underlipton

Certainly. I will shoot you an email with this username in the heading.

That intro makes me want to cry, because she's describing what the hope was for augmented reality before Zuck and Tim and every web developer looking for the next step on their career ladder stuck their grubby hands into its chest and squeezed its aorta shut. AR wasn't floating screens. It wasn't hackneyed VR. It was digital bits and bobs integrated into your physical space, onto your physical objects. You know, augmenting them. Like this, but with glasses or a headset instead of a projector. And (particularly at the beginning) not so much hyper-optimized for enterprise productivity, as for doing something small and interesting and maybe a bit useful.

We came so damn close, and it's been ~10 years. Maybe this gets people's imaginations going again. Get us ready to take that, er, magic leap forward.

Holding parties to different standards of evidence is a horrible idea

We already do that. Plaintiffs can introduce whatever, and as long as it's plausible, defendants have to directly prove it's a falsehood or otherwise inadmissible (not just that it's plausibly so, perhaps circumstantially). Sewer service is a glaring example.

In these cases, it would be naive to treat the plaintiffs (who I would argue are proxies for the attorneys) as the parties with fewer resources or sophistication.

You're assuming that I disagree. Pro bono/contingent/discounted hours billed would count towards "greater resources or sophistication", and while I'm sure lawyers would love to argue whether or not that's fair, I think you'd find that the Average Joe would say so. And I'd really like to live in a system which has his needs in mind more than that of Dick C. Eshahl, Esq.

Appropriate name for the participants.

If you want people to read, you have to be willing to accept a population that does not feel harassed and hurried. You have to give them a raise when they say they can't afford shelter and food. You have to stop gatekeeping education as a scarce credential rather than giving it freely as a public good. You have to build systems that allow them to access their needs without movement or seeking help being difficult or even a death trap. You have to rein in the forces that wish to monopolize their attention.

People read when they feel secure. We don't live in a particularly secure society.

There was a great essay I read a few years ago that I can't locate, about how much of Western society is driven by the threat or actualization of humiliation. The Black Freedom Struggle (all incarnations) was won (inasmuch as it was won) not really through moral appeals or the imposition of practical reality, as much as through the humiliation of the slaver/segregationist position on the global stage and in the media.

You want to win? Make them look stupid in such a way that continuing to fight makes them look even more stupid. Pain doesn't stop people, practical futility doesn't stop people; but, faced with the prospect of being considered persona non grata or a laughing stock or just robbed of their dignity, whether they win or lose, that is when people will call the match and walk off.

So, yes, face is a Western thing, too.

You are correct, and the problem is an embarrassing lack of understanding and imagination on the part of the people criticizing you. An entire car dedicated to delivering one meal at a time, directly to the recipient, should be exorbitantly expensive to cover labor and resource costs for the driver; the artificially low prices customers pay are borne by drivers, who see essentially zero return in the long run when their profits are netted against vehicle costs.

What actually works is delivery of multiple orders to a semi-central location for last-mile pick-up by the customers. In a sense, this is what restaurants and grocery stores are. But to retain the variety, readiness, etc. of delivery, obviously some new solution must come around.

https://www.google.com/search?q=grocery cart

It should be, "One delivery truck drives to several manned neighborhood drop-off points a couple of times a week, and 100 people walk to those points and walk home with their packages." Central distribution points that you have to drive to are as untenable long-term as everything being delivered individually.

Frankly, this goes for food delivery, too.

Only in Kenya.

Individually. A village municipal link is probably within reach, though.

Village sees increased productivity, raises the wealth of the region, suddenly surrounding villages can afford it. Or, individuals get their own. I don't like giving Musk the benefit of the doubt, but the Chinese/Sears/etc. model of catering to people no one else would try to service can certainly be lucrative.

You cannot convince me that something ridiculous wasn't covered up wrt Deepwater Horizon.

Being interested in popular culture is being interested in how the world works. It's an interest in how influence and power and money make things move in the rooms that aren't factories, and how to navigate your way into and out of them safely.

We've designed a world where math mostly doesn't hurt you when you're not thinking about it, but boy, oh boy, can your community, social circle, or people you don't even know hurt you if you haven't paid attention to and aligned yourself with the common sentiment.

Gonna be a bit of a downer and say, "The kids who need to hear what this guy was saying aren't in school with the kids whose parents are engineers." (Well, not all of them.)

You also kill the people who would have become highly-productive in the future. Their early career is defined by trauma that they learn is the norm, and they spend the rest of it reacting to real and imagined threats based on that norm.

This goes for the economy writ large. There are two generations of Americans who have been taught that housing is unstable, and that so is their paycheck, and that neither political party will lift a finger to help in any meaningful way (i.e., one that sacrifices donor sentiment and dollars). It's like the opposite of postwar Europe and Japan. How do you fix half the country not believing in your economic model?

Unless they're disclosing exactly how the location data is being used to measure driver risk, my assumption is that it's a form of redlining. Filing my racial discrimination lawsuit nnnnnnow.

And the thing is that you don't even necessarily need to make a new slot machine to compete with the old slot machine. A lot of people hate the slot machine-ness of the old slot machine. They hit a button on their Chrome extension/Greasemonkey remote to turn off the flashing lights and loud attention-grabbing sounds and whatnot. So, if your new machine doesn't have those, maybe that's all for the better. Maybe your new machine gives players more control over how they play, and doesn't try to trick them into never getting up to get some water or go to the bathroom or whatever. Maybe there's no jackpot, just a chill or educational time. Maybe you get rid of the randomness of the outcomes, so that it's easier for people to just find what they're looking for. I dunno. There are a lot of ways it could go.

