jan korbel

Buckle up, I’m going all meta on you with this one. But don’t worry, there’s a drawing in there.

I felt, I have a grasp on the concept of how Intelligence differs from Knowledge and Wisdom. When I tried to put it into words, I probably failed. But just now, a picture came to my mind. I suspect my long hours with an unnamed turn based strategy have something to do with it, nonetheless, this metaphor came to me:

Intelligence is our army of soldiers and weaponry we use to conquer Knowledge. Knowledge is the piece of land we control. The dots on an infinite map. With enough Knowledge in our possession, Wisdom emerges. Wisdom is the ability to see connections among the dots of Knowledge and (besides other benefits) shows us new land to conquer.

You see, this is not war for a finite resource that we steal from someone else. Knowledge is boundless as is the Wisdom it produces. And our growth of Knowledge and Wisdom will have positive impact on our Intelligence in the next turn.

It is a self-propelling mechanism. Not all self-propelling mechanisms are necessary good, but this one is a product of Evolution. We may be the branch that fails but who says She plays with just our planet. The Lady will get it right somewhere.

I wanted to share five paragraphs of customer support conversation I’ve had with the rest of the team (two other guys). As I’ve IMed with one of the guys few minutes ago, I automatically went for the IM window. But first thing that stopped me was I remembered that sometimes the IM does not send longer messages. So I am thinking: “OK, there has to be some better way.”

Then it clicked: “Oh, wait, this is the sort of thing we have Basecamp account for!” And that led me to realizing one obvious disadvantage of abstract software.
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Matt Gemmel in thoughtful essay:

We forget that physical objects are also just specific embodiments – or presentations – of their content and function. A paperback book and an ebook file are two embodiments of the text they each contain; the ebook isn’t descended from the paperback. They’re siblings, from different media spheres, one of which happens to have been invented more recently.

The biggest intellectual stumbling-block we’re facing is the fallacy that just because physical embodiments came first, they’re also somehow canonical.
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That’s what [Jony] Ive is talking about, I think. He’s not saying that skeuomorphic or embellished design is “bad” in any absolute sense, but rather that it’s false. It’s obviously false on the visual level, but the issue runs much deeper: it’s false because it implies that you can generalise experiences from different realms of interaction. It’s making promises that not only inevitably fail to deliver in some way, but also actually compromise the uniqueness, and quality, and essence of what you’re creating.

Timo Arnall writes:

We must abandon invisibility as a goal for interfaces; it’s misleading, unhelpful and ultimately dishonest. It unleashes so much potential for unusable, harmful and frustrating interfaces, and systems that gradually erode users and designers agency. Invisibility might seem an attractive concept at first glance, but it ignores the real, thorny, difficult issues of designing and using complex interfaces and systems.

Paul Graham has written another one of his essays.

Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds, that’s the real recipe.

Reading Cap Witkins’ essay “Death of the Free Web” I have a though that the once rogue 37signals-ish view, that there should be more web apps build for profit, is going mainstream? It’s about time, I suppose.

We’re discovering that you can’t create that sort of passion with free.
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And so we’ve begun searching for and creating services that not only solve problems, but also solve them in a way that puts the customer first. In doing so we’re creating smaller, but more lasting and passionate communities of people that believe not only in the products, but in the vision and principles behind them.

The free web is dead. Good riddance.

Via @janrezac

As much as engineers like to joke about our counterparts in sales and marketing, the most successful sales and marketers think like engineers.
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That’s when I realized – it’s not just that developers don’t see themselves as potentially amazing marketers. They might not even realize how deep and interesting of a field marketing is.

— Tal Raviv writes on his Customers over code blog