Zephyr Dear

People are products of their social environment. People have to be exercise unbridled self-interest and greed in capitalist society because a capitalist economy is built on self-interest. You have no choice; you are in constant competition. Rival enterprises are forced into competition with each other, and if one enterprise wants to see itself succeed, it must necessarily see the other fail. Workers are forced into competition with each other as well. Being that we are compelled to depend on capitalists for wages, we compete with each other to offer them our labor at the lowest possible wage.

Considering this, when you view human beings ahistorically, you will inevitably come to the conclusion that people are always self-interested and innately greedy. That’s misleading, though: we have to consider people’s actions as being consequences of social forces, not as manifestations of an eternal nature.

Communism is about combining social interest with self-interest. If you want a better standard of living, you must at the same time produce a better living standard for the rest of society as well. Communism takes individuals out of competition with each other. Rather than competing against each other, communism combines all the collective powers and talents of individuals for social betterment.

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Sacrilege is a free interactive fiction game about trying to pull guys in a nightclub. It’s by Cara Ellison.

… [visit site to read more]

A great, full-body-squick-inducing article in National Geographic provides an overview of the current research on parasites that use a combination of techniques to control their hosts' behavior, making them sacrifice themselves for the sake of the parasites and their offspring. Read the rest

Dara Lind parses a new report from Human Rights Watch on the plight of Hondurans who came to the US illegally to escape gang violence, got deported, and are now in grave danger back in their home country:

The Hondurans interviewed in the report fled Honduras because their lives had explicitly been threatened — mostly by gangs. One man had been shot in the back repeatedly by a gang initiate, and had to spend two months in the hospital and relearn how to walk. Even though he’d initially been targeted at random — the initiate was told to kill the next person he saw — he found out after he recovered that the initiate was now obligated to track him down and finish the job. Another man had sent his wife and son to the US after gang members tried to kidnap his son, then left on his own once he heard they were safe. And at least two of the 25 deportees had fled the country after they watched their mothers killed by gang members — knowing that witnesses of gang murders aren’t allowed to live.

Now that they’ve been returned to Honduras, their only priority is to make sure the gang members looking for them don’t know they’re back in the country. And because gangs are so powerful, and the government provides no protection, that means making sure no one knows they’re back in the country. Deported Hondurans hiding from gang violence can’t work, stay in their homes, or even see their children.

Caitlin Dickson focuses on what the report has to say about our asylum process – none of it good:

The report explains that there are two stages asylum-seekers must go through when apprehended at the border. First, a CBP agent must flag them for a “reasonable fear” assessment. In the second stage, an asylum officer from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will meet with them to determine whether they have a credible fear of returning home and whether they have a good chance of being granted asylum in immigration court. According to 2011 and 2012 CBP deportation data obtained by HRW, at least 80 percent of Hondurans detained at the border are placed in expedited removal proceedings while only 1.9 percent are flagged for credible fear assessments.

Comparatively, during those same years CBP flagged 21 percent of migrants from other countries for credible fear interviews. These statistics, plus the anecdotal evidence collected through more recent interviews, lead HRW to argue that “the U.S. is violating its international human rights obligations to examine asylum claims before returning [asylum seekers] to places where their lives or freedom would be threatened.”

This story has been making the rounds:

Noncompete agreements are typically reserved for managers or employees who could clearly exploit a business’s inside information by jumping to a competitor. But at Jimmy John’s, the agreement apparently applies to low-wage sandwich makers and delivery drivers, too.

By signing the covenant, the worker agrees not to work at one of the sandwich chain’s competitors for a period of two years following employment at Jimmy John’s. But the company’s definition of a “competitor” goes far beyond the Subways and Potbellys of the world. It encompasses any business that’s near a Jimmy John’s location and that derives a mere 10 percent of its revenue from sandwiches.

Neil Irwin comments:

What’s striking about some of these labor practices is the absence of reciprocity.

When a top executive agrees to a noncompete clause in a contract, it is typically the product of a negotiation in which there is some symmetry: The executive isn’t allowed to quit for a competitor, but he or she is guaranteed to be paid for the length of the contract even if fired.

Jimmy John’s appears to have demanded the same loyalty as the price of having a low-paid job hourly job making sandwiches, from which the worker could be fired at any time for any reason.

However, Clare O’Connor reports that Jimmy John’s noncompete clause is probably unenforceable:

“There’s never a guarantee, but I can’t see any court in the world upholding this,” said Sherrie Voyles, a partner at Chicago firm Jacobs, Burns, Orlove & Hernandez. “Every state law is different on this issue, but the general idea is that it’d only be upheld if it’s reasonable. The test would be, is there a near-permanent customer base? No. Customers at Jimmy John’s are probably also customers at Subway.”

Voyles said she can’t imagine any Jimmy John’s outlet actually enforcing this non-compete clause (indeed, there’s no evidence any have tried), but can’t see any reason it’d hold up in court.

Drum is puzzled:

[W]hat’s the point? I’ve not heard of a single case of Jimmy John’s actually taking someone to court over this, and it seems vanishingly unlikely that they would. That seems to leave a couple of options. First, it’s just boilerplate language they don’t really care about but left in just in case. The second is that they find it useful as a coercive threat. Sure, they’ll never bother going to court, but maybe their workers don’t know that—which means they’re less likely to move across the street to take a higher-paying job. In other words, it’s a handy tool for keeping workers scared and wages low.

Matt O’Brien’s sees the noncompete clause as the kind of thing that happens “when workers have zero bargaining power”:

Now, economists used to think that the balance of power between labor and capital was pretty fixed. In other words, workers would always get a certain share of their company’s earnings, and owners would get the rest. For most of the postwar period, this certainly seemed to be the case: the split between labor and capital stayed roughly the same throughout, although it did start to slowly shift in management’s favor during the 1970s. Despite that, labor’s share of income was still close to its longer-term average in the late 1990s.

