When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try".
Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't able to transfer that understanding to another.
When I think of critiques, I often thing of this quote from the book "Art & Fear":
Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward:
What was the artist trying to achieve?
Did he/she succeed?
The third's a zinger:
Was it worth doing?
Those first two questions alone are worth the price of admission. They address art at a level that can be tested directly against real-world values and experience; they commit you to accepting the perspective of the maker into your own understanding of the work.
The article seems to me just a regular criticism, not her saying she could do better?
Counterpoint to your view on critics. A discerning audience is equally as important to a thriving culture as artists. If critics just clap their hands whenever someone tries to make something, granting that making a bad work of art is often just as difficult as making a good one, we get junk. I don't see why the perspective of the maker is relevant at all.
“You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.” - Pauline Kael
This didn't read at all as "I could have done it better" and there's no way for any one person to create that movie, so of course she couldn't have done it better. Every single criticism of any kind will read as "I could have done it better" because the criticism points out flaws in the thing.
People increasingly do not understand that there can be nuanced criticism of things they liked.
It seems like most people can still understand, "I didn't care for it." Even if sometimes even that's too much to bear.
But I've observed that the expansion into, "I noticed some problems, and I'll articulate them" seems to get bluntly polarized into something much less generous.
"I'd like to see you do better" is a run of the mill response to criticism. Which overall demonstrates a lack of maturity / confidence in ones own taste.
For the record, I loved the movie. I thought some parts were odd. I found this piece interesting.
This is the person who created one of the translations this movie is based on (arguably THE translation Nolan based it on), so they - literally as it goes - indeed have tried and done better.
It’s a magazine that I pay money for. I’m allowed to have an opinion on the reviews they include, and yes, some reviews are unnecessary in the sense that they are overly critical just for the sake of it.
I don’t think Wilson’s translation is very good, and ergo I think a snarky review putting down a film is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.
Do you have an opinion yourself? Because "anyone worth listening to" is not a comment with content.
Furthermore, it's simply not true. Lattimore is generally considered to be the most authentic translation. There are plenty of criticisms of the Wilson translation that aren't culture war complaints. You seem to have the impression that they are, which is factually wrong.
If you don't care about authenticity, well, the Wilson one doesn't win any aesthetic awards either. It translates polytropos, a notoriously complex and multi-faceted word, as complicated.
There are hundreds of such examples. Lattimore translates one line as "Troy's sacred citadel," whereas Wilson chooses "Holy town of Troy." It's dumbed down and artless.
And we haven't even gotten to the ideological choices of certain word translations, but I won't get to that here.
Wilson wrote in great and excruciating detail about why she chose “complicated” as the translation, yet you dismiss it as if if was some sort of casual, thoughtless decision: https://emily613.substack.com/p/on-complicated
Rest assured that she’s given more thought to every single word in that poem than almost anyone else alive.
Wilson’s translation is in my reading queue before I see the film, but whether I like it or not is completely irrelevant to the quality of the work, which is best assessed by the folks who actually study this stuff for a living.
I see nothing tangible in your comment other than “I think it’s artless and dumb,” which is not as convincing as you seem to think.
Translating the Odyssey is not some new thing. There are dozens of other translations in English, and yet pretty much all of them have put just as much or more effort into questions like these...and yet few are as artless and bland as "complicated."
If you actually spend some time looking into scholarly discussion of the translation... it's seen as quite deficient and indeed cuts out a lot of meaning in the original Greek.
But you don't even need to do that. Just get a PDF of Fagles or Lattimore and compare lines word for word to Wilson.
And if you don't have an opinion yourself, and I'm guessing you haven't read any other translation, or perhaps even Wilsons? Which means you're just arguing with me because what... some culture war thing? There is such a weird obsession with defending this translation, ostensibly from people that haven't even read it or other translations. So absurd.
I have to steal part of the discussion at the Guardian for this - I have read neither translation but this is illuminating and unhelpfully makes me want to read both:
Compare the opening lines:
Fagles:
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Wilson:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
The Wilson translation is TOO distilled/simplified for me. It reads something like Hemingway or a hard-boiled noir detective story.
