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"Our internal studies showed that gaslighting users by showing them a completely new interface once in a while and then switching back to the old one the next time they loaded a page increases user engagement, so we made sure to implement such a system based on a Medium article we found that had something to do with multi-armed bandits." Every sentence in this is Doing Work; pitch-perfect.
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"“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t."
This is great.
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"After a couple of appearances on the interview program “Donahue,” in 1979 and 1980, the author and philosopher Ayn Rand enjoyed something of a renaissance in popular culture, including a week as a panelist on “Match Game” and a guest appearance on “Fantasy Island” as the Spirit of Capitalism. In 1980, two years before her death, she was offered a short column in “Parade.” Here are some excerpts." Snorting with laughter a bit.
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"The least important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What did he build?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to admire him, to stand in awe of his achievements, to worship him as a hero. But worship isn't useful to anyone. Not you, not him.
The most important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What world was he trying to create?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to create that world yourself."
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"It has some unique perspective every once in awhile, but honestly, America can be super derivative. Most of the stories have already been on The Simpsons."
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"Thanks to deep integration with Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, our users can frictionlessly share their new organs with the world." In case you had forgotten, Mike Lacher is Very Good At The Internet.
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"All Macs will be replaced with PCs, because this is a business, not a summer camp. If Russell Crowe can play Javert, you can use MS Expression to mock up your wireframes."
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"…maybe David is party to a formula for popularity, despite the fact that no art of any real value, including all Hollywood films of the past 30 years, has ever been made by pursuing one. Good artists do what they believe in and don't merely court public approval. In these respects they are the opposite of politicians. Zing!"
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"FnordMetric is a highly configurable (and pretty fast) realtime app/event tracking thing based on ruby eventmachine and redis. You define your own plotting and counting functions as ruby blocks!" Interesting.
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Remarkable satirical maps from the First World War; the Raemaekers is especially brilliant.
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“What Bella doesn’t know is that this is no ordinary home, and the Cullens are no ordinary family. By rescuing an innocent girl from where she fell, they have set her upon a path that could change all their lives for ever. And when Bella emerges from the other end of that path, she may find that things are not what she expected in… the Twilight Zone.” This is priceless.
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"Yes, we could have started with the placeholder structures and made them more elaborate and better-looking, in a general video-game-level-design way, but that’s different from having well-thought-out ideas subtly embodied in the structures of the areas, which is what we are going for." The Witness used real architecture and landscape architecture firms to help design its world.
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"Well, it’s hard to make female characters. First of all, in order to accommodate female characters in our pipeline, you’d basically need to re-code the entire engine from the ground up. Because the technology we have today just wasn’t built to be able to handle stuff like that." Matthew Burns answers the hard questions.
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"The best signpost to the future I know is to follow whatever happens after the word "computational."" Kevin Kelly being smart/interesting/as usual.