...e a global effect. Somers, a talented writer who chose to code instead of toil in the inky depths with dopes like me, admits that the idea of tracking every keystroke springs from a coder’s mind-set. “I’m a programmer, and no programmer does any work any more without a revision control system, like Git. You start to wonder, what is the revision control equivalent for writing?”
Watch Me Write This Article | FiveThirtyEight
9 years
But if not Scott, he’ll take any sensational writer. “I am not going to let a tiger go by the tail until somebody really, really great writes something important and then people can break it down. Because that’s going to be an artifact that’s valuable to every single high school teacher, high scho...
Watch Me Write This Article | FiveThirtyEight
9 years
Somers wants to use Draftback to peek over somebody’s shoulder — ideally somebody really good. His personal goal is to get A.O. Scott, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for The New York Times, to write a review or essay in Draftback. “He’s a beautiful prose stylist (diction, cadence, etc.), his writing is accessible and unpretentious but world-class, and he seems to always put his finger on the essence of whatever it is he’s talking about.” Somers is curious about whether all that comes naturally to Scott.
Watch Me Write This Article | FiveThirtyEight
9 years
Don’t waste your time on stuff that doesn’t matter (i.e. things other than building your product, talking to your users, growing, etc.). In general, avoid the kind of stuff that might be in a movie about running a startup—meeting with lawyers and accountants, going to lots of conferences, grabbing coffee with people, sitting in lots of meetings, etc. Become a Delaware C Corp (use Clerky or any well-known Silicon Valley law firm) and then get back to work on your product.
Sam Altman
9 years
...class, and I didn’t get to see none of this shit!’
Let’s have an NBC telethon moment, and say that beauty has been stolen from the people and is being sold back to them under the concept of luxury!
It’s illegal to not wear clothes, and also possibly too cold. That means someone is imposing an idea on you that should legally have to do! Clothing should be like food. There should never be a $5000 sweater. You know what should cost $5000? A car should be $50...
(5) Kanye West – Oxford Lecture Lyrics | Genius
Genius Founder
9 years
As a result, by the end of the nineteenth century the term stem-winder had taken on a figurative meaning of something first-rate or excellent. As a further extension it meant something powerful or persuasive, and became attached in particular to somebody who was an effective public speaker or impassioned talker. Later still it was used of ...
World Wide Words: Stemwinder
9 years
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Quantity Always Trumps Quality
9 years
...rnet. The feature allows users to annotate any page on the web, from the New York Times to Gawker to Wikipedia, adding a new stratum of knowledge to the largest store of information in human history. It could be a bust, but it could also be the realization of the dream of digital space since at least Vannevar Bush published his idea for a memex during the Second World War, making Annotate transcend the scope of meme into the class of those fundamental verbs of contemporary culture, such as Google and Like.
Bringing Up #Babycore — re:form — Medium
9 years
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