kradeelav

Yeesh, this looks like an accessibility issue on steroids. First time i've seen that kind of captcha, would give up in the first two.

I do fear we're headed in a direction where there'll be two false "choices" presented - either turn off all privacy improvements to browsers for vulnerable audiences (to make it easier to data mine and double dip from said paying audiences), or present these to the stubborn ones wanting to keep their privacy and hope that the friction will convert them back to the first batch.

[ raises eyebrow at #1 and the rising crime within it ]

Not the person you're replying to, but as a manager: a manager who dislikes employees reaching out for 1:1's with other coworkers for any reason is a bad one, imo. I encourage my folks to be proactive in learning from other teams and to be adults who don't need hand-holding. As long as they hold up their bargain of a reasonable amount of work done in a time frame, what they do with their time isn't my business.

(caveat that it's for normal water cooler talk and not a top-of-the-iceberg issue of a very big iceberg of issues.)

"Arnal was named as a defendant in a class action lawsuit accusing him, Ryan Cohen and other large shareholders of engaging in a "pump and dump" scheme to artificially inflate the price of the company's stock."

If I had to guess, he was more afraid of the legal ramifications of being sued.

Still a tragic loss of life, but paints a little more accurate of a picture.

do you realize how dystopian that is?

Aw thank you! Means a lot to hear that. :) Who knows, it may happen - have a few visual novel game ideas in mind for the far future.

Unfortunately with the various moral panics going on, folks who lean towards the middle / nuanced balanced thoughts are more afraid and reluctant to put their thoughts out there. It just isn't worth the brain-width or having potential people yell at you for toeing various party lines. The death of questioning is imo one of the more disheartening things in the last 5-10 years.

To your last point, I personally skew towards being deeply suspicious of institutional power being able to have more tools to further leverage the tilt against the individual, but you're also not wrong with individuals being deeply flawed beings too.

Interesting you ask that; it's only been on itch.io up until now because I was printing incredibly small zine runs (like sub 20-30) off the office printer; but recently have been working with a printer for the next few and have a surplus to which I might send out to various zine ships. Good thinking. ;)

I don't talk about my zines (https://kradeelav.itch.io) and artwork to people IRL -- it occupies a very liminal space in my mind and soul where I can mention things a bit too raw or depraved for office spaces. ;)

While I don't make zines to make money, per se (going as far to give a free digital copy on my site), there's still evidentially enough people that buy them that it technically counts.

Congrats on launching!

Compliments first - you described your elevator pitch of the company incredibly well in the starter post here on HN, to the point I'd use that as a template on your site and any kind of social media materials. Fantastic way to explain what the isasue is and how you're tackling it in a novel but practical way.

My immediate thought is "cool idea, but a non starter for me personally when I have a lot of questions about data and privacy" and how the team's handling patient's data. I'd highly encourage you to have a whole page at minimum elucidating the details there, if you're using E2E encryption, all that jazz. Given people's recent concerns about data collecting and menstrual cycles and the recent Roe fallout, this is of special concern to me as a woman.

Wishing you and the team best of luck, all the same!

re: 90's / 200's design style in websites ... check out neocities. there's a recent surge in people creating personal sites with exactly that aesthetic / nostalgia in mind.

There's no word in the english language for how tragic this is. As a sister comment mentioned, the cruelty is the point.

It's a long shot, but is there any material way of helping these artists be able to take their art with them again? Making noise at specific people? Organizations that specifically target these broken freedoms?

Artistic freedom in particular is a very near and dear subject to me, and would greatly appreciate pointers here if there's any existing work done here.

The only interaction my art page gets is a little javascript hit counter like the old web used to have - just knowing there's a certain number of people in the thousands* that have seen it at all brightens the mood.

Glad you're making a personal page for your art, by the way. :) Social media to a vast majority of artists is toxic, and there's a spark of individuality in personal pages that many people are hungry for. I'll be checking out yours.

(*I'm sure a large number are bots, but since I get some lovely personalized emails from the humans, the number itself doesn't matter in the end of the day.)