But, as you can see below, labor’s share plummeted at the turn of the century. What changed? Well, for one, globalization really got going. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, and the cost of its increased trade with the U.S. was an estimated 2 to 2.4 million jobs here, mostly in manufacturing. All this offshoring, of course, let U.S. multinationals pay their shareholders more at the expense of U.S. workers. And then the financial crisis all but finished labor off. That’s because the government did enough to save the economy, but not the unemployed, so companies could squeeze their workers even more while booking record earnings. Not only that, but, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the middle-class jobs we lost during the Great Recession have just been replaced by low-paying ones during the not-so-great recovery. That’s kept labor from catching up at all the past few years.

So the crisis has let Corporate America gobble up an even bigger slice of the income pie for itself, while the rest of America is stuck hoping for some wage crumbs.

I don’t know your situation and I’m not you and I kinda don’t do advice, because advice is presumptuous! Like there’s general living-life stuff, a lot of which turns out to be really profound but which when I was younger seemed like “shit people tell you just because it’s what they say.” For example: it’s in my nature to get up and start working on stuff. On whatever. Songs, books. Playing video games back when I played video games (I haven’t renounced them but I have lost interest so all I play now is those annoying Facebook games that when you see people’s status saying I JUST ACHIEVED LEVEL ELM IN FOREST SAGA! you judge them. I am he. I am the judged). But then I became a dad, and if me and my little dude are both awake and it’s seven and I see the daylight outside, rain or shine, I think…you need to not be conscripting little dude into your I-tend-to-stay-inside lifestyle, which is a learned behavior anyway. So we get outside. I haven’t run a spreadsheet on this but it feels like to me if I get a walk in with my little dude in the morning, the very worst the day has to offer thereafter pales in comparison to how I started the day, and on lousy days that can be really meaningful to me. Again, I’m not saying “whoever you are, whatever your situation, just take a walk!” That would make me an asshole, saying that. I’m saying “you asked for advice, but I don’t do advice, but I can tell you things I do and if they sound useful to you, they’re things you might try.” 

Mornings when I put off opening the laptop for several hours almost invariably result in better days for me than the ones (usually on the road) when I wake up and PLUG INTO THE FUCKIN MATRIX HERE WE GO and then irritate myself with news of all the terrible people doing and saying terrible things that I can’t do a damn thing about anyway. Do I stay engaged enough with the news cycle to know about what’s going on? Of course; I care. Do I have to know every last hateful thing about all the hateful people? No, of course not - I don’t need all that stuff inside me. I only need to know enough to figure out what positive change I might be able to help effect. 

Again, this isn’t advice. I’m not qualified to give advice. (If I write good songs that help people, that’s rad, but it no more qualifies me to give advice than a good carpenter’s table qualifies him to tell me how to deal with anger.) I’m just reporting what works for me: keep an umbilical connection to the outside world - trees, light, solid ground; avoid obsessive behavior; seek the delightful, shun the hateful. My son taught me this last one. He is a philosopher. 

The Easiest Way to Get More Done? Work Fewer Hours.

One of the great advantages of working with various clients is the opportunity to learn from different implementational approaches. Currently I’m helping a client out with a particularly well-architected Rails application, one which uses several gems that I’d been unfamiliar with prior to this project. One gem in particular has really captured my attention, as it can dramatically reduce the amount of boilerplate code you’d otherwise have to write when building RESTful controllers. That gem is decent_exposure and it was created by the Rails experts at Hashrocket.

RESTful controllers are great because they follow a conventional format that is immediately recognizable by any Rails developer familiar with the concept, meaning less time is spent deciphering fellow developers’ intent and naming conventions. For instance, a RESTful show action is pretty much guaranteed to look like this:

class GamesController < ApplicationController

  ...

  def show
    @game = Game.find(params[:id])
    respond_with(@game)
  end

  ...

end

The show action is then typically accessed via a URL like this http://arcadenomad.com/games/12. The routing convention dictates that the parameter (in this case, 12) is passed into the show method, which can then be used to query the database for a record associated with that primary key. The decent_exposure developers argue that because everybody knows the find method is going to be used for this purpose, shouldn’t we just take that for granted to and automate the call altogether? This means that in the simplest case the show method doesn’t even have to appear in your RESTful controller. Read that last sentence a few times to let it sink in. The reduction in code isn’t limited to show; in fact given a standard RESTful controller enhanced with decent_exposure, the only actions you’ll even have to bother including are create and update, and even those are pretty devoid of code compared to what you’re probably used to seeing.

The decent_exposure developers seek to resolve another issue: eliminating the exposure of instance variables within your views on the basis that doing so breaks encapsulation. This means when using decent_exposure-enhanced controllers you would no longer reference @game within your show action’s corresponding view, but instead just reference game, which is a method exposed by decent_exposure to the view that provides the view with access to the corresponding model’s various attributes, methods, and other features.

Installing decent_exposure

Install decent_exposure by adding the following line to your project Gemfile:

gem 'decent_exposure'

Save the changes and run bundle to install the gem.

Adding decent_exposure to Your Controllers

With the gem installed, you can quickly get started updating your controllers to use decent_exposure. I’ll revise the aforementioned Games controller to use decent_exposure, thereby giving you a well-rounded understanding of what’s possible. Begin by exposing the Game model at the top of the controller:

class GamesController < ApplicationController

  respond_to(:html)
  expose(:game)

end

With Game exposed, decent_exposure now knows to begin working its magic in response to various action requests. Here’s what the complete revised Games controller looks like:

class GamesController < ApplicationController

  respond_to(:html)
  expose(:game)

  def create
    game.save
    respond_with(game)
  end

  def update
    game.save
    respond_with(game)
  end

end

I know it’s difficult to believe I didn’t forget to include some code, but that it really the complete decent_exposure-enhanced controller! All that remains is to revise your views to use the exposed methods rather than instance variables (again, just remove the @ from the instance variables), and you’re done.

