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Feb 8 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Impossibly good execution: Nvidia made their HQ look like a GPU render.

Ubiquitous light, walls of suspiciously unidentifiable material without seams, repeating plants, repeating wood textures!
some exec learned blender in a weekend, locked himself in his office for a week, and then passed the plans off to an architect, whispering "if you change a fucking pixel, I'll kill you"
In reality this was done by Gensler but even I, who hate everything about this style, have to admit it's extremely well executed. So much that the real life pics look better than the renders and people's random photos look better than the architect's.

gensler.com/projects/nvidia
Even its inconsistencies are consistent
A big part of why these look good are restrained use of color and restrained use of concrete. But why else?

Why is this so much better than... you know. All the other stuff?

Believe it or not I think this is real wood, it's been rotary cut (how you make veneer) in a very large sheet. You can see how its not a true pattern, the grain descends as they cut.

Part of why this Nvidia modernist building is "good" is that they did not spare expense. There are no visible budget cuts with this one.

Compared to like the munch museum in Oslo, that's a huge success on it's own
I agree completely, and this is the ultimate flaw with almost all modernist structures.

You should want your materials to age gracefully. You should want them to get better with age!

A good patina will always win, in the long run.

simonsarris.substack.com/p/patina-and-i…

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More from @simonsarris

Simon Sarris Profile picture
Feb 7
From a DM, re: sharing photos of children.

I use social media to share what I think is interesting or lovely.

Babies are good, and good things should be celebrated and shared. I think the hiding of children from the visages of day to day life is something of a cumulative error.
Photography is a medium of great enchantment and storytelling, and I think if I can affect some heart-warming as you say, then that's worthwhile. If people want something like role models for the nicer parts of parenting or having children, then that's worthwhile too.
Generally if you want to make a cultural critique, you should try to make it implicit in the positive vision of what is good.

If pronatalist, you would achieve more by simply sharing and celebrating family life than by talking about policy all day long, or complaining.
Read 5 tweets
Simon Sarris Profile picture
Jan 25
Lost power for a couple days
By impeccable coincidence this book arrived by mail from @quachelsey on the day of the storm

Unless you were trying to time such a thing!
Read 5 tweets
Simon Sarris Profile picture
Dec 28, 2022
accidentally created a Rorschach test

it is kind of amazing how many people think work = jobs and jobs = manual labor. Hard to read the replies and not see a truly massive imagination deficient wrt children could be doing with their time. Or even reasoning about work in general.
while today home production is prob best, I was originally thinking about Andrew Carnegie, who did work outside the home. Getting to be a telegraph office boy at 12 and then becoming an operator early was a huge plus. But this is another can of worms...

Technology advances created office boys but then later ones also made them obsolete. It's very hard to "learn the ropes" in the way that Carnegie did today. Sometimes technology creates great jobs, sometimes it pulls up the ladder.
Read 6 tweets
Simon Sarris Profile picture
Dec 26, 2022
@sama Children working at ~10-12 years old is good and healthy and almost all kids would be happier if they could. Disallowing child labor was a good idea at the time, today its basically child abuse, causing depression and precluding a lot of precocious greatness from forming.
@sama Whoever carved ancient Venus and other goddess figurines, even very crude ones, understood something very deep about femininity and its elemental power that is lost on most people today, both men and women.
@sama ethics is an intuitive, not intellectual, practice. Ethical issues arise in modern times not because of a lack of systematization of belief, but simply because we do not have shared values. Invented ethical systems are overrated, intuitive ones are underrated. Ramifications big.
Read 9 tweets
Simon Sarris Profile picture
Dec 20, 2022
I kind of wish I could go back in time and shake young me and say YOU GAIN NOTHING FROM BEING SHY
I was on year 2 of "refuse to make coffee at home*, walk to a cafe every single day so that I have to talk to at least one person and be more social"

(this sounds slightly less crazy if you know I used to walk to work and there were 2 cafes on the way)

diplomacy is a skill. There are definitely people who need to hear YOU GAIN NOTHING FROM BEING ARGUMENTATIVE ON THE DAILY etc

argument and disagreement are tools - they benefit from trigger discipline.

Read 5 tweets
Simon Sarris Profile picture
Dec 17, 2022
never mind the other goals, I somehow didn't realize just how *fun* it would be to make my own social network from scratch

Most of the time so far has been spent learning Svelte and Prisma and fooling around with layout stuff. Svelte is really a joy to use.
A big part of my slowness is that I've spend 99% of my professional life writing a JS/TS library, and associated small business stuff, and that set of skills is very different than writing a frontend (and lil backend) product for consumption.
So it will be neat to see just how fast I can ship something.

But unlike authoring a library, there's a lot of aesthetic components to this project, and these alone will take some time. I don't want to make yet another corporate-looking blah network. It has to be a work of art.
Read 7 tweets

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