But, boy, I do know this: when I sit down, I better be able to just pull the lever and start.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48764717

You say that you're genuinely interested, but chances are that any given maintainer is not. Willingness to actually listen to UI/UX critique is what separates the Blenders from the GIMPs.

Many games re-release as "complete" editions with updates and sometimes DLC. I don't know if those always find their way on to the disc proper, but unless they're relabeling and re-boxing dead stock, I have to imagine "stamp it with some extra bytes" is more economical than "make all-new discs put in all-new boxes but it's just the base, non-updated game AND we have to keep the servers running."

Hyperstrategic origami.

so its now up to the victims who have been wronged to bring the violation to the attention of the courts/regulatory bodies responsible for enforcement.

lol

Have you tried finding a lawyer recently? For anything?

The legal system needs to be made much more accessible, but I'm not sure how that happens or what that looks like.

As far as consumer protection goes, the party with greater resources or sophistication (e.g., if you retain counsel against a pro se defendant or plaintiff) should have a higher standard of proof; be forced to follow formal procedural rules, no matter the venue; and bear all costs if they're the ones who brought suit. If you use the court system as an arm of your business, you shouldn't get any leniency in terms of crossing your t's and dotting your i's. I don't know how you get there, but that's the fastest way to level the playing field.

Of course. They meet in Davos every year.

The modern fashion industry as we know it has always had black workers and designers, but it was essentially unheard of for a black man to be named the artistic director of a major legacy fashion house. Particularly for businesses that touch the luxury space, much of the last few centuries have involved taking as much as can be taken from non-white, non-male artists and artisans without being forced to give credit or, god forbid, a leadership role. Abloh's ascension to just such a leadership role at Louis Vuitton was objectively a watershed moment.

As you say, "elevation" and appropriation are extremely common practices in fashion in particular, so the (passive-aggressive) ire he inspires in some circles would have to be based on something other than the way he worked. I don't think it was his professional background, either, considering that he had an advanced creative degree (in architecture) and several years of experience building brands independently and interning under established businesses.

Certainly, "elitism" gets closest to describing the true source, but I'll note that there is no fundamental disagreement or mutual exclusivity between that and "racism"; in fact, they often come paired. The latter, as we know, often distorts perception, leading to things like incorrect reads of Abloh's career and work as "not sophisticated," or "not influential," or "not novel or interesting," or as "kinda mid."

Eh. Allow me to play devil's advocate, for funsies. Yes, as the blog post states, Virgil Abloh "stole" (or "steals"). But he did not steal, he "stole" ("steals"). That is, his entire modus operandi was appropriating and "elevating" the work of others. This was expected of him. If his inspiration was not obvious, then it was time to start looking for whoever he did "steal" from.

Some (not 100%) of this was from lesser-known designers; thanks to his reputation, I'm now aware of several of them. I recognize the ambivalence I personally would feel if someone famous "stole" my art, reposted it, and my original post was subsequently found and exploded in engagement, but never to the level of the post of the person who "stole" it (a hypothetical analogous to the subject at hand). By extension, I recognize that this isn't a perfectly clean practice.

If you read the blog, some of his work was explicit collaborations, though. Evidently, some people saw value in his "theft" and were happy to leave the doors unlocked.

And then there is, of course, the "macro-level" elephant in the room: the fact that he was a black man in a role mostly occupied by white people, in an industry with hundreds of years of history of the same kind of "theft" that he engaged in - often not of young creatives in stable and affluent Western democracies, but poor artisans in communities whose entire historical trajectory could have been changed with the proper attribution and remuneration for their work.

For better or worse, Virgil Abloh's career exists in and is recognized within that context, and his "theft" is tolerated because of the way criticism of it would seem to impugn the industry at-large, and perhaps force changes within it that would be rather uncomfortable for all involved. Much easier to just celebrate him as a visionary. Are they being true to the realities or just lying big? shrug Either way, don't hate the player...

(The important thing is that GGP is technically wrong :).)

(I expect disagreement, please just do it thoughtfully, based on what I actually wrote.)

If it is, I'm sure that you can easily produce that documentation.

I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn

I'd like people to understand that this is a form of corruption. We've normalized many like it. LI knows that the only way to force them to fix the issue is to go through a drawn-out legal process, save a spate of bad press (RIP 60 Minutes), so of course they won't.

Americans have exerted control over their society before, of course. It's usually through embarrassment of the people in power, with an implied capacity for violence waiting in the wings.

"So, why not now?" I dunno. Something about temporarily embarrassed trillionaires. Everyone seems afraid to dole out the kind of humiliation that would change elite behaviors, under the mistaken impression that what we're dealing with is not just "a tough job market" or "adulthood" or whatever, but our own measure of unnecessary (but politically effective) humiliation, drizzling down from on high.

The earnest answer is that it's more predictable than random violence, and its predictability makes it somewhat more preventable.

That said, there is a tendency for a system to drift away from this predictability as it's subjected to "review" by people who really, really want a particular outcome, regardless of the systemically-proscribed conclusion. "Bespoke" judgments for edge cases undermines the principle of predictability, which makes a return to "random" "coercion" desirable for some (as those who coerce in anarchy generally have less absolute power than a large system does).

But then, how do you show mercy (people are driven to do so) in a zero-tolerance environment?

This is the tension.

Not that I disagree, but it should be asked: Retribution for what? The answers are, generally:

COVID restrictions

The state of the economy

The state of culture, broadly-speaking

Letting a black man become president, and the attendant ramifications (intrinsic and extrinsic, cause and effect)

I'll leave it to readers to judge. (You can probably guess what I, as a progressive, think of these impetuses, in driving half-ish of the country to vote for everything Trump embodies. And, frankly, what drove the other half-ish of the country to vote for Biden and Harris.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ktgvoH4Mc has a good overview.