ars Technica: Fulfilling its 2017 promise to make Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free, Intel has given the specification for its high-speed interconnect to the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that develops the USB specification. The USB-IF has taken the spec and will use it to form the basis of USB4, the next iteration […]

LOL

Defining an addition and multiplication doesn’t make the thing a Ring—there are axioms that need to be satisfied. Protocols are not just bags of syntax. https://t.co/pLdUxdnxR3— 🎃 Spooky ABI Stability 🎃 (@stephentyrone) March 5, 2019

RxSwift has been one of the most prominent and upcoming frameworks in the iOS & Swift community in the past years. Its usage is becoming widespread and popular with many companies moving their code base to the Reactive world across iOS, Android, Web and Backend - making it a valuable skill to comprehend. Along with that fact thought, it seems the learning curve for RxSwift and Rx in general always seems "hard" to most people, or too hard to get started with. In this lecture I hope to debunk the myth and misconception of RxSwift being a hard concept, and put developers on the right path to start building Reactive Mobile applications for the modern world. https://twitter.com/freak4pc https://swiftconf.com https://twitter.com/swiftconf

every 6 hours - by @v21 - https://t.co/UXfS5zdKV0

finished pup portrait pic.twitter.com/zMgQcUrNYj— bb ghost (@emilywithcurls) March 5, 2019

The last minute is basically my only real skill. In college, (and high school, and since I can remember) there must have been things I occupied myself with in the hours between when I left class or left a social event and when, at 1am, or 3am, or 6am, I sat down to start work. But mostly what I remember is those frantic hours, the world around me silent, tunneling to the forced singularity of focus. There was a street lamp right under my dorm window, five stories down. It came back on at 5am, and at least once a week I would watch it spark to life, as the morning leaked back into the world, and I would feel like I had acquired some substance, like whatever was coming next would be survivable, like this version of myself, awake, capable of driving the work of two weeks into two hours, was worthy of praise. I felt tangibly good at something, the way I imagine athletes feel. I liked writing, but I liked at least as much being able to say "I wrote it in an hour" about something I’d written. I still do. At this point, after many years of operating this way, I can see the seams, the flimsiness of it, but I have been relying on the last minute for so long that I don’t know how to do otherwise. If television in the last ten or fifteen has a cohesive thesis - and I believe it does - the thesis is that work will save you. Work replaces the family. It orders the world into meaning, and lifts singular identity into a high and visible register. It's easy to see why the promise appeals. You don't have to love anyone, or make anyone love you; you just have to be really, really good at your job. To do something reasonably, in manageable pieces, means to admit my limitations, to turn work from the register of miracles back down to the everyday, where it is just work.

The core observations from Fred Brook’s The Mythical Man Month is that assigning more folks to work on a project often slows down delivery. Part of that is the predictability tax.

Everyone was young, but they all looked old. Eyes wide open, wandering Manhattan it’s difficult not to ask: Is New York City falling apart? I suppose, technically, it is, perpetually, given the amount of scaffolding everywhere you look. Scaffolding as a permanent fixture of older buildings. ​ New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again. Maybe cities excel at this kind of erasure? When I walk cities I rarely feel that sense of past-people or rituals I feel in the mountains of Japan The old roads in Japan have their own tchotchekes, but for the most part contain something “like a scent,” which is, above all, fun, and is perhaps the thing most easily lost in the chaos and nowness, the inherent “nowhere,” of the big cities, and those dusty plains of the old west.

I like this concept as a whole, gonna start threading some of mine https://t.co/etG9mYlzhf— Nikhil Krishnan (@nikillinit) March 18, 2016