Further Reading

There’s no doubt that some of what decent_exposure does seems like pure magic but I can assure you it is very well done and in my opinion a required gem when your application uses conventional RESTful controllers. In order to gain a more well-rounded understanding of all that decent_exposure has to offer, check out the following resources:

• decent_exposure README: This is the place to begin in order to understand the gem’s basic features.
• http://decentexposure.info: This is the decent_exposure gem’s companion website, and it contains several lengthy pages explaining the gem’s various fundamental and advanced features.

Something very strange is happening this week: there is an Apple event, and very few people – including myself – are particularly jazzed up about it. Oh sure, I’ll watch it, and I hope I’m surprised, but there is very little in the rumor mill – a retina iMac, OS X Yosemite, and the iPad Air 2 – that is particularly noteworthy. If anything, it is that lack of noteworthiness that is the most noteworthy thing of all.

Earlier this week, one of my absolute favorite Twitter followees – SammyWalrusIV – posted a brilliant piece about the iPad:

The iPad is at a crossroads. Introduced by Steve Jobs four years ago, the iPad has gone on to become a phenomenal success (225 million units sold bringing in $112 billion of revenue and approximately $30 billion of profit), but I suspect Apple management will alter the iPad line-up in response to wearable devices and larger-screen phones and in the process iPad’s ultimate trajectory will be more modest and niche than many expect.

This is certainly a big comedown from the sky-high expectations that followed the iPad’s explosive growth in 2010 and especially in 2011, when many conjectured that the iPad business would ultimately be bigger than the iPhone. The question, though, is if the decline in the iPad’s fortunes is simply the natural order of things, Apple cannibalizing itself before others have the chance, or a missed opportunity.

I think that it’s all three.

The Disappearing Middle

At the first iPad presentation, Steve Jobs was at pains to explain that the iPad would only work as a product if it found a spot between the iPhone and Mac where it did some number of things much better than either.

There’s no question, at least in my mind, that the iPad delivered. From day one it was a great reading and video device especially, and games – particularly the complex Euro-style board games that I like – were a revelation. New apps soon arrived, too; I particularly remember how blown away I was by Flipboard. The iPad, though, truly came into its own with the iPad 2; it was significantly lighter, making it a lot easier to hold, and much faster. And by that time the App Store was in full swing, with compelling new apps being released constantly, all on top of an interface that was far more approachable and usable for simple everyday tasks. In addition, the iPad had seemingly impossibly long battery life, making it well worth the carry anytime you were away from the house for an extended period of time.

Over time, though, that middle has shrunk. Macs have gotten much smaller and, more importantly, achieved much better battery life, removing one of the iPad’s biggest advantages. Suddenly convenience pushed in the direction of carrying only one device. And, while the iPad may have been simple, its limitations meant that if there were only one device, it would usually be the more powerful but complex Mac.¹

Apple’s Self-Cannibalization

And now the iPhone is making a major play for the original iPad standbys: reading and video. One can absolutely argue that the iPhone Plus is superior to the iPad or iPad mini for reading; it’s lighter, thinner, yet plenty big enough to get lost in a good book or essay (for me, the iPhone 6 is enough; then again, I used to read RSS feeds over WAP). The battery life is just as good, if not better; more importantly, it’s always with you: on the bus, in line, and on the couch. Reaching three feet for an iPad may not seem like much, but the additional friction of physical movement, finding your app, waiting to sync, etc. just doesn’t seem worth it anymore. As Sammy put it:

Why buy an iPad when you could have an iPhone with a screen that doesn’t seem that much smaller than an iPad mini? Why buy an iPad when you can have a more powerful and just as easily transportable Macbook Air? The space between a phone and PC is smaller now than in 2010 primarily as the phone has become more powerful and larger. Tablets are getting squeezed.

Obvious though larger iPhones may have seemed to many of us, Apple still deserves praise for pushing ahead with the iPhone Plus in particular. Anyone who thinks this won’t have an impact on iPad sales is surely kidding themselves. And make no mistake: that’s bad for Apple in the short term. Sure, the iPhone Plus has much better margins – both in percentage and absolute terms – than the iPad mini especially, but one iPhone Plus per customer is still much less money for Apple than that same customer buying both an iPhone and an iPad.² Apple though, just as they did with the iPod and Mac previously, has proved itself willing to cannibalize itself.

To be sure, Apple is certainly not too worried: the downside of a bigger phone is reduced convenience and portability, opening up room for a device that is even more portable and always with you – the Apple Watch. And, just as the iPhone was much more profitable than the iPod it replaced, the Watch will almost certainly be much more profitable than an iPad.

The iPad’s Missed Opportunity

However, I think that Apple has missed a significant opportunity to make the iPad into an essential fourth device (in addition to the iPhone, Mac and eventual Watch). Sammy gets at the problem:

I can’t remember the last time I downloaded an iPad app. Curious to see how others were doing, I posed a question on Twitter, “How many iPad apps have you downloaded in the past month?” On any given question I get a decent number of responses, but this time I received a very muted reaction with a few “0” responses. Why am I not downloading iPad apps? I consider iPad app innovation to have slowed with iPhone continuing to take a disproportionately high amount of attention in the app ecosystem. Most of my daily mobile usage now occurs on an iPhone.

This echoes my own personal experience. While I still use Paper on the iPad (primarily for this blog), much of my reading has moved to the iPhone simply because the iPad apps are inferior (TweetBot) or non-existent (Nuzzel).³ More broadly, there simply aren’t that many apps like Paper that make an iPad essential. I personally will always own an iPad simply because Paper on the iPad does something for me that no other Apple device does; this simply isn’t the case for nearly enough people.

This is Apple’s fault.

While I wrote a few months ago that too many developers blame Apple for their own business mistakes, the fact remains that Apple has incentivized developers to build shallow apps with customer-unfriendly business models. Specifically, by not enabling trials, which would allow truly superior apps to charge more for paid downloads,⁴ and most damagingly, not providing built-in paid upgrades, which would incentivize developers to build and iterate complex apps with the confidence they could capture additional revenue from their existing customers over time,⁵ Apple has made it a fool’s errand to build something like the aforementioned Paper.

