This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme.
I was there pretty early. I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr that my Pro account upload quota was upgraded to 2GB monthly.
Made many friends via my photos, online and in-real-life. Many of my photos became pretty popular and picked (stolen a lot too) up by major newspapers/publications in India, USA, and even in Vietnam. Some even bought the original copy and rights. It was never my intention to sell my photos nor will that ever be but my guestimate is that I sold quite a lot (high single digit thousands of dollars).
I donated and gifted a lot of Pro accounts to people who asked, mostly students and thos who commented nicely on my blog. Many of my payments comes to Paypal and it got accumulated and there were no ways to get the money to India (for a very long time). So, I just used it to gift to others.
Before I stopped using it more than a decade ago. It had garnered over 10+ million views and my tenure with Flickr lasted almost a decade.
I signed up in 2004. It was part of a wave of hot new platforms, all of which it seems Yahoo! was acquiring (except YouTube, which went to Google). We used it at work as well (political consultancy) to host photos for applications, making great use of their excellent API. The idea of getting your photos back out again via a sane API with multiple sizes including thumbnails handled for you was pretty wild.
Yes, API was the other best thing about Flickr. A friend made his fortune, especially during the exodus days of Flickr. He traveled around the world photographing some of the best pictures I have seen in my life. He retired pretty early in the Himalayas (he is originally from there).
He made Bulkr, which was one of those tools that just works and super easy to use, in getting all of your photos offline from Flickr. I don't think it works anymore. His revenue and hits went crazy after Veronica Belmont talked about it.
As a subscriber for something like two decades I respect them for being sober businesspeople and keeping the platform alive for paying customers, rather than dumping losses for growth hacks and then ending up a smoking crater.
I moved entirely to buying hardcovers. It is easier on the eye, and paperbacks, especially in India, are horribly bad quality. The cost is a matter of perspective (or geography). A typical hardcover costs ~₹2,000 (~$20) which is the norm, but that is a costly thing in India (is roughly the cost of the tea/milk supply for the whole month for my family.)
Of course, this makes me choose my books wisely and with intention. I’m still on the lookout for an ebook reader (no more Kindles). I still want to keep a good ratio where for every 5 ebooks, I should have at least 2 physical books.
So, books are NOT cheap, but the cost is what to consider if it is “worth it” to you.
They often have much more "paper like" screens that are not thrashing your eyes with blue light, so they're more comfortable and less "screen like" for reading.
It is especially true for MMPBs (mass market paperbacks). It's a specific term for a specific format of books that are just recently being phased out. You can find more info about this online.
There are tons of price cuts that paperbacks (and especially MMPBs) use that they don't bother with on (most) hardcovers, because if you're getting a hardcover you probably don't care about absolute lowest cost.
And there's stuff much cheaper than MMPB but they're very rare (think phonebooks and old catalogs).
I guess the hardcovers are better because they are not printed in India. From what I've seen with nonfiction books, the ones printed in India are only softcovers—pathetic paper/build quality, and poor readability because they're smaller than their US counterpart (usually 19.8 cm long in India compared to 23.5 cm in the US), and the US layout is shrunk to fit the Indian size. So, any hardcover is imported from the US and thus of better quality.
During its early days (2009), an investor showed me a white Kindle reading a book. This was India, long before Amazon was even introduced to our country. I decided to get mine a few years later. I decided to move bag and baggage to ebooks. After some time, I got one for my daughter too. Then the Kindle Oasis was, to me, one of the best ways to read books.
But I realize that I have a better and cozier feeling holding a physical book to read. As I get older, that also means I cannot deal with Paperbacks (especially in India where the quality is as bad as it gets). Buying only Hardcovers makes me choose my books wisely and feel immensely satisfied reading books.
Unfortunately, with all the things happening with Amazon—Kindle, I have done away with Kindle and sold them except for a Paperwhite that I want as my gadget/device museum piece.
I have too many books that I want to get back to, so I might just keep one but looks like Amazon is not making it easy to archive books.
Now, I’m on a lookout for an Open Source but well designed eBook Reader, akin to the Framework computers but for ebooks. I would like to still keep the physical to ebook ratio to a good number; for every 5 ebooks, I should have at-least 2 physical ones.
