I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the ‘Iron Lady’ of the Western world.
A realistic view of the present and an optimistic perspective on what’s possible is at the heart of nearly every great company ever built.
We just have to face the reality that our educational system in slack economies can’t guarantee all that hard work you spend getting smarter will actually yield you anything except debt.
Moderate success is a distraction, and it keeps founders from bigger success.
Our talented pal Brandon put together this incredible video for Crafting Type, our font-design workshop. The man has a soft-spot for those who create, and describes the theme of the video thusly:
Typography is everywhere: on products, in books, on signs. We live our days in and around type and for the most part it goes unnoticed. Yet there are people that labour over type: the shape, the relationships between letters, the negative space. The work they do is important, and you can learn it too.
Brandon has teamed up with Tim to create Monogram, a brand new service that allows “makers and doers” to easily create online profiles tailored specifically for their craft: videos, photos, and the like.
It’s still under development, but you can sign up at monogr.am for early access. And go share the love by liking this video on Vimeo!
We appreciate the mention!
Our pal Kyle Fox helped put together an intriguing-looking conference at the end of August in Edmonton – Crafting Type: An introductory typeface design workshop.. There’s some extra background here, and we’re sure it’ll be a fascinating learning experience. If you’re curious about learning how to get started with type design & have the dough, you should check it out.
We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction
A fascinating interview with Nick Bostrom, a professor at Oxford. Bostrom uses philosophy & math (probability theory) to explore ideas related to human extinction, such as the likelihood of catastrophic events and our chances of surviving them.
Despite the title, the interview doesn’t try to make the case that we humans are doomed. There isn’t as much talk about apocalyptic asteroids as you might expect. Instead, they discuss transhumanism, space colonization, and moral philosophy. And what’s especially intriguing is that Bolstrom’s conclusions are based on trusted statistical models.
A few of the most interesting ideas to me were:
- Dedicating resources to saving future generations (ex: space colonization) might be of a higher moral priority than alleviating present suffering (ex: malaria). To paraphrase Bolstrom, “it doesn’t matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that it doesn’t matter where somebody is spatially.”
- Short term, probability states that developing technology (artificial intelligence, nanotech, surveillance, synthetic biology, etc) poses a greater risk than natural disaster (asteroids & super-volcanos).
- Bolstrom also considers “existential risks,” which involves “permanently destroy our potential for desirable human development,” such as a permanent global totalitarian dystopia. It’s not unthinkable that such a regime could exist if it were based on technological leapfrogs (which is even more probably given that the rate of technological advancement is itself accelerating).
- Humans underrate existential risks because of a particular kind of bias called observation selection effect (read Bolstrom’s explanation of selection effects & self-sampling assumptions).
- Experts estimate our total existential risk for this century to be somewhere around 10-20%.
It’s a long read, but definitely worth it. Save it to Instapaper or Readability and read it when you can really focus.
Great link for a Monday!
They [made] the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
That’s from Joel Spolsky’s classic essay Things You Should Never Do.
If you’re a product developer you’ve probably had the urge to rewrite a working product from scratch. I certainly have.
Us developers get a warm, fuzzy feeling when we imagine the opportunity to start from a clean slate. To re-architect moving parts that don’t make sense. To rewrite aesthetically ugly code in a shiny new language. To eliminate infrastructure choices that are hindering development.
These might seem like rational reasons to rebuild. But Joel makes an important point that most developers overlook in their state of greenfield wanderlust:
It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.
Joel outlines many other reasons developers & managers convince themselves a complete rewrite is the best course of action, and more importantly, why it rarely makes sense for a business to totally rebuild their product.
If you’ve ever considered rewriting from scratch, or have actually gone ahead with it, you’ll get a lot of value from reading the full article.
Today Microsoft Announced the new logo for Windows 8. Dropping the iconic rainbow-flag is a bold step for them, and I think it’s an improvement. However, there are a few reasons I think the new logo falls short:
- Microsoft should drop the “8” from the logo. Tacking on the version number detracts from the Windows brand itself. I understand it’s there to help consumers identify the product their looking for, but does it need to be part of the actual logo? I doubt it.
- Along the same lines, why include the (TM) and (R) symbols? They do nothing but add visual clutter and become unrecognizable blobs at small sizes. Are those marks even necessary? Probably not. I can’t find a single (TM) or (R) on Apple’s website.
- Segoe is a bad choice of typeface for this logo. Microsoft wanted the new logo to echo the “Swiss design” philosophy behind Metro itself, as well as feel “fluid.” With it’s varying stroke width and uncomfortably harsh corners, Segoe accomplishes neither of these. Its humanist characteristics also clash with the geometric & fluid feel of the four boxes.
You can read more about the new Window logo on Brand New.
Canada debates bill would allow electronic surveillance without a warrant
In a dictatorship, freedom is immediately displaced through force. In a democracy, civil liberties are gradually eroded through fear-based legislation.
Saying this bill “targets child porn” is simply a rhetorical attempt to negatively frame & dimiss anyone opposed to unchecked electronic surveillance.
