Gian Marco Castro, Matthew S., Pietro Roffi - "Daydream" (and more)

instrumental, accordeon and lower-echelons instruments... beautiful. Somehow via the Westworld Soundtrack? Also: frank sartain - "evening view" - amazing.

Rebecca Solnit - "The impossible has already happened; what coronavirus can teach us about hope"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit

George Orwell - "Why Socialists don't believe in fun"

https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/socialists/english/e_fun Utopias are now technically feasible and that in consequence how to avoid Utopia had become a serious problem. We cannot write this off as merely a silly remark. For one of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world. All ‘favourable’ Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness. The Cratchits are able to enjoy Christmas precisely because it only comes once a year. Their happiness is convincing just because Christmas only comes once a year. Their happiness is convincing just because it is described as incomplete. All efforts to describe permanent happiness, on the other hand, have been failures.

Mairead Small Staid - "Reading in the age of constant distraction"

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/08/reading-in-the-age-of-constant-distraction/ As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos. “Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,” he wrote. “It is a participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and surficiality, into the realm of duration.”

Jordana Cepelewicz - "How the brain creates a timeline of the past"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-brain-creates-a-timeline-of-the-past-20190212/ For us, time is a sequence of events, a measure of gradually changing content. That explains why we remember recent events better than ones from long ago, and why when a certain memory comes to mind, we tend to recall events that occurred around the same time. Tsao and his colleagues were excited because, they posited, they had begun to tease out a mechanism behind subjective time in the brain, one that allowed memories to be distinctly tagged. “It shows how our perception of time is so elastic,” Shapiro said. “A second can last forever. Days can vanish. It’s this coding by parsing episodes that, to me, makes a very neat explanation for the way we see time. We’re processing things that happen in sequences, and what happens in those sequences can determine the subjective estimate for how much time passes.”

Jimmy Maher - "The 68000 Wars, Part 3: We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up"

Wonderful article about the history of Amiga. https://www.filfre.net/2015/03/the-68000-wars-part-1-lorraine/ https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-3-we-made-amiga-they-fucked-it-up/ Everyone Morse and Miner spoke to agreed that “Hi-Toro” was a terrible name that made one think of nothing so much as lawn mowers. Morse therefore started flipping through a dictionary one day, looking for something that would come before Apple and Atari in corporate directories. He hit upon the Spanish word for “friend”: “amigo.” That had a nice ring to it, especially with “user-friendliness” being one of the buzzwords of the era. But the feminine version of the word — “amiga” — sounded even better, friendly and elegant maybe even a little bit sexy. Miner by his own later admission was ambivalent about the new name, but everyone Morse spoke to seemed very taken with it, so he let it go. Thus did Hi-Toro become Amiga. The Amiga was stuck in the past way of doing things, thus marking the end of an era as well as the beginning of one. It was the punctuation mark at the end of the wild-and-wooly first decade of the American PC, the last time an American company would dare to release a brand new machine that was completely incompatible with what had come before. Its hardware design reflected the past as much as the future. Those custom chips, coupled together and to the 68000 so tightly that not a cycle was wasted, were a beautiful piece of high-wire engineering created by a bare handful of brilliant individuals. If a computer can be a work of art, the Amiga certainly qualified. Yet its design was also an evolutionary dead end; the custom chips and all the rest were all but impossible to pull apart and improve without breaking all of the software that had come before. The future would lie with modular, expandable design frameworks like those employed by the IBM PC and its clones, open hardware (and software) standards that were nowhere near as sexy or as elegant but that could grow and improve with time. Miner continued to tinker with his chipset. Out of these late experiments arose one of the most important capabilities of the Amiga, one absolutely key to its status as the world’s first multimedia PC. In the Amiga’s low-resolution modes of 320 X 200 and 320 X 400, Denise was normally capable of displaying up to 32 colors chosen from a palette of 4096. Miner now came up with a way of displaying any or all 4096 at once, using a technique he called “hold and modify” whereby Denise could create the color of each pixel by modifying only the red, green, or blue component of the previous pixel. He hoped it would allow programmers to create photorealistic environments for flight simulators, a special interest of his. When he realized that HAM mode updated too slowly to offer a decent frame rate for such applications, he actually requested that it be removed again from the chipset. But the chip fabricators said it would cost precious time and money to do so, and since it wasn’t hurting anything they might as well leave it in. Thank God for those bean counters. While it would indeed prove of limited utility for flight simulators and other games, HAM would allow the Amiga to display captured photographs of the real world. As advertisements for Digi-View, the first practical photorealistic digitizer to reach everyday computers, would soon put it, “Digi-View brings the world into your Amiga!” It’s that very blending of the analog world around us with the digital world inside the computer that is the key to the multimedia experience that the Amiga was first to provide. HAM mode stands as a classic object lesson in unintended consequences of technological innovation. The Amiga’s claim to historical importance would have been much shakier without it.

Jon Allspaw - "Fault Injection in Production" [ACM Queue]

Why testing failure in production is important https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2353017 building resilient systems requires experience with failure, and that we want to anticipate and confirm our expectations surrounding failure more often, not less often. Shying away from the effects of failure in a misguided attempt to reduce risk will result in poor designs, stale recovery skills, and a false sense of safety. Why production? Why not simulate this in a QA or staging environment? First, the existence of any differences in those environments brings uncertainty to the exercise, and second, the risk of not recovering has no consequences during testing, which can bring hidden assumptions into the fault-tolerance design and into recovery. The goal is to reduce uncertainty, not increase it.

Cal Newport on Surviving Screens in isolation

https://www.gq.com/story/cal-newport-screen-time-coronavirus Interesting article on how to deal with screen time during isolation. [S]olitude is absolutely crucial. Time alone with your thoughts is how you structure your experience, and on those structures you can understand where you are in your life and where you want to go. Without that you're just adrift. You're basically just being pushed around by winds and attention economy contraptions. Where you are, what you are, what you aren't and what you want to be—that just takes thought. Now we're forced to do a lot of thought, because there's only so much we can, in our apartment, look at the same screen before our eyes bleed. One question is: what are you trying to efficiently do? What is it you're trying to speed up? What's the benefit function here that makes your life better? Efficiency devoid of a particular objective is a metric adrift. A computer scientist would care about the efficiency of an algorithm because you have a lot of things to want to use the processor, and you don't want to spend more time than you need using a processor. There's something you're trying to gain there. It allows more to happen on the machine. [...] If I took the two hours I spent incredibly efficiently yelling at public figures and I spent them doing something else that was maybe a little bit slower but felt more rewarding, I might be building towards a solution that's going to be more beneficial. I like the optimization mindset because once you're thinking about and trying to make this the best day possible, trying to optimize this goal, it just makes you much more critical about your individual behaviors.

Nintendo's product philosophy: lateral thinking with withered technology

Interesting article how the design philosophy of one man - Gunpei Yokoi - made Nintendo the successful company it was, after the trading card game crashed in the 60's (and they even branched out into taxi's and love hotels!) Basically: don't use new technology, use the existing one but create innovative products with them. Thus the Gameboy with its black and white screen won from the fancier but battery-eating Lynx handheld from Atari. more reading: interview with Gunpei Yokoi - http://shmuplations.com/yokoi/ http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/issues/issue_87/490-Searching-for-Gunpei-Yokoi