dieterrams

Jesus Christ.

Suppose he is being treated unfairly by the mods. Is that not worth complaining about?

I don't give a crap about some silly "downvote every comment complaining about downvotes" rule. Complaining about downvotes was frowned upon because people get inexplicably downvoted as a matter of course here, and the frequency of complaints was deemed sufficiently detracting to warrant being frowned upon. Being treated unfairly by the mods, however, is another matter entirely.

I haven't seen a preponderance of evidence suggesting the complaint was ill-founded, and the guy's tenure and comment history (what I looked through of it) do not suggest he's an ill-mannered troll, so I reserve judgement as to whether the complaint is in the wrong. Like any reasonable person would.

Well, someone's having a party.

PSA: one man's pedantry is another man's pro-tip.

One imagines they do. I'm not sure that's what's going on here, though.

I vouched for (undeaded) your comment, since I think the flagging/downvoting runs contrary to the principles of discourse we're (at least implicitly) celebrating here, smelling of tribalism/favoritism. Just because you view someone favorably, and someone else claims something negative about that person, doesn't mean you just get to flagbomb them into oblivion.

The right response here is simply to ask for further substantiation, as danso did. It's not clear to me that the mods are directly responsible for what you've experienced. If you haven't, I would contact them for clarification.

Combine sugar and sugar and sprinkle with the sugar.

What is this quote from?

This is almost certainly the result of how popular articles/books by Malcolm Gladwell, etc. have been, which goes back a long ways (The Tipping Point was published in 2000), rather than a prevalence of journalists who were creative writing majors.

The tactic, though effective, has unfortunately become annoyingly common.

Source re: motivations?

I have a design background myself, and frankly, you're not going to do much better for flat screen-based UIs than buttons, scrubbers, tables, lists, scrollviews, etc. This has little to do with touch, and everything to do with 2D design for screens. Better/worse design will depend on how these idioms are used/organized, rather than a radical rethink of those idioms.

That's not to say there aren't good undiscovered idioms for 2D UIs, but there's no shortage of designers trying to find them, especially outside of their dayjob. Designers love trying to invent new and novel ways to interact.

It is, however, actually an advantage for touch UIs that they aren't radically different from WIMP, because users don't have to learn a completely different UI, at least in terms of visual organization/affordance.

You can also bet the Apple designers/engineers who were prototyping iOS UI idioms before the iPhone was released explored a range of different idioms, and they continue to do so.

I'm not sure why you'd expect a radical reimagining of UI for touch. Touch UIs look largely the same as WIMP UIs because there isn't a radically better way of presenting information and affordances on a screen.

Mobile OSes haven't been ready to accommodate desktop-level use cases. Apple is moving in that direction with iOS on iPad. Once they get there, convergence makes a lot more sense.

Agreed. I think it makes perfect sense to have a phone that can plug into a tablet or any other form factor. The thermals might not let you run an iPhone-in-tablet as fast as a dedicated iPad, but given how fast their chips are getting, it's probably just a matter of time.

...which was submitted by the same account.

There used to be. Not sure what happened to it.

I didn't know that the US military budget is a third of what it was 60 years ago.

It's a little over a third of what it was 60 years ago as a percentage of GDP. And this is in line with most other developed nations.

As a percentage of the federal budget, military spending accounts for 16% of the total budget, and 54% of discretionary spending. The US also spends 2-3x more per capita on the military than France, the UK, and Germany.

I think you're absolutely right that fear is the biggest problem a writer has to overcome, and that many of these products appeal to the fearful writer.

At the same time, I do remember what it was like writing on a typewriter, and in DOS word processors, and before I had an always-on internet connection. And I do think it was easier.

I had recently tried to get back into writing, and had cancelled both my home and mobile internet service, and wrote on an iPad with virtually every app deleted except a text editor. And I found that it really did help: instead of my head being filled with stuff from the internet, I could fill it with stuff about the story I wanted to write, the way I remember being able to when I lived in a more isolated world using a device that wasn't bursting at the seams with digital affordances.

That "imposed expectation" you talked about ended up killing off my efforts after I produced a draft I wasn't happy with, so that problem was still there. I'm getting back into it again, and will probably recreate my setup from before. This time around I bought a cheap Alphasmart Dana, since I'd sold my iPad.

It could be that I'm part of a subset of people that are just more easily distracted by / addicted to a lot of digital stuff that's emerged in the past couple decades. But I do know that some professional writers have considerably more elaborate setups than myself or anyone buying a portable word processor: a tiny house out in the woods, a room that simulates a thunderstorm outside, etc.

I don't think you're wrong about what drives a lot of people to buy this stuff, but I also don't think these products are without value.

You’re rather dismissive and uncharitable, aren’t you?

