> Esslinger had been working with Steve Jobs since 1982 and was of paramount importance for the look of Apple products as an external designer -—as of 1983 also as Corporate Manager of Design. The start of collaboration between Steve Jobs and Hartmut Esslinger went from 1982 to 1983 with “Snow White,” a new color and design concept that was the base for all future Apple products. Besides specifying certain design aspects, the concept entailed introducing a new color. The dull “greige” of the industrial and corporate workplace was to be replaced by a broken white-called “Snow White" in the US. First used for the Apple llc, this white not only made the computer esthetically compatible with living rooms but also psychologically underpinned the user-friendly menu navigation. The new “Snow White” line worked up by Hartmut Esslinger was supposed to be launched with the Macintosh Computer—originally designed by Jerry Manock-but many reasons made this impossible. So the revised version could not be introduced until later: with the Macintosh SE.
I know this book is a first hand account from Esslinger himself, but aside from your quoted passage, I've never seen Snow White refer to a specific color, only to the design language itself. Even the other mentions of Snow White in his book refer to the design language, not a color.
The first product to feature the Snow White design language was the Apple IIc, which featured a color known as "Fog" which is distinct from the Platinum used in Apple's products from 1986-1999. For a good side-by-side comparison, check out this image of an original Apple IIc (1984) and the Apple IIc Plus (1988): https://i0.wp.com/lowendmac.com/wp-content/uploads/iic-and-i...
Thanks, I was scratching my head wondering why anyone would confuse Snow White (the design language) and Platinum (the plastic shade of 80s-90s Apple devices)
It's also not nearly as good as Eric Gilliam's "How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?" https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-k... , posted here a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43295865 . That could almost have been written as a rebuttal to TFA's storytelling about unlimited researcher freedom at Bell Labs, though in fact it predates TFA by a couple of years.
I'm not sure what the moral is from this, but if Atari games are just too easy, at the same time the response of the machine-learning guys to the challenge of the NetHack Learning Environment seems to have mostly been to quietly give up. Why is generative modeling essential to finding harder challenges when NetHack is right there ...?
To be a bit cynical about it: the typical DuoLingo player has probably been misled to some extent about its effectiveness, yes, but also many of them don't particularly want to learn a new language. I suspect that they're happy to be able to play a popular mobile game that everyone else is also playing without the stigma of being a "Candy Crush addict" and "timewaster". "I'm learning a language!" is the welcome figleaf. https://youtu.be/F3SzNuEGmwQ?t=243
I've never had the pleasure of experiencing DuoLingo myself, but by all accounts it's an exceptionally time-inefficient way of learning a language. If the objective is to have fun playing a buzzy mobile game with the rest of the world then whatever, but if you actually want to make progress in a language you'd be much better advised to head over to something like Refold https://refold.la/ or Dreaming Spanish https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ . Even if you simply must have a phone app which does everything for you, you'd probably do better with something like Busuu https://www.busuu.com or Glossika https://ai.glossika.com/ .
So the AI furore is a bit ironic: people profess to hate "bullshit jobs", but if anything is a bullshit job it's probably providing the manpower for a language-learning app which doesn't actually teach languages effectively. Replacing mechanical-Turk slop with AI slop probably is a genuine productivity gain unleashed by AI here, yes? OTOH a drop in subscriber numbers and total user-hours is probably a good thing too, so don't let any of this put you off from giving up on DuoLingo.
The quality of advice on Reddit seems to be variable, unfortunately. Apparently https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese is full of people who've spent years doing Genki (https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/ , probably an even bigger sinkhole for money, time and enthusiasm than DuoLingo) with little to show for it who are determined to drag everyone else into the same crab-bucket, for instance. OTOH https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/ used to be very helpful.
> I don't know when you graduated but I've been working professionally for nearly 2 decades now and I heard the same thing when I graduated - about how it was so much easier just 5, 10, 15 years prior, how I was in for a real battle, how I had an insurmountable amount of debt given my earnings prospects.
On the whole the graduate market has indeed been getting fairly steadily worse, and student greater, for the past forty or more years, no?
But also, he didn't do the technically hardest and most impressive part, Quake, on his own. IIUC he basically relied on Michael Abrash's help to get Quake done (in any reasonable amount of time).
It wasn't that simple: in practice the arrival of the 286 in 1984 was very much only the beginning of the PC's escape from the 640KiB/1MiB limit. It wasn't until some time after the promulgation of the DOS Protected Mode Interface in 1989 that it became routine for PC applications to have unrestricted, straightforward access to all of RAM. (I'm very much relying on resources like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17274672 for the details here: I was never a serious DOS user or a DOS developer.) Still it would definitely be overstating things to say that "PC memory maxed out at 640 kilobytes" in 1993 or subsequently. It does seem possible that the author did mean to say "640 kilobytes", but really just as a snarky jab at the PC platform: PC software really was still relying on DOS extenders to make use of "extended memory" in 1993, even if they were by then doing a solid job at it.
Another possibility: apparently https://www.os2museum.com/wp/windows-nt-3-1-and-os2-memory-d... all x86 machines released before maybe 1993 are restricted to 64MiB, even under Windows NT and other fully 32-bit OSes, because the BIOS simply can't report having any more RAM than that. By early 1993 the first "service" allowing the reporting of more than 64MiB of system RAM (up to the full 4GiB supported by x86) was starting to appear on some BIOSes.
> Esslinger had been working with Steve Jobs since 1982 and was of paramount importance for the look of Apple products as an external designer -—as of 1983 also as Corporate Manager of Design. The start of collaboration between Steve Jobs and Hartmut Esslinger went from 1982 to 1983 with “Snow White,” a new color and design concept that was the base for all future Apple products. Besides specifying certain design aspects, the concept entailed introducing a new color. The dull “greige” of the industrial and corporate workplace was to be replaced by a broken white-called “Snow White" in the US. First used for the Apple llc, this white not only made the computer esthetically compatible with living rooms but also psychologically underpinned the user-friendly menu navigation. The new “Snow White” line worked up by Hartmut Esslinger was supposed to be launched with the Macintosh Computer—originally designed by Jerry Manock-but many reasons made this impossible. So the revised version could not be introduced until later: with the Macintosh SE.
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