Oh nice find! I took this picture of the textbook over a decade ago when a friend showed it to me, so I really can't help you with that though.
5,510 karma · joined December 11, 2023
I once encountered this diagram comparing cultural thought patterns in a Japanese textbook, it comes to my mind regularly https://jellypictu.re/p/8dd73d2c
Things can get much uglier and be much more protracted for governments.
A few years ago, Apple would have never shipped such a feature because the conventional design wisdom within the company would be that the user problems that this solution aims to solve can be better solved in other ways (that’s why we got features like handoff, continuity, etc).
A feature like this shipping is indicative of a greater mindset shift - perhaps a greater willingness to interpret user requests more literally (not too dissimilar from the MacBook Pro redesign going back to having all the ports).
People want faster horses? Well let’s breed faster horses for them, we’ve got the best horse breeding program in the world!
IMO the real interesting questions your post brings up are:
- what kind of labor is the $100 your users are spending coming from
- where would these $100 have gone before your product existed
- where do these $100 go once they change hands from users to you
There are many answers, not a single answer, to these questions, but I think they're worth considering.
In a previous life I worked for a startup where, getting to know our users, I realized that if you broke it down the revenue was essentially money being funneled from hourly-wage workers to venture capitalists, which was a sobering realization.
UIs generated in systematic, composable ways emerging naturally from all the plumbing (pipes, option flags, etc) we already have in place.
Lots of pg tweets/comments over the years about how the thing Sam is best at, and what drives him the most, is climbing up ladders and acquiring power.
It's just lame and not what this forum is about.
If only it were that easy. I come from a country that is notorious for having political parties dissolve/new ones forming all the time, and politics are still all about identities and people still treat issues with a very black-or-white perspective.
As many have made the point before, I think this kind of discourse/attitude is more due to the social media echo chambers environment we now evolve in, and that modern societies can't escape it.
Is there a 0 missing? 6k lines of C is on the lower end of things, especially given how verbose vanilla C can be for basic stuff...
The problem is that those people have families to feed and clothe and housing and utilities to pay for and you can’t expect them to work for free (or a pittance) when they’d need to be paid a high 5 figure/low 6 figure salary to be able to afford their basic cost of living.
Users broadly don’t want to pay and will turn up their nose at having to spend $50 a year on a service or $10 on an app built by honest people with privacy and respect of the user in mind (when they don’t have any issues blowing hundreds of dollars on much more ridiculous things that don’t respect them as customers, but that’s another story…)
And on top of that, how do you make your services known when trillion dollar companies will always beat you in ad spending while offering a free product they have hundreds of people working on?
As an example from just a couple days ago, Read.cv just announced they were shutting down and acqui-hired by Perplexity even though they were a lean 3-person team with a monetized product that their users loved. They were at it for 4 years and couldn’t make it work.
> I've been working to build a company on my own
Very sincerely: good luck, I hope you succeed in your goals.
But just as sincerely, if you truly believe the real problem is that the technological class lacks an “epistemological hunger” and not the basic money/visibility issues I raised above, you’re in for a rude awakening.
Games are interesting because designers have figured out what to present to the player, how to frame it in ways that are engaging/stimulating/challenging/intriguing/etc. That still needs to be authored in some way.
Great example that there's a point of organizational no return that no amount of awareness and intelligent analysis can fix. When the barbarians are at the gate, it's too late.
I have a sneaking suspicion our generation won't make it as far as them (and a few of my family members in the generation after have died in their 70s already). A part of me wants to say "chemicals and microplastics" but my grandpa worked in factories with some pretty nasty chemicals so that can't count for nothing (and they drove cars with leaded fuel too).
Maybe it is in no small part that they spent more time outdoors, and more time socializing? Or maybe it's all just randomness and none of that has any rhyme or reason.
Is it a scale issue? When I look at the sea it doesn't look much like this either, so I don't think so?
Is there a combination of parameters I could set in the simulation such that it looks like what I see when I pour myself a glass of water, or watch waves at the beach?
Or is it because all the real world examples I'm referencing are 3D, and this is 2d?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/firstadopter
The other is a software engineer based in Japan:
My current dashboard includes metrics like free -> paid user conversion, app crashes, features that are most used, etc.
Those are fundamental aspects of my business that I need to track every day and map to events in time like new releases, marketing efforts, etc.
How are they "an invitation to pattern-match the past instead of interrogate the present" or "answers to some long-forgotten question"?
We innovate because we like being comfortable. We don’t want to tend to a fire constantly to be warm. We don’t want to depend on the randomness of hunting/foraging to have a full belly. We don’t want to take days and days of travel to go a few towns over. We don’t want to have to deal with people we don’t know because that’s anxiety inducing.
So we invent all those things that means many modern humans can just stay comfy, warm and fed at home with all their basic needs met without having to go through all this discomfort.
The problem now is that we’re all unhealthy, lonely, feel purposeless (and to top it all the planet is on fire).
The goal of interfaces depicted in movies/media is to look cool.
(Sadly too many designers do not understand this)