randomWalks

It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done.

To me, Steve Jobs stands out most for his clarity of thought. Over and over again he took complex situations, understood their essence, and used that understanding to make a bold definitive move, often in a completely unexpected direction.

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(via Camera ~ photo by bgreenlee)

I can’t pick up your standard, but you didn’t expect me to. You gave me the tools and the inspiration to pick up my own. How dare I give back anything less than my very best effort?

I was reminded of AllMusic’s biography of Miles Davis: ‘… he was in the thick of almost every important innovation and stylistic development in the music during that period, and he often led the way in those changes… It can even be argued that jazz stopped evolving when Davis wasn’t there to push it forward.’

After a couple of bizarre weeks where I attended meetings all day filled with amazing people and amazing technology, knowing that at any minute I would have to leave, HR informed me that they’d talked the insurance company into providing special coverage. Just for me. It was that important to NeXT and to Steve that they keep a nobody first-line manager they had just hired. A couple of months later they turned that into coverage for all gay employees at NeXT.

When I would criticize the decisions of record labels or phone carriers, he’d surprise me by forcefully disagreeing, explaining how the world looked from their point of view, how hard their jobs were in a time of digital disruption, and how they would come around.

Elegance, character, artistic integrity, and ruthless dedication to design can no longer be derided as luxuries of those who don’t have anything to lose.

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My own deep-seated libertarianism is probably more a conceit of modern technology than a core human trait.

24 years ago, Apple predicted a complex natural-language voice assistant built into a touchscreen Apple device, and was less than a month off.

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"This kettle was groundbreaking; it was one of the first production pieces that used an existing mold/die in its form rather than manufacturing one from scratch. The designer recycled a headlight from a pre-war car, which was flipped over to create a usable kettle. Great thinking. Designers in the age of sustainability would be wise to look backwards and record how design activity developed during the depression and into WW2. -Todd Falkowsky" (via The CANADIAN DESIGN RESOURCE » K-42 Electric Kettle)

Plenty of things in your ordinary, “small life”, would be inconceivably extravagant to your ancestors. It seems like humanity as a whole is on some sort of hedonic treadmill. I don’t think any of us, for instance, take any pleasure in the fact that we can freely shave ourselves or kick safes or go out in the rain without dying of an incurable infection, which is insane. All of human history minus the last hundred or so years people lived with this reality, and it was probably a great comfort to people to escape it, for about five seconds. Now we’re back to taking it for granted.

(oh and I would say the majority of the daily use kind of smokers I know are all over 40 and quite tweedy, if you need a source, why not try the head of the history department?)

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(via Dry Niagara Falls, 1969 | HOW TO BE A RETRONAUT)