Ten years ago (exactly, remarkably) Notch wrote about his father on his old blog.
I think it's a beautiful, sad, human piece of writing. It's hard to find online, now that his blog ("The Word of Notch") went away. Someone made a 500+ page PDF backup of his blog, here:
The post, titled "I love you, dad", is the second to last post.
Making beautiful things doesn't make up for saying horrible things. Still, every time I used to hear about the awful stuff Notch posted, I remembered how I felt about him when I read about him and his dad.
I just wish things didn't have to be so awful, for everyone.
Neither is a human powered ultra light weight, huge aircraft like the gossamer albatross. If you have a very weak engine it needs to be made out of incredibly light materials, and even so light it must be flown indoors with zero wind.
That's a thought-provoking perspective. It made me wonder whether BW has more to say, and what his plans are for how to say it.
A charitable hypothesis is that he thought that his existing work said what he considered to be most important in the clearest way, and that anything further he said would detract from it.
Another charitable possibility is that he knows what he has yet to say, but he thought "we" weren't ready to hear it yet for some reason (e.g. the marriage of the comic medium and its commercial dimensions made saying it too complicated or risky. Maybe other reasons.)
I think it's easy to assume that BW acted selfishly by doing nothing. Well, not easy in every way--your perspective isn't in the majority, and the pushback from other commenters demonstrates that, I think. What I mean by "easy" is just that I can see his behavior as being in-line with human frailties (easier to talk the talk than walk the walk). I know it would be hard for me to choose to labor, creating my art, when I'd already achieved success.
I'm hoping that you could forgive his failures as being just the ordinary human kind, or maybe even consider the possibility that he might not have failed at all, but was instead in a situation where it didn't make sense to produce more.
But I like your argument a lot, because it reminds me that we have a responsibility to more than our own welfare and success. If we can do something to help the world, we should, and those (like BW) with more opportunity have more responsibility.
Facebook has thousands of pictures of our faces under a variety of lighting conditions. It would be exciting (or scary, depending on your point of view) to see that data, combined with sensors on the headset itself, to generate realistic-looking face models in the virtual space.
I just came here to post this. They also recently hired Yann LeCun to head up their AI Lab and also published a ground-breaking face recognition paper. So, they have the data, and they have the people.
Pushing pixels to a high resolution display, under tight latency constraints, is going to stress even today's high-end systems. If they succeed at appealing to the mass market, I bet there will be a significant effect on the rate of system upgrades.
Just got my devkit and this was the first thing I noticed, I started to wish my 3 year old MacBook Pro had a faster GPU. First time in a really long time that I actually had the urge to update my system, haven't felt something like that since the 486/Pentium days.
I think there's the potential for a renaissance of super-high-end gaming-class PCs for sure. As well as a reason to radically enhance the 3D graphics computational power of smartphones and tablets.
The grammatical class of prepositions changes considerably more slowly than other classes.
We need new nouns and new verbs all the time, because what occupies and what occurs in our environment changes so fast. Interestingly, despite that rapid change, the set of prepositions, the set of conceptual relationships we've chosen to concisely express, stays pretty steady.
It's fascinating to read about a new preposition entering into common usage, because it makes me wonder what new pressures we're collectively facing in describing conceptual relationships. Certainly it could just be Twitter's character limits causing people to drop the "of" in "because of", but maybe other forces caused this construction to have utility now.
My bet would be on an increased expectation that our conversational partners share our context, and our models for understanding why things happen the way they do, because internet.
This product (might someday) solve a real problem I have: one significant impediment to picking up a new web app is the need to learn yet another way of interfacing with the content I "own" on it.
If Collections can provide a compelling consistent interface on top of existing web apps, and an API for new web apps to target, then they might get to own some valuable conceptual real estate in user's minds: "I'm willing to try this new service because I already know how I'll be able to manage my content on it".
This also makes the world a better place by making it easier on the newcomers--it's unfair to them that established players occupy the "I know how to use this already" space in users' heads, that their service has to not just be better, but be that much better than the established players, to reach people.
Then they could use that conceptual real estate to promote those new web apps, and that promotion could yield revenue. Another option would be to wrap their own reference implementations of the services they're abstracting over in a premium layer. Another would be to work with web apps to provide value-added interfaces to the web apps' premium services and take a cut of whatever the web apps charge. Another would be to offer a premium corporate version that plugs into internal corporate datastores (in a way that, presumably, doesn't suck, distinguishing them from other products).
Collection's play for native integration (e.g. extending that consistent interface over all your local content) distinguishes them from Dropbox, which prefers to own that content.
A similar problem to this, that Collections isn't targeting (yet), is to provide an abstraction not over data but over operations. It's already far too complicated to juggle email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, G+, SMS, tumblr, etc. That means that I have to really think hard about letting a new web app into my routine.
An intermediary that presents a consistent interface to all those services, and opens itself up for use with new services, could try to win over valuable conceptual space with users and make the world a better place in exactly the same way.
News like this worries me because I've always imagined the world's improvements in mass market technology being driven by competition between major players like Intel and AMD.
In other words, I'm afraid that the loss of competition for Intel will slow the approach of the future.
The other sources of competition that Intel faces might be strong enough to motivate it, but I'm not as familiar with the influences that, say, ARM chips and Apple's own CPU development have had on Intel.
In desktop and servers, for about 5-6 years now Intel has mostly been in competition with itself. If it can't engineer faster parts, it can't get people to upgrade, which means no sales. I wouldn't worry about that too much.
This is more true than you'd think, unless you know how Intel is organized and operated.
When someone from Intel visits your company to discuss future product directions and you sign an NDA, they give you some documents with scary-looking bright yellow "CONFIDENTIAL - DO NOT DUPLICATE" covers.
The thing is, though, they don't much care if you turn the document over to AMD, Samsung, or whoever. They might yell at you or sue you or take you off of their Christmas card list, but they'll get over it. What the program manager is absolutely terrified about is that another manager at Intel will hear about the project and knife it.
Intel is a Darwinian dystopia. When Andy Grove titled his book, "Only the Paranoid Survive," he wasn't joking around or being overdramatic. It's an interesting company, quite unlike any other I've ever heard about.
I think it's a beautiful, sad, human piece of writing. It's hard to find online, now that his blog ("The Word of Notch") went away. Someone made a 500+ page PDF backup of his blog, here:
https://habrador.itch.io/the-word-of-notch
The post, titled "I love you, dad", is the second to last post.
Making beautiful things doesn't make up for saying horrible things. Still, every time I used to hear about the awful stuff Notch posted, I remembered how I felt about him when I read about him and his dad.
I just wish things didn't have to be so awful, for everyone.