HN user
keepfrozen.com
TLDR: A well-known luxury brand doesn't fit one user's unique needs. ("inconspicuous street photography" "discreet shooting")
Why try to extrapolate this to some thinkpiece-level nonsense, with literally nothing else to support the writer's thesis? Just shoot on a Fuji and don't pretend your personal needs and preferences represent some deeper truth.
I got about as far as "indoctrinated woke shibboleths" before I started to doubt that the author is truly interested in overcoming ideological bias.
It's interesting how much more complicated and better thought-out that stuff is now than it was fifteen years ago. I think supply chains and lifecycles are a huge part of things, and it was barely a part of our thinking back then. It was more like "hey did you know taking a plane burns carbon too?"
What would the unveiled villainous conversation sound like?
I think this stuff is a lot less complex than people think. Companies just want to increase sales with effective marketing that makes them look better than their competitors.
Maybe! I think the one thing I've learned from my biggest clients is that slight % increases in sales for companies of that size equal billions of dollars, so there's so much room for waste. It doesn't have to be villainous - they can spend $50m on renewable tech and it just doesn't matter - it's a drop in the bucket compared to other things, and can fail without consequences. I bet it attracted a lot of great talent, and I bet a lot of that was lured towards more profitable things with big bags of money.
I can't really speak to BP's higher-level strategy, but this was the mid-2000s. The fact that an oil company was saying anything about climate change felt like a step forward. Other oil companies' ads were all about American workers and generic shots of sunsets over oil fields, BP wanted to position themselves as the "green" gas station at a time when that was becoming more a concern - not just with climate change but overall. At that point, BP had a pretty good environmental record compared to competitors like Exxon, who was still reeling from the Valdez disaster - so the requirement would've been to focus public interest on BP, not away from it.
But oil companies don't run ads telling people not to buy gasoline, so you've got to come at it from a slightly different angle. Luckily, "Greener than Exxon" was a pretty low bar, so they didn't need to talk about carbon taxes or emissions. Personal energy consumption has been a part of the discourse since the 70s, and probably fit in well - virtually no one will actually change their habits in any meaningful way, but will probably come out of it feeling better about themselves and BP.
The article itself seemed kinda all over the place. I agree that the world would be a better place if her preferences would've been enacted fifteen years ago, but I'm not sure that BP's advertising campaign had that much to do with it. It wasn't 4-D chess, it was "BP = Green = Good", and literally blew up in their face a few years later when Deepwater exploded.
It doesn't keep me up at night. In retrospect, it was probably one of the most dubious things I worked on in a decade of advertising, but I (mostly) left the industry because it was morally neutral, not outright wrong. It just felt like a big waste of talent and money, rather than "insidious"
Not my proudest work, but this was pre-Deepwater and BP was honestly putting a lot of new money towards green and renewable projects. At the time, it felt like a step in the right direction.
Huh! It’s not every day you see your work called out in The Guardian as “insidious propaganda”!
I worked for Ogilvy and Mather in the 00s and made the Carbon footprint stuff they mention, at least one version of it. Didn’t come up with the concept or wording, but was responsible for the web implementation in the US.
AMA, I guess
This guy doesn't seem to get what an 'accelerator' is besides a check. There are some valid complaints about Chile's bureaucracy to be had, but he's not making them..
“they looked like scrap metal to anybody but me”
What nonsense, I hope he was misquoted.. Like the linked video says, he bought them in Chicago from Joell Hays, another vinyl junkie (and all-around nice guy) that held on to them for a decade, but couldn't get the funds together to restore them all.
I can't understand why every story about vinyl's resurgence needs to make the story into some sort of mythic "rediscovery". My label's been putting out vinyl for years, the only difference is that now there's a 6-month waiting list at the plant. :)
Presage is great, but to clarify some other comments - it doesn't involve any specific dataset, like SwiftKey - it simply does nice smoothed predictions when given a large database of n-grams (groups of words) and their frequencies. It's fairly easy to chop up a corpus into n-grams using NLTK or other tools, and there's a good port for Python called Pressagio.
My startup Spoken - http://spokenaac.com - uses n-gram predictions to help users with aphasia or other language disorders speak. The user interface challenges aren't quite as intense as Stephen Hawking's binary input, but it's an interesting field if you're into design and big data.