It’s criticised a lot for lacking character depth and not focusing on the characters. I’d agree somewhat but there are a few characters and one in particular which I felt a real connection with as the world unfolds in the later books.What it lacks in character charm though it makes up for in mind bending sci fi. Scale. The possibilities that could lay ahead. It focuses on mass psychology, how civilisations react, different ages etc. It’s about a much much much bigger picture and almost sacrifices character development to focus on that other stuff.I wouldn’t change a thing despite finding book one quite difficult too.My appreciation for it warped beyond recognition as I made my way through books 2 and 3.

Chinese is a utilitarian language, yes. It's also a language that heavily relies on context for impact and meaning. Cixin Liu's writing is no exception and is similar throughout his entire bibliography. It's very recognizable when he was truly inspired, e.g. the hairs on Ye Wenjie's cheeks standing up when she first stepped on Radar Peak, the making of the first sophon, etc. These moments increase in number progressively through the series, and Death's End is mostly one super inspired moment he obviously dreamed about writing for a long time after another, to the point where the final chapters are a mind-boggling rush through new concepts, eons and the coming together of numerous old concepts and plot threads. In short, this was written by a practicing engineer.

And that a core portion of book two was about how wartime footing caused famines and death and hardship, and then there was an explosion of freedom, innovation, and overconfidence. He critiques both the East and the West. I liked that.

I’ve only finished Books 1 and 2, and truth be told, I read them because I wanted to know what would happen. So I’m definitely more into it for the big concepts and ideas than the stories. But I did find some of the stories very interesting, moving, or sad, or surprising, and I really liked the fact that during the first book, he talked about the Cultural Revolution, and censorship, and stifling political pressure, and as a Chinese insider rather than a critical outsider.

The strength of this book is scale and innovation. The 'writing' is not necessarily the best quality. The author is an engineer, not a professional writer, so you can only expect so much. In return, the ideas are much wilder than the typical sci-fi.

For scale, there are two aspects. First is the depth: you start in the cold war era and literally go the end of the universe, with all the major steps in between. Compare this to other sci-fi, like star trek, that happens in an advanced but static universe. There really aren't any game changing tech coming out through the course of star trek, but happens like 10 times in TBP. You can critique the actual science, but the consequences for each technology felt impactful.

At no point where the human and trisolarians even remotely on even grounds. This is in contrast with many other sci-fi works where aliens things had human equivalents (cars, jewelry, etc.) and they interacted face to face.

Chinese literary convention tends toward less emphasis on the individual and a preference for that which is larger scale. In Chinese literature, putting a lot of emphasis on the internal monologues of characters, expounding on their motivations and detailing the minutiae of events are seen as formal and stylistic faults that make a work tedious.

The highly divergent ideas about narrative and sense of aesthetics can make Chinese literature very difficult to read for us in the west, which is why the most popular ‘translations’ of Chinese literature tend to be abridged adaptations that interpret the spirit of the work rather than the actual contents, this is why Arthur Waley's Monkey: A Folktale of China is by far the most widely known and read version of Journey to the West in the English speaking world and the only people reading actual verbatim translations of the full work by Wu Cheng’en are scholars.

somebody else in this thread has already commented on married men living longer. It works both ways, too. Each partner keeps tabs on the other, notices problems, encourages them to stick to health resolutions, etc. Plus you both are much less likely to forget things or miss appointments, because the other one is there to say, "Didn't you say..." or "Weren't you going to...?" and so on.

in the article they're talking about how live-coding is inherently harder for people who have been working in the industry longer. which sounds.....not right? like why would more experience with coding make you worse at interviewing? it's because these interviews filter for people who spend their free time practicing coding prompts and algorithms for fun. and people who work 9-5 jobs and have lives outside of work just don't do that, so they're inherently going to be worse at these type of interviews.

my critique of Manjoo’s article specifically and the ongoing privacy hysteria broadly is not simply about definitions or philosophy. It’s about fundamental assumptions. The default state of the Internet is the endless propagation and collection of data: you have to do work to not collect data on one hand, or leave a data trail on the other. This is the exact opposite of how things work in the physical world: there data collection is an explicit positive action, and anonymity the default.

