Extensions
Dirt: The indomitable human spirit
what stretches ahead is a banal ending that refuses to end: the slow violence of capitalism and climate change, a future of could-haves and should-haves void of capital-M meaning.
A core reason behind this genre’s popular success lies in the fact that it lacks the cloying, naïve quality so often associated with positivity. While this partially stems from the aesthetic and language employed—which, thanks to its poetic tenor, internet avant-garde style, and general high-low approach, reads as more online-experimental for those in-the-know and less cheesy iFunny reposts for Boomers—these would matter little if it weren’t for the honest realism that underpins this trend’s optimism
Unlike the deluded optimism espoused by politicians, technologists, and millionaires—which views progress as linear or believes that technology will save us from ourselves or thinks that watching celebrities sing will solve crisis—this trend, like the pessimists it responds to, recognizes that there seems to be no turning back from the precipice.
The genre positions the exercise and resilience of the “Indomitable Human Spirit” at the scale of a single life at the center of its philosophical optimism—not our ability to save the future, but rather our willingness to try and endure with grace.
Kill Your Identity
Robert Pirsig’s definition of Static and Dynamic Quality:Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It’s an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.
Words can only approximate Quality, but never fully encompass it. A static thing can never fully capture a dynamic thing.
We create problems for ourselves by using static language (e.g. judgements) to capture a reality that is dynamic & ever changing — by mixing observations and evaluations.
The caveat to keeping your identity small is when you want to identify as a positive trait – “I’m a kind person” – so that you’re forced to live up to it, especially when this is an unchanging desire.
Kate Berlant, in Conversation with Nathan Fielder
Urban Dictionary: magpie syndrome
Staunton chess set - Wikipedia
The Staunton pieces broadly resemble columns with a wide molded base. Knights feature the sculpted head and neck of a horse. Kings, the tallest pieces, top the column with a stylised crown topped with a cross pattée. Queens are slightly smaller than kings, and feature a coronet topped with a tiny ball (a monde). Rooks feature stylised crenellated battlements and bishops a Western-style mitre. Pawns are the smallest and are topped by a plain ball. Pieces representing human characters (the king, queen, bishop, and pawn) have a flat disk separating the body from the head design, which is known as a collar.
‘I Bawled’: A Congresswoman’s 18-Month Fight For A Neglected Tribal School Just Paid Off
How Creativity is Shaping the Virtual Rave ⟋ RA Films
Arc is the best web browser to come out in the last decade
Why you should never use px to set font-size in CSS - Josh Collinsworth blog
This is also a very good reason to avoid viewport units, like vw or vh, when setting font size. Those are also static, and impossible to override by the user. At most, a value like calc(1rem + 1vw) might be acceptable, since that still contains rem as a base. Even then, however, I’d recommend using clamp() or media queries to set minimum and maximum values, as screen sizes often go far beyond what we might expect or test.
To differentiate between the two: 1rem is always equal to the browser’s font size—or, more accurately the font size of the html element. rem stands for “root em,” and the root of a webpage is the <html> tag. So, 1rem = whatever the document font size is. (Which, again, by default, is 16px, but can be overridden by the user.) em, on the other hand, is the font size of the current element.
1px is equal to whatever the browser is treating as a single pixel (even if it’s not literally a pixel on the hardware screen).
The Cost of Being Poor: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor in America
Apple launches Freeform: a powerful new app designed for creative collaboration | Hacker News
I failed 3 job applications, here's what I learned
An All But Definitive Guide to the Hollywood Nepo-Verse
TikTok’s Secret Sauce
EmailOctopus – Email marketing made easy
Scaling vs Growth
We humans are so interconnected to our jobs, admittedly more than we should be. We identify our job with who we are as people. This means that if we are not growing at work or in our business, we feel like we are not growing as people. Growth can, and should be divided. We can both be growing as people and growing as workers or business owners.
Growth at the group level and specifically scaling growth is not good for us as people. The amount of stress and pressure that is undertaken while trying to scale is unhealthy and unsustainable – regardless of what your favorite hustle culture influencer says.We need time, space, and agency to grow at our own paces. We need to be able to get better and worse at things, without being vilified for it.
The State of UX in 2023
When content is shorter and maximized for engagement, we often lose track of the origin, history, and context behind it: a new designer is more likely to hear about a UX law from a UX influencer on an Instagram carousel than through the actual research which brought it about.The lack of nuance from algorithm-suggested posts undermines any value we could get from them. For a discipline known for asking "why" and for striving to understand users’ context, it’s time we become more intentional about our own information sources.
Shifts in visual narratives happen every decade or so, so it’s not surprising that the design world is moving away from the corporate flatness of web2. Instead of reminding us of the problems of our current world and the harm that’s been caused by Big Tech, the new, abstract forms of web3 distract us from the crises of the day with the promise of a new virtual world.
