The Acceleration of Addictiveness

Paul Graham – The Acceleration of Addictiveness:

"One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.

[…] Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world."

The Top Idea in Your Mind

Paul Graham – The Top Idea in Your Mind:

"I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

[…] I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn't been thinking about them. My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish."

The Amazingness of Instant

Scott Adams – The Amazingness of Instant:

"I've discovered that 90% of its usefulness comes from the fact that it's speedy. Yesterday a fox walked by the window, and I was the only witness. Someone asked what type it was, and I was able to point to a picture on the iPad in less than 30 seconds. Some version of that situation happens continuously. Life comes at us in sub-minute chunks, especially in the kitchen. That's a lot of iPad opportunities."

HTML5 and the Future of Adobe Flash

Gartner RAS Core Research Note at Adobe.com – HTML5 and the Future of Adobe Flash [PDF]:

"The root causes for a suboptimal user experience consist of lack of appropriate process and governance, and lack of a genuine commitment to a quality user experience. Such a commitment would lead organizations to adopt a user-centered, usability-oriented development process. Rather than taking these steps, we see a lot of projects that are “stakeholder-driven” (i.e., driven by internal politics). […] Most enterprises don’t seem to care enough about the user experience to change their habits (in terms of processes that are developer-driven, vendor-driven and stakeholder-driven, rather than user-driven)."

(Via Mike Slinn at InsideRIA.)

Forget the Defaults

Tim Bray – Forget the Defaults:

"Seriously. I’ve learned a lot of programming languages over the years, and I’ve taken care never to learn the operator precedence rules in any of them. It’s easy to get them wrong and get bitten and why should I require that people reading my code learn those stupid rules."