mqrs

I maintain that we don’t need this article to be true to debate with the response about assuming good intent, precisely because ”assume good intent” is a statement on its own and it is being positioned as general advice, therefore it is independent of the facts of the article. I get what you’re saying but I don’t think it’s relevant because no one is really picking sides between Google and the former employee.

> why are you engaging in this creative writing exercise?

Because I'm responding to the very top comment about assuming good intent and the people already agreeing with it. I'm not arguing that what happened in the article is verified true.

> Are you really trying to claim that you have traversed the near-infinite space of potential interactions and deemed them all 'NOT OK'? All of them?

I made no claims. I asked the question.

> What if this comment was in context of a sun-tan because you, your new coworker and other people were talking about about their sun-tans and your new coworker pointed out they tan really quickly (or not at all)? Is that too silly? What if your new coworker was the one who brought up their skin tone and you politely agreed with them? Too contrived? Don't like this creative writing exercise? How is that different from what you're doing ... except you're not only taking the absolute worst and most ugly interpretation of a half-a-sentence reference from this article, but also categorically stating that there is no context under which it would be 'OK' for two co-workers to reference skin color. Insanity.

Then you're just assuming good faith on behalf of the offending party in the article based on certain "what ifs" that you conjured, which isn't so different from my engaging in conversation with HN re: the boundaries of workplace racism based on the "what if" that the article is, in fact, true.

I don’t understand your point here—if I’m traveling to a foreign country and I’m asking about what’s offensive because I don’t want to offend the locals and be an annoying, insensitive tourist, then I’m just automatically being “woke” instead of trying to genuinely learn about the indigenous culture from the point of view of the locals? Are you saying that I should be asserting my own perceptions of the world to the people whom I am visiting?

You don’t have to make any judgment about the parties involved in the story. If you want to critically think about both sides of the argument, you’re going to have to ask anyway whether there exist “good faith” motives for pointing out a new coworker’s skin color in corporate America, because if there’s an answer to that question, then doubting (not knowing) the intentions of the former Google employee would be justified.

So, when is pointing out a new coworker’s skin color actually okay?

> Google is an international company with lots of immigrants not familiar with modern American norms

Still, doesn’t the responsibility of understanding the sensitivities of an unfamiliar culture fall onto the foreigner who’s coming in?

What “good faith” motivation could possibly arise from pointing out the color of one’s skin in America though?

Check out your iPhone’s Settings > Privacy and scroll to the very bottom. You’ll see “Analytics & Improvements” and “Apple Advertising”, which both contain toggles and details about the data that has been gathered so far. There was also an iOS update in the past where the onboarding flow asked me to grant these permissions, though I vaguely remember seeing it on every major iOS version update.

Now, that’s not to say that the iPhone setting guarantees that Apple is not up to something sketchy. We can’t tell what’s going on under the hood or in their servers, but if we really wanted to be extremists about privacy, then we have to resort to apps that we’ve built and self-hosted ourselves.

You can still parameterizethe API calls if you want to attribute user activity to a specific flow, and that way you wouldn’t be “feeding the beast” that is GA.

Yes but it’s not necessarily Google analytics.

If you’re just using analytics to look at how effective UI designs are in making business conversions, couldn’t you still measure that by checking the backend and looking for a spike in activity towards the API endpoint that the UI invokes? Couldn’t you measure effectivity with a spike or drop in sales? I mean, good UX doesn’t so much rely on Google Analytics but on a UX engineer’s depth of knowledge about human psychology.

Are we really supposed to be thinking of all currently available land as being flexibly provisioned for landfills.

“Do what you love” is not so much a privileged thing to say. It’s just an ideal to aspire towards, a north star of sorts, even if you’re currently in a position where you’re only doing what pays the bills. Doing what you love is life advice on how to live a good, happy, and fulfilling life—do what pays the bills isn’t.

> Espousing a desire for any change will always be offensive to someone, and so wanting any improvement necessarily includes being deliberately offensive.