Honestly, 4chan would be a vast improvement over the sound of this. At least it's funny occasionally.

My father has a background that's eerily similar to yours, right down to running a firm the same size, and he feels the same way you and yours does (so do I).

It truly is a lost art and there's a lot more hidden knowledge and reward that comes with knowing traditional drafting than it may appear on the surface. Patience, precision, a sense of intuitive aesthetics, and how to arrange a composition on paper to tell a story effectively ... thank you for sharing this comment, I'll have to tell him somebody else agrees. :)

Online safety education for the younger generations. There's of course outliers, but as a rule I've seen some scary amounts of zoomers who have zero idea of why giving out a photo of their government ID card (unredacted) to total strangers for age verification is a very bad idea.

It's a far cry from the old "don't give out your A/S/L/(and name)" that I got.

Best is entirely subjective. ;) I'm quite fond of my own(1), but it's pretty basic and heavily modified/hacked together from a very minimal wordpress theme.

Let's start with the two you mentioned: looking at the source code, one's actually built from a squarespace theme, and the other is likewise built from a wordpress theme, feels like an slightly older one given it's not mobile responsive. That's not a knock, by the way - sometimes you want an audience that don't use phones or deliberately flock to the retro vibe.

I don't know your budget or capability to self-code, but browsing squarespace's themes would be what I would recommend if you have a higher budget, and likewise doing the same with wordpress if you're operating on a shoestring mindset. There's some gorgeous ones on both, though squarespace is far more curated and caters to a more modern/slick looking audience and clientele.

(1) (SFW) art log: http://log.kradeelav.com/

A bit amusing to see the article and think "they really could have summed it up as "show, don't tell", aka the old sage writer's advice. :)

Some very good points made in the article, glad I read. I admit the personal instagram would be a huge turnoff for me since it shows ("shows") that there's not an expectation for work sphere and personal life sphere to be airgapped. Then again maybe that's the kind of person they're trying to filter out.

Putting aside micro-design trends that come and go per decade given this has been happening for longer than just for one or two, my bet's on:

a) corporations skewing towards multi-use capabilities (your camera is not just your camera, it's a phone, mobile computer, app machine, and camera all at once) and

b) corporations trying to capture the maximum amount of dollars (said more uncharitably: cater to the lowest common denominator). There's a lot of sister comments here that mention that colors evoke strong responses - it can be good, but bean counters are going to cringe at every lost sale and agitate for neutrals.

Personally I wish the transparent devices of the 90's would come back. seeing the internals was magical. :)

Putting aside the business model side of it (I can't speak for that), I agree with you about pro-privacy arguments tend to be annoyingly insufficient on the material justification ... when I can think of plenty.

Put simply, it enables massive power inequalities that threaten to be permanent, if they aren't already. Several living examples:

* Black advocates have already raised attention to pre-emptive tracking mixed with AI to "anticipate" crimes committed by "at risk" individuals (read, racial profiling) when this goes against everything that the Constitution stands for re: presuming innocence.

* The recent controversies with Roe that another sibling comment is a textbook example about how information mined from menstrual apps or location services can be used to criminalize women seeking an abortion.

* On a similar tangent, there was a case early on in adtech's history when a young woman who was pregnant and hiding it from the people she lived with got found out because ads about baby supplies were shown to them (after she had searched up the items). People's living situations can be volatile and this could have been fatal for her if they were sufficiently abusive enough.

* Health/Medical apps tend to be especially obscene with tracking - collecting data on the most medically vulnerable (eg disabled people) and letting that data be resold often times means locking them to a sub-standard life because jobs and insurance can and will discriminate in obvious and subtle ways if they know about certain medical conditions, if they can get away with it.

This is only the tip of the iceberg.

