A few days ago my wife and I went to see Uncut Gems at a Regal theater in Chicago. We booked our ticket online, reserved our seats, showed up 15 minutes ahead of time, and settled in. After the coil of previews, and jaunty, animated ads for sugary snacks, the movie started. About 20 minutes in, a…

Phil Agre http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/ Computer people are fine human beings, but they do a lot of harmin the ways they "help" other people with their computer problems.Now that we're trying to get everyone online, I thought it mightbe helpful to write down everything I've been taught about…

Enlarge / The sun is actually in the sky, not in your hand, which is key to playing Boktai . Konami The 2003 Game Boy Advance exclusive Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand! is a largely forgotten game, even among Hideo Kojima fans. The concept is as indulgent as a Kojima game could ever be: you play as…

really good and infuriating piece from ⁦@bencjenkins⁩ on the response to the fires in australia https://t.co/TzDXBwXUVn

In Software Disenchantment we’ve seen how software has degraded in the past two decades. Recently Jonathan Blow gave a talk where he explained why it might be happening: The talk is very, very good, but since I already know you won’t find time to watch it here’s my interpretation. The software…

At IGN, we’re all about having fun, but when it comes to reviews we take things seriously. Reviewing is the most important thing we do, because this is when we help you make a decision about how to spend your money. Our goal is twofold: Offer a critical view of how a piece of media succeeds or…

Quijada’s invented language has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise. Photograph by Dan Winters / Typography By AJ Frackattack There are so many ways for speakers of English to see the world. We can glimpse, glance, visualize, view, look, spy, or…

For three weeks in late January and early February , I travelled to Asia, spending two weeks in Saigon, a few days in Singapore, and about 48 hours in Doha, Qatar. Here are some of the things I saw and did and ate. Note: this is a long post, maybe the longest thing I’ve posted here in many years.…

The princess, the plantfluencers, and the Pink Congo scam https://t.co/Rpyf1POlas

College, 2012 —Internship recruiting season. “What are you looking for in your internship?” the recruiter asks. “I’d like to solve hard technical problems,” I reply. I end up at Jane Street writing software to calculate numeric integrals of a function that is costly to evaluate. (They don’t tell me…

The insidious popularity of Hot Mess Syndrome Kelli María Korducki Feb 20 · 4 min read Tina Fey as Liz Lemon in episode 611 of “30 Rock.” Photo: NBC/Getty Images T witter virality is the cultural diagnostic tool of our time, the DSM for our internet-broken brains. Which is why it’s not surprising…

I can sum up every article, book and column written by notable management experts about managing IT in two sentences: "Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring. To overcome these…

I articulated it at one point: Our philosophy was to remain “aggressively stupid”. https://t.co/HtCT480trd

If there’s one thing that defines the shift from another technology role to Product Management, it’s the shift from thinking in terms of solutions to thinking in terms of problems. As Engineers (or just about any other technical profession), we’re trained to think in terms of solutions (what feature…

I wrote 5,000 words about the miserably bad decision letting T-Mobile buy Sprint. I regret to inform you that I am now dead. https://t.co/ub517eOdZ1 https://t.co/QzJX9RSl68

Credit... Hokyoung Kim Skip to contentSkip to site index Opinion I Don’t Want to Be the Strong Female Lead In pop culture, women are often objectified and disposed of. But even when we’re not being victimized, the alternative leaves much to be desired. Credit... Hokyoung Kim Ms. Marling is a…

I got my first glimpse of the Vaporfly in a briefing at Nike headquarters in 2016, a few months before the now-infamous shoe was released. It had already been used in secret by both the men’s and women’s Olympic marathon champions a few months earlier, and lab testing had already demonstrated a four…

"We are saying, in effect, that we are happy to increase the risk of our extinction, so long as we have a good time." https://t.co/pIAlgbT3vw

January 2020 When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out.Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true. I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always talking tosome startup working in a new field I know nothing about, or readinga book about a topic I don't understand well…

Surely nothing else could go wrong now With the Abort button troubles behind them, Shepard and Mitchell appeared to be headed towards a good landing. All was going very smoothly four minutes into the descent, as the LM passed through 36,500 feet (about 11 kilometers) above the lunar surface. Based…

“This might be the longest I’ve spent on a single bug. Across over three years I’ve poured more hours into debugging this than I care to count...” https://t.co/f09NagfJFY

