ayushgta

Eigenharp is fascinating but very expensive. Artiphon is also very interesting.

I highly recommend "Essays After Eighty"

Sometime in early 2000s, I had a meeting with Chris. It was early days for them and they were running out of their home. This was the time when Flickr was a darling of the valley (and wasn't acquired by Yahoo yet).

Chris and I were talking, sitting around a dining table with a bench and some chairs. I remember there was a lot of light and windows all around. Don (his son) was going in and out of the house taking delivery of some hardware/servers. Toni (his wife) was handling customer support from a room upstairs. And there was a dog, I think. That's it!

It was a breath of fresh air for me! In a place that has a deep-rooted infatuation with building products on raised capital, they were running their company as a small business. They were going up against giants like Snapfish, Shutterfly, Google, Yahoo and a bunch of others in a crowded space. Unlike those giants, they were charging money for their service! And they had the audacity of doing it under the name SmugMug. I recall Chris grinning about how much some people hated the name SmugMug!

This was the only time I met them. I've thought back to that meeting many times over the years. It was inspiring for me to see software/technology being used build something for a niche need... with a clear focus on running it as a small business. I found that to be uplifting then and I still do today.

Every couple of years I'd go to their site and see how they continued to grow. And each time it would bring a smile to my face. That they ended up buying Flickr is so darn sweet... I could not hoped for a better cherry-on-top to how I personally view the SmugMug story.

The "glitch" css animation on the title of this article is sweet.

Weird, I don't see any mention of accessibility.

Indeed! Other than examples like back button, scroll hijack, password criteria most degraded user experiences mentioned in the article are side effects of a desperation to monetize. These articles bitch and moan about the bloat and degrading user experiences. I'm sure it feels good to vent. However the real challenge here is coming up with a healthy economic model around content publishing.

I view this conversation as having three facets:

1. Evolutionary disposition. We do have canine teeth and like underbluewaters said "Animals eating other animals is the basis of much of life on this planet.” This is also alluded to in oh_sigh's statement "we have all the equipment and desire to eat other animals”.

2. Social conditioning. Many humans have been eating meat for generations. They have been eating it some form since they were born. The society en masse around them does not see anything wrong with it. There is an inadequate opposing force in social conditioning to a balance positive bias towards eating meat. Social conditioning plays a huge role. For example. there is social conditioning and bias against eating dogs or horses. Pigs, cows and lamb.... not so much.

3. Intellectual choice. Unlike other animals, humans are intellectually evolved and we act guided by our moral compass. Furthermore, as the most intelligent species on this planet, we have a fiduciary responsibility to other species that we share this planet with. Not always but often enough, the right intellectual choice is against our evolutionary disposition and social conditioning.

If you take evolutionary disposition and social conditioning out of the picture and view killing and eating other sentient beings purely on the basis of intellectual merit, where does your moral compass point to? When framed that way, I feel that the signal-to-noise ratio is improved in framing the morality question.

I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted. I, for one, completely agree with your accessment of how future generations could look at this. The comparison with racism and sexism also does not seen far fetched to me.

I imagine reading articles like this from the perspective of an intelligent alien species who do not kill other sentient beings for sustenance, and for whom the idea is, well alien :)

Now imagine someone from that alien species looking at articles which casually talk about how a glorious peacock must be freshly killed or inject humouous anecdotes about the process. Imagine them looking at TV shows, magazines and articles which go over details of skinning recently living beings and talking about the right temperature to fry or bake their flesh. When I look at cooking shows from that perspective it gives it a completely different coloring. It starts feeling kinda horrifying and at the same time morbidly funny.