When I moved out to "the Valley" in 1995, the apartment I picked out turned out to be right next to General Magic (on Mary Ave.).
I knew it as a "spin off" of Apple but at the time did not know the luminaries that were there. It was just a cute rabbit in a hat logo — lit up when I got home late and was turning off to my apartment.
How do we get it back?
How do we share it with others?
There has to be a way.
Time machine.
> How do we share it with others?
Just like the church, capture them in their most formative years.
If it works out well, I'm going to see about getting a Wacom One display tablet with touch.
I admit it is exciting to make something you truly believe is good and helpful.
And that it's disappointing when that thing isn't used by anyone.
It's even worse when it turns out it's just not that useful.
But in the end, everything is replaced anyway. So I guess it's fine.
Two billion active Apple devices in 2025.
I want to double down on this - I’m lucky enough to have worked places where I truly believed the world would be a better place if we “won,” and not on the margins, and it really, really makes a difference in quality of life. I’ve worked at other places, too, and the cognitive drag of knowing that your skills and efforts - your ability to change the world - is at best being wasted is something you don’t truly feel until it’s gone.
I've also wasted countless years on pursuits I still think were good but overall never truly helped make the world better. This was less bad and seems inevitable.
> The Apple II displayed white text on a black background. I argued that to do graphics properly we had to switch to a white background like paper. It works fine to invert text when printing, but it would not work for a photo to be printed in negative. The Lisa hardware team complained the screen would flicker too much, and they would need faster refresh with more expensive RAM to prevent smearing when scrolling. Steve listened to all the pros and cons then sided with a white background for the sake of graphics.
But looking at today's tech landscape, with its walled gardens and app stores, I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.
Every other human creative practice and media (poetry, theater, writing, music, painting, etc) have existed in a wide variety of cultures, societies, and economic contexts.
But computing has never existed outside of the immensely expensive and complex factories & supply chains required to produce computing components; and corporations producing software and selling it to other corporations, or to the large consumer class with disposable income that industrialization created.
In that sense the momentum of computing has always been in favor of the corporations manufacturing the computers dictating what can be done with them. We've been lucky to have had a few blips like the free software movement here and there (and the outsized effect they've had on the industry speaks to how much value there is to be found there), but the hard reality that's hard to fight is that if you control the chip factories, you control what can be done with the chips - Apple being the strongest example of this.
We're in dire need of movements pushing back against that. To name one, I'm a big fan of the uxn approach, which is to write software for a lightweight virtual machine that can run on the cheap, abundant, less/non locked down chips of yesteryear that will probably still be available and understandable a century from now.
I'm not against the idea of a disasterproof runtime, but you're not "pushing back" against the consumerist machine by outlasting it. When high-quality software becomes inaccessible to support some sort of longtermist runtime, low-quality software everywhere sees a rise in popularity.
on some level it is just human nature to want to consume than create. just is. its not great but lets not act like people havent tried to make creative new platforms for self expression and software creation and they all kinda failed
Grateful for all his work.
I find myself pining for a lot of the "old days" when anything seemed possible and it was open and exciting. You could DO surprisingly, not a lot, but everything still felt possible.
Now everything seems trapped in advertising dominated closed box. Login and live in this limited little space...
The internet is still there, I can still put up a site that isn't covered with ads. I wish I could surf just that internet and so on.
I'm interested in how to do "good" journeys vs non-good ones...
I think this was the hook that got many of us to admire Apple as a company (and more broadly, to get excited about computing as a discipline/industry). For a long time, that was arguably (one of) their primary mission.
I suspect to what extent it could still be considered to be the case today would be subject to much debate.
JKCalhoun•3h ago
Watching some YouTube about the Beatles and, of course, their LSD trips. More recently the history of Robert Crumb — on his big acid trip he more or less created a large part of his stable of comic characters.
Somewhere along the way, someone said that LSD alters your mind permanently....
It caused me to wonder if we'll never get the genius of Beatles music, Crumb art without the artist taking something conscious-altering like LSD. Of course then I have to consider all the artists before LSD was "invented" — the Edvard Munch's, T.S. Eliot's, William Blake's, etc.
(Tried acid once in college. That was enough of that.)
nine_k•2h ago
LSD is not known to permanently alter brain; for that you need psilocybin.
j_bum•1h ago
If you understand that LSD doesn’t permanently alter the brain, why do you think PY “permanently” alters the brain? It does alter the brain (like LSD; see the plethora of research on PY altering neurogenesis and functional connectivity [0]), I’m unsure of what you mean by “permanent”.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07624-5
TechDebtDevin•1h ago
j_bum•1h ago
I know that there absolutely are people who shouldn’t take it based on their mindset and underplaying predispositions.
There is certainly a point to be made about psychoactive (and other) drugs inducing episodes of psychosis. This is something on the uptick with marijuana legalization in the US [0].
And I think am plainly wrong about my understanding of these effects not being “permanent”. I suppose I was thinking about this too much from a “neurotypical” angle, and not from the angle of how substances can alter the neurological trajectory of people with predisposed sensitivity.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/marijuana-induc...
nine_k•23m ago
For psilocybin, there is plenty, e.g.: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8376772/
pyinstallwoes•1h ago
paulryanrogers•1h ago
tough•1h ago
at least acid doesnt make sense to consume daily because it stops having the same effects the more you consume it