The Fagles translation is much more lyrical without being overly pompous or florid, and the McKellen audio version (which is the way the story was first told, right?) is delightful. Reading along as McKellen tells the story is a joy.
However, Wilson made her translation using strict iambic pentameter and matching line count to retain the pace of the original poem. That brings something new to the table. And IIRC her simplified language is supposed to better match the nature of the poem as rooted in oral tradition. It was never meant to be complex and florid — regular folks were enjoying this story as much as anyone else.
If anything, this emphasizes that no single translation will be the definitive one. (And to call Wilson’s “artless” is quite a stretch.)
> Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton, The Death of Socrates and a biography of Seneca. She has also translated Seneca and Euripides as well as both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
It seems to me they did indeed try, and you didn't even check who the author was.
They're pretty related endeavors. Not literally the same of course, but in both cases you're trying to convey something profoundly alien (because of its age) to a modern audience.
Orthogonal to the movie/review, but if I could upvote this 100 times I would. These 3 questions were drilled to me in an elective Study of Visual Arts course in college and changed how I thought about everything and everyone.
> When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better"
This feels like a pretty shallow take on a what seemed to me like a pretty in depth and interesting review. Clearly there's a huge amount of potential ground that could have been covered in a film like this, so a critical look at what was and wasn't included, the angles that were chosen, the parts that were glossed over etc. can be revealing. Put another way, I think the review is a pretty in depth look at the questions "what was the artist trying to achieve?" and "Did they succeed?".
How is that "disarmingly straightforward"? Does that mean it's a straightforward question for anyone to answer because it's obvious, or that it's straightforward for the viewer of the art because in that case the answer could be anything? If the former, that's an incredibly difficult question to answer and kind of nullifies the point of this entire exercise.
im getting more of a "books are better than movies" feeling from the review. pretty weary take because, yeah, duh. Everyone whos read a book and then seen the adaptation figured this out when they were 9 reading Tolkien
This is one of my all time favorite games. It and Shenzhen I/O do a wonderful job of capturing the essence of what makes programming fun and put them into a game.
My biggest surprise from playing EXAPUNKS is how futile it is to try and pre-optimize a solution. I had to remind myself time and again to solve the puzzle first, then try and try and optimize it.
While the games are fun on their own, I recommend playing them at the same time as a friend. Trash-talking about finding more optimal solutions really added to the overall fun of playing the games.
> capturing the essence of what makes programming fun and put them into a game.
They definitely straddle there line between "those is a fun video game" and "it looks too much like my job" for people in the industry, but there's a whole genre of workplace simulators for doing other people's jobs vicariously. A semi truck driver would see playing a semi truck simulator in the same way, but American Truck Simulator is quite popular. Anyway, play Zachatronics games if you find them fun, but if you don't, then, uh, don't feel bad about not playing them.
There's a portion of American / European Truck Simulator's playerbase who are truckers. I've even seen a few streams from guys playing ATS/ETS in their sleeper cabs. Some of them have said the game is a way of processing the stresses in their jobs. I found that very interesting.
It's an interesting contrast to programmers and programming games. For me personally, the best way to process is to do just about anything else. Programming games are most fun when I haven't had to do much coding recently. Though sometimes, if I'm already in the flow, it's fun to play one of them and ace it since I'm already in the right mindset.
I feel the same as you about programming games, but can sort of see it for truckers, because surely some truck drivers picked that job because getting in the "flow" of long-distance driving appealed to them. I presume the trucking games try to appeal to exactly that feeling without, as you say, many of the actual stressors of the job.
So I can imagine it might let them reconnect with that feeling and be a relaxing experience much more easily than a programming puzzle game would let us reconnect with what we love about programming. Being a puzzle game it inherently will involve some frustration, which is the thing I want to escape from after a day of programming.
Too true. I used to absolutely love Zachtronics games. Then I became a professional programmer and I just can’t play the programming themed ones anymore. Kind of a shame because TIS-100 is what made me want to be a programmer in the first place.
Will the LARP costumes require suits and ties and a Company Song, ala 1960s IBM, or require scruffiness and nap rooms ala dot-com-bubble tech startups?
