Finally reaching the end of Dyson’s biography, and the impression I’m leaving with is mostly this notion of “all of you, everyone really, can MAKE things.”
Use cardboard, or fold paper airplanes to test wing shapes, or weld together metal bits — it’s not that hard, really.
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As a software person, this idea is … alien to me?
Dyson talks about how the Concorde engineers folded paper planes and threw them in the office to test wing shapes. How his earliest vacuum cleaner prototypes were cardboard shoved into the back of an existing vacuum.
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Oh, it’s just that as a software person, I think everything hardware is ready made and unhackable. (Of course I don’t think that re: software). And so seeing this “if it’s expensive I can just MAKE my own” attitude in hardware is … refreshing and alien and weird!
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to me it seems to be less about hacking and more about being willing and able to do something imperfect as a step toward something that works better
maybe more like prototyping?
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That … is a good point! Though it’s not my default behaviour to, say, lop off the back of a vacuum cleaner in order to insert a cardboard cylinder, just to test a theory that I have.
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ha no but you would easily do equiv for code
maybe it is about knowing affordances — more likely for domains you are familiar with
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Analogous to using an API to make a portion of a prototype real from a data perspective, but faking the rest with lots of flat PNGs
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