6 ms·
Breaking Smart
- phaemon 11y agoThe first essay on that list starts talking about "soft technologies" without defining what they are. They don't match other definitions of "soft technologies" and I'm having difficulty figuring out what the definition is here that only includes writing, money and software (frankly, I suspect if anyone other than an American had written this, money wouldn't be on the list).
- petejansson 11y agoI was comfortable with the notion. It seems to me that "soft technologies" are the ones that cause ideas and thoughts to be materialized in the world. The other technologies seem to be physical transformations of matter and energy. What I'm really curious about is how to best consume these. I suppose a mailing list would be the norm, but I'd like to see them automatically land in Instapaper or Pocket. I'll have to see if there's a way already.
- phaemon 11y agoThere are many things that cause ideas and thoughts to be materialized in the world. Money is not one of them. It's simply a crude approximation of trust.
- danprisk 11y ago"What I'm really curious about is how to best consume these. I suppose a mailing list would be the norm, but I'd like to see them automatically land in Instapaper or Pocket. I'll have to see if there's a way already." It was a little laborious, but I went through each essay and used dotEPUB (http://dotepub.com/ http://dotepub.com/) to convert it to epub, then transferred to my ereader manually. I considered looking for a more automated solution, before realising that it would take more time looking for a solution than just manually doing it. Similarly for pocket I imagine with the frequency these are coming out it would be easiest to simply manually add each essay to pocket.
- ilzmastr 11y agohere is the script that I use for doing this: https://gist.github.com/ilyakava/47aedca7bc39483d7a94 https://gist.github.com/ilyakava/47aedca7bc39483d7a94 All you have to do is input a txt file of links, in this case: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=8PTFJ2x4 http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=8PTFJ2x4 Here is the output epub for all to enjoy: http://cl.ly/022V1Y1t2I24 http://cl.ly/022V1Y1t2I24 In cases when I care about formatting/metadata, I might use pandoc to merge all the \d+.html files, regex or edit, and then use pandoc to output *epub
- firun 11y agoI've deleted some "Share this" and such stuff if epub and it's available here – https://www.dropbox.com/s/ws3xakwcd6dqbss/Breaking%20Smart%20-%20Venkatesh%20Rao.epub?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ws3xakwcd6dqbss/Breaking%20Smart%2...
- meesles 11y agoHe defines them right here: And only two of these, written language and money, were soft technologies: seemingly ephemeral, but capable of being embodied in a variety of specific physical forms.
- phaemon 11y ago"Seemingly ephemeral" but not really, is not a particularly good definition. A drawing fits his definition. Or a dance.
- tedsanders 11y agoMy interpretation is that they are technologies that embody/manipulate information, as opposed to matter or energy. And, whether you agree or not, the argument being made is that information technologies are different in fundamental ways than matter or energy technologies.
- lazaroclapp 11y agoThere is also the fact that mathematics isn't in it. It's a list of abstract non-physical technologies that includes writing and software and excludes mathematics. I am not sure whether money should or should not be there (trade and value-store are both pretty transformative concepts for sure). But the idea of encoding the rules of behavior of the world in a form amenable to direct manipulation over those same rules seems to either be missing (math), or presented as a 21st century discovery (software).
- tbrownaw 11y agoThe idea makes a decent amount of sense (technologies with no fixed physical component), it just that the list of what counts is completely FUBAR. For example: math, the OODA loop, indexing, laws, logistics (ex siege warfare, "never start a land war in asia"), contracts, empire / political hierarchy, etc.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- andrewtbham 11y agoI sense this may coin several new phrases, much like "software is eating the world." breaking smart, Promethean mindset /pastoralist mindsets. Also lots of references to previous great insights: Alan Kay, Carlota Perez, Jeff Bezos,
- kzhahou 11y agoCoining a phrase is every tech pundit's ultimate dream. I refer to this as "cementing the drive."