I used to feel the same but, with the LLM mandates made me have more fun playing Shenzhen I/O than actually programming at work. I'm one of "those people".
I have a strong feeling that with the advent of AI these kind of games are going to come back in style. Many programmers myself included aren't doing that much "coding" in the workplace anymore.
For me, it’s less that I’m burned out on coding and more of a feeling that if I’m going to be doing puzzles in assembly I mine as well just do it in real assembly.
I love the Zachtronics games and Zach-likes, but, for hardware engineering the minor differences with reality drive me crazy. Such as the clock edge timing in Shenzhen I/O and other points where something so lifelike doesn't work the way I know it does in real life.
I also get this problem when I play Linux-terminal-emulating games like the various "global hacker" CLI based games.
I enjoyed both TIS-100 and Exapunks though I didn't have the patience to finish either of them. For me they get too hard (due to constraints) too fast (if not straight up obscure).
I had a great evening with a friend playing through TIS-100 together. We plugged in two keyboards and mice so we didn't have to pass them back and forth.
This comment resonated with me in a way that few pieces of writing do. My only complaint is that it’s perhaps too short. I get the impression that you could turn this comment into longer post (with citations) and I encourage you to do so.
Can anybody point me at any interviews of Fabrice? I've looked several times (including just now) and I can't find /anything/ - am I missing something obvious?
I helped set up the first meeting between a Microsoft executive and Thomas Preston-Werner.
One of the moments that stood out to me was when Robert Youngjohns (the exec) asked Tom what it would take to have GitHub move to Azure. I was surprised that Tom had a response ready, saying that IOPS were really important and that virtual disks weren’t fast enough.
I think Slate can get it shipped, that won’t be the issue.
The issue is that Slate has completely underestimated customer preference for four door vehicles.
Two door vehicle variants have absolutely died off in the market and I’d say with good reason.
Find a two door Jeep Wrangler. You’ll find 20-30 four door jeeps before you find a two door.
Can you even imagine in 2026 the idea of an Accord Coupe, a Camry Solara, Volkswagen Eos/Cabriolet, Ford Explorer/Bronco 2-door, Civic Coupe, Ford ZX2, Chevy Cavalier 2-door, the list just goes on and on.
Back in the day chopping off two doors was a semi-legitimate way to get a barebones base model or I guess look cooler or something. Honestly, I don’t understand how the practicality trade-off ever made sense.
Maybe in the days before heavily automated assembly lines, two door vehicles were legitimately cheaper to make?
> I don’t understand how the practicality trade-off ever made sense.
I did over 100k kilometers in two/three door vehicles. Back seat never had any passengers in them. Meanwhile it was easier to get into my car, visibility was better and the car overall looked better. Less things to break. Less weight. In my specific vehicle the three door variant had pillarless windows.
I can understand your anecdote and even agree with it conceptually, but I don’t think the market agrees with you.
For ease of getting into the car, consumers clearly prefer the crossover SUV as the king of in/out ease.
For having less things to break and having a lighter car, I’m not sure those things are very common buyer sentiments as they relate to a four doors. I’ve never had anything related to my door break. The weight of my vehicle has never impacted me. I don’t even know how much my vehicle weighs.
As far as visibility, that’s just something where older cars always win out because of differences in crash and rollover safety standards.
I’m talking about a vehicle that you can buy in either two or four door version. In that direct comparison the two door wins in ease to get in to, visibility, weight and less complexity. If you don’t use the rear seat the two door is a no-brainer.
Vehicle weight in many countries is important for tax, registration, insurance, fuel economy.
> Two door vehicle variants have absolutely died off in the market and I’d say with good reason.
People looking for a four door will walk away from a two door, and people looking for a two door will grudgingly accept it? Because either you get a small four door truck, or you pay for a f-150 cause you can still get that with two doors... but not if you want any of the neat features... no electric single cable f-150, no single cab f-150 with the generator output. (at least when I last looked)
But if part of the pitch for the Slate is it shouldn't be very long, you can't put four doors and have any bed left. Unless you go cabover, but I don't know how many people would consider a cabover these days... VW and Toyota vans were cabover through the 80s, but I don't know how you pass safety tests when the drivers knees are the crumple zone.