Oh I absolutely love the font choices and numbers as a designer - wish more boutique mechanical creators would get creative there more frequently. The knobs are quite handsome too. Immediately subscribed to the mailing list ... Thank you for sharing and I hope to see more eventually. :)

C-suite folks and "idea gurus" don't use the same success metrics as engineers (and to a lesser extent, designers) do. Sheer charisma, being able to pitch some hair-brained idea over drinks, political machination, and notoriety are their metrics with rare exceptions which leads to classic study cases such as this.

They're far more like politicians in that sense if I can be cheeky.

Charts can lie. Whether or not you can buy bacon* or gas is real.

*substitute with whatever staple you wish. I used bacon here since it's historically a working class' person's meat.

This piece touches on the inherent tension between originality and selling out (or selling to the masses) that I've definitely seen in comic circles. So many aspiring indie artists/comic creators who think Patreon is their easy ticket to a passive and liveable income when the stark reality is much different.

It's why my first piece of advice to any creative is to have a dayjob that maximizes their free time to create freely without financial strings. Even if burnout or predatory publishers don't get you, following the whims of trends is a slow creative death that's far more insidious than the other two.

Any company that substitutes surveillance in the place of emotional maturity is going to have a real bad time in the long run. You don't get creative, well-functioning adults that can adapt on a dime by treating them like drones.

(sauce : coming from a manager that would rather quit on the spot than use / be monitored like how the article describes. absolutely dystopian!)

100% agreed. To add what you mentioned about increasing time on the things you care about, personally found it helpful to link a purpose to those specific actions in my head and mentally state it.

For example -- "I've been anxious lately, I should sit down and journal in my physical notebook for 5 minutes" or "I haven't taken a lot of play time to myself lately, let's go read something offline for 30 minutes."

Re-framing it slightly so it feels like a practical suggestion to immediately do something from somebody else to myself helps break down a lot of the procrastinationation loops, imo. Triggers that "I want to be useful" feeling.

It's odd as a design manager, I feel like people focus on the wrong things to be alarmed about with DALL-E, and aren't alarmed enough about others.

* feels like there will be a subtle shift from (corporate) designers as creators to designers as technical sheepherders and retouchers. senior designers who have a real nose for art direction and understanding the fundementals will be fine. interns and juniors may get hit with a widening canyon of blindly using these tools without understanding why the "base" styles/logos look good. the act of creation is a learning experience that this removes.

* I feel like phi-y in a different comment has the most accurate read on the situation, given how this will not replace the superstar artists who've already gone through the years of training and sweat-shop work to refine their craft, but the beginner artists who "need" the sweatshop years to get a real-world sense of their craft and the money from the more easily reproducible works.

* there is a difference from using digital art as a tool (say, an apple pencil) to digital art as a resource-crutch (photobashing) when crunched for time or resources. I have mixed feelings about photo bashing as an art but those who rely on the resource-crutch sign may get hit hardest versus the ones that already have the raw illustration skills and can adapt/art-direct on the spot.

* copyright laws are gonna be interesting when people start trying to "base" results on logos like disney and coca-cola and get lawyers sent after them if it's too obvious. My fear is this creates yet another power imbalance between those who have the money to sic lawyers on others versus not.

* I'm mixed on DALL-E because on one hand and to be perfectly blunt, I feel like the most easily reproduced work is ugly/same-y as sin, and lacks all originality compared with the more creative/taboo-art circles who are the first ones to push stylistic and thematic boundaries. I'm not worried about DALL-E replacing styles that are inherently harder to reproduce.

On the other hand ... a sense of grace should be extended to artists who are affected. Being slowly replaced/treated as obsolete is a hard thing to experience, much like how natural age is rough on people's emotional states to the point where it's a type of trauma. It's messy, and it's hard, and I acknowledge there's going to be casualties.

Agreed - surgeries too. Between waiting for the anesthesia to work itself out and the body recovering from the shock of it, it can be a wallop to the energy reserves. Recently slept like 20 hours a day for a day or two after a comparatively mild one.

> "can't be cracked"

If Adobe PS is anything to go by, that's not a worry. :)

+1 for openlibrary/archive.org - I'd say a good half of my to-read list is available on there.