I wrote about Paper specifically in a series last year about Apple’s App Store failures:

• Papering Over App-Store Problems link
• Casual Gaming is a Sustainable Business but not a Platform Differentiator link
• Why Doesn’t Apple Enable Sustainable Businesses on the App Store? link

In that final piece, I chalked up Apple’s refusal to allow developers to build sustainable businesses to their 1997 paranoia:

The trouble for Apple – or any platform provider – is apps that cross that line from nice-to-have to completely irreplaceable. It’s at that point a user’s loyalty shifts from platform to app, and there are no greater examples than the aforementioned Photoshop and Microsoft Office [which Jobs had to beg to continue supporting the Mac, most famously at the 1997 Boston Macworld Expo]…

But there have been downsides to this paranoia. Apple’s inefficient use of its cash is the most famous, but I think developer hostility is an aftereffect as well. I would go so far as to argue that that Boston keynote was at the root of Jobs’ opposition to any 3rd-party apps on the iPhone, much less app store policies that enable sustainable businesses. Never again would Apple be held hostage to an app that was bigger than Apple.

The problem is that must-have apps are exactly what the iPad needs to become indispensable. And sadly, while Apple seemed to shrug off much of that 1997 paranoia at this year’s WWDC, they didn’t make any real changes to the App Store policies around trials and upgrades that would truly make a difference. Truth be told, though, this year’s WWDC was likely already too late. By then iPad sales had already started to decline on an annual basis, giving developers even less incentive to focus on the iPad.

The iPad Going Forward

To be clear, I’m by no means declaring the iPad doomed. It remains far more accessible for many people than a Mac will ever be, and rumors about split-screen apps and larger sizes suggest that Apple sees its role as slowly but surely replacing the Mac over time, particularly for the younger and older generations. It remains a killer device for video, although that’s a job that is fulfilled just as well by cheap Android tablets. There are also niches that are thriving on the iPad, particularly in music, and here the iPad is highly differentiated from Android. In addition, Apple is clearly positioning the iPad as a tool for the enterprise; Tim Cook’s default answer for questions about the iPad has been to point to Apple’s partnership with IBM.

Still, I can’t help but reminisce about what might have been had Apple harnessed the incredible developer enthusiasm for the iPad in 2010-2012. More than any other iOS device the iPad needed help to make it indispensable to everyone, but Apple famously doesn’t like depending on anyone. And now no one cares.

The post The Diminished iPad appeared first on stratechery by Ben Thompson.

There are some games that are so simple, so pure, so fundamental that they feel like they were discovered, not invented. Go is a perfect example. Probably Tetris.

If I were to get really good at a game, I feel like such games would be more worthy of my time. It's part of my game design philosophy to try and make games that are discovered, not invented.

When I started working on Miegakure, I had experimented a little bit with making higher-dimensional games and so I knew that the player would be looking along three vectors out of four (these vectors could be oriented any which way in 4D). Why did I chose to let the players see only along three dimensions (taking a 3D slice), and not project the entire four dimensions down to three, then to two for the screen?

First of all, I wanted the 4D world to feel like an extension of the 3D world we live in. What if our world actually had four dimension, but we didn't know it? I love this idea of a mysterious fourth dimension, rumored, but never seen (that's true in the real world too!). And as a player you are the only person you know that is capable of reaching it.

Second, if you use a projection a lot of objects are going to overlap on the screen, objects that you can't actually touch because they are too far away. You could try to solve this problem by coloring objects differently based on where they are along the fourth dimension, but this is unnecessarily difficult to visually parse.

In retrospect, one thing that makes Miegakure special as compared to the few other 4D visualizations that exist is that it lets you touch the 4D objects as if they were real objects, and create entire 4D generalization of our world. This is something that is much harder to do using projections, which is the usual way of representing 4D objects, such as this more commonly seen, confusing-looking, projection of a Tesseract (the 4D equivalent of a cube).

Then there was the question, how should the player be allowed to move along the fourth, perpendicular vector? The obvious way would be to have the player press another couple of buttons to move up or down the 4D.

It quickly became clear that you don't want the player to move blindly along the fourth direction; you want vision and movement to be coupled: if you could move without being able to see where you are going, you would bump into invisible objects, and the whole world would change at each step (In the 2D/3D version of the game shown on the right and in this trailer, if you could side-step the world you see would change at each step).

So the idea of swapping a dimension for the fourth one came about. Inspired by Ikaruga (which is a beautiful shooter where all the complexity is derived only from the ability to switch colors by pressing one button), the simplest thing you can do is to have one button that swaps a dimension for the fourth one back and forth.

I loved the idea that the game plays like a regular platformer, except for this one special button that you press once in a while. Braid is also this way.

If you are only allowed to move along three dimensions, but you can pick which ones they are, then you can move anywhere in 4D. The following question remains: which direction will be swapped for the fourth one? If you name the three dimensions X,Y,Z,W, and decide that gravity will point down Z, then you don't want to swap Z out, because it would look very confusing, and pressing the jump button should probably always move you in Z. So you're left with swapping either X or Y. If doesn't really matter which one we pick, in my case it's Y. For simplicity X is left untouched. It would not be interesting enough to let players swap in the X direction to justify adding that ability. It also means that levels can be made harder or easier by simply rotating them 90 degrees in the XY plane (i.e. swapping X and Y)!
It turns out that a swap can be implemented as a 90 degree rotation, which can be interpolated smoothly (this is what is happening when the world looks like it is deforming).

As you can see, from first principles there was only one way to design Miegakure, and even though I was especially lucky in this case, that was very much something that I was trying to do. The rest was just exploration of this rule set.

But the next problem was: how do you make it so that the interactions are meaningful? 4D space is exponentially harder to fill with meaningful stuff. It takes 10²=100 data points to fill a 10x10 grid, 10³=1000 data points to fill a 10x10x10 grid, and 10⁴=10000 data points to fill a 10x10x10x10 grid! This means that even if we take a small region of 4D space (10 units in each direction), we need a huge number of things to fill it with.

