> I was unnerved by the fact that the author consider plain activities as hiking or cooking as necessarily better than creative ones
Cooking involves just as much creativity as Lego, it's a useful skill, and it's not governed by one massive corporate entity. "Better" is a subjective word, but those are some nice qualities.
You left out a lot of context for that quote. Here's the full paragraph:
> No wonder I feel guilty as I’m driving my children to see “The Lego Movie.” I should be taking them on a long hike or handing out aprons and baking cookies. But we aren’t doing those things; instead we spend our weekends hunched over expensive plastic bricks, and now we’re going to watch them on the big screen. I have filled my daughters’ empty minds with a blind devotion to an indifferent commercial empire.
The issue isn't just the ads, or just the expensive bricks, it's how the two come together to form a feedback loop. The kids enjoy playing with legos, so they want to see the movie. They see the movie, which makes them want to buy more bricks. Lego Movie 2 comes out and the process repeats. The main thing the author seems to dislike is manipulation.
> If you wanted to do things in equivalent lisp style, you'd just compile a Config.java/Config.scala file and add it to the classpath.
That's really not equivalent though. With Java and Scala, there's a sharp divide between what's code and what's data. Even if you create a Config.java class, you can still point to some bits and say "that's Java code" and other bits (like primitives or array literals) and say "that's data". Java doesn't know how to treat the code bits like data, or the data bits like code.
This means that there's a whole load of cool stuff that you just can't do with your Config.java that you could with a config file holding Lisp code. For one, you couldn't use macros to easily pre-process your config file. Or, as Yegge pointed out, you couldn't just turn the tag names (in an xml like structure) into functions that transform themselves.
Newer versions of Spring use Java for configuration. As you said, it's pretty cool to be able to compile and type check your config. As cool as that is though, it's not at all the same as putting your config in Lisp code.
> As crazy as this sounds... I've got no problems with being in an "ecosystem" as long as it can be run on any device. See Kindle for a perfect example -- I have it on my iPhone, iPad, desktop and my PaperWhite. Perfect.
That's how I felt, until it wasn't perfect. I have a lot of DRM free tech books from publishers like O'Reilly. I'd like to be able to read them on my Kindle and sync my notes with the Kindle desktop app or "Cloud Reader". Doesn't work. Notes and highlights only sync between desktop apps and the Kindle e-ink device when you're reading Kindle books bought from Amazon.
That's the problem with a closed ecosystem. No matter how hard they try, the creator of the ecosystem isn't going to be able to foresee/support every use case.
And if that's true, is it really much different than what we have today? If you have deep pockets, you can already buy speed by using the services of a CDN like Akamai. We already have an unlevel playing field.
Right now Comcast (except for torrent traffic, fuck them for that) doesn't meddle in what the packet is or where it's going, per se. However they do, apparently, have peering agreements with companies which allow these companies to serve traffic directly from THEIR networks, straight into Comcast's networks. This effectively does favor certain traffic over other traffic, but it's a kind of favoring that's been going on forever, and is generally accepted.
I dunno. I actually fail to see how peering in general is not a violation of net neutrality, however it's so critical to the smooth operation of the Internet, I'd rather have peering than net neutrality, if I had to choose.
What traditional reading speed/comprehension test did you take? I just took the one at readingsoft.com, and I felt like I could have guessed most of the answers in the test without even reading the text. I'm wondering if mosts comprehension tests actually do a poor job to testing comprehension.
This stuff always interests me because I'm a terribly slow reader (I think I did ~180 wpm on the above test). I'd really like to be able to improve without hurting my comprehension. However, when I discuss an article with someone who reads quickly I usually find that they've missed some important pieces of information. The sort of gaps exposed by real conversation may not show up on a simple multiple choice quiz. I'm just guessing here though. Based on my own experience, hearing that someone read 700wpm with 95% comprehension is like hearing that someone has broken the laws of physics.
(Not the OP, but I just take the test.) I got 6 out of 11 without reading the text. I didn't even skim the text. And in most of the questions I got wrong, the correct answer was my second choice.
If he hasn't already, the author should really read The Lean Startup before criticizing the term that it popularized. In the context of the Lean Startup, the V in MVP doesn't refer to financial viability.
"To apply the scientific method to a startup, we need to identify which hypotheses to test. I call the riskiest elements of a startup's plan, the parts on which everything depends, leap-of-faith assumptions."
"Once clear on these leap-of-faith assumptions, the first step is to enter the Build phase as quickly as possible with a minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP is that version of the product that enables a full turn of the Build-Measure-Learn loop with a minimum amount of effort and the least amount of development time." - Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
An MVP is simply the smallest possible product that is capable of testing your assumptions about the value you think you can provide to customers. An MVP doesn't have to represent a viable business model, it only has to provide a viable means of testing your assumptions.
Depends on your definition of inferior. I can count the number of desktop apps that I use on a daily basis on one hand, and they're all development tools. I have more than twice that number of pinned tabs in my browser that are open at all times.
Are those pinned tabs all running applications or merely displaying information (websites)? Are you sure the ones running apps would not run better were they written as a native/desktop version? Are the apps trivial (e.g. to-do lists)? There's a lot of context you left out.
Some are just websites, but I would say many of them are full blown apps:
Gmail - email client
Mog - Music player
Google Voice / MightyText - Messaging
TweetDeck - Twitter client
Confluence - Team wiki
Trello - Organizational tool
Toggl - Time tracking
Bitbucket/Github (I suppose you could debate that these are
just websites)
Google Drive - Document editing and storage
Would these run better as native apps? Probably, if you're just talking about raw performance. However, I frequently jump between OSX, Windows, and Linux machines. When I open Chrome on any of these devices I can pick up right where I left off. Could I say the same with a native app? Probably not. For me, the performance of the web version of these apps is good enough, so cross platform compatibility becomes more important than raw power. That's what I meant when I said it depends on your definition of inferior.
I don't think mobile hardware or mobile browsers are quite there yet. But I don't see any reason why they won't eventually get to a point where they're "good enough" for people like myself, at which point other factors beyond raw performance will become more important.
