The first two sections reminded me of an observation I've made about myself: the more I delay "doing the thing" and spend time "researching" or "developing taste", the more I turn into a critic instead of a creator.
> Your taste develops faster than your skill
> "the quality group could tell you why a photograph was excellent"
They are critics now. People with a huge taste-skill gap are basically critics — first towards themselves and gradually towards others. I don't want to generalize by saying "critics are just failed creators", but I've certainly found it true for myself. Trying to undo this change in me and this article kind of said all the words I wanted to hear. :)
It's both dense and beautifully written. Feels like every paragraph has something profound to say. This kind of "optimizing-for-screenshot-shares" writing usually gets overdone, but since this actually had substance, it was amazing to read.
For those who haven’t run across it, I like the man in the arena speech from Theodore Roosevelt to put things in perspective when I turn into a critic, or get harsh feedback from a critic.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
If the Uranium came from multiple supernovae, then why is it shocking that earth has different concentrations of U235? Moreover, how is it proof of a past fission reaction?
What if that "part" of U235 came from a separate supernova which is a little older and some more of its U235 had already decayed?
There were unusual elements characteristic of the decay chain following a fission.
After a U-235 atom undergoes fission, one of the outcomes is it releases Barium and Krypton (and some neutrons), which then eventually decay to stable/semi-stable elements. If one of those stable elements is common in the deposit but otherwise rare naturally, it would point to a nuclear reaction having occurred.
Also note that the U-235 decay chain generally looks different from the decay chain following a fission reaction of U-235.
Funny, when I was in my 20s and not British, I knew what a Dalek was because it was just part of the zeitgeist. Tricoders are frequently mentioned as one of the life imitating art type of things that modern tech is striving to take from sci-fi to IRL. I had never even seen an episode of Dr Who, but I was familiar with it because of all the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into. Ironically, I did know what someone wearing an H on their forehead meant from watching Red Dwarf, but that’s a tangent. It just seems like a strange Venn diagram where source code android and Star Trek tricoder do not intersect would be a very odd diagram
I think you hit the nail on the head there, you and the author are simply from different cultural zeitgeists. I also remember Star Trek and Dr Who being a big deal, but I was entirely too young to care. And I continue not to care, since I don't watch live action shows much. Never seen an episode of Friends or Game of Thrones either for example. Just a starkly different generation and subculture.
Indeed. There is such an immense amount of media that is produced from decade to decade that nobody can ever know everything and understand "all" the references. Things that may seem like "things everyone know about" vary wildly between location and year ranges, and in the recent decades with the Internet there are just so many subcultures that all could be classified as "nerdy" but which lack a lot of overlap.
I suppose I'm too young to have watched Star Trek when it was really popular (and have all sorts of other blind spots when it comes to TV shows and other media even for people my age), but I've definitively heard about it. And I know some other references to it like Spock and the Vulcan salute, but the Tricorder had completely missed me until now.
Also, with something like GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I I could pretty easily tell it was a reference to something fictional (in that case Star Wars) since there is obviously no celestial body with that name. But with the Tricorder I was looking to actually make sure it's not some kind of actually real but vestigial hardware sensor thing that Android might have supported in the 00s, tangentially related to the Tricorder that was on Star Trek. I have certainly witnessed stranger coincidences.
Like Android still has functionality in the API for supporting trackballs, which I know used to be on some really early Android phones. So if that had been among the list as "there's this joke input device called a 'trackball' in the API, implying there are phones with a big physical ball you can roll around to move a cursor on the screen", that would be quite silly. Because it was a real and used thing in the past, even though nowadays it's more of a legacy feature (though might be a bad example as I assume you can connect input devices over USB or Bluetooth that may be treated as a trackball by Android).
I guess that’s your answer. People have different interests and as such there’s a virtually unlimited number of culture combinations that people can be into. And people can have white spots in places that are surprising to others, there’s only so much time.
These are two very different things here, I think. You're talking about celebrity and franchise fandom which is parasocial and exists because they are actively influencing you to become their fan. They're already famous or have made it.
What the article talks about is much more grounded – being excited about other people you know and believing in them. This "fandom" doesn't necessarily originate from admiration of achievements but from sincere belief. You're becoming a fan while they're just being themselves.
This was comforting because I have these constant worries but I think it's a false comfort.
> Your brain is telling you something important—listen to it
I don't trust it cause it's often wrong and sucks at prioritising. Sometimes, the stimulation an ADHD brain is looking for can be in form of something actively detrimental. If I "listen to my brain" in the moment, there's a significant chance I don't come out stress-free at the end of the day and instead become more anxious.
I'm all for increasing things in your life that you want to do more of. But that often takes doing things instead of giving in.
- I've found a total of one use case for Object.freeze until today. Since exported modules are live bindings and are mutable, exporting a global object which is not intended to change during the runtime (e.g. an application wide config) is a bad idea. Exporting the object after wrapping it in Object.freeze can help avoid unnecessary mutations to it.
I own a MacBook Air and I agree with almost all of this except the hardware part. I like Chiclet/flat keyboards more than mechanical ones. The battery is good. The weight and size is what every laptop should aspire to be. The only thing I found difficult (and still do) is the layout swapping fn and ctrl keys.
The software on the other hand... <rant> is surprisingly terrible for something that is praised as "just works".
Why is the close button there if it serves the same purpose as minimizing? If it's meant for hiding, why is it a red x?