I believe the privacy debate needs to be reset around these three assumptions: Accept that privacy online entails trade-offs; the corollary is that an absolutist approach to privacy is a surefire way to get policy wrong. Keep in mind that the widespread creation and spread of data is inherent to computers and the Internet, and that these qualities have positive as well as negative implications; be wary of what good ideas and positive outcomes are extinguished in the pursuit to stomp out the negative ones. Focus policy on the physical and digital divide. Our behavior online is one thing: we both benefit from the spread of data and should in turn be more wary of those implications. Making what is offline online is quite another.

One thing I learned long ago is that people who prioritize design, UI, and UX in the software they prefer can empathize with and understand the choices made by people who prioritize other factors (e.g. raw feature count, or the ability to tinker with their software at the system level, or software being free-of-charge). But it doesn’t work the other way: most people who prioritize other things can’t fathom why anyone cares deeply about design/UI/UX because they don’t perceive it. Thus they chalk up iOS and native Mac-app enthusiasm to being hypnotized by marketing, Pied Piper style.

Those who see and value the artistic value in software and interface design have overwhelmingly wound up on iOS; those who don’t have wound up on Android. Of course there are exceptions. Of course there are iOS users and developers who are envious of Android’s more open nature. Of course there are Android users and developers who do see how crude the UIs are for that platform’s best-of-breed apps. But we’re left with two entirely different ecosystems with entirely different cultural values — nothing like (to re-use my example from yesterday) the Coke-vs.-Pepsi state of affairs in console gaming platforms.

How they translate into 3D spaces, how they are integrated with architecture, lighting, textures & materials enables more avenues for brand expression, and often elevates the perception of a brand over time and exposure, even if the logo fades somewhat into the background.

I’ll take an inventory in a future post, but here’s one as a sample: AIs can be used to generate “deep fakes” while cryptographic techniques can be used to reliably authenticate things against such fakery. Flipping it around, crypto is a target-rich environment for scammers and hackers, and machine learning can be used to audit crypto code for vulnerabilities. I am convinced there is something deeper going on here. This reeks of real yin-yangery that extends to the roots of computing somehow.

Design thinking, in a slight divergence from the original model, suggests instead that the designer herself should generate information about the problem, by drawing on her experience of the people who will be affected by the design through the empathetic connection that she forges with them

In fact, problem-solving is always messy and most solutions are shaped by political agendas and resource constraints. The solutions that win out are not necessarily the best — they are generally those that are favored by the powerful or at least by the majority.

Design thinking has allowed us to celebrate conventional solutions as breakthrough innovations and to continue with business as usual.

In much the same way that the project shelters the young, it protects nascent ideas by providing a protected space for the on-going and collaborative engagement with the ambiguity and uncertainly

the Living Breakwaters project offers an alternative to the closure built into design thinking. It illustrates a design process where the designer is dethroned and where design is less a step-by-step march through a set of stages and more of a space where people can come together and interpret the ways that changing conditions challenge the meanings, patterns, and relationships that they had long taken for granted.

It represents a commitment to a process with no clear beginning and end, with a goal that is often no more explicitly defined than imaging and articulating new ways to meet changes that are still murky and immeasurable.

What made me love the wretched thing was its tender and intimate portrayals of friendship, how friendship can, if not save a life, make it bearable and offer innumerable joys for those who are shut off from the traditions of marriage and family.

Sprints don’t help organize things, they’re not a useful organizing tool, and if we were all honest with each other then we’d admit they’re designed for managers who don’t trust their employees

Good teams don’t need sprints to get good work done. They don’t need to point tickets or file receipts away once something is complete. This always leads to an endless backlog of crap anyway which is also a waste of time since they too only serve managers who are scared to say “ah yes, we have listened to this complaint and we believe it’s not important.” That’s what a backlog is; a list of useless tasks that makes people feel better.

