Agreed that it’s kind of ridiculous to assume you can’t rest your arm… people do with phones all the time. To be fair, old lcd displays did have a razor thin viewing angle.
202 karma · joined July 29, 2021
It sounds like you were looking at a federal resume which are differently structured and much, much longer than private sector resumes. Candidates appreciate feedback letting them know: “Thanks for applying but I can’t suss out what you can actually do based on what you sent. Feel free to reapply with a more concise, descriptive resume.”
If they’ve worked in the federal government that long, they might just not realize how inappropriate their resume is for private sector jobs even if they’re qualified. If they can’t course correct and describe their skills in common business language, that’s a good enough indicator of their ability to adapt to the position, I’d say.
But that's the problem with bias in general, though— It's always a matter of practicality. It's been some time since most discrimination deliberately stymied people with a background or makeup the dominant culture considered objectionable. These days it hides in the subconscious mechanisms governing the purportedly rational generalizations we rely on when lacking time and resources to properly investigate something.
I don't think it's anybody's fault— it's a bug in our brains and we can't control that. I do think we're ethically obligated to push back when practical requirements compel us to make those generalizations. If we expect police to do it when someone may or may not be pulling a gun out of their pocket, we should certainly expect ourselves to do it when we've got a queue of resumes to process.
Not only could you be bypassing people passionate enough to work their way into the field through pretty adverse circumstances, you could be inadvertently reducing the diversity of your workforce in doing so. I know it’s tough to have to whittle down a list of candidates on paper, but the closer you are to judging a person’s path rather than their capability, the more likely you’ll be to favor people who mirror your cultural identity and experiences. So if someone looks like they’ve got the requisite skills. It certainly doesn’t mean everybody with a pile of certs is worth considering, but it’s probably not a good immediate disqualifier.
The likelihood of a 2000 employee software company simply not considering that they could streamline their build process is pretty slim.
So, given that enough industry analysts believe development will be heavily automated to make top-10 lists, and recent developments provide even stronger evidence (copilot writes better comments on existing code than my coworkers,) can someone providence a strong a priori argument or maybe even empirical evidence that utilitarian software development is somehow uniquely immune to this?
When I was first considering getting a BFA (in my late 30s) I thought my inability to photographically reproduce scenes using pencils and other traditional media precluded my going to art school... but I still gathered my courage, front-loaded my portfolio with what I thought was my strongest work— very polished photography— and scheduled a “do I even stand a chance here” portfolio consultation.
I swallowed hard when the interviewer (gruffly) introduced himself as a professor in the fine art photography program. He cooly disregarded shots I thought were most impressive— a perfectly composed and finished shot of a huge lightning bolt over a brick victorian cathedral shot from a fifth floor outdoor vantage point a few blocks away with a full frame DSLR; some long exposure shots of really grand views in a city; a few others. ‘Ah, yes. Very pretty. Doesn’t say much about you though, non?’ But as soon as he got through those and got to the ones I threw in there to pad things out, he started to pay more attention.
One-for-one, he was most interested in the ones I liked the most. I did not even take most on a ‘real’ camera, I took them on my phone... Abstract shapes made by overlapping subway bars. A smashed pile of dropped beer glasses at the bar I worked at. A guy in a suit sitting down waiting for a his hamburger order at 3am. He actually stopped, put his coffee and pen down, and spent a solid minute smiling and just taking in a picture of my wife, from behind, sitting a fifty or so feet away on a beach staring out into the water in the low-left corner of the frame with a low-flying plane the same size as her in top right of the frame. The shot really does viscerally convey groundedness, and airiness, the simultaneous distance and closeness of the juxtaposition on the infinite expanse of ocean and sky... it’s a great, kinda grainy, totally unpolished iPhone photograph.
Without a single pencil portrait or oil painting, he waived my admission and let me in on the spot. My school is no RISD, but a professor who went to RISD prided himself on perfect pencil realism as a high school student, but soon realized how little it mattered in practice. We obviously must know how to produce things visually, but perfectly reproducing a glass sphere sitting in front of a waterfall is a parlor trick. The time spent honing those skills to that level would be much better spend figuring out new and interesting ways to present what you see, or figuring out new angles or new truths to communicate about YOUR world, or even going out and experiencing new things to find captivating about it— many of them you'll probably find on your block.
Many folks— largely folks that haven’t ever or recently had anything to do with formal art education— think we lost something important by deemphasizing those rigid classical technical capabilities. Many of those folks would also be pretty sad if rock, rap, folk, cool jazz, folk, electronica, or any other modern music was replaced by Serious Classical Virtuosity.
