I think one of my biggest problems with Unity is that it enabled a massive market of me-too "business men" who "employ" unpaid and underpaid interns to hack together asset-store-ware they then dump on the app stores. When a gem game stutters, people blame their crappy phones rather than the company who probably stiffed its developers.

I've seen a lot of my friends do this constant churn of signing up for the next game shop that will hire them. Places that throw many, many red flags the second you even walk in the door. They work hard to get a game done on a budget 1/10th what it should be, the game ends up being a flop, and they never get a chance to grow their portfolio or skills to eventually get a better job.

This isn't something you can lay at the feet of Unity Technologies, but I do think it is a reason to avoid Unity: the job ecosystem is just awful.

The materials he chose were meant to make home ownership accessible to the common man. Your own link to the Jacob's House talks about Mr. Jacobs being "a young newspaper man". The $5000 cost in 1935 is like $120k today. Yeah, if 1500sqft houses cost $120k today, I could believe a journalist just starting out on their career could afford the mortgage on it.

Are houses L-shaped now? Yeah, sure. Are they accessible to the common person? Not at all. People are talking the Little Golden Book version of Wright's philosophy.

Also, my house is not L-shaped. Jacobs got 25% more house for 1/6th the inflation adjusted price. He got a study and a shop; I'm performing my own manual labor in my back yard to build a gazebo that I hope will work as a shop for me. As a newspaper hack with a likely-unemployed wife he got a house near a lake. My electrical engineer with a master's degree wife working at a major military research institution and I got a drainage ditch that kinda looks like a stream when it rains really hard. And we're in our 40s. Everyone massively missed Wright's point.

Being only a short walk from Fallingwater, we spent some time there every day, including one day when we had the whole house to ourselves and had dinner on the terrace. We each tried to gain a sense of what it was like to live there, rather than just be a museum tourist. A couple of folks played card games sitting at the kitchen table all night. One person curled up with a book in one of the tall, narrow bay windows. I laid out on the floor of the living room and stared at the ceiling, something I do at home sometimes. I thought laying on the floor would give me a feeling of ownership, of doing whatever I wanted with a place, because you couldn't do that as a regular tourist.

It... kinda worked. Not really. It was too surreal. I don't know if I'd ever be able to feel like Fallingwater was home.

My wife and kids and I visited Taliesin West last summer as part of a Grand Canyon trip. I had much the same feeling there, while listening to the tour talk about FLW and his apprentices living there, that I couldn't imagine it as a real living space. Also, I started getting real cultish vibes from the stories of some of the stuff the apprentices went through. Of course, Scottsdale, AZ wasn't any cooler back then than it is today and they built the place themselves, by hand, without any air conditioning. More than one apprentice's marriage ended in divorce over the place because their wives couldn't stand living in tents in the desert without power and running water during the construction years. I was also struck by how I would not expect anyone to even be allowed to bring a spouse on any similar apprenticeship in the modern day, but that's a different issue.

Between all of those experiences and also hearing the stories of how much the wives of FLW's clients would fight with him over kitchens, my own career as a consultant, not being able to imagine telling a client they couldn't have the kitchen they want, and other issues, in recent times I've lost some respect for FLW.

I don't think his Usonian concepts have had much impact on society. For one thing, most people don't even know Usonian is a word, as evidenced when I see them try to come up with a word for a North American who isn't Canadian or Mexican (USian has to win a prize for finding an even more awkward term than Usonian).

That leaves all of his contract work, which was frequently deeply flawed in construction. Some of that defectiveness was due to him experimenting with new construction techniques that eventually got perfected and are no longer so flawed, but there are still many core issues. I would come home from visiting his works and I would wrack my brain over how to employ his ideas of incorporating nature into living spaces before I finally remembered I live in Virginia: nature here is primarily composed of mosquitoes a this breathable water we call "air".

His designs are all-or-nothing, it must be employed as a unified whole. It doesn't look right if it's a single piece of furniture or a window treatment in an otherwise normal house. Putting a 50" flat screen in Fallingwater would ruin the place. Got walls at 90 degree angles to each other? Sorry about your luck! It ends up looking like wearing cargo shorts and a Fedora. If you have a regular ass house like every other "impoverished" slob with a quarter acre lot in suburbia, FLW-style design does not work. I say "impoverished" because FLW-style designs are exclusively the purvue of the ultra rich. To have a house that coordinated, that put together, takes "I make people work overtime for me and I don't even know their names" kind of money.

In 2024, I spent $750,000 on a 1200 sqft rancher built in 1962. Less than a decade before that, Kentuck Knob had been completed for about $96,000. My house may not be as pretty, but at least the roof doesn't leak and the stove can fit a cake.

WTF is that supposed to mean? I'm sorry, maybe I'm being dense. I can't figure out what "look around corners" is supposed to mean. "Think outside the box," I guess? Why "look around corners?"

I mean, maybe I do get it. Altman has a weird face that looks like you can't predict where his eyes are based on where his head is. "Shifty," one might say. But I doubt that's what Iger meant.

It's dumb. It's dumb corporate speak. I'm so sick of this kind of stuff getting a pass. We used to bully people over using the word "synergy." Let's make america anti-corporate-weasel again.

My dad has also started sharing with me links on Facebook to pop songs that have been re-arranged in different genres. This was a big area of fun for a number of folks in my family several years ago as we discovered YouTube artists like Chase Holfelder who put significant effort into making very high quality rearrangements. But I kept noticing these weird issues in the new songs.

I've gotten to where I can identify an AI generated song almost immediately: there's a weird, high frequency hiss in the mix that sounds like heavy noise getting to overcome compression artifacts but the source from which it's coming should be clean. There's a general lack of enthusiasm to the lyrics and a boring, nonsensical progression to the lyrics on original arrangements. Sometimes, the person generating the song tries to hide that last issue by generating instrumentals only or they use one of those try-to-hard-to-sound-badass Country Rock genres that are popular on Tik Tok to stick on top of clips from the TV show Yellowstone (WTF is with that?!), but then when I check the details, there's an obviously AI cover art for artists I've never heard of. The accounts will be anthologies full of these artists that have never existed.

So, I know people keep parroting "a good artist can use any tool". But I've yet to see it. All this "democratizing art" (didn't know anyone was gate keeping it to begin with, certainly have not seen any lack of talent online in several years) doesn't seem to be producing results. It becomes pretty obvious very quickly it's all just a pump and dump scheme to Get Them Clicks.

I think principles are important. Especially when it comes to art, principle might be all we have. Going back to the crypto example, NFTs were art that real people had made. In some cases, very good art. People railed against NFTs despite the quality of the art. That is being against something on-principle. Comparatively, if my local grocery chains were owned by neonazis, I'd have a much harder time of standing on principle, giving that doing so may have a negative impact on my ability to survive and prosper.

AI Gen works, on the other hand, most often do not come with readily available marking that it is AI Gen. What people are complaining about is the lack of quality in the work. If they accuse a poorly human-written article of being AI Gen, that's just a mistake. But the general case is a legitimate evaluation of the quality of the material and the conditions under which it was made and presented.

In my own case, while I certainly have plenty of "principled" reasons to dislike AI Gen works, I also dislike it because it's just garbage. Oh yeah, sure, it's impressive that a computer can spit out reasonable content at all. It would equally be impressive for a chimpanzee to start talking in full sentences. That doesn't mean I'm going to start going to the chimpanzee for dissertations on the human condition.