I appreciate the dedication to minimal performant code. For me a standard Jekyll setup with a theme and github pages is absolutely fine. It's slow and a bit annoying sometimes but it's very straightforward markdown to html and compiles categories into URL structure. It's also easy to throw in some JS if you need, customise CSS etc.
I genuinely feel that these two books, and the audiobooks even more so, are full blown genius.
The character has been steeping in his own mythology and metatext for decades, and these books use that to such a wonderful effect. I think they hold up as amazing comedy in their own right, but having the character describe events we’ve seen in previous formats but through a warped narrative is a wonderful and uncommon device, and the intentional bad writing is so joyous.
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They've absolutely blown Meta out of the water on their value proposition.
They've started with: here's how you would use this device to round off all the rough edges of work / travel / productivity etc.
Whereas Meta: why don't you try to replicate all the most meaningful human interactions here with Mark.
On price: it's a lot, but as they say toward the end: relative to a home entertainment system with a powerful screen + surround sound, it's less ridiculous, plus it's portable.
My prediction: people who have the money to spare will buy it in very good numbers. In fact, I don't think they'll be able to meet demand. If you're already the kind of person who takes flights a lot for work, and who would consider upgrading to the latest Macbook Pro, it will be appealing.
> They've absolutely blown Meta out of the water on their value proposition.
Agreed. But this is because Apple can leverage their existing ecosystem. They’re clearly leaning into that heavily, which is an excellent strategy. Zuck has no existing platform, so they need to reinvent 1p experiences (which feels like talking to Zuck), or rely on 3p devs (that are awkwardly constrained by lack of content and the app-silo model).
> relative to a home entertainment system with a powerful screen + surround sound, it's less ridiculous
This was a lie, and they knew it. A headset can only be used by one person at a time, and I suspect sharing it with others will suck because of the single iCloud account hegemony (this has been a huge problem with iPad already). Home entertainment systems is not targeting overpaid lonely tech workers, it’s for family and friends in the same space. Headsets are 100% isolating yourself from others and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. So this is a solo device for now.
> If you're already the kind of person who takes flights a lot for work, and who would consider upgrading to the latest Macbook Pro, it will be appealing.
I don’t doubt that there are enough tech enthusiasts to saturate demand, but I also don’t think an iOS-like platform is enough, currently, to replace Mac Pro use cases. I think if this was a pro workstation replacer they would have sold that story heavily. Apple has struggled for years to roll out sandboxed apps on macOS but most “pro” apps are still stragglers. But why bother? They make much more $ on the iPhones anyway.
Just FYI, the layout in the “deployment” box near the bottom of the splash page is very shrunken on iPhone - so narrow that there’s basically one character width.
Good retrospective on the inflection point for this cohort of digital media in the generally excellent Odd Lots podcast recently (Search “End of an Era for Digital Media).
Their conclusion on Vice was that it was never in the same league as BuzzFeed or similar in terms of traffic, but had one of the most pure and influential brands in the space.
Vice and Buzzfeed really benefited from their social media strategy back when Facebook newsfeed began to promote more news articles. They were often featured together as the rising stars of digital media.
> [Vice] had one of the most pure and influential brands in the space
I also remember the Intel Vice campaign. Shows that Vice had such a strong appeal that Intel really wanted to reach out to their younger demographics back then.
As many have pointed out, I haven't seen their articles or videos going viral recently. When Shane Smith left, it seems that the voice of counterculture and rebellion disappeared from the editorial leadership.
> Before Vice, Smith went to university in Ottawa, played in local punk bands, and travelled around Eastern Europe before moving to Montreal.
I’m not sure why money would be the measure for whether someone was counter-cultural enough, especially when they made their money through providing something that the mainstream (at the time, certainly) was not.
Maybe it did in the 70s. But anything past that it’s basically the opposite. Punk music is oldies; literally half century old tradition at this point. It’s like calling folk music counter culture.
Smith was born in 1969, and being in a punk band was counter-culture right up to the point in the late 90s when Americans in the mainstream started to reuse the word (when grunge was being replaced) for bands that clearly weren't punk.
Aside from that, what does age have to do with being counter-cultural or not? The word you're looking for in your example is "new", or possibly "trendy".
Ok, that puts him in the zone of “real” punk. I was thinking he was a millennial. And no offense intended to any young punk rockers. It’s just a different thing when you’re imitating your parents or grandparents generation down to wearing the exact same clothing. Nothing wrong with that, but it ain’t counter culture.
Ouch. I think there's still plenty of post-70s punk that's counter-culture (see, for example, Leftover Crack), but I think you're right in that "pop punk" definitely dulled the edge of the genre in general.
I know very little about Vice but even after taking into consideration everything posted here, I'm still rather dubious that this is sufficient to warrant the label "counterculture"