For a cultural explanation, I look at the rise of liberalism. In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen argues that the project of liberalism seeks to detach us from the constraints that once tied us down — family, culture, place, identity, tradition. As liberalism grew more popular, the circumstances of kin and place became more malleable. Thus, today’s Westerners are increasingly free to shape their identity. I don’t think liberalism is inherently a bad thing, but like anything else, it has its tradeoffs. Freed from the ties of kin and place, people aren’t bound by the traditional virtues of honor and loyalty, which are two of the defining pillars of a commitment-heavy culture.

For a technological explanation, I look at our culture of abundance. The “so muchness” of modern life has given us commitment anxiety. It’s a version of the Paradox of Choice, which argues that people can reduce anxiety by eliminating choice.

Instead of thinking about building intergenerational family wealth, people are thinking about their own desires and their own freedom. People are more likely to grind for their own success instead of their family name.

professor Mihir A. Desai defines optionality as “the state of enjoying possibilities without being on the hook to do anything.” With enough optionality, you can always change what you’re doing in order to pursue something better. Desai critiques students for seeing optionality as an end in itself. Instead of trying to work towards a meaningful goal they can commit to, they try to accumulate options in order to delay making a firm commitment. The result is that we’re under-committed as a society (with the curious exception of tattoos, which are everywhere now).

The challenge is that the greatest rewards generally go to people who are tied down in certain ways.

Once I committed to running Write of Passage for the long term, my FOMO disappeared and I felt calmer.

I’ve learned that the commitments you make in the present are made possible by the experiments you’ve tried in the past.

I’ve also seen a lot of users on Twitter asking “who is Horizon Worlds for?” And it’s a good question. I have an Oculus. Meta’s core metaverse platform, the thing that ostensively will be replacing Facebook soon as Meta’s main online portal, the central OS for the company’s VR world, is too boring for children, too complicated for old people, too time-consuming for anyone raising a family, and, though, it might eventually be good enough to function as some kind of inescapable cyberhell for white collar workers to have endless meetings inside of, at the moment it's hard to imagine a real use case for it. Except for one. I’ve come to conclusion that Meta’s metaversal aspirations are just a cold and cynical bet on a future where we just can’t go outside anymore. Meta’s big plan is to spend the next few years cobbling together something with enough baseline functionality that we can all migrate to it during the next pandemic. That’s the only explanation for the absolutely deranged amount of misplaced optimism Meta has about this stuff. This is a company who has decided they can make a lot of money off a catastrophic future by forcing us into their genital-free off-brand-Pixar panopticon and mining us for data while we Farmville ourselves to death.

It creates more generic-looking interfaces that may perform well in numbers but fall short of appealing to our senses.

It’s easy to make data-driven design decisions, but relying on data alone ignores that some goals are difficult to measure. Data is very useful for incremental, tactical changes, but only if it’s checked and balanced by our instincts and common sense.

It became clear to the team in that moment that we cared about more than just clicks. We had other goals for this design: It needed to set expectations about what happens next, it needed to communicate quality, and we wanted it to build familiarity and trust in our brand.We could have easily measured how many customers clicked one button versus another, and used that data to pick an optimal button. But that approach would have ignored the big picture and other important goals.

Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.Data is good at measuring things that are easy to measure. Some goals are less tangible, but that doesn’t make them less important.While you’re chasing a 2% increase in conversion rate you may be suffering a 10% decrease in brand trustworthiness. You’ve optimized for something that’s objectively measured, at the cost of goals that aren’t so easily codified.

Design instinct is a lot more than innate creative ability and cultural guesswork. It’s your wealth of experience. It’s familiarity with industry standards and best practices.

Overreliance on data to drive design decisions can be just as harmful as ignoring it. Data only tells one kind of story. But your project goals are often more complex than that. Goals can’t always be objectively measured.