This is not true. Whatever you’re disagreeing with another person, you don’t have to call that person any politically incorrect slur, which is really the kind of “offensive” that we are talking about here.

> We're going to see more fragmentation

Whenever people say this, I wonder whether they are considering the possibility that once the internet goes in the direction of fragmentation, more states would swoop in with regulation to barricade their own internet in the same way that China has a great firewall. There are plenty of incentives into banning US-based tech companies--states would then have access to data about their citizens instead of being at the mercy of Facebook or the US, and local software companies would begin to thrive.

> A more apt comparison would be a group in a corner having a conversation at a rock concert. Suddenly this argument appears less apt.

This is a tired old argument and it isn't convincing or effective. There's a big difference between having a conversation in a corner at a rock concert, and having a conversation in an online service hosted by someone else outside of that conversation, in a territory owned by a state where the host has to comply with laws which place the accountability of user-generated content on the host. A more apt comparison would be... I don't know, I actually don't have any idea. How about simply not being deliberately offensive or hateful or using whatever rhetoric that could ultimately translate into real-world violence?

I mean, I didn’t sleep through 2016 onwards but people threatening violence still get banned, people with bigoted views still get called out or damage their real-world offline relationships, and it’s possible that there’d be even less people who’d be mindful of what they say without those feedback mechanisms.

It's really not a correct model even at the scale of the phenomena for which it is correct, that's why it can't explain what's beyond its scale, nor can anyone draw a line to clearly define the boundaries of the scale in which it is correct. I'm afraid I don't have a more profound argument than that. The math of Newtonian physics merely coincides with what's actually going on in reality, but what's actually going on in reality is as explained by Einsteinian physics. We're only keeping Newtonian physics around because it's close enough as an approximation of natural phenomenon and therefore it is pragmatic, but pragmatic does not mean correct and it remains an estimation nonetheless. It's not the correct model of what's actually going on.

Doesn't the fact that Twitter posts (mostly) stay incentivize conscientiousness, precisely because it doesn't take away the reality that words have consequences? It's still not an excellent representation of how forgiveness and personal development exists in the real world (i.e. we can forget about the details of what's been done in the past, but what we post stays in some database), but without the longevity of Twitter/FB posts, people just wouldn't think twice about what they're saying and this is a time when we do need more critical thinking.

Newtonian physics is only coincidentally correct. It’s not “wrong” in the sense that the math isn’t sound or that experiments aren’t reproducible within earth, but it’s not the correct model for what really happens in physical phenomenon regardless of scale.

I wonder if removing the Touch Bar has something to do with prepping up the line for gaming. I personally don't dislike the Touch Bar except when I'm playing video games, and Apple Silicon is on a trajectory to be able to run games on a Mac with fairly decent graphics.

> Were a less material society now

Genuinely curious as to what led you into thinking that.

I haven’t read Epictetus and I can’t tell exactly what he meant by that proverb, but the nuance that I can only react to cockroaches differently under conditions perfect to me must not be lost. That nuance is what’s lacking in the article and his judgmental explanation for the causality of the women's reactions.

It raises way too many questions about where to draw the line for the concepts of control (as in the above example), detachment, and what is natural, and I don’t like inherently ambiguous worldviews because they become way too prone to highly subjective interpretation (especially true for stoicism when you try to apply it to the context of political and moral questions) and they create too many discussions that aren’t worth having (or, are only worth having with better-stated claims/philosophies that emerge from a mental model of the world that corresponds with what science confirms).

> If so, then why was the waitress not disturbed? It is not the cockroach, but the inability of those people to handle the disturbance caused by the cockroach, that disturbed the group. I realized that, it is not the shouting of my father or my boss or my wife that disturbs me, it’s my inability to manage my reaction to the words around me.

This sounds like a reference to stoic philosophy (of which I am not a fan), but I mean, don’t phobias exist, and don’t degrees of intensity exist so that it’s actually impossible to resist a trigger?

