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Meticulously detailed icons became the thing. The Icon Factory were at the peak of their game making bespoke icon sets.

One of the most engaging aspects in the storytelling of The Last of Us is that, because Joel dictates how you move forward in the game, you’re implicated in his increasingly gray decision-making. On TV, the viewer is primed to be sympathetic toward a main character, so there’s not the same level of friction as experienced by the gamer. Story lines that feel alive as an active participant in the game instead feel hackneyed on television. Watching The Last of Us, I wanted to pick it up and shake it free from its preconceptions about what it has to do in order to be faithful to its source material and what it wants to do in order to be taken seriously as television. As a series, it says nothing new in either case.

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.

here are five large language model applications that I find intriguing: Intelligent automation starting with browsers but this feels like a step towards phenotropics Text generation when this unlocks new UIs like Word turning into Photoshop or something Human-machine interfaces because you can parse intent instead of nouns When meaning can be interfaced with programmatically and at ludicrous scale Anything that exploits the inhuman breadth of knowledge embedded in the model, because new knowledge is often the collision of previously separated old knowledge, and this has not been possible before.

So when ex-Telltale Games designer and writer Sean Vanaman announced last month that the first game from Campo Santo, his new video game development studio, was "being both backed by and made in collaboration with the stupendous, stupidly-successful Mac utility software-cum-design studio slash app/t-shirt/engineering company Panic Inc. from Portland, Oregon," it wasn't expected, but it wasn't exactly surprising, either. It was, instead, the logical conclusion of years-long friendships and suddenly aligning desires.

"There's a weird confluence of things that have crisscrossed," he said. "One is that we're lucky in that Panic is the kind of company that has never been defined by a limited mission statement, or 'We're the network tool guys' or anything like that. I mean, we made a really popular mp3 player. Then we kind of fell into network tools and utilities, but we've always done goofy stuff like our icon changer and these shirts and all that other stuff. "I kind of love that we can build stuff, and the best reaction that we can get when we do a curveball like this is, 'That's totally weird, but also that totally makes sense for Panic.'"

"To me," Sasser said, "when you have actually good people who are more interested in making awesome things than obsessing over the business side of things or trying to squeeze every ounce of everything from everybody, then that stuff just goes easy. It's just fun. The feeling that you're left with is just excitement.

Every backdrop was generic and crisp: the scrubbed tech-compound where Gemma (Allison Williams) works; the bland, Wayfair-decorated house she lives in; the clean, non-specific streets she drives on. I thought little of this while watching. The movie looked expensive and professional, or at least had the hallmarks of those things: glossy, filtered, smooth. Only after it ended did it occur to me that it seemed, like so many other contemporary movies and shows, to exist in a phony parallel universe we’ve come to accept as relevant to our own.

All advice is context dependent to a degree that you may not appreciate until you encounter a different context.

If you’re talking to kind of a mature audience that appreciates the limits of knowledge and the limits of advice, then you can say almost anything, and it doesn’t really matter because you don’t have to worry that they are gonna misinterpret what you’re saying and apply it in some domain in which it’s not appropriate. You as the advice giver cannot caveat your advice sufficiently.

if you go somewhere substantially different from where you are, you get to experience a different reality and that will make you question your own origins. It’ll make you question the norms of the place that you’re from.

However the most controversial step I’ll be taking is removing a few of the functions. This usually gets pushback from most product managers as for them “features == sales”. The problem with this thinking is that it assumes a) all features are used and b) extra features has no negative impact.

Blockbuster responded by pricing Blockbuster Online 50 cents cheaper, accelerating Netflix’s stock slide. Netflix, though, knew that Blockbuster was carrying $1 billion in debt from its spin-off from Viacom, and decided to wait it out; Blockbuster cut the price again, taking an increasing share of new subscribers, and still Netflix waited.

As the site of consumer engagement transitioned from print to web in the mid- to late-2000s, many brands found themselves with identity systems that were unequipped for the technical constraints of the web at the time, which lacked broad device compatibility, support for responsive design, or opportunities for nuanced customization.

iPad.

Chazelle gives lip service to the idea that this version of landing on the moon is worth the trip, but he drags his characters and the viewers through so much misanthropy to get there that it's hard to believe him.

the ascending arcs of the outsiders—Manny, Sidney, and Nellie don't understand they're part of a system that values them about as much as it does the equipment it needs to shoot the films (maybe less).

The claim that simpler gender recognition will lead to unsafe changing rooms and toilets is further undermined by a strange and ignominious chapter in North Carolina’s history where, in 2016, these exact concerns led to the introduction of a law demanding people only use toilets which correspond to the gender stated on their birth certificate. The new law not only caused a rise in transphobia, it also opened up the possibility of increased harassment of women in public restrooms who weren’t transgender but who didn’t dress or present in a ‘feminine’ way. It also meant that transgender men were being forced to use women’s toilets. In the end, a federal judge got rid of the dangerous and unworkable legislation in 2019.

“…often cite fear of safety and privacy violations in public restrooms if such laws are passed…No empirical evidence has been gathered to test such laws’ effects…This study finds that the passage of such laws is not related to the number or frequency of criminal incidents in these spaces.

Men who prey on vulnerable women are a worldwide problem, but this has nothing whatever to do with trans people. On the contrary, trans people are generally far more worried about accessing toilets and changing rooms than cisgender women, because they fear being verbally abused or attacked by people who don’t think they should be there.

It would be useful to know of the evidence you have that trans rights are affecting education and/or safeguarding. Trans rights do not affect either, just as the right to equal marriage did not affect the rights of cisgender heterosexual people to marry

We do not consider it a crime for women to express concern. We do however consider it abusive and damaging when people conflate trans women with male sexual predators, impute sexual criminality to trans identities, suggest that support of a trans child is parental homophobia and misogyny, and share uncorroborated and inaccurate information which severely damages the lives of trans and non-binary people.

Every software framework you've ever used is in the abstraction game: it takes a general-purpose tool, picks a specific set of common use-cases, and puts up scaffolding and guard rails that make it easier to build those specific use cases by giving you less to do and fewer choices to think about. The lines between these three are blurry. Popular abstractions become standardizations.

The stories we are launching with draw on themes that have long been part of the Dirt ethos: nostalgia for a smaller internet, the ephemerality of “vibes” and how they manifest on different networks, the infinite ways intellectual property can be adapted across platforms, visually-driven online subcultures, the collapse of “high” and “low” culture, and the imperfect politics of the emerging metaverse.