There’s this great feeling standing infront of a couple loaded billy bookcases trying to pick what to read that i just don’t get from looking at the directory listing on my kobo. (I can reccommend a kobo, it runs linux and with koreader you can even open a terminal emulator on it, ssh into it etc).
I like and use both, but yeah the feeling just isn’t the same reading on a screen vs a nice folio society hardcover.
I grew up having a lot of books around, mostly non-fiction, mostly from library book sales, garage sales, and used bookstores. There is a magnetic pull to a large well sorted bookcase. Pair it with a comfortable chair free of distractions. The best entertainment to my mind.
I tried out with a tiny project. It is the muscle memory built up with Git that kicks in and wish that JJ does it. I went through all the raw mistakes and doing things the hard way with Git, that, my mind plays trick trying to use JJ with the Git mindset. For now, I have mapped all of my Git aliases to JJ equivalent. But I would like to learn it the right way and do it the JJ way. This is going to take time, I’ll go slow.
I really recommend just ripping off the band-aid and using jj "as intended". It took me only a day or two to adapt, and a week to feel like I am now a jj native. It's really a tiny cost to pay, and way less than the overhead of maintaining a bidirectional mental mapping between jj and git.
You do things slowly, intentionally, again and again and again, that it becomes almost muscle memory that when the times comes for you to do it again in future, it happens smooth and is thus fast eventually.
The philosophy that was not being understood was "move fast and break things." "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast" was mentioned as an opposite point of view.
To then explain "slow and smooth, and smooth is fast" as a reply is to not comprehend the comment at all. Then, it ends with a link to their own blog.
the top level comment is fine. the lame guy's comment was a promotional chatgpt-generated useless tl;dr that added zero information and linked to his own blog post
This whole thread is trainwreck. Your initial comment is three simple sentences with very little room for misunderstanding yet here we are. Then there is a comment on that comment which is self-promotion of LLM-trash published as blog post. One would think should an easy donwvote, but it is not. Then, a dude who pointed out this lame self-promotion is donwvoted into oblivion, because what? Bunch of people cannot think of three seconds and use their eyes to try to understand what's lame about that?
"this" doesn't indicate which one it's referring to. Obviously they understand the effects of "move fast and break things", so it makes sense it would refer to the other one. Doubly so they quoted one but not the other, which is often done in contexts like this to indicate you're repeating it verbatim because you don't understand it well enough to paraphrase.
In that case, scrolling down, the other replies don't get it quite right either. An alternate way of phrasing that one would be "innovation over stability/perfectionism". It came from Facebook, where users can tolerate some minor breakage, in an era when they were cranking out all sorts features and overtaking MySpace. I think the idea is generally understood to be a good thing in the startup stage where the goal is to disrupt existing competition - if you take too long to get to market, whatever you're doing might not matter anymore.
It is OK. I actually love looking around other people’s work. Perhaps, I will never follow exactly but one a while, I get the gotchas where I can steal and adapt to mine. Let it be, let people express. If not for the veterans with years of experience, people coming in recently should find these things something to read up and learn.
It has been a while (I think ever since Safari introduced Reader Mode), and I do almost all my reading on websites in Reader Mode. For some websites, I have set to “Use Reader Mode when Available,” such as that of paulgraham.com, daringfireball.net, and quite a few others with horrible Typography.
> I don't understand though why reader mode is not always available. The text is there.
Mostly because we don't have any standard markup to say "this is the content". Which means reader mode has to guess which tags contain the content, and this whole thing boils down to a pair of regexps[1]
I was there pretty early. I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr that my Pro account upload quota was upgraded to 2GB monthly.
Made many friends via my photos, online and in-real-life. Many of my photos became pretty popular and picked (stolen a lot too) up by major newspapers/publications in India, USA, and even in Vietnam. Some even bought the original copy and rights. It was never my intention to sell my photos nor will that ever be but my guestimate is that I sold quite a lot (high single digit thousands of dollars).
I donated and gifted a lot of Pro accounts to people who asked, mostly students and thos who commented nicely on my blog. Many of my payments comes to Paypal and it got accumulated and there were no ways to get the money to India (for a very long time). So, I just used it to gift to others.
Before I stopped using it more than a decade ago. It had garnered over 10+ million views and my tenure with Flickr lasted almost a decade.
I’ve taken backups/takeout but do not have the heart to delete my account yet. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/
reply