I am a 21 year old senior in college. I am in desperate need for advice on how to lose weight. I am a biology major trying to get into med school and between school and two jobs it seems like I don't have time for friends and family let alone working out and eating healthy. I tried meal prepping but…

Anthony Blasko Updated at 3:32 p.m. ET on December 17, 2019. I knew nothing about Cole before meeting him; he was just a name on a list of boys at a private school outside Boston who had volunteered to talk with me (or perhaps had had their arm twisted a bit by a counselor). The afternoon of our…

I sexually identify as an attack helicopter. I lied. According to US Army Technical Manual 0, The Soldier as a System, “attack helicopter” is a gender identity, not a biological sex. My dog tags and Form 3349 say my body is an XX-karyotope somatic female. But, really, I didn’t lie. My body is a…

Y ou have a mind-shattering headache. You’re standing in the aisle of your local CVS, massaging your temples while scanning the shelves for something— anything —to make make the pain stop. What do you reach for? Tylenol? Advil? Aleve? Most people, I imagine, grab whatever’s cheapest, or closest, or…

Om du inte får den du älskar, får du älska den du får. Setting My previous MacBook Pro was a mid-2014, 15-inch model, purchased somewhere shortly after the introduction of the ill-fated USB-C MacBook in 2015. In the first few months, I saw the butterfly keyboard essentially crash and burn in the…

“I wanted to smooth the edges off my marriage” https://t.co/Yf8kPJ76yp

D isclaimer: Disclaimer: All individuals and examples in this article are inspired by experiences in my career; any resemblances to real people, organizations, or situations are in no way associated with my current employer. The views represented here are my own and don’t reflect those of my…

When Raffi turned two, someone told us that the truly difficult part was just beginning. It was hard to believe. Illustration by Audrey Weber Our son Raffi has always been a handful. He is wild, willful, easily frustrated and disappointed. He is also curious, adorable, and full of joy. These…

Please, please read this: https://t.co/qv99Wrqf7b. https://t.co/ojI2NRo9ks https://t.co/sbsxjlZ5xG

We all have this little voice inside our heads, chattering away behind the scenes. Stuff like, “You’re too fat. You’re not good enough. You’ll never get promoted. You don’t have what it takes. No one will like it. Why do I try? Who cares?” It’s a sadistic, negative little voice. Other times, a dose…

Jessica Lester started dating Matthew Boynton when she was fifteen. After they were married, her grandmother said, “it was almost like her personality got squished out of her.” Photograph by Danna Singer for The New Yorker Jessica Lester’s friends persuaded her to date Matthew Boynton, a boy in the…

Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise. I’ve smoked since I was sixteen, behind the high-school football bleachers in Northfield, Minnesota. I used to fear the embarrassment of dying youngish, letting people natter sagely, “He smoked, you know.” But at seventy-seven I’m into the actuarial zone. I know…

Top highlight For the better part of three decades, I have struggled with the twin-barreled blast of depression and anxiety. I don’t remember when it started. I don’t remember how. Around the time of the Gulf War and the Buffalo Bills’ Sisyphean Super Bowl run, our classroom sent handwritten letters…

December 2019 Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point Ifelt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about livingvirtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children.But did I want them now? No. If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known…

In 2017, I was told the best gaming story I'd ever heard. I'm very happy to say that I'm now getting to tell it myself, as a feature and a little documentary. This is The Lie That Helped Build Nintendo. Written: https://t.co/vQRuxWyR9c Video: https://t.co/Br56SxKmLF https://t.co/hobd5BHeYL

This is the first installment in The Design of Y2K , a series telling the stories behind the most influential products of the late 1990s and early 2000s. “I’ll be honest, and this is a funny story to tell. Initially in design, we didn’t want the chin.” Today, Paul Pierce is a distinguished designer…

System administration is in a sad state. It in a mess. I’m not complaining about old-school sysadmins. They know how to keepsystems running, manage update and upgrade paths. This rant is about containers, prebuilt VMs, and the incredible mess theycause because their concept lacks notions of “trust”…

David Wisnia at his home in Pennsylvania. Credit... Danna Singer for The New York Times Was she the reason he was alive today? David Wisnia at his home in Pennsylvania. Credit... Danna Singer for The New York Times The first time he spoke to her, in 1943, by the Auschwitz crematory, David Wisnia…

Far Cry Every theory of aesthetics must be able to explain what is commonly known as "The Paradox of Tragedy". The paradox goes as follows: if tragedy causes an unpleasant response in a subject, how is it that we ultimately derive pleasure? Several theories have been posited by philosophers ranging…