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phantarch

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This and the post yesterday about adding latency to websites reaffirms an idea I've been thinking about lately - adding friction back into digital processes helps break some of the addictive power they have.

Imagine if you had to use a printer to print out your facebook feed when you wanted to see it. Then, in order to interact, you had to write on that paper the comments, likes, etc. that you wanted to transmit and scan it back into the system. That mode of interaction seems "primitive" compared to the way we use things on our phones, but I think carries with it a lot of nice advantages like introducing time buffers for your mind to catch up to your impulses.

Additionally, you could rephrase from "downvote" to "rebuttal", which I think makes it more clear that not only is the opinion/post unpopular, but that there is information that contradicts the OP's post. It could make for a more substantive phrasing

I just was recently introduced to this and other discussions on city planning by a couple of great youtube series by donoteat1[1]. "Franklin" and "Power, Politics, and Planning" are some of the best and most humorous examinations of topics like parking minimums, public housing, gentrification, etc. I've come across. The presenter is highly left-leaning, but also knowledgeable and backs up his positions with data. Agree or disagree with his views, it's informative either way!

It's opened my eyes much more to how cities are actually planned and the problems posed by politics over the ages - the conflict between public good and private interest, and how specific policies affect cities and their accessibility to people of various economic statuses. Would recommend if you enjoyed this article and want more related topics to learn about.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFdazs-6CNzSVv1J0a-qy4A

Another way to say this could be if you decide to take the route of explicitly not solving an edge case or write throwaway code, that feature becomes a leaf until the branch of immature code can be pruned and a new, stronger one put in place.

I like the presentation a lot, but after looking at the features tab I'm left wishing there were some sort of interactive demo.

This looks like a really cool project! I like the idea of a journaling tool that also helps you reflect at a meta-level after you've entered in your momentary feelings.

Often times I get frustrated with the second type you describe because they seem to assume that I have deliberately (or otherwise) chosen to do something suboptimal out of laziness or neglect when often it is simply from not being a subject matter expert myself.

There is a lot to be said for not taking any shit when it comes to getting things right in a project. However, I think that the most brilliant engineer is the one who helps people who make mistakes or are not as smart/experienced as they. Implying the only reason someone would not do "The Right Thing" is because they're bad is a sort of self fulfilling prophecy.

I don't deny that this is an issue in any college setting where lots of hormone-driven young men are crammed together around a smaller number of women, but something about the way the question in the article is posed makes me suspicious of the intensity or widespread nature of the claim:

Of the 455 people who responded, 338 reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment, including gender harassment — such as being ignored because of their sex or gender, or being told inappropriate jokes — unwanted sexual attention or a combination thereof during the previous two years.

How inappropriate were the jokes? How much of it was harassment versus social unawareness? How does the survey distinguish between idle chatter that goes south and aggressive men with bad intentions that corner women in the stairwells of physics buildings?

Again, I don't deny the issue, but short articles like these that are lacking in detail about their claims, then link to another article from the same site, which links to a $55 copy of the study [1] seem like insufficient data points beyond everyone's gut feel that "sexism and harassment are a problem in male-dominated fields"

[1] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24994/sexual-harassment-of-women...

That's an easy sentiment to come away with from every article in the series except the very last.

The final one does offer (imo) a pretty clean solution to the problem he's been exploring, which boils down to viewing the rules of the game as the class definitions and using the things in the game world as data to be plugged in to the rules, rather than the other way around.

Cool tool, I really like the idea and workflow it promotes!

Only question I have is about the content I write into your text box. Is it still mine? Is it private to everyone (even your servers)? Writing is a personal exercise and can be creatively rewarding, but only if you've got the confidence that it's still solely _your_ writing and that you control who can see it and when. The only privacy callout I see in your about section is regarding other users on the app not being able to see your content. A paragraph about what you do with the writing I put in your tool would help me not feel worried that I'm writing with someone over my shoulder who owns my words as I pen them.

Again, good work so far!