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jsprogrammer 11y agoI think Andreesen and others just have an overwhelming need to put that phrase into every piece of text they create.
- seiji 11y agoHow else can you be a legitimate thought leader?
- alexashka 11y agoCan somebody provide cliff notes? This is too long and I strongly dislike what has been written in the first few essays. Maybe somebody can sum this up in shorter form.
- curiousjorge 11y ago"I'm too lazy to eat this steak because I have to chew, can somebody please turn it into liquid so I can drink it?"
- akulakhan 11y agoImagine yourself in a very boring TED talk about nothing. (every TED talk) This is that, except in ascii.
- dylanjermiah 11y agoGlad it's not me who finds 95% of TED talks pointless.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoThis is a very syncretic fusion between computing, dialectical materialism, entrepreneurial laissez-faire idealism and a bombastic techno-optimism. Unsurprisingly, it harbors plenty of confusion. "Towards a Mass Flourishing" makes the outrageous claim that the hacker ethos is best embodied in Silicon Valley. In reality, SV is one of the most detached from the MIT hacker ethos, instead having its own entrepreneurial hacker culture that is markedly distinct. The "Purists versus Pragmatists" essay romanticizes the release of Mosaic and gives little credit at all to Ted Nelson's ideas, who is shoved aside as a purist crank. It's a false dichotomy through and through. "Agility and Illegibility" again romanticizes widespread access to personal computers as some entrepreneurial Randian vision, that of Bill Gates specifically. The "Rough Consensus and Maximal Interestingness" essay misquotes Knuth and incorrectly attaches philosophical meanings to technical terms like dynamic binding and lazy evaluation. It further espouses the "direction of maximal interestingness" and grand visions in the post-dot com bust era, when in fact systems software research is becoming increasingly conservative compared to as recent as the 90s. "Running Code and Perpetual Beta" presents the dogmas of "release early, release often" and constant chaotic flux in software as a natural result of great ideas, as opposed to being the result of a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers. Note that fault tolerance, stability and security are not mentioned once. "Software as Subversion" equivocates "forking" as being a Git terminology that somehow reclaimed its negative stigma, when it is purely a GitHub redefinition. The author makes no distinction between a clone and a fork. Also a misrepresentation of OS/2's mismanagement to argue in favor of "worse is better" (ignoring all other great systems besides OS/2) and babble about how blockchains are pixie dust. "The Principle of Generative Pluralism" sets up the false dichotomies of hardware-centric/software-centric and car-centric/smartphone-centric. I suppose it somewhat reflects the end user application programmer's understanding of hardware. "A Tale of Two Computers" prematurely sets up mainframes as obsolete compared to distributed networked computers (they are not exclusive) and makes the error of ascribing a low-level property to an ephemeral, unimportant abstraction - its marvel at the hashtag when the core idea of networking has enabled the same for much longer, and will continue to. "The Immortality of Bits" is one of the worst, and makes this claim: "Surprisingly, as a consequence of software eating the technology industry itself, the specifics of the hardware are not important in this evolution. Outside of the most demanding applications, data, code, and networking are all largely hardware-agnostic today." This reeks of an ignorant programmer, oblivious as to how just how much hardware design decisions control them and shape their view. In fact, this is a very dangerous view to propagate. Our hardware is in desperate need of being upgraded to handle things like capability-based addressing, high-level assembly and thread-level over instruction-level parallelism. This stupid "hardware doesn't matter" thinking will delay it. The essay also wrongly thinks containerization is a form of hardware virtualization. It further says the "sharing economy" will usurp everything, which is ridiculous. "Tinkering versus Goals" again sets up tinkering for the sake of it as leading to disruption and innovation, and not churn and CADT. The "Free as in Beer, and as in Speech" essay clumsily and classically gets the chronology and values of open source and free software wrong. Moreover, the footnote demonstrates a profound bias for the "open source" ideal of pragmatism. This is in spite of the fact that many of the consequentialist technical arguments for OSS like the "many eyes make all bugs shallow" argument have proven to be flawed, whereas free software making no claims of technical superiority and using ethical arguments has a much stronger, if less popular case. ---- Overall, I do not recommend this.