In the end, you need exactly as much skill as you need to express what you want to express. The tools or techniques compensating for ‘missing’ skills often become the most compelling elements— like Jan van Eyck, here. He could have gotten a future iPad beamed to him with Adobe Illustrator installed on it and it wouldn’t make those prayer beads (or any of the other captivating shinies in his work) any less stunning. You can instantly tell his work by looking at it and it’s certainly not because everything looks just like a photograph— it has real emotional impact. It really viscerally communicates that weird Van Eck something and it definitely would do a worse job of it had he not used whatever projection doodad he used to get it.
Nothing about that situation has bearing on whether people first think of safely concealed sources or being publicly dragged through the mud like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden before sharing things far more important than entitled rants about customer service for entertainment-related products. My lord.
> Surely I can't be the only one who finds it incredibly frustrating to see how many people think being republican associated is noteworthy when in the context of scary privacy violations. It would seem to me you're just encouraging republicans to buy this phone. Surely, the privacy conscious people in this community want privacy for everyone regardless of political affiliations, right?
It's frustrating when people unnecessarily politicize things— like when they express righteous indignation over their inaccurate accusation of political discrimination in a thread that's literally just pointing out its association with divisive partisan political groups.
Except wanting anyone, ever to talk to them again about something controversial.
If you’re wondering why people think software developers are seen as out of touch children, I don’t think professional licensure is high on the list tbh.
It does show lexical homogenization. It does show an increase in their shoddily assembled list so-called diversity words. The concluded implications and pretty much every other part is hand waving, assumptions and political insinuation.
Like here where the author disclaims the shoddiness of using word frequency as a measure of politicization because the nuance and subtlety of bias make quantitative measurement difficult (he should apply for a grant to research that)… but then draws the entirely unsupported conclusion that politicization is actually worse than their only data implies:
“Note that word counts is a somewhat crude way of measuring politicization. Bias, particularly in the social sciences, is often subtle, and can apply to the kinds of questions that get asked and the standard of evidence used to accept or reject a hypothesis. Thus, the fact that so many grants contain terms that are in most contexts clearly associated with left-wing political causes likely underestimates the degree of politicization in science funding.”
And the author puts that assumption to work a couple of paragraphs and charts later:
”This report presents direct evidence that scientific funding at the federal level has become more politicized and less supportive of novel ideas since 1990.”
The opening paragraphs don’t even indicate a connection beyond “Look at this trend which I assume means Y. Now look at that trend which I assume means Y. Now look at them together. Vaguely similar, eh? Awfully suspicious, eh?.”
“Taken together, the results imply that there has been a politicization of scientific funding in the US in recent years and a decrease in the diversity of ideas supported.”
How about a real “diversity word” selection criteria instead of just showing some tenuously relevant clustering? How about contextual analysis or explanation of the terms? Language and public discourse have changed a lot since the 90s. To inform and help validate their word selection analyzing ~30 years of data, they used the “DEI terms” diversity, equity and inclusion, but the DEI acronym wasn’t used until about 10 years ago— it could be a coincidence, but could indicate those terms weren’t always an accepted standard — is there evidence other terms weren’t used instead? Is there any evidence those are the best terms to use now? Did 90s political grants use euphemisms or code words for political ideas to send more neutral? Were the terms you selected used by political activists as commonly in 1993 as they are now? Would the declining prevalence of second wave feminists and original civil rights movement activists, to use two prevalent examples of very political movements ubiquitous in academia long before 1990, have been equally political but using different words? How many of those words are central to the research topic and how many are positioning unrelated research as good for society or aware of current trends or more beneficial than they are? What other words or topics showed similar/different results for comparison? So-called inclusion words removed, was the lexical similarity static? During that same period, a small number of ubiquitous spelling and grammar checkers gained sophistication and adoption; writers who disregarded or disabled them probably retired and others probably changed how they wrote; the Internet sharpened the curves of trends and memes and also probably exposed people to better writing practices; writing trends have probably come and gone; educational curricula become more standardized; the Internet facilitated access to far more grant/business writing examples; there may have been particularly influential events or pieces of writing that changed things for other reasons— how did they consider or reason about factors like that? Do Internet-focused terms which would have gained prevalence in the same time frame follow a similar trend line? Any medical terms? BPA? GMOs? Genetic testing? Any other points of comparison at all?
