"There will be rich debates about the socioeconomic implications of Helvetica Light, and at some point, you will have to decide whether serifs are daring statements of modernity, or tools of hegemonic oppression that implicitly support feudalism and illiteracy."
The State Department has banned the use of Times New Roman and mandated Calibri in its stead, because serifed fonts are oppressive to people with reading or vision problems.
This is fantastic writing, and James should stop working for Microsoft and move to Hollywood like Barton Fink. Ok, maybe not the best example in the world..
I wasn't entirely surprised when I read your response, although I didn't know that. I sort-of suspected somebody that entertainingly frank would have to confront some PR positioning issues.
Ah fantastic. This is a great read to distract me from the Bitcoin fanatics I work with who insist “but they’ve solved the Byzantine generals problem! This is amazing technology and just wait until we find a practical application!”
This is how I feel as I research CPU vulnerability mitigations. The earth beneath us is a thin hollow shell and to keep from falling through it into the abyss we must perform abominable rites.
Every year the security researchers find new evidence that literally all computers are fundamentally and irreparably broken, every year the software engineers add mitigations to the kernel, we hope that the vulns are mitigated but we sleep a little worse at night.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 70.6 ms ] thread“You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.”
Saddest day indeed, maybe for more than just system programmers.
The State Department has banned the use of Times New Roman and mandated Calibri in its stead, because serifed fonts are oppressive to people with reading or vision problems.
Mickens is a Goddamned prophet.
https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k
https://youtu.be/D5xh0ZIEUOE
He’s at Harvard now, which I think is a step up from Hollywood.
Harvard has other fish to fry. They'll get to James when they're on top of the other stuff I guess. They let him publish https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens which is a good sign!
He’d saunter up to the microphone, and you could see the VP’s face droop…
Good times, my man. Good times.
Every year the security researchers find new evidence that literally all computers are fundamentally and irreparably broken, every year the software engineers add mitigations to the kernel, we hope that the vulns are mitigated but we sleep a little worse at night.