Substrate

and the flavors are so muted that drinking, say, LaCroix’s “muré pepino” is more like having someone gently whisper “blackberries and cucumber” in your ear than tasting either a blackberry or a cucumber. What differentiates seltzer from plain old water are the ephemeral qualities of smell and texture, and they begin to dissipate as soon as you pop the tab. Like Swiss cheese, it’s a product that’s defined as much by what’s not there than what is: Seltzer is nothingness, bottled and branded. This isn’t a story about death, not really. I just have to tell you about death so I can tell you about seltzer, because that’s how I can tell you that everyone you love is going to live forever. ​ It wasn’t just nothing, it was a placeless nothing, so LaCroix was free to be anything to anyone, anywhere. In an age of personal branding, online self-realization, and individualized versions of truth, LaCroix could take on any qualities of its consumer. It became a mirror. ​ To use freshman-year Marxist terms, social media replaces interaction between people with interaction between objects. All content, from a selfie to my mom’s last words to this article, is nothing; it only becomes something when it’s seen by someone else. ​ The fact that you never know who a hashtag is going to hook makes it something more than a way to interact with brands — a hashtag is a seance, mediating the space between constructed identities. It’s a way of reaching out, in hope and longing, into the ether. In this way, it performs the same function as art or prayer, linking tangible worlds to transcendent ones, an invisible line cast out with the hope of connection and of becoming whole, if only for a moment, right before the bubble bursts. ​ Content may be nothing, but nothing has two faces, emptiness and infinite potential, facts and ephemera. ​ I don’t remember much of what I said at my mother’s service. I know I tried to say that she was still a part of me, that she was alive where we all keep the people we love alive inside ourselves, but wasn’t able to get much of that out. This piece is how I finally said what I wanted to say. Maybe once it’s shot into the ether of the internet, it’ll take its place there with all the ads and memes and YouTube comments and every other bit of flotsam that’s thrust out with desperate apathy and the unspoken prayer that someone, anyone will notice. It, too, will be nothing, but by being nothing, it can be a point of momentary connection, a ghost that fades from view when it’s no longer in the corner of your eye. Like memories of the people you love, the act of willing these points of connection into being can exist long after the tangible things that put them into the world have disappeared.

"I know someone who tracks contacting friends in OmniFocus – which sounds almost callous at first blush, but really strike me as a deep expression of caring"

A thing that affords play, then, is a thing that suggests playful uses; a thing that naturally guides its user towards a playful state of mind. ​ The very existence of a reliable undo command is an open invitation to engage in playful experimentation A canvas or sketchbook serves as an “external imagination”, where an artist can grow an idea from birth to maturity by continuously reacting to what’s in front of him. ​ Consider what it’s like to play Super Mario Bros. for the first time. Now consider what it’s like to write, say, a shell script for the first time. In both scenarios, your challenge involves learning how to manipulate a wildly complex system in order to achieve a desired outcome. But so far, I’ve yet to meet anyone who had a harder time learning Super Mario Bros. than learning to program ​ an unfortunate trend in contemporary games is to spell out every detail in a hand-holding “tutorial” session at the outset of a game – unfortunate because it shows both a great deal of contempt for the player’s intuition and a lack of confidence in the designer’s own design. but more than that, it’s a design failure because it tells the player the rules instead of allowing her to learn them. ​ sharp relief Why, then, do people learn to program through tutorials and exercises that tell rather than show? Perhaps because the tools, languages, and environments embraced by modern programming practice are at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile to play. When you first launch Super Mario Bros., you’re greeted by an engaging, reactive first level designed to guide you gently into the world of the game. When you first launch the Unix shell, you’re confronted by an empty, inscrutable command line that will reject, with a tersely worded error message, almost anything you choose to type.

Credibility is the currency of leadership. If you read nothing else, if you remember nothing else, remember that. It will help you everywhere you go, and it will help you assess ot...

I can say “this hurts and it sucks” and also be content with what I can do. I have space in my head for the good and bad.

Congrats on a super neat project! I wish only that it had a better name. Ableist language is any word or phrase that intentionally or inadvertently targets an individual with a disability... Exampl...

