I read about a Japanese flying to Indonesia in 1959 (the president of the country was courting her). She flew from Tokyo to Hong Kong, then to Bangkok, then to Singapore before making the last hop to Jakarta.
That would have been right around the time that airlines were transitioning to jet aircraft. Back before jet travel it could take a whole week to reach the far east.
In regards to Suharto, it seems the 1965 coup attempt that got him into power was a surprise even to the US embassy in Jakarta, but of course they welcomed it, considering the previous president (Sukarno) was anti-imperialist and was flirting with the 3rd largest communist party in the world (after USSR's and China's).
Somewhat relatedly, a documentary moviemaker realized what was behind the curtain of Indonesian society and said "it's as if I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power.". He made a documentary following a man who was sanctioned by the Suharto regime to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
A book 'The Jakarta Method' by Vincent Bevis is a great exploration of those events and similar cases of deliberate destruction of the independent third world.
Sorry YouTube regional-based DRM (presumably) is fucking you. Director's name and documentary title is available, you're going to need to search it for yourself.
Yeah, I can't stand these influencer-wannabe web-devs misusing terms.
béton brut means "raw concrete" in French, and in architecture that's what brutalism is. I'd say only sites that look like they use the default style of HTML with no CSS on Netscape 1.x could be called "brutalist"...
> I'd say only sites that look like they use the default style of HTML with no CSS on Netscape 1.x could be called "brutalist"
I agree, but maybe just not on the Netscape 1.x part. Brutalism in all of it's forms has never been about traditionalism. Even if concrete wasn't a new matieral in the 50s, you can't say something like Église Notre-Dame du Haut [0] is following any sort of traditional church architecture.
Brutalism on the web to me would focus more on honesty. An honest website shows you the processes your browser is undertaking, and how that results in rendering it's purpose. Images should load in progressively, any layout tables/divs/scaffolding shouldn't be invisible, a link/button/headings should behave/look how they "natively" do in whatever browser you happen to be using (not specifically netscape 1.x). If you're writing a cookie to the current session, I want to see that state reflected on the page. If I see a process happening I don't like, I should be able to stop it.
That doesn't have to look old or be unstyled. But there's certainly a way that letting hypertext just sort of "exist" makes a website more honest. All things considered right now, I'd say honesty is a pretty non-traditional adjective for the web haha.
I instantly thought of Nielsen's personal homepage - http://useit.com - which has moved on to a little softer and corporate design - but still linger in the Internet Archive:
Completely forgetting that design in of itself is completely subjective and brutalism within a digital space is conveyed in an entirely different way to that of architecture.
Constantly reminded why I gladly left the design space, can't stand people who think design should be siloed or interpreted this way.
> Neobrutalism is a mix of regular brutalism in web design and more modern typography, illustration, and animation standards. Neobrutalism refuses the usual components of UX-UI design and embraces uncomfortable design elements, and it is more fearless to use distinctive color palettes.
nothing about this is neobrutalist by their own standards. There is nothing “uncomfortable” about these standard round flat shapes, and unvibrant 3/4 saturated tones, they aren’t distinct, its called Alegria[1], calling it neobrutalism is a corruption of the meaning of brutalism and comes off as distinctly uncultured.
neobrutalism should have sharp edges, very vibrant saturated colors, and virtually none of these flowery spiral shapes. (neo)brutalism is forcing a square peg in a round hole with a hammer, and leaving it like that on purpose, because the raw swedge is the aethetic.
I don’t necessarily think it’s doing something wildly new and different, but I also don’t see how this style looks anything like what’s in that Wikipedia article.
Neo doesn't mean it can just be a completely different thing, it means its a modern take on the same thing from before but slightly evolved. Neo-Classicism still looks like Classicism. Neo Nazis are still Nazis.
If I create something called Neo-Cuisine, you'd expect the result to be edible. If I see something calling itself "Neo-Brutalist Architecture", I'd expect it to look like Brutalism, or have some hallmark of the style. e.g. raw, but a different material new to the time period).
As far as web design, there's nothing "raw" about 100s of dependencies and animated charts and rounded rects and opinionated fonts and the rest of the this pastiche in "64 components, charts and star shapes for React and Tailwind v4. Built on shadcn/ui and Base UI." This is just Corporate Memphis + dialog aesthetics[0]
It's a visual style, yet all your criticisms are about under-the-hood technicalities. The style I use for my personal projects (https://frost-e.com/design-system/) is a single css file, but looks similar. Nothing is stopping you from applying this visual style to plain HTML components.
The under-the-hood technicalities are part of it, but I didn't call it Corporate Memphis for nothing. What hallmarks of the Brutalist style do you think this exhibits, in-so-far as an architectural style can be applied to the web?
>It's a visual style, yet all your criticisms are about under-the-hood technicalities
the very point of brutalism is to turn its material 'inside out', what defines brutalism is that it makes the material and structural elements it's made of visible. It's not a 'visual style' or an aesthetic at all but an 'ethic of construction' something was brutalist if it was honest, and exposed, what a thing was made of.
