My spouse has a background in engineering and health sciences and is an Excel fan. I do IT support, and I kind of hate Excel, but I kind of love Apple's Numbers app.
I've exclusively used Numbers for as long as the app has been around. It meets all of my needs, including almost seamless Excel compatibility for imports and exports should the need arise.
The IT industry overall remains similarly entrenched. Enterprise software vendors insist on Windows dependency, staying tethered to outdated standards; upholding an inefficient status quo that serves only MSFT, developers, and technicians—not users nor progress.
And us industry standard excel users hate when we send you Excel sheets (for a good reason) and then you use and edit them in .numbers, and then send them back as .numbers without a care in the world ... often we lose all the background goodness we built in (often designed to make your life easier!) ... you in the general sense ... calms shaking rage
Numbers could be nice if it was fast. Unfortunately it’s dog slow. It’s good enough with the simplest formulas, but once you try to actually use it for anything, it becomes unbearable.
"These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the same for every one over the face of the whole Western world, are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were."
Well... this aged like fine milk in retrospect to what was coming 20 years down the line.
Considering how complacent everyone got in the interwar period about what was going on... I dont think any one at that point in time thought they would do it all over again, 20 years later, with Germany.
Eh, is it a matter of aging? WW1 would be fresh in people’s minds… it seems like a bad quote then, too. I bet, for example, any reader who’d been in a trench for a week long bombardment would take the record player instead.
It seems like a surprisingly weak essay, from an otherwise pretty thoughtful guy.
If there's one thing we've learned in the past year is that curly haired men named Sam in the tech industry claiming that they are doing it "for the good of all humanity" probably ain't doin' -anything- for the good of humanity.
57 pages in before we get a single screenshot. In a lot of ways, I miss this kind of weird ass writing about introducing people to computers with so little previous context to computing.
OTOH, 57 pages in before we start telling us how to use it seems like the fore bearer of 2023 recipes on web pages: "I love chocolate chip cookies. My mother used to make them for me back in 1970s after a day out in the late fall. My mother died in the late fall in 1986, and that is the year I set out to recreate my mother's cookie recipe for myself."
- a “Guided Tour” floppy that contained a “Mousing Around” application that taught you to operate the mouse, for example by dragging a path through a maze.
Someone is sitting on the jumptorecipe.com domain. My fantasy is they're working on a simple website with recipes, and none of the babbling prose or instructive ads.
Reality is such a site probably can't make money, and I don't know why today's Google would bother even crawling it.
There was a chrome plugin, “Recipe Filter” which produced a beautiful recipe card to print or read from whatever site you threw at it. It worked really well.
The author got tonnes of backlash/abuse from people writing recipe sites.
Yeah, the site operators' perspective is that such an extension is same as an adblocker. But everyone else's perspective is that (a) they're hungry and (b) see (a).
Recipe sites aren't exactly high stakes, but they're one of the worst mismatches between the needs of customers and the business plans of providers. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that solving the recipe-site problem is isomorphic to saving the web.
And this poor kid has started working for the Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the biggest censors of the Internet. It's sad that this is going on at an institution of higher learning.
I also hate it. My hatred stems from the fact that it's very much a tech bro ideology. They get it into their head that THEIR system is 'the one'. It's the same way that tech bro weirdos running startups get it in THEIR head that THEIR product is some sort of life changing piece of technology that every human on the planet is going to ultimately adopt once they just "understand it". And god forbid if the product does catch on, because then it's a horrific confirmation bias to them. So instead of luck and market coercion, the product's success is evidence of their brilliance.
I know that seems like a weird conclusion to get to from this, but having read a LOT of these types of articles over the years and seeing people's convictions and deep seated beliefs about their categorization systems, it really underscores a lot of how humans get it in their heads about their POV of the world is the 'right one' that the rest of the world should get on board with.
I think from my side the problem could be expressed in a more nuanced way: it's usually not the originator of some idea to be the annoying techbro trying to evangelize everyone. In most cases the culprits are early adopters thinking they found the silver bullet solving all of their (and everyone else's!) problems and being very vocal about it
I agree with most of your sentiment. I also came to associate the proponents of these system with a a set of other traits:
- obsession with tools and methods over outcomes
- busywork
- insistence with their approach being the only right one
It seems these trait could be quite adjacent with tech bro behaviour
The energy in creating your own catalog system to this extent while one already exists seems pretty ridiculous.
Why not Dewey Decimal? Well... I mean... I guess you could. But most libraries have converted to LOC since it is fully supported and still receives attention and updates to categorizations.
The article you linked to doesn't explain plainly how the cataloging system works. Going to Wikipedia[1] makes it a little more intelligible, but honestly it still sounds pretty complicated.
If a cataloging system is difficult to explain in plain and simple terms, it will be tough to advocate for it with other people. I might put in the effort but how can I quickly convince others to do so?
Johnny Decimal is pretty simple in comparison, it's 4 bullet points:
- A JD number is two numbers with a dot in between: XX.YY
- First digit of first number: a broad category
- Second digit of first number: a sub-category
- The second number is incremented each time you create a new folder (which you want to be careful about!)
Once you've explained that and you show a basic folder structure, people will understand how it's used, at least. That's where it performs better than your system.
It's probably fine if it's tough to define, but it has to be simple to teach.
Yeah. All systems like this have to account for ad-hoc additions. Otherwise you will often jam a few squares into some circles just to accommodate your categorization system.