Anyone interested in actually advancing human understanding rather than creating political cudgels could poke holes in this garbage all day. I don’t see how anyone could look at that and think “huh — thoughtful analysis” rather than “huh — that’s some elaborate work to give a tenuous air of legitimacy to a claim they didn’t test presented in a manipulative piece which won’t get much traction beyond a politically sympathetic subreddit.”
Really? The Commitment Subscription payment model is super common and old as time.
Oracle. Microsoft for some services. Lots of random SaaS companies. Unity Pro. Gyms. Internet service. Webex since forever. POTS service. Mobile service until Verizon got greedy and they started letting phone subsidies do the same thing. Leases. Service contracts for everything from software support to pest control. Consulting contracts. Columbia's Record of the Month Club.
I am firmly against blaming people who've been ripped off because they didn't' prevent it, but this is not new. It is a standard business practice across many industries. It's not even new to software.
Beyond that, even with Adobe, you don't even have to use it— it's just the only one Adobe lets you sign up for a free trial with. If you go to Adobe's sub page: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html
And click on the 52 whatever a month plan, the three options for subscriptions— Month-to-Month, Monthly with a 12 month commitment, and annual paid upfront, are listed clear-as-day on the right.
I think the Hanlon's Razor play on words is clear. When the two possibilities at large seem to be "Adobe, the world standard in creative software, maliciously styled their cancellation terms to trick the sliver of people suspicious enough to read the terms but not suspicious enough to realize the text was cut off" and "Adobe fell behind on user testing for infrequently viewed text-only fine print pages," Hanlon's razor is the heuristic people should use, and the results are self-evident.
Folks have legitimate bones to pick with Adobe— including the cost alone— and I think that’s why folks want to pig-pile on them for something like this. That said, I don't think this is a dark pattern. I don't even really think it's critique— more like conspiracy theory.
Dark pattern: Buttons confirming difficult-to-undo actions not in a user's best interest hiding in buttons styled and positioned like cancel buttons.
Dark pattern: Ad modals with undersized X closing symbols in low-contrast colors with transparent backgrounds over complex graphics making it hard to find and harder to not click on the ad.
Dark pattern: Cookie consent boxes w/an “accept all” option but only line-item rejection of dozens of entries requiring 2 or 3 clicks each.
Dark pattern: Cookie consent boxes with “reject all” options which don’t reject cookies selected in other tabs/cards not visible unless you click on them.
Dark pattern: Inconspicuous opt-out adware in Windows installers that rarely require user interaction beyond clicking next.
Dark pattern: One-click sign-up requiring in-person, written, or phone cancellation via a ‘retention specialist.’
... this pattern: Bait link that doesn’t tell the whole story leads to a screen with a prominent order form. It has only one line item near the top that’s labelled commitment which says "annual plan, paid monthly £49.94/mo" with the monthly price. It clearly states the length of the free trial, twice, including the explicit date you need to cancel by to not get charged. The terms modal, which could be more clearly styled, explicitly states the penalties for not cancelling before twice the length of your free trial passes.
So if a user signs up for an annual subscription and doesn't cancel until more than double the time their free trial passes then they get charged a penalty. Ok.
Adobe has room to improve here, but sorry— this is just not a dark pattern by any good faith measure.
The first page is obviously a bait link, It should prominently state a 12 month commitment and save non-interested users the click. While it's overly salesy, it's a standard advertising tactic and incredibly mild compared to what you see at your average car dealership. Newer SAAS companies (e.g. Slack) do a much better job, here, and Adobe should follow suit. I would absolutely levy a dark pattern accusation if users only saw that before committing more than a click, but it's not.
I don't understand how anyone viewing an order form occupying ~ 1/3 of the screen with a prominent box labelled "commitment" saying "annual plan, paid monthly £49.94/mo" would not understand that you're making an annual commitment to pay £49.94/mo, and that the total cost will be £49.94/mo * 12. Never has any phone plan or car lease or gym membership or anything else I paid for monthly with some multi-month commitment prominently displayed the explicit total price. The free trial end dates are prominently mentioned twice.
The cancellation terms box styling should more clearly convey the document structure, but even someone quickly skimming the first 8 paragraphs would see the content didn't end with the headline “Cancellation Terms:”. Hanlon’s Razor shreds the assertion of deliberate malfeasance over a site-wide design system flubbing form follows function.
Normally love a pig pile on Adobe’s pricing practices, but this looks a lot more like histrionics intended to drive twitter traffic than a useful analysis of Adobe’s sign-up process.