The mobile graphics model […] is mostly focused on achieving smooth animation by taking pre-rendered textures or layers and zooming, panning and blending them.
(While one of the least generally applicable quotations on this site, the above is nevertheless a remarkably succinct summary of how mobile and web apps are encouraged to optimize rendering/animation performance.)
You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
— Daniel Dennett, sharing Anatol Rapoport’s rules of constructive argument and debate (via Nagesh Belludi)
Using technology to ease the burden on the user is… kind of the whole point of creating software!
Why would I go and say bye-bye to Miami in the winter, bye-bye to Saint-Tropez in the summer and bye-bye to spring and fall in New York? I have a perfect life.
A poorly functioning government is not inert. Instead, it lives the life of a pinball. The life of a pinball can feel quite busy.
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’
— Edgar D. Mitchell, astronaut
“What I don’t like about Washington is people do not let you know how they feel,” he said. “They’re very nice to your face and then they take a shiv or a machete and they stab it in your back. I don’t like it. I’m a Wall Street guy, and I’m more of a front-stabbing person, and I’d rather tell people directly how I feel about them than this sort of nonsense.”
Wheeee, life is a horrible hall of mirrors and I am powerless to do anything but smile about it.
i love and don’t trust the web
— Greg Ziegan (via chat)
I just explain things really slowly and simply to a very fast idiot for a living.
— noir_lord, attempting to dispel the belief that only a “genius” could program.
Even though her character was very young and mostly wore white, she wasn’t remotely virginal, her tone of voice was the auditory equivalent of an eye roll, and she never hesitated to inform Darth Vader that he was wretched and vile, and to tell his henchmen that they stank to high heaven.
The elephant in the room is a bear.
Frank Rich in NYMag
How can a world have pandas…. and war? It makes no sense….
— David Rule (in internal corporate communication)
Things were getting worse faster than we could lower our standards.
— Carrie Fisher (in her HBO special, Wishful Drinking)
From the outside, Silicon Valley looks like a gleaming tower of technological perfection. Yet, once the curtain is pulled back, we see that behind that shimmering façade is a warehouse of good old fashioned humans, subject to all the same biases and fallibility, but with their results now laundered through the sheen of computerized infallibility.
— Kalev Leetaru (in an otherwise droll article on Forbes)
The new logo retains the rainbow of colors but sheds the grownup curlicues: it now evokes children’s refrigerator magnets, McDonald’s French fries, Comic Sans. Google took something we trusted and filed off its dignity. Now, in its place, we have an insipid “G,” an owl-eyed “oo,” a schoolroom “g,” a ho-hum “l,” and a demented, showboating “e.”
— Sarah Sarson in the New Yorker (archive)
I either buy her the thing she doesn’t need and hate myself for giving in and spoiling her, or she makes my life miserable. No good can come from shopping with your daughter!
When you design in perfect settings, with big, contrast-rich monitors, you blind yourself to users. To arbitrarily throw away contrast based on a fashion that “looks good on my perfect screen in my perfectly lit office” is abdicating designers’ responsibilities to the very people for whom they are designing.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.
I think just starting to [journal] every day impressed on me how much is going on inside that I otherwise would never have made space for. I know I make space for the ideas that I feel comfortable with, but when else did I take the time to not only have thoughts about other topics and also see them written out? Personal writing is evidence of an inner life that I cannot otherwise shake off.
— Faith Hanna (via private communication)
And though “youth-driven food boom” may sound frivolous, it is anything but. Restaurants and cafes are a big part of the personality of a city. Imagine walking down a street in Paris. What are you walking past? Little restaurants and cafes. Imagine driving through some depressing random exurb. What are you driving past? Starbucks and McDonalds and Pizza Hut. As Gertrude Stein said, there is no there there. You could be anywhere.
These independent restaurants and cafes are not just feeding people. They’re making there be a there here.
— Paul Graham in his essay “How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub”
Most Catholics realize that the Vatican is led by old celibate men who know little about families or women.
— Former nun Mary Johnson, as quoted by Valerie Tarico
I don’t vote with my vagina.
We’re not working in an ideal world here — we’re making standards for them to be applied in the real world. So we’re not going to look at something that would revolutionize the keyboard completely. We want something that’s usable, something that’s economically feasible. We want it to work.
— Philippe Magnabosco, project manager seeking to improve French-language computer keyboards, as quoted on The Verge
An army of donkeys led by a lion will defeat an army of lions led by a donkey.
— Mongol saying
