The difference for me has been the Apple Pencil. Now I don’t view the iPad as trying to replicate the mouse and keyboard experience, because it’s something different. For notes, brainstorming, research ideas—something where I don’t want a keyboard—the iPad with Pencil has been excellent.
I'm not sure this is the best defense of the publishing industry. That $35 ticket price for a hardcover can be avoided by buying used, renting, or an ebook (if cheaper). It's true that a physical copy grants you perpetual ownership, but the general public doesn't seem to value this that much, especially for a new copy. With the barriers to editing, formatting, promotion, and distribution never being lower, publishers need to make a better case for their form of the product other than "it's not that expensive historically."
I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.
> he was working as an instructor (not a professor)
No he eventually became a full professor too.
"He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary(equivalent to $68,000 in 2025), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students.[g] In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research. After a struggle over two years, he reached an agreement with the university that he would keep his title and give the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class. On October 18, 1979, the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry."
> In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research.
I thought the whole point of getting tenure is that you can't get fired.
Yes that’s true, but I was referring to the line where it said he was making more money as a writer, which was before he became a tenured professor. In any case, we’re both addressing the point that he did have an academic career aside from writing.
I've read his biography. It was definitely intentional - and of course making a living by writing was a big factor. But he just didn't like the academic environment or his colleagues.
I think this also creates a vulnerability where, the more time and effort is spent to craft the “correct” solution, it becomes easier to dismiss topics out of hand. Even if our modeling tools have changed, emotions and the human mind have not.
For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically. Old English makes more sense if you’re aware of Frisian, Dutch, and other non-Scandinavian Germanic languages, since that’s the area it originated from. German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica).
> For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically.
...it does. That's why the form of the word is "Germanic". That's what it means.
There are different levels at which you can be related to something. In this case the contrast is between Indo-European languages related to German and Indo-European languages not related to German (except through the shared ancestor called proto-Indo-European).
> German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica).
I suspect the reason for that is that the first of each of those pairs is the native word and the second is borrowed from the English linguistic terminology.
There isn’t one singular “German.” Sure, there’s a standard form in the country Germany, but the language family is more diverse than that. My point is that the English terminology fuses the language family with the modern country of Germany.
> There isn’t one singular “German.” Sure, there’s a standard form in the country Germany, but the language family is more diverse than that.
This is a statement with no implications; "Germanic", in its meaning "related to German", will mean exactly the same thing regardless of which dialect you designate as "German".
Compare how "canids" are the same taxonomical group of animals regardless of which animal within them is called the "canine".
There’s a page “Robert’s comments on Tim’s MIT trip” that says:
“I hope this does not offend Brewster, but I hope, probably in vain, that the commercialists will stay out of the Web world. Selling information is like selling air and water to me, though of course you need to pay the people who provide the information. Your comment already points out some of the bad side-effects of selling per access, or worse, tariffs per type of information or per item! Like: today's newspaper is 10CHF because there is this item in it which everyone wants to know about.”
Interesting too that an article
on the front page the other day was about microtransactions for news.
The problem of viable news business models persists, and micro-payments have been proposed, but I have yet to see a viable implementation. Also, I think paying per news story isn't the right level of granularity. Articles that are less popular also need to be written, and the people that wrote them need food, too.
You can write your posts in Markdown, use Obsidian to sync them across devices, and render the pages in Quarto. This might not let you publish from mobile, but you can at least write them anywhere you want.
I saw a comment recently that described the shift to a "consumer economy." Relative to boomers, millennials have increased access to goods and services like high-definition televisions, computers, international travel, and luxury foods (e.g., avocado toast). But in terms of wealth and assets, millennials have reduced or less feasible access to things like home ownership or college degrees (not to mention childcare or healthcare), compared to boomers. Though the causes of this shift are up for debate, it does seem that boomers had an easier path to ownership or growth, while millennials and beyond face more rent-seeking obstacles.
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