We collectively tried the approach you’re describing, and we stopped doing it because it sucks. It looks nice in simple cases, but the lack of encapsulation or locality makes it impossible to change upstream styles without breaking something somewhere else. Also you have to use horrible BEM-style names to avoid accidental collisions between styles from different parts of your app, which kind of ruins the elegance in itself.
It’s not universal, people just don’t bother writing posts with the opposite perspective because it’s boring. Tiger was my first version of OS X and I think what we have now looks much better.
The UIs are designed for the monitors of their time and it’s not fair to compare them on the same screen. 2000s computers had shitty TN LCDs with low contrast which is why the UI had so much kitsch.
I think you're missing that even shallow popular music is fundamentally about the interplay between familiarity and unfamiliarity in a way that's informed by the broader world. Sometimes it's about knowing who the performer is and how a song fits into their life and persona, or maybe it's about the way the melody and style conform to or defy current idioms, but it's definitely not about anything simple enough to be replicated in an unguided way by an AI. Like an AI could spit out a perfect 2000-era Britney Spears song tomorrow and it wouldn't be a hit regardless of its technical merits, because that's not what anyone is actually looking for in 2020.
It's weird to assume that all time spent outside a paying job is leisure time. People who have money can afford to spend a lot less time cooking, taking care of children and elderly parents, etc.
I haven't finished the article yet, but I think one thread that's supposed to connect those two ideas is that in both cases, it's important for the external surface to be consistent with the worldview of a naive reader, while further thought reveals a meaning that's at least somewhat subversive if not completely contradictory to that worldview:
> It follows, then, that a writer who seeks to educate philosophically through Socratic dialectics must make a special effort to enter sympathetically into the received opinions of his time and place—though he may consider them false—while pointing quietly to certain puzzles or contradictions within those opinions.
I think using pure black is actually more analogous to compressing your audio. Excessive compression (+ normalization) maximizes the recording's volume in the same way that using pure black as your default body text maximizes contrast; in both cases, you're losing headroom that you could have reserved for parts that need emphasis.
I think part of the reason this doesn't come up in Ruby is that Ruby doesn't have Python's powerful namespacing system.
In Python, it's reasonable to have a package with just functions in it, whereas in Ruby, writing a top-level method means polluting every object in the system. You can write modules that have singleton methods on them, but you still don't have anything as flexible as Python's "from pkg import foo, bar"—the caller needs to either write "ModuleName.my_function" at every call site, or use "include" and end up with the module's methods as part of the consuming class's interface.