We want the number of objects to keep track of to be small to help the player hold them in their head. This essentially means that we want our "base" (the number that is raised to the power 4) to be small. This is how building the game out of 4D tiles, some of them pushable, with small levels (4x4x7x4 for example) came about. (Note that other, more detailed objects can always be placed on the tiles).

I think I may have been partly inspired by this puzzle from Braid (probably my favorite in the game!). The entire puzzle can fit on the screen; it's just two doors and a key. It is extremely compressed. Everything extraneous to the puzzle itself has been removed. But it is still interesting and difficult to solve. All the difficulty is in the understanding of the systems at play, such that when you understand them properly the puzzle becomes trivial. (A video of it, spoilers!).

Because the number of objects to keep track of is small, it's possible for the player to hold an entire level in their head. This is very important to me, because that means they are truly thinking in 4D, as opposed to looking at a bunch of 3D spaces one at a time.

At this point I could vaguely picture how to walk through walls using the fourth dimension in my head. I knew that since two dimensions are always visible an entire plane would stay the same after rotating, and therefore objects on this plane would be reference points, and that they would help the players orient themselves.

So I didn’t really know what the game would look like! I especially could not picture how the transition between the two states would look like. But I programmed it and found out and I was the first person to discover how to play the game.

I bought one of these at New York Comic-Con this weekend -- it's a surprisingly good facsimile of an old NES cart; and the rubber stopper (rated to 10psi) performs better than it looks like it would. My only complaint is that it's a bit awkward to nip from directly, though it'd be fine with a straw. Read the rest

I’ve been designing & developing for hire since I was 14. But I almost never write about my past. It’s old hat to me. I’m an always-moving-forward kind of girl.

This has led many to assume my strongly opinions on bootstrapping come ex nihilo — or possibly from bitchy sour grapes at being excluded from Startuplandia, unable to reach that sweet venture dolla dolla.

Quite the opposite.

I wrote, once before, three second-hand tales from the startup trenches that I had the privilege (or misfortune) of witnessing.

Here are my stories.

Let’s start with what may seem like a terrible loss:

The ones that “got away”

Fun facts few know:

• I was invited to design an early version of Kickstarter
• I was offered a small percentage stake in Shopify to become its designer
• I was approached to take over design for Simple (pre-launch; back when it was still supposed to be its own bank).

I said no to all these offers because they didn’t pay cash… or pay enough cash (or in the case of Simple, demanded a full-time commitment).

And I was in the position to get them — and say “No” — because of who I was & who I knew…

How I got internet “famous”

The time: 2005-2009. I was by far the most well-known web & interface designer in the Rails world. I got in early; I wrote, I taught, I helped people solve their Rails & design problems.

In short, I did all the things I now teach my students to do.

Thanks to this, opportunities (real) and “opportunities” (imagined) fell into my lap.

Those were the times when I’d get a startup pitch a day for months at a time. And said “No” to them every day, too.

“Fool!” you may be thinking.

True, a percentage in Shopify would have paid me handsomely by now.

(Assuming I could sell it.) (Assuming everything else worked out the way it has done in this timeline.) (Assuming Tobi and I didn’t become bitter enemies like I’d seen so many partners do.)

But by time I talked with Tobi, I’d seen inside too many startups to have an optimism that it’d ever pay… or, if it did, that it would lead to anything but overwork, broken friendships and misery.

You see, Rails wasn’t the start of my stint in startuplandia.

I got started early, freelancing…

Before Rails, I did PHP development, and before that, I did design, HTML, CSS. I’d been building the doomed dreams of so-called entrepreneurs since I was a teen:

The online food ordering service powered by a Beowulf cluster of fax machines, started by 2 semi-retired public school administrators who held meetings among the potted palms and maroon carpet of hotel lounges.

The nurse staffing agency owner who said he treated his employees like his family, would treat me like a sister, and wanted to build the 2002 version of Uber for Nurses.

The khaki’d early-20’s dudebro who ran several of those “sign up for offers, get credits, get free iPods” sites. (He was actually one of the few who made real money, and did indeed deliver the iPods. The irony.)

And so many more I’ve forgotten.

These sound ludicrous, I know – yet far more credible than your typical startup, since they all had built-in revenue streams.

After I got sick of freelancing (and got conned by a sociopath — see below), I took a job with one of my clients. That sucked so 3 months later I jumped ship and graduated to more serious work, aka…

I joined a professional services company

I was hired out to work on the very first launch apps for Ning. Yes, that Ning. Back when it was a “stealth” startup with a totally different name (24 Hour Laundry).

And the toy social media project of a multi-multi-multi online millionaire who wore $1000 paint splattered jeans when he swaggered into my boss’ office and yakked to me about Somerset Maugham and demanded more faux brick and neon lights. In my web design.

And others less amusing, but no less doomed.

Sick of consulting, I took an in-house job

At Limewire, of all places, which wasn’t venture-backed but awash in absurd amounts of undeserved cash. I first saw the corrupting influence, the way disproportionate rewards created an almost comical atmosphere of wastefulness, treachery and lies.

You’d think earning $400,000 a year as a Java developer in 2006 would make you feel secure and easygoing. You’d think being a multi-millionaire with several profitable businesses would make you business savvy, and brave enough to make firm decisions about product and/or fire toxic elements.

You’d be wrong.

Sick of being undermined by the insanity, I quit

After I quit my crazy high-paying and insanely weird job to consult again:

I worked for quite a time for a mapping startup you’ve never heard of.

And for a B2B startup in the commercial real estate market space, which according to a news report at the time had already connected more than $100 million in deals.

I did some great interface designs for a kinda crazy-cool distributed desktop documentation/knowledge base/sharing tool for enterprises… right up til the two engineers discovered that not only could they not sell it direct to the enterprise decision makers, the employees wouldn’t be allowed to install it on their own, either.