Why are windows so difficult to organize? If you're not a tiling WM user, then good luck finding a workflow that works. Why is there no proper way to make project separated workspaces similar to Windows desktops?
Why does pressing "return" rename a file? Why do keyboard shortcuts just refuse to work sometimes?
Why is the preferences app so broken? What is the point of search if it doesn't search anything at all?
Why are updates so large? Why does only macOS take 35 GB out of my 256 GB?
I self-host a couple of things including an Emby server to watch movies. Self-hosting a music library seems interesting. But I discover and listen to music far more than I watch movies.
This article tells me how good Jellyfin is, but the music collection process is not here. Do you download them manually? Do you buy records?
I grew up downloading music into my PC and then transferring them to my SD card which I used in my phone. Once I had a Spotify, it was just... easier. I can discover music faster with the "song radio" feature in Spotify. I can find and listen to an album as soon as I come across it.
I'd absolutely love to have a better media player and "frontend" than Spotify but I haven't solved the collection part of it. What can be done there?
I've never used Spotify so can't compare to that, but Bandcamp is like a much better version of the local record store. You can follow artists and record labels you like, which will give you email notifications whenever they release something. You can browse new and old music by all kinds of esoteric tags and subgenres. Every week or so you get an email of some new releases in your favorite genres. You can download in multiple formats, personally I download FLAC for backup and 320 for listening. It's easy to search for tracks or artists you discovered elsewhere, it's easy to listen to and scrub through tracks... Just great. If you're a gamer, it's like the Steam of music.
My only complaint is that when I buy a bunch of songs my credit card gets charged a bunch of times (one for each artist/label) which has triggered fraud warning in the past, but I guess they do that to avoid the hassle of routing money to each artist in their own currency... It seems mildly customer unfriendly to me but in a world where people charge a can of coke to their credit card maybe not all that weird any more.
I am a heavy user of bandcamp, but I find their notifications...lacking. I ended up taking their emails, categorizing them, and putting them in RSS [1]. This has cleaned up my notifications and makes it much easier to follow artists and to easily separate new releases vs news/merch/...
Also, I find bandcamp's wishlist manager to be severely lacking. I use the wishlist as a queue of things I need to check out or have already checked out (and may not have liked). But, it isn't really meant for having 1000s of albums in there.
So, I wrote a wishlist manager [2][3], which lets you organize, comment, rate, and listen to your wishlist.
I spend a quite a bit on bandcamp, especially since many of the bands I listen to are only available on bandcamp (no streaming services!). While I am glad it hasn't been enshittified by the acquisitions, I do think there could be a few small UX improvements.
I think the unstated assumption is that the reader has an existing music library. Where that library came from is an excercise left to the reader. I use bittorrent, which I admit is a little morally smelly, but I justify it by buying vinyl albums of any artists I listen a lot to. It'd take a lot of Spotify listens to match the money to the artist of buying a single album from the band website. Lots of vinyl comes with digital downloads too. When I'm at home, physical media is fucking rad. I mean, I can unplug the turntable, spin it by hand, and hear the music directly from the needle. No software, no gadgets. It's so primal, like the artist is whispering to me. I hadn't realized how much I lost switching to Pandora until I switched back to physical media.
Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.
I can't justify the time to do it manually and feel like if I just wait long enough a turn-key AI solution will pop up.
I don't usually recommend software that isn't open source, but MusicBee is really great for organizing tunes. You can build really deep auto playlists based on any tag you like, you can do bulk updates across lots of fields, you can have it reorganize files into folders around any of the tags, including with fallbacks for missing tags, there's configurations to download metadata from online, all kinds of stuff. Plus it's a super customizable music player too.
I can't justify the time to go torrent music every time I want to try something new. I don't have a "small list" of artists, I listen to tons of artists and if I immortalized it with a torrented library, how would I ever find new music?
Somehow we did it before spotify :). Browse forums. See what people are talking about. Follow local venues and see who is coming to town. Read about different artists. Different producers. Different record companies. Fall down the rabbit hole. You don’t need an algorithm to tell you what to listen to. Take the reigns. It’s a hobby right? Lean in.
There're recommendations in these comments that can solve the automating and downloading part of it but they still don't solve the discovery part of it.
The only way I see is - use Spotify to discover; sync your library using said software to collect and play later.
I do not know what you are listening to, but for my kind od music I have few webpages that I can visit for new and old releases. I can filter for example by genre and see few yt videos with to see if this is something I would like. Then you can download it or buy it. This is a lot od work but I would never discover few bands 'the spotify way'. Like i.e. Austrian Death Machine.
> Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.
I've recently started using Beets[1] to organize my music collection. It's a command line application that IMHO is not entirely intuitive to use at first. But once you get the hang of it, it works incredibly well.
It said Circe --Daughter--> Helios. So I thought oh it's supposed to be "Circe is Helios' daughter" but then it had Circe --Brother--> Aeetes and Circe --Mentor-->Hermes.
> Your taste develops faster than your skill
> "the quality group could tell you why a photograph was excellent"
They are critics now. People with a huge taste-skill gap are basically critics — first towards themselves and gradually towards others. I don't want to generalize by saying "critics are just failed creators", but I've certainly found it true for myself. Trying to undo this change in me and this article kind of said all the words I wanted to hear. :)
It's both dense and beautifully written. Feels like every paragraph has something profound to say. This kind of "optimizing-for-screenshot-shares" writing usually gets overdone, but since this actually had substance, it was amazing to read.
(See how I turned into a critic?)