Laws of UX 9 years ago

A new "Law of UX" should be coined: "Visual design is not UX."

It feels like a centralized organizing service for web content (and by extension, retail goods sold online) is an inevitability in today's internet. If we switched google off, some other search engine would replace them simply because people need to be able to find things on the internet in a way that doesn't involve spending 30 minutes running through different "top hotlinks" lists on obscure web pages.

To me, the real issue is that we have a service which people depend on like a public utility (the internet) whose components are completely privatized and uncontrolled (ISP's, search, social networking). It's not a bad thing that so much of the traffic is being routed through certain pages. What makes this unsettling is that those pages are undemocratically, privately controlled and you've got next to no say in it because if you switch to a different private alternative, who's to say we won't be in exactly the same situation 10 years from now?

A question for the author or anyone who has been through a similar experience: Can you better describe what life is like without the "haze"?

One thing that I see consistently in these kinds of writeups is the author describing living life "through a haze". Then later, after the therapy/drugs helps them out of the depressive pit, they say how much clearer things are. This worries me because I have plenty of days where I feel "hazy", but have always though it to be normal.

They are also a very large, non-homogenous business which has had some great people work for them as well as some very shitty people.

The best managers there are the ones who largely disregard the incentives placed before them and respect the complexities of working at such a large scale. It sounds like the people who would show up at your dad's were enabled by management who cared more about bottom line sales than understanding how to appropriately treat a supplier with limited volume.

I'm sorry this was the experience you had, but there are just as many talented, respectful, and generally honorable people that work there and I wouldn't want them to get lumped in with the scum. (Source, have worked at WM home office)

Anecdotally, I almost exclusively buy Fair Life milk nowadays which usually has a very comfortable shelf life of 2-3 months. No discernible taste differences.

They claim that they've got a cold-filtration process which is what allows for their milk to last so long. Doesn't sound the same as the UHT discussed in the article, I'd be curious to know what they exactly do. (https://fairlife.com/our-process/)

Is this measuring a causal relationship though? Correlation is not causation...

Maybe those kids from more wealthy/well-educated families are more persistent and tempered because their self-image aligns with society's looming popular image of what people /should/ be: wealthy, polymath millionaires.

I think that a lot of the 'unfixable suckage' comes to exist by people not wanting to rewrite boilerplate code to achieve a seemingly simple task, so they import someone else's boilerplate (angular) and use it to achieve their ends quickly. The fact that multiple boilerplates don't all work well or that one doesn't work in every case is hardly surprising.

I'd be curious if the time tradeoff in the "Rewrite the whole goddamn app" bucket is smaller than the one in the "Churn out boilerplate code and maintain it yourself" bucket.

This makes a lot of sense. If investors can get a real feel for who they're investing in rather than a lot of marketing/canned pizzaz, I think they'll make consistently better decisions and founders will get a much clearer understanding of where they fall short.

Not to say that showing a proof of concept should be ditched entirely, but making a marketing pitch is not always the same as having a good idea.

I'll echo that sentiment, I experience it daily. Very rarely is a business itself abstract and complicated enough to merit an abstract and complicated technical solution. Meatspace is still pretty simple.

Thanks for the insight.

In regards to comparing new technologies against previous ones to understand their legal definitions, it feels like the burden is on technologists to navigate us through the ethical minefield. I'm not very aware of what place ethicists have in many tech corporations, but it feels like most of us just build straight ahead and figure out the implications afterward. Not that we should halt progress on everything until we know if it's "good", but maybe a tech ethicist could be a kind of QA role during product development.

How is echo audio data substantially different than something like a tape recorder that was live in the man's home? What about a cell phone that was on a call at the time of the alleged murder?

I definitely understand wanting to ensure reasonable privacy for users, but to me it feels an awful lot of a stretch to say that the echo is off-limits in this case.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Not saying that DistroKid is perfect, but sometimes all it takes to be the best in any given market is to be exactly what's needed and nothing more. It may seem like giving one's hand away, but what could there be to add? There's certainly not much fat to trim. How would someone else compete?