Daring Fireball: Panther Text Rendering
If you want an overview of everything new in Panther, the best resource I’ve seen, by far, is Mark Pilgrim’s “What’s new in Panther” — 11 pages, 100 screenshots, and pretty much a point-by-point overv
The hard part in becoming a command line wizard
I’ve long been impressed by shell one-liners. They seem like magical incantations. Pipe a few terse commands together, et voilà ! Out pops the solution to a problem that would seem to require pages of
Jeffrey Paul: The Case Against Microsoft And Github
Microsoft is cool again, or so the trends would have you think. Microsoft is not an okay company, despite their deliberate efforts to improve their reputation in recent years. Collaboration with US mi
Stevey's Blog Rants: Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret
Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret "And as for this non-college bullshit I got two words for that: learn to fuckin' type" — Mr. Pink This is another one I've wanted to write forever. Man, I've tried
Dead Reckoning
This story is assembled from contemporaneous first-person accounts. As such, quotations contain some antiquated spellings, grammar, and phrasing. In the Earth’s extreme southern latitudes, where the P
When Will the Planet Be Too Hot for Humans? Much, Much Sooner Than You Imagine.
To read an annotated version of this article, complete with interviews with scientists and links to further reading, click here . I. ‘Doomsday’ Peering beyond scientific reticence. It is, I promise, w
What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type? | Objective Funk
In August of 2015, my hands stopped working. I could still control them, but every movement accumulated more pain, so every motion came with a cost: getting dressed in the morning, sending a text, lif
More people should write « the jsomers.net blog
More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about. I have a selfish re
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
Open-plan offices offer few pleasures; one of them is snooping on other people’s browsing habits. When, years ago, I began working for tech companies in San Francisco, I noticed that my co-workers were always scrolling through a beige, text-only Web site that resembled a nineteen-nineties Internet…
Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mi
The Stranding of the MV Shokalskiy (Idle Words)
07.28. 2019 Australians have an odd relationship with Antarctica. The fact that there's an even less hospitable piece of territory further to the south seems to soothe the young country, reassuring th
The Causes and Consequences of Berlin’s Rapid Gentrification
Last New Year’s Eve was my first in Berlin. We live at the edge of Wedding, a neighborhood just north of the city center that, counter to what its name evokes, is gritty and sprawling, studded with public housing and betting parlors. A photo of our block from August, 1961, when it was part of West…
Basics of the Histogram: From Foe to Friend
A long, long time ago, that is, in days of film photography, it was a rather difficult task to learn how to produce properly exposed pictures. There was no instant feedback and the only way to see how
How to assess the quality of garments: A Beginner's Guide {Part I}
How to assess the quality of garments: A beginner's guide What's the number one prerequisite to building a high-quality wardrobe? Exactly: You need to be able to recognize a quality garment when you s
How to assess the quality of garments: A Beginner's Guide {part II}
How to assess the quality of garments part II: Seams, tailoring, linings & details As promised, here comes part II of the quality beginner's guide: all about assessing seams, linings, tailoring and de
Productivity
I think I amat least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me forproductivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compoundgrowth gets discussed as a
André Staltz - The Web began dying in 2014, here's how
André Staltz The Web began dying in 2014, here's how 30 Oct 2017 Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Today, there are still many people using services from
Why Arabic Is Terrific (Idle Words)
08.20. 2011 I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-wee
Dennis Ritchie, Unix, and clarity - All this
Next post Previous post Last week’s obituaries of Dennis Ritchie focused, naturally, on his creation of C and his co-creation, with Ken Thompson, of Unix. I want to talk about something else: the rema
Why I Was Fired by Google
Former Google software engineer James Damore. Photo: Peter Duke By James Damore Aug. 11, 2017 3:54 pm ET I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally ra
No, the Google manifesto isn’t sexist or anti-diversity. It’s science - The Globe and Mail
By now, most of us have heard about Google's so-called "anti-diversity" manifesto and how James Damore, the engineer who wrote it, has been fired from his job. Titled Google's Ideological Echo Chamber
‘The Wire’ — Game Day
Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language. And some spoilers. The goal was for the aggression to stay on the blacktop at Baltimore’s neighborhood-famous Cloverdale Courts . Proposition Joe’
Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria
meshaphoto / Getty / Konstantin Orlov / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic Y ou were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still
The Shamanic View of Mental Illness — JaysonGaddis.com
I am reprinting this from an email I received from Malidoma Some , a west African Shaman whom I’ve had the privilege to meet, drive around Boulder, and work for for two days. Since I am going through
Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones
How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.” “It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world
Why young men queue up to die in the French Foreign Legion – Robert Twigger | Aeon Essays
What comes to mind when you think of the French Foreign Legion? Most likely men struggling through the desert in heavy blue coats and white peaked caps. Men who joined up after a lifetime of crime, fi
Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly, that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and
Shell from vi | Arabesque
A good sign of a philosophically sound interactive Unix tool is the facilitiesit offers for interacting with the filesystem and the shell: specifically, howeasily can you run file operations and/or sh
Plainness and Sweetness
Plainness and Sweetness March 27, 2017 It’s human nature: I over-value where I have influence. Since I am a designer, this frequently means placing too much emphasis on how things look and work rather
In Berlin, a Grass-Roots Fight Against Gentrification as Rents Soar
Housing prices have soared in fashionable Berlin neighborhoods like Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Under pressure from a growing grass-roots movement, the city has put in place measures to fight gentrifica
Yes, Your Sleep Schedule is Making You Sick
Yes, Your Sleep Schedule Is Making You Sick Credit... Icinori Jet lag makes everyone miserable. But it makes some people mentally ill. There’s a psychiatric hospital not far from Heathrow Airport that
Berlin Living Rooms
Christian Boros (German advertising maestro) and Karen Lohmann Boros (art historian). Berlin Mitte, 2015. When I lived in West Berlin during the last days of the wall, the historical image of the Berl
If plastic replaces cash, much that is good will be lost – Brett Scott | Aeon Essays
I recently found myself facing a vending machine in a quiet corridor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. I was due to speak at a conference called ‘Reinvent Money’ but, suffering
Video Games Are Better Than Real Life
On the evening of November 9, having barely been awake to see the day, I took the subway to Sunset Park. My objective was to meet a friend at the arcade Next Level . In size, Next Level resembles a ho
How to Be a Stoic
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was born a slave, around 55 A.D., in the Greco-Roman spa town of Hierapolis—present-day Pamukkale, Turkey. I first encountered his teachings in 2011, shortly after moving from San Francisco to Istanbul. I lived alone on a university campus in a forest. In the midst of…
4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump – Dale Beran – Medium
Dale Beran Feb 14, 2017 · 32 min read Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him. An Italian newspaper reporting on Donald Trump retweeting himself
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a
A Conversation With Brian Eno About Ambient Music
The unceasingly curious composer on chance, minimalism, and the politics of form. Photos by Shamil Tanna Visiting Brian Eno ’s studio in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood, there’s plenty to catch the