I also consulted periodically for a “hot startup” in the video/advertising space that shrunk from 120, to 50, to 25, to 4 people the last time I walked through the door into a blue-carpeted wasteland of empty cubes and plastic sheeting. God knows why they called me in that last time; all I remember was the creepy smell of defeat.

And then there was Bear Stearns. My biz partner John and I were there, consulting, for weeks before and also the very Monday after the axe fell on that fateful Sunday which kicked off the meltdown in 2008. Imagine 45 floors of forlorn zombies shuffling about in blue oxfords.

Later, my client-boss at Bear Stearns – who was himself great to work with — wanted our help on his own project, a video startup. We did indeed help, but as far as I can tell, it went nowhere. At that point in my career, I expected it. Didn’t even bother keeping tabs. I don’t even remember its name.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

Because I certainly spotted it:

• Nursing staffing app: Dead
• Food delivery service: Dead
• Rewards/iPod platforms: Dead
• Commercial real estate marketplace: Dead
• Social network: Dead
• Ecommerce sharing app: Dead
• Video startup: Dead
• Bear Stearns: Dead
• Video startup 2: Dead
• Limewire: Dead

The key exception seems to be that mapping startup. It’s still here, sort of (propped up by the coffers of intelligence agencies, from what I hear). Ning exists but was sold for what appears to be less than its invested capital, after many, many years, so chalk that up as a failure.

And this is just a short list of ones that stand out.

There were so many.

And most of them were DOA or not long after.

Yes, my startup history is littered with corpses… and a few undead, who somehow cling to a semblance of life without growth.

For a little while I felt embarrassed by my apparent touch of death. But then I took a closer look and saw that it was the same for everyone, everywhere.

I started to see trends, the common things those “founders” did to destroy their prospects…

…right about the time all my Rails friends — and their friends — were asking me to design their apps for equity.

There’s more. A lot more…

Like that time I went to Startup School and pitched Paul Graham: He invited me to apply for the summer class even though the deadline had passed; I decided I could make a business without uprooting my life and living off ramen in Cambridge.

Or that time I got suckered by a pathological liar who played the “lie that you have the feature then go back and build it like hell” approach on a grand scale, fooling everybody from me to Novell to the local news media. Today, that kind of evil recklessness is just the kind that would get him funding. Instead of wrecking just a handful of lives for a year, his blast radius would have been huge.

Even when I haven’t been directly involved, I’ve had splash zone seats. I’ve known some of the biggest names in startups today before they were half as big, and I’ve watched how rarely it’s paid off for them in terms of happiness.

I’ve felt & seen how quickly the thrill and perceived “esteem” of being tied to a famous person (or project) fades.

Even now I have friends who are struggling with the inevitable path of the funded startup: die, sell, go public. These stories aren’t mine to tell.

But every one has taught me things.

That’s why I bootstrap.

I saw a few good moves and a lot of bad ones in all those years in startuplandia. So I took stock of the mistakes and set out to do the opposite.

That’s why we grow slow and only spend what we earn. That’s why I never gave up equity. That’s why I didn’t take any equity in other people’s startups, either. That’s why I have stuck to a simple, “boring” but useful service. That’s why I play the long game, rather than setting my sights on a “rocketship.” That’s why we hire conservatively and fire when we have to, no later.

That’s why I corrected our biggest mistake by doing the hard thing, & never looked back.

That’s why I don’t regret for a second not taking a share in Shopify. I’ve seen too many equity deals devolve into hatred and spite, and I can’t imagine wanting to expend that much stress over something as stupid as money.

That’s why our business is 6 years old, stable and growing.

7 core lessons from 7 years of startups

Don’t get me wrong — I’m thankful for all the experiences, good and bad. I learned from the work itself, but more critically, I’ve learned the meta-lessons that run beneath the surface of almost every story:

1. ego is toxic
2. risk is overrated
3. belief & passion signal nothing
4. success doesn’t make you better
5. work addiction is a sign of weakness, not power
6. unearned/excessive money corrupts individuals and groups
7. seeking answers to questions about reality (e.g. markets) inside yourself is a recipe for failure

And, as it turns out, most promises of instant “power” and “freedom” leave you more entrenched than before. The trick with quicksand isn’t to struggle mightily, but to ease yourself out inch by inch.

I’ve worked in big startups, small startups, pre-funding, post-funding, rich and poor. I’ve worked for experienced founders and total newbs. I’ve worked in new ventures both before and after the latest VC wave began. I’ve ranged from unsexy but profitable B2Bs, to stupid consumer plays. From shameless vanity projects to serious businesses.

And so I’ve made the obvious choice:

To hell with all of that.

Learn the techniques I used to bootstrap profitably.

There was so little guidance out there for doing what we do that I read everything, absorbed everything, and had to forge my own way. Most startup dogma is designed for people with money to waste, who are willing to either go big or die. Mine is designed to help you squeeze the most out of the least and grow gradually and sustainably.

Get your free guide:

In an interview, Swamplandia! author Karen Russell discusses why she taught Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “The book feels subversive to me as an adult reader,” she explains:

[Stephanie Palumbo]: How does Bradbury use human activity on Mars as a metaphor?

KR: He’s writing against patriotism during the Cold War. Humans land on Mars and then destroy it. Not much time elapses between landfall on Mars and the annihilation of all Martians.

SP: There’s a haunting image in one story, where a little boy is playing with a white xylophone that turns out to be a Martian ribcage.

KR: The planet is basically wiped clean of its indigenous people. I was shocked by the descriptions of these ancient, bone-white cities on Mars, and it took me an embarrassing length of time to recollect that people can visit ruins anywhere on our planet, too. It’s a case where sci-fi holds up a funhouse mirror to our own history. In case we have amnesia about the horror of the frontier, here we see another frontier and xenophobia, paranoia, aggression, madness. But we see people be really good to each other too. Bradbury seemed to be such a humanist at the same time that he is calling us out on our most despicable qualities.