UX design is becoming a commodity — here’s how we can break the mold
TikTok looked at what makes their content unique. Applying an OOUX mindset, the most interesting object is the “post” populating the feed. Two things stand out. First, the videos are very short, with only a couple of seconds of runtime. Which meant the usual distinction between browsing and watching made little sense. Second, opting for a truly mobile experience, their videos would be portrait mode. This meant users could browse and watch in the same orientation, one video at a time. The design decision to merge the browse and watch experience into one stream with autoplay broke all kinds of conventions. Yet, by doing so, it created a unique and engaging experience that is even borderline addictive.
Tinder understood that the selection moment is what makes them unique. They wanted to provide a quick and easy method for their key interaction to decide if a user is a match or not.
Star Trek Into Darkness - Wikipedia
In the end, Abrams recognized that "there were certain things I was unsure of [...] Any movie [...] has a fundamental conversation happening during it. And [for Into Darkness,] I didn't have it [...] [The problems with the plot] was not anyone's fault but mine, or, frankly, anyone's problem but mine. [The script] was a little bit of a collection of scenes that were written by my friends [...] And yet, I found myself frustrated by my choices, and unable to hang my hat on an undeniable thread of the main story. So then I found myself on that movie basically tap-dancing as well as I could to try and make the sequences as entertaining as possible [...] I would never say that I don't think that the movie ended up working. But I feel like it didn't work as well as it could have had I made some better decisions before we started shooting."
How to... use AI to generate ideas
Why Google Missed ChatGPT
Even if chatbots were to fix their accuracy issues, Google would still have a business model problem to contend with. The company makes money when people click ads next to search results, and it’s awkward to fit ads into conversational replies. Imagine receiving a response and then immediately getting pitched to go somewhere else — it feels slimy, and unhelpful. Google thus has little incentive to move us beyond traditional search, at least not in a paradigm-shifting way, until it figures out how to make the money aspect work. In the meantime, it’ll stick with the less impressive Google Assistant.
“Google doesn’t inherently want you, at an inherent level, to just get the answer to every problem. Because that might reduce the need to go click around the web, which would then reduce the need for us to go to Google.”
G3nerative
Web3 has largely been technology looking for problems to solve while generative AI has been about almost too many solutions created by technology which is evolving on a seemingly daily basis. As a result, web3 has thus far been evangelists trying to convince us to re-solve old problems with their new technology
Abstraction is Expensive - Speculative Branches
DUNE IMAX Footage | Standard VS. IMAX Comparison Side by Side
How to evaluate the UX maturity of a company | Matej Latin
n order for designers to do high-quality design work, they need to work at companies that truly understand design. Here’s the catch though, there’s a tiny amount of such companies out there.
They treat it as something that makes things look pretty, so they hire UI designers to do UX design for them.
Discuss HN: Software Careers Post ChatGPT+ | Hacker News
ChatGPT feels like the current aim assist debates in a lot of FPSses to me. It'll make you better at the shooting part of the game, perfect even. But, won't necessarily make you that much of a better player, because aiming is only one aspect of what makes someone good at FPSes. However, if someone is generally good enough or very good at the "not aiming" portion of the games, then having aim assist would drastically increase their overall skill.
A ghost to most – Lawyers, Guns & Money
The Gentrification of Disability
Autism has been gentrified. This is a dynamic I now cannot stop seeing: once a human attribute like autism or mental illness becomes seen as an identity marker that is useful for social positioning among the chattering class, the conversation about that attribute inevitably becomes fixated on those among that chattering class. It becomes impossible to escape their immense social gravity. The culture of that attribute becomes distorted and bent towards the interests and biases of those who enjoy the privilege of holding society’s microphone.
Today we have the usual demand to have it both ways, to be seen as one’s disorder when convenient for differentiating ourselves from the pack and then setting aside that definition when uncomfortable. Again, the truly disabled can’t do this. They do not deftly craft facades from their disorders, lacking the self-control and capacity for social scheming required to do so. They aren’t afforded the possibility of ignoring their condition when convenient. Yet the voice of the ambitious and shameless patient seeking validation and coin for being sick is becoming the voice of mental illness, those unprincipled enough to treat it all as marketing. Mental illness should not be fodder for building your personal brand.
there is something disordered, and untoward, about a society in which legions of successful people have suddenly discovered their diagnoses and, despite those conditions never having impeded their relentless marches up the ladder of American meritocracy, making the mental illness conversation all about them.
how do you proceed with your quest to turn mental illness into a positive thing, an honored thing, a “valid” thing, without inevitably privileging the narratives and interests of those whose mental illness is least malign? How do you tell generations of young strivers that having a mental illness is cool and unique, without alienating those who feel neither cool nor unique, but only afflicted?
How do you keep the schizophrenic and the schizoaffective and the bipolar and the borderline and the violent and the self-harming and the catatonic and the permanently deluded at the forefront of the culture? Because the way things are going, contemporary mental illness discourse threatens to do to the truly incapacitated the very thing it claims to oppose - leaving them voiceless, ignored, unheard, alone.
Narrative Distillation - kwokchain