notes.husk.org. tagged speed.

2012-05-01

post/22199282329

photo 18:01:00

joshuanguyen:

dbreunig:

Mike Krieger explains why Instagram uploads photos so quickly.
It’s slight of app.

Great deck on why speed is a feature. Esp. on mobile.

I’m a little surprised this is news to people; it took me a few months to figure out that Instagram had to be doing this, but I always think of myself as slow.
The billion dollar valuation for the company still looks high every time I see it, but the critics who suggest that sharing photographs from mobile phones is either obvious or was already solved haven’t thought at all about how well that app works. (It’s reminiscent of the dismissiveness of Twitter a few years ago, which amazingly I still hear around the office occasionally.)

dbreunig:

Mike Krieger explains why Instagram uploads photos so quickly.

It’s slight of app.

Great deck on why speed is a feature. Esp. on mobile.

I’m a little surprised this is news to people; it took me a few months to figure out that Instagram had to be doing this, but I always think of myself as slow.

The billion dollar valuation for the company still looks high every time I see it, but the critics who suggest that sharing photographs from mobile phones is either obvious or was already solved haven’t thought at all about how well that app works. (It’s reminiscent of the dismissiveness of Twitter a few years ago, which amazingly I still hear around the office occasionally.)

2012-04-06

post/20556278517

quote 01:11:10

“ The reality that many of the Avenues weren’t even paved back then, because there were no houses there that needed streets, or that the Marina in 1920 was yet to be built following the clearing of the 1915 World’s Fair are just messy facts that get in the way of a good story… as is the reality that the stretch of Stockton Street pictured in this post was a relatively low-density community then, while today it’s part of one of the highest-density communities in America (though the street hasn’t gotten any wider). ”

This Just In: Muni Used To Be Faster! from the Market Street Railway blog, in reference to this Bay Citizen story (as previously quoted here).

2009-07-19

post/144653965

photo 11:15:13

The Technium: Was Moore’s Law Inevitable?

Of course, it kind of weakens his argument, but I still find it odd that Kevin Kelly doesn’t admit anywhere in this post that the speed curve for rockets he posted turned out to be wrong.

OK, fine, it predicted the first satellite launches and Apollo, but then it broken down catastrophically. The fastest a human has ever travelled was in 1970.

Kelly does address the reason later on:

In this microcosmic realm energy is not very important. We don’t see exponential improvement in efforts to scale up, to keep getting bigger, skyscrapers and space stations.

Multi-stage chemical rockets are the only way we have to hoist payload. Unless and until we shift to nuclear rockets or tease out of particle physics some magic method of propulsion, they’re the only way we have to get to the Moon, and Saturn V and Energia are as big as we’ve made. As Charlie Stross says:

Stick a LEM on the moon and bring the contents back? Easy. Increase the mass that the LEM brings back? Very expensive — the price goes up as the sixth power of the weight you’re returning from the lunar surface (because you have to loft the heavier LEM into Earth orbit to begin with).

This doesn’t really invalidate Kelly’s argument. I just found it a bit of an odd omission.

notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.