If you want to apply that notion to web design It's not about 1 CSS file or 100 but whether the mechanics of CSS or HTML are still visible on the site, or if it's all buried under colors, animations, styling etc. Craigslist is a pretty good example of a brutalist website, so is this site, HN.
Brutalism is absolutely a visual style. It's an architectural style artificially designed to look drab, raw and ugly.
If you look at brutalist buildings, it becomes obvious that its looks are the results of intentional design completely removed from its underlying "structural" concerns. You don't accidentally arrive there by refusing to think about aesthetics or by just being "honest".
You can't accidentally arrive at a building, that's by definition true for all architecture, it doesn't fall out of the sky. They also didn't design it to be ugly, that's your value judgement, not a property of the architecture.
What brutalists meant when they talked about honesty or the ethic of design is that the building should reflect on the outside, its construction, its social purpose, and its function. Obviously that's a visual choice, but not an aesthetic one.
And the fact that so many people, including you reach for the description of it as 'ugly' proves that point. They weren't trying to appeal to some established notion of taste, or some aesthetic school that prioritizes the appearance of a thing over its function but the opposite.
My "expert" (/s) conclusion of Zuck is that he's a kid who knew some PHP and got really lucky that a website he made went "viral". He's got billions but is clueless, e.g. blowing a lot of money on animated VR avatars "because it's the future", and then blowing lots of money on AI. To be fair that's what the other dumb tech billionaires are doing too, they're building datacenters full of GPUs because they think throwing money at LLM will get them AGI, and they're desperate to be first.
(And no, I don't know if they'll reach AGI, my uninformed bet is: no).
> they're building datacenters full of GPUs because they think throwing money at LLM will get them AGI, and they're desperate to be first.
Another factor (which can also be seen in the "metaverse" business) is that how our investment/economy system makes these companies "need" [0] to always be a "growth stock" with something even bigger, even after they're already enormous quasi-monopolies.
Myspace had certain problems and probably didn't scale well, it had UX problems and management problems, combine that with the fact people wanted better granularity of privacy settings (though to be fair, Myspace was decent about it. There was a publically visible wall, but, still) and Facebook seemed to offer that, but of course Zuckerberg continually subverts the settings because he does not care about privacy (Facebook actively has switched people from 'friends only' to 'friends of friends' or 'public', multiple times), and also the fact Facebook apparently built a tool early on to import your contacts to Facebook from Myspace, but, of course, not the other way around
Google later offered a prompt in their own services, because Facebook was hoovering up contacts or... something, I forget
Zuckerberg actively wants a monopoly. He's, in my estimation, a sociopath. He got lucky, but 'lucky' also means 'internet 2006'. If you steal the Winklevoss' product (something he apparently also did with 'Metaverse'. The twins meant it in some sort of bitcoin sense, Zuckerberg co-opted it) you too can capture the literally entire global market, because the world was just coming online in those years
> Zuckerberg actively wants a monopoly. He's, in my estimation, a sociopath.
Fully agree. Facebook apps on Android can/could scan what apps are installed on the phone, and they could see if another social media app's install base was growing. He bought Instagram, he bought WhatsApp, he copied the Snapchat concept of "24 hour stories" when they refused the purchase.
TBH if I had the billions, I'm not sure I'd be any different (at least with the monopoly, I sure as hell wouldn't be blowing it on metaverse).
Apparently buying up everything is "brilliant acquisitions" and something to be celebrated. I don't get it. People just want him to succeed no matter what even after he's shown his true colors
A lot of Chinese do have a policy of "as long as we're comfortable (economically, etc), we'll let the government do whatever they want.", some justifying it by saying "society needs their government to be a strict parent".
It does seem most widespread revolutions only happen when the discomfort grows big enough (as the saying (1) goes, "civilisation is n missed meals away from anarchy" (n = a number below 10, I thought 3, but it's 9)).
It's interesting though, the CCP does chicken out. The last time that I remember this happening is when enough citizens in Beijing protested against their prison-like Covid restrictions, that they relaxed it within a day or two.
Same thing with Russians and the war: 2). Heck, Americans are anguishing but most are too comfortable/don't want to go through the discomfort to actually do anything against the rising fascism in their country.
A lot of Americans do have a policy of "as long as we're comfortable (economically, etc), we'll let the government do whatever they want.", some justifying it by saying "they're doing it for the Middle Eastern people's freedom!"
Well, sorry but not really sorry for that. We all know that literature aka the art of conveying something regardless of what that thing is is an art. We all need to take responsibility for not only what we say but also how we say it.
> A lot of Chinese do have a policy of "as long as we're comfortable (economically, etc), we'll let the government do whatever they want.", some justifying it by saying "society needs their government to be a strict parent".
On a spectrum from like Appalachians at one end to the CCP on the other, most societies in the world are closer to the Chinese end of the spectrum. Appalachians will forgo civilization to avoid government. But most people in the world do want government to be a strict parent and maintain order and a well-functioning society. This is something that Americans completely do not understand.