- PuffinBlue 11y agoThe text on the site is too small and too wide to read comfortably on a screen. The lines are over 120 characters long at 16px. On a 1080p screen this is just to small and wide to follow properly. This sort of thing is bearable here on HN when skimming comments but for reading over '30,000 words' it's just too off putting to even start reading.
- npizzolato 11y agoYou realize you can shrink your browser window width and increase the text size to make the layout how you want? For some reason there's always some highly-rated complaint on HN comments about the website layout, and I do not understand why. They are honestly the most boring comments to read.
- DanBC 11y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739 > A reader emailed to complain about how this and other HN discussions often become derailed by off-topic carping about blog design. I agree completely. Could there be a more classic form of bikeshedding? It would seem parodic if it weren't sadly real. This has become more of a thing on HN lately. It needs to become less of a thing. > I don't mean to pick on you personally, or just on this one comment. (Your second sentence alone, by the way, would have been a helpful contribution.) The problem is the tedious stampedes such comments spawn.
- ido 11y agoYou realize you can shrink your browser window width and increase the text size to make the layout how you want? On iOS/android you generally can't.
- mercer 11y agoPerhaps dang should answer this, but is flagging these kinds of comments a good use of flagging? I generally find the rules governing flagging a bit murky (even after searching around HN for dang's posts on this). I would much appreciate an answer as I've tried taking up the responsibility of doing my part in keeping HN a great place with valuable comments and insights!
- vonklaus 11y agoSo this is a blog that will write 1 article every 5 weeks and batch release them in 2017? I am all for thoughtful content, but binging isn't a concept that can be applied to blogs. This makes no sense. Edit: i get what turned me off by this. It was the positioning as a radical new media concept and the convoluted and confusing explanation. What do you call the development and research of a text based narrative which is catalogued for direct and total consumption online? > an e-book. Got it now guys.
- SamReidHughes 11y ago> I am all for thoughtful content, but binging isn't a concept that can be applied to blogs. I'm sorry, what? Oh it certainly is, believe me.
- javajosh 11y agoIt's a valid thing to do because the ideas are all interrelated in complex ways. Releasing them all at once allows you to read a little, get inspired, jump around, check another intriguing title, and then come back tomorrow to read a little more (if you are inspired). A somewhat darker view (from a certain perspective) is that he wanted to say his piece without being contradicted or argued with. To write a series of essays that don't have to respond to "the community" and get weighed down by reaction. One could even say that it's an expression of a pastoral utopia of pedagogy! :P
- jordanpg 11y agoUmm, who is Venkatesh Rao and why should I read 30 essays by him?
- joelrunyon 11y agohttp://www.ribbonfarm.com/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/
- zvikara 11y agoI read some very good posts he wrote and would highly recommend reading this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296
- to3m 11y agoHere's another good one: http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepreneurs-are-the-new-labor-part-i/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...
- antisugar 11y agoI wrote up a very rough summary/set of notes. Please excuse all the errors in punctuation, spelling, and formatting. Thought it might be helpful for people who want to skim, as the whole thing is more-or-less a book. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rWspzjvnv4a3bRkVaaFFMWU_IwAfXh4U6ZUlAxK5XYA/pub https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rWspzjvnv4a3bRkVaaFFMWU_...
- j_lev 11y agoTIL "polyannish" [sic] is a word. Agree Ribbonfam peaked with the Gervais Principle essay. Agree with some of the criticisms here. Will add my own: the first three essays are somewhat accessible but after that the author is talking to the echo chamber which is his regular blog audience.
- bluishgreen 11y agoHoly negativity batman! This is a great collections of essays, I'd say bed time reading for the budding entrepreneur and/or VC. Ignore (or misunderstand) at your own peril.