Over my dead fat diabetic body!
Pure evil
Facebook launched in 2004. Today, it has more users than the entire Internet had in 2004.
Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.
Two pieces of news that are no longer new.
First, check this video of 2pac performing at Coachella. He’s long been dead but is now almost live — it’s creepy and incredible to think about the future of what it means to be human.
Then there was some great reporting from Extreme Tech on just how large the online porn industry is. The massive amount of fleshy video sent over the wires is almost unfathomable.
Now if you connecting the dots, it should be easy to see where these technologies converge. If you’re skeptical, I don’t think you’re in tune with some basic facts about human nature.
Big debate this week about whether you should or should not learn to code. I’m not going to really weigh in on the topic, but I do have a decent story about how coding changed my life.
Although I grew up making angelfire pages with photos lifted from nba.com, I otherwise had very little programming experience. I went to college for film and television, and printed t-shirts in a friend’s basement for some extra spending money. Nothing even close to coding.
When I graduated and starting looking for work, I struggled. Film and television are hard to get into, and I wasn’t willing to move to LA without a job prospect. That left me with t-shirts. So I found a job at CustomInk, doing grunt work in the production art department. We’d process 40-50 orders a day, doing very similar and repetitive tasks for each order.
Can you see where this is going? I automated some of that grunt work with Illustrator macros. We already used a handful of them, so I became curious about how they worked. Then I realized how simple they were, and how many other things could be automated. And then - this part is key :) - I automated them. All in all, my changes only increased productivity ~5%. We were already fairly well optimized at that point, so I was shaving seconds not minutes.
But boy was it empowering. So I dove into another scripting language, AutoHotkey, and created a custom toolbar to help navigate our backend systems. Even more empowering. And when I felt burnt out in the art department?
Well it turns out there’s a market for people who can teach themselves technology (which is really what this debate is all about.) I was able to move around the company, continue learning, and eventually make a career in software as a product manager. And all it took was curiosity and a few macros.
TL;DR: Liberal Arts Degree > Illustrator Scripting > Career in Software
My grandmother died last week. She died in the house she lived, the house her husband built. He wasn’t a contractor by trade, just a man who built his own house. I, on the other hand, still gloat about the coffee table I once refinished.
And as I think about my fathers father, building a house, or raising a barn or sowing a field, I am soaring 30000 feet above earth. And as I think about my fathers mother, teaching class, rolling gnocchi or leading grace, I tap my thoughts on a three inch slab of glass.
And I think about how quickly things change. Just two generations but a world of difference.
My grandmother had a social network so large we needed 3 days to celebrate her life with everyone she knew. But she wasn’t online. She didn’t need to be connected because she was. I don’t think it has much to do with technology. It’s fear and comfort in solitude and luxury.
Originally wrote this little piece in January, just getting around to posting some old stuff.
Web monopolies are not as sticky as the monopolies of old.
Just keep playing, no matter how weird it gets.
(via austinkleon)
I’m just baffled by this. Is photo sharing really that hard? It’s not, is it? I mean, these photo sharing companies all seem to have about a dozen employees, so there can’t be much to it. So what’s their selling point? Instagram makes your pictures look like old, faded snapshots, something that strikes me as interesting for about two minutes. Pinterest’s claim to fame, if the Times can be believed, is that “there isn’t much room for commentary.” So….just photos. And that makes them worth a couple of billion dollars?
And of course, all this is playing out in public, because nobody is as fascinated by Arrington, Siegler, Carr, and Lacy as Arrington, Siegler, Carr, and Lacy are.
It’s 2012, and we are the media. When we fan the flames of non-issues like this, we become the media that we should seek to leave behind.
