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i still think this is a powerful take: "the social implication of creating a gradient of difficulty that also can be used as signal"
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Replying to @BrianTRice and @rsnous
This. This is it. On DOS, the difference in extensions was the aesthetic gap that made you feel a batch file or BASIC program was somehow "less" than a .exe. Tech almost never realizes the social implication of creating a gradient of difficulty that also can be used as signal.
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Anything in particular that got you thinking about this? I see this dynamic underlying a lot of the observations that makes about society, and the layers of signaling that inevitably emerge when there is a big (and profitable) gap between substance and form.
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Replying to and
nothing super related, I think the .EXE thing had come up a couple times: - here twitter.com/djmicrobeads/s - and some recent DMs speculating about why people replace spreadsheets w/ custom software, have their own blog instead of Medium, use custom font/CSS instead of Bootstrap…
I think that the points about how having your own site is
genuinely better than Medium because you own the
relationship with your reader are right, but I also wonder
for how many people that's the actual reason they get
their own site

 

I bet a lot of people are actually pushed by the aesthetic
drive of wanting your own domain in the address bar +
your own site style

also kinda like people avoiding Bootstrap, or getting a
custom font
I basically rebuilt custom spreadsheet software, and it
was total shit

The only value was that it felt special because it had the
firm's branding

On almost literally every other dimension, it was worse
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Replying to @djmicrobeads and @gabagrl
fonts are basically magic as far as i am concerned, it would be like knowing how to make .exe files
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Replying to and
This resonates. I've found myself weirdly almost embarrassed that my blog is backed by an Evernote notebook, it feels so primitive As a programmer, shouldn't I have written my own CMS??? But works great! And it's way less maintenance and fiddling than a custom CMS
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I remember feeling the “exe is real” feeling on DOS too, but I think it’s more than signaling. It was the maximally robust and portable form of code that was least dependent on user skills or environment. So wanting to make exes was wanting to make the most real thing.
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Here, I’d never run a blog on Evernote. It’s an entirely unnecessary dependency on a piece of proprietary software that has nothing to do with blogging and might evolve in ways that hurt blogging. I still prefer Wordpress because it actually is the exe of blogging.
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Yeah I really worry about the dependency bit, especially considering what a mess the company has been in for ages The tradeoff is worth it to me because it makes the publishing step incredibly low-friction, so I end up publishing more At least I think it's worth it... we'll see
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My way is very creative destructive. Often nothing of the original thought will survive at the other end, or only a core metaphor. I don’t think of it as a production flow, since my output is often as unfinished as my input. It’s phase changes via higher temperatures/pressures.
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