> The forensic science behind this was genuinely elegant. No two typewriters print identically. The mechanical tolerances of individual typebars—those metal arms that swing up to strike the ribbon—create unique signatures. Forensic document examiners look at three primary characteristics: alignment (whether a letter strikes slightly above or below the baseline), impression (whether one side of a letter prints darker than the other due to uneven wear), and damage (a chipped serif, a broken bowl on a lowercase “g”, a filled-in counter on an “e”). Taken together, these micro-imperfections form a pattern as distinctive as a human fingerprint—or so the authorities claimed.
> The East German Stasi took this principle to its industrial extreme. They maintained an exhaustive registry of type samples, a vast database of typewriter fingerprints. When a dissident pamphlet surfaced, the Stasi could compare its letterforms against their archive and, in theory, trace the text back to the specific machine that produced it. The countermeasure was ingenious in its simplicity: dissidents sought out pre-communist typewriter models—early Mignon or Ideal D machines manufactured before the registry existed. A typewriter without a file was a typewriter without a name. It could speak and not be traced.
Since they had control of commerce, I suppose it was possible to intercept every typewriter and "fingerprint" it before it is sold, or even tweak the typewriter to produce something unique (e.g. chipping a typebar so it prints a particular letter distinctly). Hah, needing to register your name/address to buy a typewriter feels spooky too. And if it gets stolen, you'd have to tell the authorities that it's no longer in your possession.
Also not an expert, I wonder if there's some rule where a "Go around!" order has precedence over any other activity anyone in the cockpit wishes to perform.
As a passenger I had my first go around a few days ago, but we were 5km away from the runway.
I experienced my first go-around a few months ago, in an A321 that was landing in Tampa.
The clouds had been very thick for awhile. The plane was making those weird low-and-slow vibes that it makes on final approach.
We popped out of the clouds and there was a highway with cars! A huge parking lot! (An airport, too? Certainly, but I didn't really see a runway or any runway-adjacent stuff.) To my inexpert eyes, we just looked to be impossibly low for our location.
The folks in the cockpit apparently didn't like what they saw with their eyes, either. In an instant, the engines roared as they simultaneously pointed the thing upwards. My little pea brain was very impressed by the immediacy of the forces on my body as we disappeared back into the clouds after what was at most just several seconds of visibility.
Anyway, it was very clear that there was no hesitation to the go-around. However that decision was reached, it was then simply executed.
The next attempt went very smoothly about ten minutes later.
It totally does. Every approach briefing includes instructions on what they will do in the event of a missed or unstable approach. The procedure is generally full throttle, nose up, gear up, retract flaps, head in the direction briefed, and notify ATC. All automatic from memory.
When either pilot calls for a go-around, both are supposed to drop literally everything else, execute the go-around without delay or hesitation, and then pause to analyze the situation once ATC gives them a heading and altitude or holding pattern to regroup.
The only thing lost in a go-around is fuel and time.
Any sane airline will never punish a call to go-around if done so in good faith.
I remember reading that Clinton's team was very concerned about Al Qaeda, but the Bush team ignored their warnings. It might have been very different with Al Gore in command.
> In his strongest public statement, to 60 Minutes, [Richard] Clarke said Bush “ignored” the terrorist threat before 9/11. To the commission he testified, more soberly, that, for the Administration, it was an “important issue but not an urgent issue.” Clearly, the Clinton White House worried more. Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger remembers telling his successor, Rice, during the transition that, for the Bush team, “the No. 1 issue that you’re going to be dealing with is terrorism generally and al-Qaeda specifically.”
> The record of the Bush Administration’s first half-year suggests its members didn’t buy it. They were more focused on Russia, China and especially missile defense. In his book Bush at War, Bob Woodward quotes Bush himself saying of Osama bin Laden, “There was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11. I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace … But I didn’t feel that sense of urgency.”
> Clarke’s strongest argument in this dispute is the pace with which the Administration considered the plan he proposed on Jan. 25, 2001 for combatting al-Qaeda. The program had evolved during the Clinton years, as al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and then the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000. The Bush team put the proposal through an April meeting of senior officials, took their time with it over the summer and finally brought it to Bush’s Cabinet-level security and foreign policy chiefs, who approved it, just a week before 9/11. None of that suggests it was a national-security priority.
The Bush administration dig themselves a pit by criticizing the Clinton administration so much for directly attacking the Al Qaeda training camps. They couldn’t turn that around without losing face.
If you want to lean more search for the phrase “wag the dog”.
It is distressing that so many groups, usually calling themselves "ideologies" or "religions" demand that the countries where they happen to be cancel their own values. ESPECIALLY when it comes to values like equality.
In this case equality between men and women, but let's not pretend that for most ideologies that is any more than just one of many inequalities they would like to introduce. Sorry, "to have respected", as if that means anything different.
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