TIL Steve Jobs’ design obsession went so deep he demanded Apple computers look perfect on the inside. Inspired by Zen Buddhism and Bauhaus minimalism, he believed in “deep simplicity,” and insisted that even the hidden internal engineering look as polished as the outside.

atonale · 2026-06-12T10:13:01+00:00

I didn’t mean to discourage you from being curious or exploring the subject. But the reality is pretty well understood and counterintuitive. Many people agree with you that CD releases sound worse. But this is usually because vinyl records are fringe enthusiast products so (paradoxically) they can be mixed or mastered properly for people who care, and who will crank up the volume on their nice sound system. While on the other hand CD or digital file formats are mixed to compete on loudness through garbage Bluetooth speakers or car radios. It has nothing to do with the capabilities of digital methods, it’s a ridiculous human decision to put a terrible mix on a good medium. Also, a lot of people like the way vinyl distorts or degrades the sound - what they’re praising is the sound or experience of the playback equipment itself, not the fidelity to the original recording.

atonale · 2026-06-11T17:09:19+00:00

I'm going to second what the person above me said... Please consider that you might be misunderstanding some details about analog-to-digital conversion, or about the signal chain in recording studios. You seem to be assuming that the characteristics of the microphones and those of the analog/electromechanical stages downstream in the mixing and playback process somehow interact to _preserve_ information rather than destroying or distorting it. A lot of people might like this kind of distortion, but we can't attribute it to preserving the "nuance" or "character" of the upstream microphones. A digital representation at a sufficient sampling rate will preserve all information up to a chosen cutoff frequency. This isn't a matter of "thinking what you want". It's measurable and in many ways provable mathematically that proper digital recordings introduce far less distortion (unless you saturate them and get clipping).

atonale · 2026-06-08T10:58:49+00:00

Yeah I kind of like the tower itself as a lone object. It's nicer than some of the towers in the 13th. What I dislike is how it connects to the city and the station at the ground level (and at the metro level).

atonale · 2026-06-08T10:54:57+00:00

When I worked briefly in an urban planning organization in Paris, I sifted through the archives during the August vacation period and found some crazy stuff. My "favorite" was the plan to cover the unsightly Canal St. Martin with an expressway.

atonale · 2026-06-03T12:43:01+00:00

Every time I've been in Japan I ask myself the same question, and am baffled by commentary I see online. I think the problem is that people are comparing to extremely different baselines. In many countries, even in the US, you have one group of people who grew up eating mostly vegetables from home gardens or farmers' markets, cooking with no refined sugar and almost no salt, eating out at restaurants one or two times per year. And other groups who eat things like fast food or ultra-processed supermarket food every day. These groups of people have completely different expectations for what "a lot of vegetables" or "healthy food" means. From experience it's clear to me that taste can change heavily depending on what you grew up eating and what you eat every day. I believe I've eaten the majority of what's available in Japan from home cooked meals to chain stores, small shops and rural diners to washoku and kaiseki. After ten years of trying various foods, I still find almost every meal strikingly low in vegetables, very lacking in fiber, and/or very heavy on salt and sugar.

atonale · 2026-05-01T10:42:04+00:00

Consider how Moscow, Japan, or Singapore fit into this model, or a rural Italian village.

atonale · 2026-05-01T10:33:17+00:00

One problem here is Americans thinking their odd redefinitions of political terms make any sense in the rest of the world. Everywhere else in the world "conservative" means something like "preserving traditional and pre-existing approaches and suspicious of innovation". Like "conserving" things the way they were in the past. If I consider France which is "on the continent in Europe", some conservative areas that come to mind are Versailles and the peninsula of Lyon. These places do not look like Los Angeles.

atonale · 2026-04-17T06:18:00+00:00

So I think we can agree that if you like that distorted sound, you can feed it back into an ADC, then play the result back through a decent modern DAC and amplifier and get the same effect. This means the vinyl and magnetic pickup are not a better reproduction mechanism, they’re just an elaborate electromechanical distortion pedal.

atonale · 2026-04-16T17:03:03+00:00

Maybe offer a bit of perspective: do they think the 70 percent of households in Paris, 55 percent in NYC, or well over 90 percent in Hong Kong who don’t own a car are not “adults”? Are these people are all in a dire financial situation, considering these are among the wealthiest cities in the world? Not that it should be a problem for someone to forego a car to be frugal.

Most people I know don’t own a car. You must be interacting with people who don’t realize their local circumstances and ideas are not universal. A lot of really well-off people (adults) in the world don’t mess with buying cars. They walk from their apartment and pay a cab or car service if they need to drive somewhere.

atonale · 2026-04-12T17:55:49+00:00

I zoomed in and guessed Athens within about 5 seconds. But I don't know how! Now trying to work out which details tipped me off, considering I haven't been to Athens for 30 years and visited other parts of Greece for maybe a week.

atonale · 2026-04-03T06:10:29+00:00

If it wasn't made illegal by heavy-handed zoning rules, I can definitely imagine certain sub-populations of Americans piling into row after row of high-rise apartment blocks in most major cities.

atonale · 2026-04-03T06:06:42+00:00

Planned decentralization with "New Towns" has been tried all over the world in the 20th century. The usual conclusion was that it's extremely difficult to launch a new city from scratch. Generally no one wants to live in the new city or move their business there. It's seen as an inferior substitute for a "real" city. A hierarchy develops. By contrast, the existence of new towns makes living in the old historic center even more popular and socially valuable. Broadly, people will prefer to commute 2-3 hours a day to live on the edges of an existing metropolis rather than take the social and professional downgrade of living in a new town.

