I'm not sure how what Adobe insists on is at all relevant.
Reality informs us that there have always been competitors in the field: GIMP, DarkTable, ACDSee, Luminar, and many others.
It's surely true that their existence has been pushing Adobe to improve. And the good news for everyone is that they have: Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop are improved products now, and so are those other competitors.
A successful exit means you've built something so useful that someone else will pay lots of money for it. Sure that gets twisted sometimes when borderline frauds (and actual frauds) sell companies through misrepresentation ... but there is similar fraud whenever and wherever money is involved!
Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow.
But ... it's also true that founders who exit successfully are like 0.001% of the Bay Area's population, but we talk about them like they're 10% ... so we should all stop talking about them so much ;)
"Let me tell you about the weird people in my social circle I've chosen to write about ... aren't they weird? Now I'm going to draw massive conclusions about everyone in the Bay Area based on the extremely weird group (that I self-selected)."
Context matters. The first guy to write X is a luminary. The next 50 people to write variations of X start falling along a spectrum, from luminary to hack. After that, everyone except children have been exposed to X, and anyone writing about it seems trite.
I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov, and now the original seems trite (when you read it after all the stuff derived from it). But the work remains foundational.
this story has arguably aged worse in that respect than asimov's similarly titled "the last answer". that one still evokes a "whoa" when I think about it.
Thank you - I hadn't read that before. Its a much richer, and also darker, work than The Last Question.
Also it was written in 1980,.almost three decades after The Last Question. I wonder if part of the difference (to me) is in the evolution of the author's writing practice, or development of themes in SF over that time?
The triteness was more in the ending than the overall exposition. Humans create computer, computer creates universe->humans.
> I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov
You're probably right, although the transitive chain of derivation is necessarily long. Clarke - probably not derivative. Blish and Cherryh (some), Stapeton, Lem, Heinlein (the juveniles, as a kid), Baxter, Banks, Gibson, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, Peter Watts... I dunno.
I did grind through the Robot books as a child, and the Foundation books that he wrote. But just because they're foundational (no pun intended) doesn't stop them feeling stuffy and dated now.
(And as an aside, it strikes me now that Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God is kind of the anti-particle to The Last Question.)
the penultimate line of "the nine billion names of god" has always stayed with me: "there is always a last time for everything". sounds a bit trite just by itself, but it was an incredibly powerful line when I encountered it in the story and that feeling has stayed attached to it for me.
Great project, but it has an absolutely TERRIBLE UI. Please, if you love audio enough to put in the 95% of effort to get the files to the web, don't let everyone down with an atrocious interface to actually access those files.
Please, get someone who knows about usability or building web UIs to help you!
Archive.org always made puzzling UI choices, not really sure why, but its a long running trend thats not likely to change. Such that for larger Band repos, fans stepped in and made their own front ends:
Clearly this tape stash is worthy of similar treatment.
Also of note for live music fans and collectors: Legendary Long Island Radio Station WLIR Live Show Archives:
"Sugar substitutes are a mixed sachet. They include synthetic concoctions (such as aspartame, saccharin and sucralose) and substances derived from plants, including a family of carbohydrates known as sugar alcohols (such as erythritol, maltitol, sorbitol and xylitol) and stevia."
So they're all completely different substances, with completely different effects on the human body. Surely the article will address that critical piece of info?
"a number of large, long-term observational studies have found the opposite: people with higher consumption of sugar substitutes—some of whom may be using these to replace sugar in their diets—end up putting on more weight than those who consume the least."
Nope. There's barely even an article there, and it just makes a giant sweeping generalization. They might as well have written an article about how food is bad for humans, because they studied several kinds of food (including poisonous mushrooms) and some people got sick.
The "Well Informed" column is a weekly series of very short articles (half a page, or even just a column) on health issues. You can hardly expect a very deep dive.
> Nope. There's barely even an article there, and it just makes a giant sweeping generalization
The article mentions both RCTs that show the benefit, as well as long-term observational studies that show the disadvantages of sugar substitutes, and furthermore clarifies that "proving causality through such observational studies is difficult". That strikes me as fairly nuanced.
"Avoid JavaScript reimplementations of HTML basics, e.g. React Button components instead of styled <button> elements."
Tell me you know nothing about web development without saying you know nothing about web dev ...
1. React is an irrelevant implementation detail. You can have a plain HTML button in a button component, or you can have an image or whatever else. React has nothing to do with the design choices.
2. React is also how you get consistent design across a major web app. Can you imagine if every button on every site was the same Windows button gray color, regardless of the site's color? It'd be awful! React components (with CSS classes) are a way for a site like Amazon to make all their buttons orange (although I don't actually know if Amazon uses React specifically). But again, whether they look and act like standard buttons comes down to Amazon's design choices ... not whether their tech stack includes React or not.
Look idiomatic design is incredibly important to web design. One of the most popular web design/usability books, Don't Make Me Think, is all about idiomatic design!
But ultimately it's a design choice, which has very little, if anything at all, to do with which development tools you use.
> React is also how you get consistent design across a major web app. Can you imagine if every button on every site was the same Windows button gray color, regardless of the site's color? It'd be awful! React components (with CSS classes) are a way for a site like Amazon to make all their buttons orange (although I don't actually know if Amazon uses React specifically).