This maintains proposals for changes and user-visible enhancements to the Swift Programming Language. - swift-evolution/0192-non-exhaustive-enums.md at main · apple/swift-evolution

When we started this YouTube project, we gave ourselves one simple rule: if we ever stopped enjoying the videos, we’d also stop making them. And one day, we woke up and felt it was time. ​ Your work is only as good as your research, and the best research tool we have is the public library ​ Once we find this spine but we encourage you to take Seinfeld’s advice: put steel in the walls.

Apple Watch—Series 3 Digital Crown

The problem really happens when you assume that what is helpful yesterday is the same thing that is helpful today. And they both can be different from what’s helpful tomorrow. ​ Are you working out too much, because that’s just what you do? Most athletes have gotten to the point of needing to step back and admit that whoa, I shouldn’t actually run this week because my knee is pretty fucked up right now, and I kind of wish I took it a little easier last time. Maybe then I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am now.

I often think of Pareto efficiency in terms of decision making. The closer you get to the Pareto frontier (of the space of possible solutions), the harder it is to make any decision Pareto efficient. Meaning for almost all decisions, you’re going to have to sacrifice something. For instance when you do a big refactoring of a system it’s easy to get hung up on trying to preserve all features while adding a few new ones. In reality this is going to be extremely hard or impossible. If you can do it possibly it’s because you forgot to include some other axis in your analysis, like code complexity. It’s like pushing a balloon into a box. loss aversion may sometimes be explained by people trying to make Pareto efficient decisions. My conclusion from this silly example is that you should really think twice before assigning the responsibility of a functional area to a single person. A simple model for why buying decisions are so hard is that it involves Pareto effiency – market economy will drive out all TV’s that are dominated, leaving only the TV’s on the Pareto frontier. That makes it a lot harder as a consumer because now every choice will become a trade-off. Whereas in something like clothing there’s a lot of dimensions, so you should expect a more fragmented market.

but the aim is always the experience, not the measurement itself. ​ A company understanding its nature is critical to its execution in context over time.

In addition to education levels, human capital models should consider factors like optimism, imagination, and hope for the future. It’s straightforward to measure a recession’s effects on employment and output. But what if the psychological impact of a recession is much more severe than we thought, to the extent that it could make a dent in long-term productivity growth This is the social risk: That the minds of many talented young people today will be permanently disfigured by this obsession with Trump embarrassments. have a vast base of knowledge to work with, when they’ll be able to make connections of facts on their own, instead of being taught some interesting rules and not enough content to practice them. The way to avoid this Girardian conflict is to direct our gaze outwards to the tangible things of the world.

The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?

In moments of chaos he penalized people for pointing blame instead of proposing a fix.— Rebecca (Slatkin) Sloane (@RebeccaSlatkin) August 17, 2017

Command to download a video’s audio: `youtube-dl -x "URL" --audio-format "mp3" -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s"`

An important thing I learned upon leaving Slack: there were pockets of deep appreciation for me, everywhere.

All of my math stuff from grad school. Contribute to mbrandonw/my-math-notes development by creating an account on GitHub.

I'm dipping my toe into screencasts. Here's my first attempt.

I recently made a video mentioning my new mic setup and got a few questions about it. Instead of making a video that just mentions tons of links, I...

That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world than of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it.

A lot has shifted for me personally during my 365 days of Pome. I changed jobs and moved to a new city even more packed with writers than my last; full of readings and poems in the physical world. I have a new schedule, new rhythms. And I keenly feel the need to make room for fresh projects and ideas, not get too comfortable.

With about a minute to go, I opened up my AirPods, ensured they were connected to my iPhone, woke Erin up, and handed her one. She popped in the left, me the right, and we were able to share New Year’s together. We did so silently, with Declan sleeping between us, none the wiser. ​ I’ll forget AirPods one day. I won’t forget the opening of 2017. With my little family, all huddled in one hotel room bed, celebrating together, each in our own little way.

Even though it’s a steep learning curve, and it requires rewiring your brain to think about problems differently

In the fourth installment of my RxSwift primer, I'll introduce Drivers.

In the third installment of my RxSwift primer, I'm starting to show why Rx is so great.

it’s likely that the iOS team can crib their solution, platform differences aside. That’s very powerful, as it leads to us all speaking a common language, even though our actual languages are very different.