I was merely giving you the clearest possible examples, since you seem to be confused about what possible harm nepotism could cause.

Sure, in some situations, it may be ambiguous who is actually the better pick. For argument's sake, let's assume such choices are ALWAYS ambiguous. If you're consistently picking your friends in those situations, you're nevertheless creating a perception of nepotism (read unfairness) throughout the rest of the company, which will minimally be harmful to morale. So yeah, even if you're not being particularly nepotistic, guarding against the perception of nepotism is still important.

My bigger concern, however, is that it's very easy for someone to rationalize nepotism when they're a beneficiary.

I really don't know enough about the specifics of your situation to know if nepotism is much of a concern, but I definitely don't think your friend's "nepotism is GREAT" stance is worth taking seriously.

Suppose it is clearly the wrong business choice for your friend's company to acquire your company.

Suppose a friend promoted you over someone else who was vastly more qualified, and worked much harder than you for that promotion.

Etc.

Now suppose you're the one getting screwed over instead of the friend benefiting.

It's not nepotism if friends benefiting is merely a side effect of making the best business (or whatever) decision. But if that decision process is subverted in order to benefit friends, negatively impacting other stakeholders that you have a responsibility to, creating a work environment which is deeply unfair and unmeritocratic, etc., then that is absolutely a problem. This should be pretty obvious.

I was saying her categorizations are cartoonish, as in overly simplistic morally and sociologically.

It's so interesting to me that your critique went to group politics and identity, though. Rand was consistently negative about groups and big government cronyism. She treated her archetypes as equally noble whether they were breaking rocks in a quarry or engineering some new miracle metal. Do you view the world through such a group identity lens that you couldn't see that in her writing? It's absolutely plain.

I’m not really sure what you’re talking about. I do have thoughts on group and identity politics, but I certainly wasn’t referencing them in my post. Not consciously or in any way that is obvious to me, at least.

Re: her archetypes being treated as “equally noble”, I didn’t suggest they weren’t? Although she certainly presents a hierarchy of value that depends on what a given character is doing / capable of. Rearden is without question the lesser man in Rand's and Dagny Taggart's eyes, compared to Galt.

The fundamental problem with Rand's ideology is her cartoonish categorization of everyone that isn't Galt-esque or an enthusiastic, hypercompetent support person as evil looters/parasites. Iirc, Galt is basically trying to collapse society for everyone but the former.

When you realize that you can't just write off people because they didn't turn out to be brilliant entrepreneurs or perky worker bees, and that the workings of government and justice are more complicated than Rand would allow, Atlas Shrugged does become pretty repugnant. Granted, she was reacting to her experiences with communism, so I don't totally blame her for going all the way to the other extreme.

But insofar as someone wants to invent great things and do well from them, I don't take issue with that.

The problem isn’t the fluff we read online. The problem is that when you go long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it. Reading fluff online doesn’t make you stop reading novels, though, any more than watching TV makes you stop reading novels. It’s entirely possible to do both, with the caveat that everyone’s time is limited. But there’s nothing about browsing online that intrinsically makes it hard to read novels.

First, the issue isn't that what's being read is "fluff", but rather that online reading promotes that "grafted, spasmodic" style of attention.

Second, you're completely wrong that the media formats we consume don't affect the other media formats we consume.

Do you have a short list of book recommendations?

Jobs’ approach is to inculcate a deep-seated insecurity that drives people to do better work. This is quite a bit different from dissolution of the ego, because it very much depends on the subject having an ego to manipulate.

Watch Whiplash.

Some of the arguments I’m reading in defense of digital search point out that the things luggage search was originally supposed to find would now be stored on your phone.

I accept that argument in principle, but practically, since it’s so easy to keep any illegal materials on the internet and retrieve them post-security, how does digital search still make sense?

It was a couple years ago, but I spoke with one of their engineering managers about Swift adoption within the company. His response was that it was being used for new apps/projects, but not so much for existing codebases.

Having worked on a large Obj-C codebase that began adopting Swift, there are definitely some headaches involved in Obj-C/Swift interop, and you often aren't getting many benefits of Swift unless your new code has few to no dependencies on / is not depended on by Obj-C code, unless you can refactor it into Swift.

Given how quickly it seems they've been forced to ship, I can understand not wanting to deal with these issues, or not having the time to address them.

To be fair, GP didn't say they wouldn't hire someone who didn't code for fun in high school, or whatever. Just that hiring was more difficult if you're trying to hire people who actually care about their craft.

Do they think the world will run out of low-skilled jobs because AI learns how to perform current ones? History doesn't back this up,

I don’t have a well considered opinion about AI’s impact on jobs, but AI isn’t exactly like the industrial revolution, automated farming, or other historical upheavals. So I don’t think you can reliably conclude that it will turn out just like them.