I don't understand this point specifically. I make all buttons on a site have the same theme without needing a framework, library or build-step!
Why is React (or any other framework) needed? I mean, you say specifically "React is also how you get consistent design across a major web app.", but that ain't true.
It depends on the type of site/app you are building. If you are building a basic website (not a web application), or a simple application, you don't need React (or a similar framework like Vue or Angular). You might not even need Javascript at all.
However, as you build more complex and interactive applications, you need "framework", like React. It's essential to simply handle the complexity of such applications. You will not find a major web app that is built with out a framework (or if it is, the owners will essentially have to create their own framework).
When you're using such tools, they are how you enforce consistent UI. Take Tailwind, the hugely popular CSS framework (I believe its #1). They have nothing to do with Javascript ... but even they willl tell you (https://v3.tailwindcss.com/docs/reusing-styles#extracting-co...):
"If you need to reuse some styles across multiple files, the best strategy is to create a component if you’re using a front-end framework like React, Svelte, or Vue ..."
The author is completely mistaken in thinking React ... or even that layer of web technology at all (the development layer) ... has anything to do with what he is complaining about. It has everything to do with design choices, which are almost completely separate from which framework a site picks.
I am not convinced that, when using a framework (React, etc), the best way to enforce consistent UI is via the framework.
A button should be styled independent of the framework. That's how you will get consistency. Same with every other non-component element.
The use of the component framework should be to consistently style non-primitive style elements (all the standard HTML elements).
What value is there in using React/whatever in styling buttons, links, paragraphs, headings, various inputs, etc? Today, in 2026, even menus, tabs, etc are done with nothing more than primitive elements; what value does React bring to the consistency of menus that you don't already have?
Serious question: I have one response for fellow web dev, and another (that would be pedantically explanatory, and maybe even offense to a web dev) for a non-web dev.
> Design is more than styling, it is also behaviour and state,
Maybe I need an example of this for buttons: what behaviour on buttons should be consistent? What about state - what state on buttons should be consistent?
The core value of front-end JavaScript frameworks is state management. You don't need to use a framework, but the need to manage complex application state doesn't go away.
Take this example: when a checkout button on an ecommerce website/application is triggered, the button should reflect that state and prevent re-triggering the same action so the button has to be disabled, then ideally a loading state has to be shown. When that action fails, an error may need to be displayed. Ideally you would use native DOM states first, ARIA states may be used if no native DOM states can be used, and if that's not enough then custom data states may be necessary.
Styling should be reacting to application state, preventing impossible states and bugs to create predictable UIs. Thus, styling is also a state management concern. UI=fn(state).
Yes you can, on a small/simple site. But on a serious web application sticking to plain HTML/CSS will be far too limiting, in many ways.
There's a reason why 99.9% of web apps use JavaScript, and with it a tool (framework) like React, Astro, Angular, or Vue. And if you're using such tools, you use them (eg. you use React "components") to create a consistent UI across the site.
But again, which tool you use to develop a site has very little to do with what design choices you make. A React dev with no designer to guide him might pick the most popular date picker component for React, and have the React community influence design that way, but ... A) if everyone picks the most popular tool, it becomes more idiomatic (it's not doing this that creates divergence), and B) if there is a human designer, they can pick from 20+ date picker libraries AND they can ask the dev team to further customize them.
It's designers (or developers playing at being designers) that result in wacky new UI that's not idiomatic. It has (almost) nothing to do with React and that layer of tooling, and if anything those tools lead to more idiomatic design.
> Can you imagine if every button on every site was the same Windows button gray color, regardless of the site's color? It'd be awful!
As it happens, this is how it was for years and years, actually, for most of the existence of the Web. The basic appearance of form elements used to be un-styleable, locked to the OS UI-appearance, for general usability concerns.
Why do I care about their choice of a screaming color for my buttons?
> same Windows button gray
We don't need to go the other extreme, can there be no middle ground of letting users pick between the boring gray and the bright orange?
You know, a good system could even offer you a choice of palette that takes the website color into account...
> Can you imagine if every button on every site was the same Windows button gray color, regardless of the site's color?
Imagine how cool would it be if we had a pure, logical language where we could set properties in a page based on the properties of the objects around it!
> Tell me you know nothing about web development without saying you know nothing about web dev
This Twitterism really bugs me.
You took the time to write a really detailed response (much appreciated, you convinced me). There’s no need to explicitly dunk on the OP. Though if you really want to be a little mean (a little bit is fair imo), I think it should be closer to level of creativity of the rest of your comment. Call them ignorant and say you can’t take them seriously or something. The twitterism wouldn’t really stand on its own as a comment.
It bugs me that the author is "dunking on" React without knowledge on the matter (React is the tool you use to enforce consistent UI on a site; it has almost nothing at all to do with a design decision to have inconsistent UI). So I guess I "dunked on him" in response.
But ... too wrongs don't make a right. I'd remove the un-needed smarminess, if it wasn't already too late to edit.
*Working towards prosperity for everyone, empowering all people, and advancing science and technology are moral obligations for me."
"Prosperity for everyone" ... you lying weasel! You literally took a contract from Anthropic because they wouldn't mass surveil Americans or mass murder non-Americans ... and you would!
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