"... condense their message ... rather than rambling self-indulgently ..."
And in the process discard you discard the layering of supported ideas. Instead you get a fragment of an idea that you have no idea how it was formulated. Real life isn't like this. You have to sort the noise from the signal. An essay is one way you can do this. If all you want are the short "tell me the answer" type posts you are susceptible to relying on others to think for you and hence be manipulated.
I make it clear what data I'm summarizing, but the summary also seems more timeless to me than the data. I can imagine it being derived from other books about the wisdom of crowds. Like this blog post:
One difference between good and bad writing is in the organization and presentation of ideas. There should usually be flow or structure, although there's no reason not to be creative about it.
"... If your reader is filtering noise from your signal ..."
In the processing of writing you are filtering your own ideas into words. This for writers is the main benefit. Through writing you clarify your own ideas. The difference between brevity and verbosity between writers could indicate greater skill in writing converting the ideas into words.
i think his main point was that, despite popular opinion, more people will read the longer articles, and more people will take them seriously and remember them. to quote: In short, I think long blogs have better survival characteristics: greater reach and greater impact.
Reads like an unsatisfying self-justification to me. I think people read his posts not because they are long, but simply because he's a pretty decent writer with a pretty engaging style. Nevertheless, his style entails a lot of extraneous, decorative statements that get annoying when you're looking for raw information.
That kind of style works fine with, say, Violent Acres, because you know what to expect. But Yegge also writes semi technical material with the same style! In this regard, Eliezer Yudkowsky does a good job IMHO: long, but succinct.
I think of some Twitterers as becoming the poets of blogging. Their form: 140 words. It's not horribly restrictive, but the best can have a sensibility and quiescence not dissimilar to haiku.
After you see that metaphor it just becomes a matter of whether you like poetry or just novels.
Reading a well written blog is interesting.
I don't like soundbites/marketing slogan type things like this tweet. They overly simplify something so that it 'feels' right to the masses, when in actual fact it may not be.
Going for a popularist vote rather than forming a cohesive argument.
"you become defined by your tastes rather than ability."
Oh? How so?
" your tastes only narrow & exclude people."
Again: How so?
(Yes, these are semi-rhetorical)
I mean, I'm all for creating over not creating, but this sounds like feel-good but completely unsupported assertions. The sort of thing people want to believe, perhaps because people want to see themselves as creative.
(Also, are there any people who do not in fact create anything?)
For the first, I know that it's true for me that if I don't actively create things, my ability stagnates. If I actively create things right at my skill level, I stay the same, and if I actively try to learn new methods to deal with problems my ability increases. If my ability were to stagnate far enough, all I would have left would be opinions about the methods that made up my previous ability. I could probably still argue in their favor, but not do much else than that.
For the second, it's a bit vague to me. I guess if you don't have much in the way of ability, you may start defining yourself by your opinions - which can lead to narrow-mindedness and exclusion because you are stuck in a mindset where your opinion is "correct" and have not experienced the other side of the debate, whatever it may be.
I'm pretty sketchy on my guess on that second one.
"I mean, I'm all for creating over not creating, but this sounds like feel-good but completely unsupported assertions."
You may be right, but I have the feeling that it has more to do with the format of twitter than anything else.
"(Also, are there any people who do not in fact create anything?)"
Unless you're speaking of the obvious physical limitations on "not creating anything", yes - tons of them.
the biggest condesenting pricks i have known usually use macs. It is rare to see windows users sneer at other people, just b/c of their choice of OS.
Remember, not everybody has 2K to spend in a computer, and if you are a student and do, your priorities are kind of backwards.
You can save a 1k by bying a decent PC, so you have 1k of savings, and one month more of runtime to work on a basement for your idea or startup to flourish. And I Bet you money, that all you need to spend is about 1 DAY in tinckering around, until you make both Windows and Linux as usable as your Mac. If you can survive with 1k a month (I could in Cambridge), you just saved about 29 days to work on your startup, if you had to buy the pricey macbook pro.
And, I have Macos, Windows XP, and a Linux box at home, and i can say that while MacOs is the more polished and better looking than all, it is not necessary the fastes for me. I find myself working much faster in XP or Linux.
And all of those that say you have to spend lots of money $$ into a good laptop in order to be able to get working, well, if you can't code in a $1,000 laptop, you probably can't in a $2,000 one.
If you work faster in $OSChoiceOne instead of $OSChoiceTwo, great. Use whatever works for you. I wouldn't expect you to do anything less. I would think less of you if you chose to use $OSChoiceTwo anyway, just to be popular. Which i think is the real problem here: Choosing something due to its perception and thinking it will make you work better instead of finding something that actually makes you work better.
And just to note, not every Mac costs $2000. Just like not every PC sells for < $1000. The Macbook costs $1100 (even less if you're a student or have an ADC discount) and an Alienware laptop from Dell costs $2100.
Sorry, but the macbook is a piece of crap. Flimsy as hell, and it's keyboard is unusable.
I know this, b/c I was shoping for a mac a couple of months ago.
You have to go for MCB Pro in order to get anything usable with macs, for which you have to shell at least 2k. Or go the iMac route. Either way, it is much more expensive than you can get out of pc.
"that all you need to spend is about 1 DAY in tinckering around, until you make both Windows and Linux as usable as your Mac."
you can turn windows into a unix in a day?
As for linux, I used it professionally for a few years and it is not as usable as a mac. One example is that I had to spend hours getting my sound to work again after an OS update on more than one occasion with linux.