I get distracted more easily than a five year old.:

meme4u:

Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was addicted to meth-amphetamine, according to documentation recently released by U.S. intelligence services. Read the rest

get past the pants. So I’m suddenly freaking out, and as much as I love that this is happening, I’m trying to defuse the moment a little. I REALLY like this girl, I really don’t want to blow this. So she seems concerned, and asks what’s wrong, and she looks really freaked out that she’s hurt me or something (or so i assumed). At this point, we’re both nearing panic attack territory, and attempt to stop. While we’re trying to detangle from each other, I realize why she’s freaking out:

she’s gotten hard. Turns out, she’s trans as well, and was scared my panic was because I had realized, and was trying to bail on her for it. I explain, and she cracks the fuck up, and so do I, and long story short: we’ve been married for three years now. I figured you might enjoy, as you’re one of my favorite blogs for relationship/sexuality things, and I thought I should share. :D

Awww.  

Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants advocates the idea that technology is an adjunct to evolution, and an extension of it, so much so that you can consider it a kingdom of life, in the sense that biologists use the term. Mr. Kelly draws fascinating parallels between convergent evolution and multiple discovery, and brings a ton of very interesting background material to support his argument. However, I don't believe he understands all the background material, and I almost feel as if he's persuading me despite his argument, rather than persuading me by making his argument.

So I recommend this book, but with a hefty stack of caveats. Mr. Kelly veers back and forth between revolutionary truths and "not even wrong" status so rapidly and constantly that you might as well consider him to be a kind of oscillator, producing some sort of waveform defined by his trajectory between these two extremes. The tone of this oscillator is messianic, prophetic, frequently delusional, but also frequently right. The insights are brilliant but the logic is often terrible. It's a combination which can make your head spin.

The author seems to either consider substantiating his arguments beneath him, or perhaps is simply not familiar with the idea of substantiating an argument in the first place. There are plenty of places where the entire argument hinges on things like "somebody says XYZ, and it might be true." No investigation of what it might mean instead if the person in question were mistaken. This is a book which will show you a graph with a line which wobbles so much it looks like a sine wave, and literally refer to that wobbling line as an "unwavering" trend.

He also refers to "the optimism of our age," in a book written in 2010, two years after the start of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The big weakness in my oscillator metaphor, earlier, is that it is an enormous understatement to call the author tone-deaf.



Then again, perhaps he means the last fifty years, or the last hundred, or the last five hundred. He doesn't really clarify which age he's referring to, or in what sense it's optimistic. Or maybe when he says "our age," the implied "us" is not "humanity" or "Americans," but "Californians who work in technology." Mr. Kelly's very much part of the California tech world. He founded Wired, and I actually pitched him on writing a brief bit of commentary in 1995, which Wired published, and that was easily the coolest thing that happened to me in 1995.

Maybe because of that, I'm enjoying this book despite its flaws. It makes a terrific backdrop to Charles Stross's Accelerando. It's full of amazing stuff which is arguably true, very important if true, and certainly worth thinking about, either way. I loved Out Of Control, a book Mr. Kelly wrote twenty years ago about a similar topic, although of course I'm now wondering whether I was less discerning in those days, or if Mr. Kelly's writing went downhill. Take it with a grain of salt, but What Technology Wants is still worth reading.

Returning again to the oscillator metaphor, if a person's writing about big ideas, but they oscillate between revolutionary truths and "not even wrong" status whenever they get down to the nitty-gritty details, then the big ideas they describe probably overlap the truth about half the time. The question is which half of this book ultimately turns out to be correct, and it's a very interesting question.

brucesterling:

*Well, if you amend that to “clutching the Old Testament and consulting the Koch Brothers,” it’s pretty spot-on, Carl

I'm taking classes in the motion graphics and animation software Adobe After Effects. It needs a cache, and I've put its cache on an external hard drive, to avoid wasting laptop drive space. But I sometimes forget to plug that hard drive in, with the very annoying result that After Effects "helpfully" informs me that it's using a new cache location. I then immediately quit After Effects, plug in the hard drive, re-launch the software, and re-supply the correct cache location in the application's preferences.

Obviously, the solution was to remove After Effects from the OS X Dock, which is a crime against user experience anyway, and replace the dock's launcher icon with a shell script. The shell script only launches After Effects if the relevant hard drive is present and accounted for.

("Vanniman Time Machine" is the name of the hard drive, because reasons.)

In an excerpt from his new book, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Creation in Creative Pairs, Joshua Wolf Shenk describes the ways individuals in creative partnerships communicate:

When the writer David Zax visited The Daily Show to profile Steve Bodow, Jon Stewart’s head writer (and now the show’s executive producer), Zax could understand only a small fraction of their exchanges, given the dominance of “workplace argot and quasi-telepathy.” “If you work with Jon for any length of time, you learn to interpret the shorthand,” Bodow said. For example, Stewart might say: “Cut the thing and bring the thing around and do the thing.” “ ‘Cut the thing’: You know what thing needs to be cut,” Bodow explained. “ ‘Bring the thing around’: There’s a thing that works, but it needs to move up in order to set up the ‘do the thing’ thing, which is probably the ‘blow,’ the big joke at the end. It takes time and repetition and patience and frustration, and suddenly you know how to bring the thing around and do the thing.”

I’ve interviewed many pairs and seen a variety of styles. Some talk over each other wildly, like seals flopping together on a pier, and some behave with an almost severe respect, like two monks side by side. (Watch a video of Merce Cunningham and John Cage for an illustration.) But regardless of a pair’s style, I usually came away feeling like I had just met two people who were, while inimitable and distinct, also a single organism.

highmasc:

dickensianwerewolf:

Testosterone is considered a Schedule III controlled substance because cis men irresponsibly use and abuse it to sports better and other horse shit.  Meanwhile, “transtrenders” continue to totally not affect my access to hormones in any way.