I think the truth of the matter is that the middle class no longer buys second cars or cars meant to perform one specific utility. Whatever car you buy has to fit all your needs.
The other thing is that a four door truck has both interior and exterior cargo space. If you have a two door truck you don’t have a place to put significant cargo in a place with locking doors. If you have a four door Ford Maverick you can lift the rear seats and stick a lot of luggage back there in the locked area rather than in the bed.
Essentially, you buy a Maverick and you get all the benefits of two types of vehicles.
I can buy a Slate with 2 doors and the price is under $30k which is awesome. But if I buy an F-150 for $40-45k it has 6 seats (front bench option) and it can be my primary family vehicle that replaces a minivan. It can also tow a trailer with significant weight or hold 1,000 pounds of gravel in the bed since it’s a body on frame half ton truck.
The reason the Ford Maverick doesn’t offer a two door is exactly the same: the primary buyer is using it for all the things you’d use a 4 door SUV or sedan for.
I don’t think the buyer of the Slate exists in significant quantities. Even work trucks seem to be purchased in 4 door variants often so you can fit a crew of workers inside. That’s what they’re called a “crew cab.”
In most places if I need a long bed I can just get a longer vehicle. I have a family member with an F-250 that has the extended cab and the 8 foot bed. Yeah, it’s a huge truck. But they don’t live in New York City or Chicago, and the length of their vehicle is never a problem. But what is a problem is if they can’t fit drywall in the bed, they can’t lock up their gear in the back seat, and they can’t carry four people in the vehicle.
If the market for the Slate existed there would be 2-door variants of the Chevy Colorado, Ford Ranger, and Ford Maverick already on the market.
demohgraphics with less and less chidlren being born and more and more single occupant households would beg to disagree with you, there surely is pretty big market for 3 doors cars
obviously 5 doors cars will suit bigger number of users, but many people just don't care
I mean my mother has some small Yaris which has 5 doors, but the back seat (height/head space) is so small I can't sit there anyway, so what's the point...
Btw. I am pretty sure cabriolets are still being produced, so are coupes, and obviously these are always 2 doors cars, those are not very good examples supporting your statement.
Also the new Suzuki Jimny was at release sold out for months/years in preorders.
All of this is valid reasoning, and honestly, so many 2-door vehicles have left the market that it almost seems like there must be some level of unfulfilled demand. Just like how full size sedans have been discontinued all over the place but the Camry still sells big numbers: all the buyers have had to move by necessity to Honda Accord and Toyota Camry.
However, if you are bringing up about the Jimny I assume you are not thinking in the context of the US or European market (the Jimny was largely pulled from Europe since it couldn’t meet emissions standards, and Suzuki does not sell cars in the US/Canadian market).
In the US there basically aren’t any 2 door vehicles outside of specialty or performance cars. Similar to the station wagon situation, they’re almost all imported from Europe and from brands like BMW and Audi.
There’s a long list of discontinued vehicles in the rear view mirror.
The only new 2-door vehicle released that I can think of is the Ford Bronco and the new Honda Prelude that is just coming out, which Honda has already made a statement saying it’s a low volume vehicle (it’s a very unappealing vehicle, basically a very expensive non-performance coupe).
Brands that no longer sell any convertible in the US that once did:
Some of those makes you list only sold convertibles that were extremely niche, short lived, and/or incredibly ancient history. I wouldn’t use them as practical examples.
We'll know the price in two more weeks. I'm yolo'ing it and I can't wait for my little orange-wrapped pickup.
So far their manufacturing and progress videos are quite impressive. The fact there's 25-50+ basically production-ready prototypes if not more now driving around their factory and doing testing compared to most of the other vaporware companies out there has me holding out strong.
(How many Elios are out there doing testing? How many TELOs? Oof.)
Tangentially related: Since you are at Texas Instruments, I wonder if you could find out what the status is of the intellectual property for the TI Explorer lisp machines. I know who owns the IP for Genera, but wasn’t able to find out about TI’s lisp OS
It's like calling "a bill recently introduced by Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan" ... "California's new bill". It's not California's anything, and won't be unless/until it becomes part of California's legal code.
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