Most of the country seems to agree that things don't feel good, whether it's the persistent pandemic, rising inflation and gas prices, school shootings, war overseas; or the culture wars happening over gender ideology, racism and free speech. Many Americans have simply moved on from Jan. 6. Or, if you want to take the view of Chris Hedges, perhaps it’s impossible to care when you view the entire system as corrupt and all the politicians at the helm on both sides as self-interested hacks aiming to get reelected and enrich their donors. Trust me, I get it.

You’re likely seen as a bright brain with a knack for solving problems, and what good are the liberal arts¹ and the humanities² in solving the world’s large, technically complex issues? You want your work to have impact and “matter” — something you know to require hard work, discipline, and things like “frameworks” and “mental models.” Tactical, practical, and efficient. But consider, for a second, your thinking. Where did your thoughts and beliefs come from? What about your conviction, your mission, your sense of purpose on this earth? These questions are why the liberal arts and the humanities, or subjects distinct from professional and technical subjects, exist.

The ecosystem that we inhabit as technologists was not built with humans in mind, it was built to run laps around other industries within the capitalist game, and it does this on the backs of the young people it exploits. In simpler terms: the status quo of technology was not designed to make you a happy, content, morally well-rounded young person. That, however, is precisely the purpose of examining the world through a liberal arts lens. Through this frame of view, we might think thoughts without action items, try opinions on for size, celebrate contradiction, and revel in the pursuit of understanding both each other and the world around us.

At their core, the liberal arts and the humanities serve as aggregated documentation on the human condition — the kind of documentation that is meant to be digested, discussed with others, and revisited from whichever angles serve you best along your journey.

It is difficult to advocate for the liberal arts by appealing to results or metrics. But our bias towards viewing these non-instrumental disciplines through a problem-solving lens is exactly why we need spaces that suggest other ways of seeing the world. While that lens grants impressive achievement, it might also leave you wondering why you were even chasing after the thing you achieved to begin with. Our goal is to show you that the problem-solving lens is one of many possible views you can have on the world. You can treat this view like a pair of glasses, one that ought to be regularly removed and replaced with a more reflective, contemplative, and critical lens.

This is all build-up to my proposal for what Musk — or any other bidder for Twitter, for that matter — ought to do with a newly private Twitter. First, Twitter’s current fully integrated model is a financial failure. Second, Twitter’s social graph is extremely valuable. Third, Twitter’s cultural impact is very large, and very controversial. Given this, Musk (who I will use as a stand-in for any future CEO of Twitter) should start by splitting Twitter into two companies. One company would be the core Twitter service, including the social graph. The other company would be all of the Twitter apps and the advertising business.

TwitterServiceCo would open up its API to any other company that might be interested in building their own client experience; each company would: Pay for the right to get access to the Twitter service and social graph. Monetize in whatever way they see fit (i.e. they could pursue a subscription model). Implement their own moderation policy. This last point would cut a whole host of Gordian Knots:

A truly open TwitterServiceCo has the potential to be a new protocol for the Internet — the notifications and identity protocol; unlike every other protocol, though, this one would be owned by a private company. That would be insanely valuable, but it is a value that will never be realized as long as Twitter is a public company led by a weak CEO and ineffective board driving an integrated business predicated on a business model that doesn’t work. Twitter’s Reluctance

All an “Uncharted” movie had to accomplish — all that it possibly could accomplish — was to capture the glint and derring-do that helped the series port the spirit of Indiana Jones into the modern world. And while it’s true that the best moments of Ruben Fleischer’s thoroughly mediocre (if not unpleasant) adaptation manage to achieve that goal for three or four entire seconds at a time, this generic multiplex adventure falls so far short of its source material because it fails in the areas where history says it should have been able to exceed it. The areas where movies have traditionally had the upper hand over video games: Characters. Personality. Humor. Humanity! You know, the things that films get for free, and video games have to create through witchcraft. The same things that someone up the ladder decided to leave behind when they took a solid-gold brand like “Uncharted” and turned it into an IMAX-sized chunk of cubic zirconia, resulting in a movie that isn’t just less playable than the game on which it’s based, but less watchable too.