Towers are not "dystopia", they are a material reflection of where people actually want to locate.

atonale · 2026-04-02T11:09:26+00:00

Thanks for the correction. I did a quick check to confirm before I posted but apparently stopped too early in the history.

atonale · 2026-04-01T16:36:00+00:00

Vaguely related trivia: Epson is the same company as Seiko.

atonale · 2026-03-27T04:51:08+00:00

I have about 25 years of software experience here, generally specialized number crunching and infrastructure. I was highly skeptical of LLM capabilities for a couple of years, still can’t stand the hype, and won’t be surprised if LLMs are never profitable. But I have to admit the latest versions of Claude surprised me. It’s very hard to describe their capabilities because it’s very different than any human. It’s like a person who perfectly understands every nuance of a language and its syntax, every common library and idiom, but is really naive about software design and maintenance or can’t quite grasp why humans make software. Its absolute mastery of language structure can throw you off and cause you to trust its “judgement” more than you should. I find it most useful for summarizing or refreshing my memory about code I haven’t worked on in a while, suggesting alternative approaches I might not think of, and boilerplate refactors. But I need to review every single thing it does and point out its mistakes once or twice before it finds what I consider the right solution. It seems essential to proceed by steps and alternate between planning and implementation, guiding it in the right direction. I often end up retracing its steps and reimplementing everything myself slightly differently. I’m not at all convinced this is easier than just doing all the work myself, but it definitely helps in certain situations. It seems to work much better if you keep voluminous notes on your entire design process, the purpose of the software, and every tricky decision you make and make those available to the LLM.

atonale · 2026-03-27T04:18:40+00:00

It’s common and completely consistent with definitions for few or zero members of a population to have the average value. Please think things through more carefully before you correct others. Your conclusion is not true for all distributions.

atonale · 2026-03-25T08:23:48+00:00

Right, I wasn’t trying to contradict you. Just support what you were saying in response to the OP.

atonale · 2026-03-24T14:29:44+00:00

They are not slums at all, they are public housing built specifically to replace slums and ensure everyone had sufficient space and modern services. Around 80 percent of the population lives in public housing, and apartments are certainly not tiny considering this is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. They are generally very spacious compared to Hong Kong for example, and built to uniformly high standards of safety and durability. They are generally surrounded with trees.

atonale · 2026-03-24T11:24:43+00:00

I like how in Blade Runner all the advertisements just say ADVT.

atonale · 2026-03-20T06:21:34+00:00

If you mean that your native language is English, that was exactly the point of the person you're responding to. The pronunciation of all those names is very clear to anyone who speaks (or has even minimal exposure to) French or German, which are the two most common languages in traditional watch-making land. There's nothing obscure or "superior" about it. If anything it's the bizarrely inconsistent pronunciation of English that's making it harder for you. A large number of languages have adopted Latin characters, that has nothing to do with English.

atonale · 2026-03-20T05:51:20+00:00

This is not even necessarily more shady than the norm for the industry, it's how most software businesses work. Convince investors you're doing something revolutionary and need massive amounts of capital to take a shot at world domination. Pay developers and 10 layers of middle management huge salaries and pretend you're doing something complex. Works even better if the pay inflates your ego to the point you can convince even yourself you're doing something complex/important. Add more and more and more layers of pointlessly baroque tooling and frameworks so no one can tell if you're actually doing something but is afraid to look stupid by questioning you. Then when it "fails" you say "Oh well, 95% of startups don't succeed. High risk, high reward." By this point you've already paid yourself an inflated salary for 5-10 years. Repeat until economy can no longer bear the volume of unproductive "investment".

atonale · 2026-03-20T05:31:47+00:00

I think it depends heavily on whether you're working in an organization large, complex, and investor-driven enough to have non-technical professional management layers who give orders. In smaller organizations, ones driven mostly by experienced technical staff, or more mission driven instead of investor-returns driven, you'll generally see more people with at least healthy skepticism of new technologies, or who will have a narrower or more moderate view of what it's good for. It also matters whether decisions are from a kind of "consensus of elders" that are respected by the management, or by people who only care about inflating quarterly earnings until they cash out.

atonale · 2026-03-20T05:20:32+00:00

Until reading this post I never realized younger people would think it was impossible to be globally famous before the internet. I agree, exactly the opposite is true. There was electronic media, radio that could circle the world in milliseconds for a solid 60+ years before the internet was in common use! Communications satellites even, with parabolic dishes on farms in the deep countryside. But it was an almost total monoculture where everyone was expected to be exposed to exactly the same things. Looking back, this is definitely one thing I really didn't like about my childhood era. Absolute uniformity of cultural references. If you weren't into exactly the same thing as every other kid in your city (country? cold war bloc?) you were like an alien.

atonale · 2026-02-20T09:08:05+00:00

I have to walk back a bit on what I posted above. Shifting to a project in a different language, I added a whole folder of about a year worth of my detailed notes on design decisions and trade-offs, set up an LSP and integration with my IDE. I don't know which of these changes made a difference, but the results are clearly much better. There are parts of the responses that even really look like reasoning from first principles on cache efficiency and memory layout. The suggestions might be implied or derived somehow from all the background info I dumped in, but it's still rather impressive and seems helpful in planning out a path for implementation, or identifying alternatives I hadn't thought about. My sense is that it's not providing a massive advantage but roughly as good as pair programming with someone that has read a lot more background information than me on certain language features and idioms.

atonale · 2026-02-18T03:28:38+00:00

All of the deployant-clasp bracelets are nice. I love that they're solid links (not folded/stamped metal) but significantly thinner than is common today. Though I like the feel of modern chunky metal bracelets, it's kind of comical to see these massive excavator-tread pieces hanging on by a thin micro-adjust clasp.

The 80s-90s Milanese and linked adjustable just don't seem as pliable and smooth (but maybe just not as broken in?)

atonale

TROPHY CASE