Well if i can get cygwin to work properly i get a UNIX++(an octopus made by...). As for linux, the only hardware problems I've had was with my printer, and since the only non-windows drivers were 2 RPM's i doubt that mac OS X would magically solve that problem.
And here is my really awesome opinion, i understand all the hype around OS X, its new, its cool, and it gets you laid(well, that youtube video said so, so it must be true). Lets just forget about the company logo that stays on you laptop. Is their really any real advantage that macs have to linux? One would say better graphic design. My KDE desktop looks pretty enough, i've spent years in xp, so KDE looks great to me. Next is usability. Well, after i tweak my KDE desktop a little i get all the usability i need, i do all the things that i want to do. OK what else does OS X have that linux doesn't? It has better apps. OK, that might be true. I don't know how many apps OS X has, but if they are close to 16000, how do you expect them all to be as good, as the best. windows has the same problem, too many apps, when OS X gets popular enough we will see a big amount of bad apps. So, what do we see? I don't need a mac, linux is good enough. OK, is this the blub OS paradox?
OS X is more usable: it's got a very wide set of features, and they're each extremely polished and designed to be fast and stay out of your way - unlike many of their Linux counterparts.
Mac developers are regarded as among the best out there. Look at Adium vs. Pidgin: the one is a much better-designed product. Although, of course, iChat's pretty excellent to begin with. That's one example out of hundreds: I've found that whenever I need something done on a Mac, there's an app that does it superbly.
You're allowed to not use a Mac, and nobody here would pressure you into getting one. But don't make statements when you have no clue what you're talking about. I wouldn't profess to make statements about more involved variants of Linux, because I at least know that I know next to nothing.
the problem with linux is that you spend a good amount of time tweaking it to get 80% of the usability of a mac.
When I used ubuntu full time for 2 years I twice had to spend close to a full day getting my sound to work again after I did an apt-get upgrade. Copy and paste didn't always work between apps. There is no photoshop. Flash was buggy on linux back then (i have no idea if it is now) and I had to reinstall flash a few times after updating firefox.
There isn't any major thing one can point to with linux and say "that is the problem". Instead it's a long list of issues that suck time and ultimately productivity.
Actually, it wasn't until I got a Mac that I found Coda, which is the only coding app I've ever truly fallen in love with. I've coded much better on my Macbook than I ever did using an HP desktop.
I wouldn't use that to argue that OS X is necessarily better than other operating systems, but as an individual case to remind you that when you make your OWN case, you're relying not on facts but on arbitrary whims of your own. The rest of us know it: stop pretending like you dictate fact.
And, by the way, your entire post reeked of condescension, a tad ironically.
This is going to be voted down into oblivion, but he's pretty much right; too many people treat being "creative" as a lifestyle. Having vague artistic or musical aspirations doesn't make you creative, creating something does.
Yeah. I'd guess there are just as many people using Linux and not getting any coding done. That's a flaw with humanity in general - not in Apple users. Similarly, I'd bet that some people spend all their time using HN and not getting any startups done.
Some people use Linux and focus on e.g. learning about advanced networking or systems administration stuff over programming. Or because nothing else works on their old hardware, etc. Not everybody uses it because they're a programmer.
And some people use Apple because they want to write music with GarageBand, or because they're looking for a good way to edit their films, or because they're interested in designing iPhone apps. What I'm trying to say is, don't pigeonhole an OS's users.
As for stereotyping Mac users as "creative" types, though, that has been part of Apple's marketing. I definitely agree that it was a cheap shot, but it's not exactly coming out of nowhere.
Your stereotype of "most Mac users" may be a bit dated. Lots of people own Macs for reasons that have nothing to do with being (or appearing) creative.
Since when does using a Mac mean you're an aspiring artist who fails to actually create anything?
That would be when someone makes a generalization. I'd suggest that it's always dangerous to generalize when talking about people's lifestyles and habits.
It's the idea that the person sitting there working on a mac must be creative b/c he has the good taste to own a mac, the machine of choice of graphic designers, marketers, and other creative types.
See, maybe it's where I hail from (New Jersey), but I've never seen the mindset that Apple = creative. Me and other Mac users talk a lot about our Macs because a lot of us are just finding out how to do stuff, and if somebody else brings up the stereotype of artsy-fartsy we jump into character... but I haven't seen anybody walking around with this "I own a Mac" self-importance. There's a lot of "Boy am I glad I have a Mac" mentality, but that's about it.
Actually, the most pretentious lad I know uses a Windows because he's too artsy to use something that's accepted by the artistic majority.
Knowing _why, if he expanded it out into a full article it would involve cartoon weasels, a grayscale cardboard-cutout version of Lee Iacocca and a smoked ham.
I really like that quote. Probably one of the more insightful quotes i've read recently. If more people created things that were a fan of the scene in which they made something would only improve. On the flip side, you have to acknowledge the quality of the creations, which can only improve with the number of creative contributions.
man I'm really thinking about leaving this site. people ask questions on here and sometimes they don't get past 1... (when they are legit) and things like this... get 11!!
When I was a writer for Wired News, it was always exasperating to see the previous day's stats and find that the story with the word "iPod" in the title got 5 times the pageviews of the "hard stories" on topics like privacy breaches or environmental waste.
But them's the breaks.
It's not a vote on the True Merit of a submission -- it's just a nod to something you happen to have found interesting that day.
If you're going to leave, just leave. There's no need to waste our time telling us about it. I'm not trying to be (overly) harsh, but I'm pretty sure there are far more people than just me who are tired of wasting time reading comments from people threatening to leave or bitching about a post that got too high on the homepage.
