Second link is a 404 fyi
5,184 karma · joined December 28, 2008
Emoji is used for more than arguing or "objective discussion"!
Emojis are used for friendship, for flirting, for jokes, for sexting, for gossiping, for nattering. "I'm a woman who likes to dance", "I am white", "oh but I'm an old man" — these are all valid statements people say to one another; adding this capability allows emoji to be used to convey these meanings.
If your argument is "people shouldn't conduct electronic discussion in these sorts of ways, when using emoji they should only have arguments over objective facts" that's ... well, it's a stance, but you're at odds with how billions of people communicate electronically. This is why I use terms like "obvious" and "strange".
There is more to language than debate-club argumentation, too. Consider - why is it important what gender someone is? Or age? Should emoji only have had unisex and age-less figures instead of its current set? Is it sexist to use a female-presenting emoji?
These things all have obvious utility for communication, and you're ending up making some deeply strange arguments to try and dismiss that utility.
The wave-hand emoji with a black colour allows you to compactly say "+1 as a black person", for example. That means emojis now support conversations about race. I've seen it used exactly like this in the wild in multiple fora.
With emoji you can, in one glyph, raise your hand in a conversation to say, eg, "me too". With skin tone support, you can still raise your hand but can also say, "and I'm a person of colour" which may be a crucial piece of context for the conversation.
TLDR People need to talk about race. People talk using emojis. Skin tone allows them to talk about race while using emojis.
Is it a "pretty grotesque" sense of entitlement at work when a man looks for a urinal in a public building? Or when a disabled person looks for the wheelchair ramp? These things have half utility at best by your "obvious metric".
Take this further: imagine architecture firms were staffed mostly (80%+) by women. They keep getting complaints because their doorways are only 5'11" high (ideal for 99% of women's bodies), they don't provide urinals and so on.
Is it a wild assumption that having more men – or, god, "experts in catering to men (who might be men but also women)" - on their teams would help address these repeated own goals? Or do we need to spend years getting the data that shows us the real, mysterious, non-political underlying cause of this gender bias in buildings?
If there was a woman on that team it says even less good things about Apple that they shipped without it.
But: Apple's diversity report from then [1] says they were 80% male in tech, so while the assumption might be serious, I don't think it's unreasonable.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/12/5949453/no-surprise-apple...
People bring politics and emotion. If your customers or staff are people, it is more effective to be able to discuss their issues directly without contorting yourself into a "just focus on the work" correctness.
Want examples beyond hand driers? Apple missed menstrual cycle tracking in the Health app. NASA offered to send 1,000 tampons with the first woman in space - and had to abandon its first all-woman spacewalk for bad planning in kit availability. Google Photos tagged black people as gorillas. (Regardless of the cause, it shipped). SnapChat shipped a yellowface filter. Google Translate delivers highly gendered results when translating from gendered languages into English. Google Home is 70% more likely to recognise male voices because of training set bias. Women are 49% more likely to be injured in car accidents because the seating position for crash testing is designed for men. And - yes! - Pinterest has struggled to reach men as users apparently because of its SEO strategy.
Want more examples? Ask any passing woman what app she uses that clearly didn’t think about women.
Diverse teams make better products. The stats are out there.
Trying to argue this highly political. We wouldn’t even be able to talk about your point at Basecamp. Does that not worry you? Don’t assume they will always agree with your politics just because they’ve done this.
For one thing, there is no shortage of examples of social products that have launched offerings without thinking how they could be abused (hello cross-Slack messaging) and had to recant quickly. But to go more deep: social software is about community, and communities bring political and social issues with them.
Should you have a gender field in your user form? What values should it have? Should you have vacation auto-responders? How will they operate? Do you have activity lights? With what timeout? Should you allow users to filter or block one another? What emoji do you offer? What biases do they exhibit? Will you refuse certain kinds of customer? Will you _protect_ certain kinds of customer despite public outcry? Or certain kinds of content?
How you approach these sorts of questions can touch on a wide range of social/political issues, and they appear to be saying "only David and Jason can discuss, decide or think about these things". Which seems ... limiting.
Untaxed inheritance perpetuates inequality. Inequalities are unfair and arguably damage our societies. Functioning societies aim to repair the damage by rebalancing structural inequalities. Hence inheritance tax. The children of the very wealthy aren’t being “abandoned”, they already have surpassing advantages while their parents are alive.
This is a climate where companies lay off entire staffs for daring to unionise. If you’re working for a company that already makes you piss in a bottle and are concerned about keeping your job, what are you going to do when they order you as plainly as can be to vote no?
It says absolutely nothing good about Amazon that the workers voted against unionization. You certainly can’t conclude the workers didn’t want to be unionised.
The original assumption from TBL was there would be much richer tooling to allow everyone to compose HTML without knowing tags, but for various reasons that's not the direction Andreesen et al took Netscape. And third-party tooling (like SiteMill) end up focusing on developers and evolved into things like DreamWeaver.
Hence the mess we're in today: the world's greatest publishing platform, and it's near-impossible for non-technical users to start publishing directly to it as conceived. Good news for Wordpress and CMS vendors, but a road sadly not taken in so many other aspects
And if you're niche, you can't establish a new file format in a networked world, so you end up having to be interoperable, with markdown in text or xls for spreadsheets. And if you're interoperable, you end up shrinking your market even further: people your users are sharing with don't need to use you.
You really can't build much of a moat on "powerful UX that boils down to a sharable file format". The only way to make space for yourself then is to become a platform in your own right (see emacs/vscode etc).
And what prevents spreadsheets becoming a platform? The install base of Excel, for a kickoff, but also the enormous limitations of csv on the other hand.
In short, the conditions that allowed all those 1980s applications to flourish – bespoke file formats, invested users, no truly dominant players, less networked sharing - have all gone. And so have the apps.
This was a public performance for Jobs, of course he'd have thought through and rehearsed what he was going to say. His ability to weave together the rehearsed with the improvised - like when his remote broke on stage at WWDC - is one of the things that took him to the next level. Just like the comic who can handle a heckle and get back to their set in such a smooth way you can't even see the join.
That's why later successors like LiveCode have to aim themselves at niches of the original HyperCard audience, like those who want an easy dev tool. Which is nice, but misses the tool-for-everyone dream of the original
But the reason the debate is dying out is because the competition is dying out: Word won. And that doesn’t mean the app, it means all the Simonyi-type ways of thinking it brings with it: paragraph-level formatting with overrides, single frame with embeds, no visible codes beyond P-marks, output-dependent page definition, local fonts, etc.
It’s like if all editors were just vi variants and nobody was trying anything else any longer.
Which is a damn shame, because there are an awful lot of alternative approaches to rich document creation that could be explored, especially now the printed page is probably the least important part of things, but developers don’t care (plain text obsessives, usually) and the industry doesn’t (because competing with Word and GDocs doesn’t make you rich).
Instead what action there would be in the space has moved to things like Notion. Which is great for note-takers, less so for writers.
We also found a privilege escalation endpoint, and were only caught when the network server was upgraded to an Archimedes and the special badging on admin accounts in the GUI gave our MRBIG account away.
Will my children use them? Possibly not. Is it still better than a reasonable anticipated lifespan for AirPods Max? Yes.
I know the reflex answer is "they won't do it because iPhone exclusivity sells iPhones" but suspect that's increasingly only true in the US.
People here are describing how phones there are increasingly WhatsApp-running platforms, and Apple would be wise to prevent that while it can. Might also offer them an upsell route for their other cross-platform services.
People deserve dignity, even if they are (sometimes forced into) making economic choices you think suboptimal.