Drastic stuff

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

iTunes changed the music industry because it was more convenient than stealing. Most people made the value judgment that ten bucks for a clean, legal digital album was worth the alternative of fishing around for files that may or may not be damaged or infected.

Hollywood continues to completely ignore that lesson. It continues to punish the people who play by the rules with an insufferable customer experience. This is the sole reason piracy is up and profits are down: because doing it right totally sucks. And that’s apparently how the studios want it.

the thing is good. the second thing isnt so good. the second thing is set before the first thing. but is basically the same as the first thing. but isnt as good.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is not a universal truth—and sometimes it puts you in the company of pretty crappy friends.

Schrödinger’s cat is not actually a paradox at all. It’s what’s called an apparent paradox. Apparent paradoxes are powerful teaching tools in physics, because they serve to break down intuitive ideas that turn out not to be correct or useful.

The point of Schrödinger’s cat is not that it’s possible for a cat to be both alive and dead at the same time. It isn’t possible for a cat to be alive and dead at the same time. The point is that particles are not cats. The rules that apply to macroscopic, everyday life — things continue to exist when they’re not doing anything, for instance — do not apply to particles, and the intuition we’ve built up over a lifetime of interacting with the world at a certain scale is not helpful for understanding smaller scales. Such intuition must be discarded.

Schrödinger’s cat looks like a paradox, because it asks us to accept that two contradictory things are true at the same time: the cat is both alive and not-alive. But it’s not actually a paradox, because if you replace the cat with an electron and the whole box-gas-contrivance thing with a magnetic field, you find that the electron’s magnetic moment is in fact aligned both parallel to and perpendicular to the magnetic field’s orientation right up to the point when you turn the magnetic field on, at which point you either get a photon emitted indicating that the electron has precessed into alignment, or no photon indicating that the electron was already in alignment, with no way of predicting which it will be in a single experiment. All you can do is repeat the experiment many times and see that the average of your results converges toward the expectation value your equations predicted.

CSS is a total slag, and often rather dirty.

Visual Idiot's Photoshop Simulator

You will gain tremendous credibility, become much more productive, make those around you much more productive, and experience a great deal more joy in your working life if you look someone in the eye after hearing one of these verbal brain jammers and tell the person, “I don’t have any idea what you just said to me.

…we aren’t frustrated enough, impatient enough, skeptical enough, with the technologies we use every day. Machines are still made by and for specialists. And even if Apple has come closer to an ideal of simplicity, we are simply not being demanding enough.

Good technology is like good writing. If your grandmother doesn’t know what it’s about, you have failed.

I’m skeptical of rote simplicity. It’s good for the people making digital tools to simplify their job and make one tiny widget, but a swarm of tools that all do one tiny thing well is still a complex system for the user to manage.