I personally used to be really scared of roaches, too, and I got over it not because I learned to control the fear itself, but because I thought about roaches differently (something along the lines of considering them weak). There is no controlling that fear because fear in this context is intense—I still get jerky sometimes when a cockroach shows up by surprise, or when there’s more than one of them, or worst of all, when they actually fly. I can usually avoid making a scene when there’s room to run somewhere else or if there’s an insect spray nearby, but stuck in a room with these triggers? I might go insane.

The conclusion that the women screamed because they’re not in control is not only lazy and prejudiced, it’s also an arrogant epistemological claim on something that the author doesn’t actually know, which is whether the fear or disgust of roaches is simply more intense for other people.

> perhaps the best way is to topple inefficient slave societies through full-spectrum competition, from military to economic. This pressure incentivizes efficient human resource utilization.

Isn’t that what’s already happening though? One might even say that this neoliberalist take is precisely what brought about the current situation. For producers in the market to be competitive, they must (over)optimize for profit. One of the best ways to do that is by reducing cost. One of the best ways to reduce cost is by employing cheaper labor (“efficient human resource utilization”, you said), and to do that, tech companies must outsource to manufacturers located in poor countries with weak state institutions where the transacting parties can get away with slavery.

> Video games are more likely to give you real world skills. As more and more of the world moves online, skills that you pick up trying to get games to work or trying to make them run faster can be valuable. Online etiquette is another thing you tend to learn (hopefully, instead of just being toxic).

This is begging the question more than a statement of real fact. What about magical combat against imaginary enemies, opening treasure chests, and completing collectibles is valuable in the real world? At least learning to play a musical instrument is actually doable in the real world.

One might argue that video games can teach someone to solve puzzles or to strategize towards an end when given a set of strengths and weaknesses, but if you really wanted usable critical thinking out of puzzles, you'd be better off grinding away at LeetCode and HackerRank. Strategizing towards any end requires the specificity of the context, too, and the world in video games is often very far from real.

And besides, if you really believe in video games--are you willing to raise a child to spend his youth and energy on video games instead of learning new skills?

I was coming from mobile app development when I tried Tailwind (with Vue) and I knew right away that it was architecturally sound. It's the only CSS framework I've ever used since, and I think it's very future-proof.

That said, I really don't like how it's being described as "utility-first". It's very ambiguous language to me even as an experienced programmer, and I've never really seen that phrase used elsewhere. Besides, all that the authors really seem to mean by "utility-first" is that it is "composition-based" as opposed to the more common inheritance-based approach to working with CSS.

> there is rarely a chance to go back and refactor

I wouldn’t say that this has been true in my experience. I’ve worked on multiple products that evolve over time and it often happens that a new feature touches on previously built features that can’t support all the behaviors of the new one, so then a refactor of the old code (at least some of it) is necessary. You can argue that doing so would require regression tests, but that’s why you automate those with a unit testing framework. This mindset of never modifying previously written code within reasonable and pragmatic boundaries is so rigid and anti-growth, I don’t even know how it came to be so popular within an industry that identifies so closely with innovation. That’s how you end up with putting band-aid solutions on top of each other and slowing down the agility of your teams over time.

Even if you could resolve the ethical issues, the only thing that a study would prove is that “people tend not to care for children that aren’t theirs”, and not “biological relation is necessary for a parent to be able to care for an adopted child”.

Since we’re at the topic of eloquence, might I add that horribly-written codebases are unbearable to work with during this time, or perhaps even during regular times for as long as the set up is remote. I get it that codebases inevitably rot over time, but the amount of rot can be mitigated by good dev practices such as unit testing, code reviews, best-effort (not perfect!) documentation, and standardizing dev practices. Dev teams that simply don’t care about code maintenance practices because the code “works” won’t be able to move fast enough during regular times, much less during a pandemic remote-setup scenario.