Not cosigned. Cis gender men should be able to alter their hormone levels under proper medical supervision the same as anyone else. Policy that controls drug use instead of medical advice that controls drug use is bad regardless of who it effects.

yep, that is true, kinda orthogonal to this though, no? insofar as the “point” is that i am not so worried about cis men (im not) as i am about defending “transtrenders” but ymmv.

when i began taking T, it was not regulated the same as now, and so literally the only thing that has greatly shifted my ability to get access to T over my life is a result of patriarchal valuation of male bodies. i put it that way because the reason it is regulated, other than “roid rage” (which i cant speak on as being a real or serious danger tbh) is that it upturns the “fairness” of sports, or makes clear how “inauthentic” and “unnatural” such contests of male bodies are.

in other words, it is regulated because we expect cis men to compete on some footing (patriarchy) where admitting that male bodies are constructed in any way is a huge violation. so especially from that perspective, i’d say any cis man that wants T is entitled to it, and all the better if folks know. meanwhile, i’ve also spent years sparring other transmen fear-mongering about the “wrong” kind of trans people getting it, when they never would’ve questioned a cis man asking for it as a supplement. have you not had the same experience?

for the record in general, i dont think doing drugs or substances or however we want to try to distinguish body or perception altering inputs with a model of criminality is right. but then, i’d go much further to say i think a model of criminality is rarely if ever useful or justified.

spookycyborg:

the reviews say “gritty realism” but the heart whispers “suburban straight boy libertarian fantasy with a limited color palette”

“One thing, however, is clear: nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.”

- Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1 (via transparkle)

“People with ADHD tend to be very, very different from one another. That’s because the condition, which has a common underlying cause, has as an end result something that is very personal – if you are interested in something, you can do it, and otherwise may find it extremely hard. As such, the condition of ADHD can be found in a very wide variety of people – from celebrities and dancers, to mathematicians and plumbers.”

- Gurevich, David (2010-05-24). Adult ADHD: What You Need to Know (p. 35).  . Kindle Edition.  (via adhdisme)

If not, then I will have failed, at everything, and no one will be able to convince me otherwise.

On the plus side, thank you for the word “fanction”.

At traffic stop, Indiana state trooper asks motorist: Do you accept Jesus Christ as your savior?

gothiccharmschool:

activewitness:

mad—but—magic:

bundere:

daughteroctober:

x

honestly, this is so important though. at 18, i had been depressed for so long that i was afraid of what would happen if it were to get treatment. “if this part of me goes away, who am i? will i still be the same me?” i was legitimately afraid of getting help for myself. your depression may shape you, but it doesn’t define you.

THIS IS SO FUCKING VALIDATING I CAN’T EVEN.

GETTING HELP DOES NOT MEAN LOSING CREATIVITY.

Let me repeat that, in case you weren’t clear: getting help - therapy, medication, self-care - does NOT mean losing creativity. I know too many fabulous creative people who lose themselves and their art to this nonsense.

“

Nancy Wake, who has died in London just before her 99th birthday, was a New Zealander brought up in Australia. She became a nurse, a journalist who interviewed Adolf Hitler, a wealthy French socialite, a British agent and a French resistance leader. She led 7,000 guerrilla fighters in battles against the Nazis in the northern Auvergne, just before the D-Day landings in 1944. On one occasion, she strangled an SS sentry with her bare hands. On another, she cycled 500 miles to replace lost codes. In June 1944, she led her fighters in an attack on the Gestapo headquarters at Montlucon in central France.

Ms Wake was furious the TV series [later made about her life] suggested she had had a love affair with one of her fellow fighters. She was too busy killing Nazis for amorous entanglements, she said.

Nancy recalled later in life that her parachute had snagged in a tree. The French resistance fighter who freed her said he wished all trees bore “such beautiful fruit.” Nancy retorted: “Don’t give me that French shit.”

”

-

"Resistance heroine who led 7,000 men against the Nazis," The Independent. (via madelinecoleman)

"strangled an SS sentry with her bare hands"

"too busy killing Nazis for amorous entanglements"

"don’t give me that French shit."

(via snarlfurillo)

The delicious creatures have grown a lot in 50 years:

The one on the left is a breed from 1957. The middle one is a 1978 breed. And the one on the right is a commercial 2005 breed called the Ross 308 broiler. They’re all the same age. … The image above comes from a study done by researchers at the University of Alberta, Canada, who raised three breeds of chickens from different eras in the exact same way and measured how much they ate and how they grew. This allowed them to see the genetic differences between the breeds without influences from other factors like food or antibiotic use.

They remind me of how football players have grown in the same period. Meanwhile, Christopher Leonard examines the modern poultry industry from a different angle, focusing on “the tournament,” a “secretive system that companies like Tyson use to pay chicken farmers, which … pits farmers and communities against one another to earn a living”:

[C]ompanies like Tyson keep a tally of the farmers who deliver chickens to slaughter. Based on how well they fattened the birds on a given ration of feed, the farmers are ranked against each other. At the end of a given week, Tyson will mail out tournament results to all the farmers whose birds were processed. Farmers will learn how they ranked, how many players were in the tournament, and how much weight their birds gained on their feed rations. Those at the top receive premium payment, while those at the bottom are financially penalized. …

Critically, the tournament is a zero-sum game: the financial windfall of the winners is taken from the pay of the losers. This means the tournament systematically pits farmers against each other. The difference in pay between the winners and the losers can be the difference between making a profit on six weeks of work and taking a loss.

Poultry companies say the tournament incentivizes farmers to work hard, which might make sense if they had any control over their operations. But the success of a given flock of chickens rests on the quality of feed the birds eat, and the healthiness of the chicks when they’re delivered. A farmer can be a genius, can put in ten-hour days, seven days a week, but he will not raise a good batch if his feed is bad or he gets sickly chicks. His impact is on the margins: if he completely neglects his birds, they won’t gain as much weight. If he’s in the chicken houses constantly, they’ll gain a little more. Farmers pray for good birds and feed, and the tournament is laid bare as a lottery.