mrxd

Incredible findings. Apparently your mom dies sometime when you are between age 30-90.

This is what I think it is too. A gullible person draws on their personal experience and overestimates other people’s susceptibility to deception.

Design linting tools solve this problem.

This is true in the entertainment industry, but it's because consumers want to buy what everyone else is buying. Not because there's a huge difference in performance. In fact, it's the opposite. There are many equally attractive/talented performers who can do the job just as well. It's very competitive, success is rare and fleeting even when it does come.

This translates into other parts of the economy. High income households experience high income volatility, consistent with the hypothesis that there is lots of competition at the highest levels of success—not very little competition.

There are edge cases where a personal reference is valuable. If you’re inexperienced, it can get you an interview. Or it can get you a job at a small company without a real HR department.

But outside of that, a hiring decision made based on a personal relationship is considered cronyism. It isn’t always illegal, but most HR departments go out of their way to prevent it.

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is terrible career advice in general. It can be incredibly seductive because it promises people an advantage over competition. But it’s wrong. It’s a waste of time and in my experience, the people who follow it tend to interview poorly because they come off as arrogant and complacent.

This is untrue for the simple reason that your friends’ employers wouldn’t allow it. Hiring practices based on personal references opens the door to discrimination lawsuits, so every HR department creates objective interview processes that remove such advantages.

I clicked on the “soteria houses” link in the article

I wondered what is this “community-based” mental health care that the author advocates for, and how is it different from psychiatry. Are psychiatrists not part of the community? It turns out it refers to “dream-work, breathwork, herbalism, and meditation.”

The goal of the union is to improve wages, benefits and working conditions. If Apple addresses those concerns to the extent that union membership is a worse deal, then the union has won.

I think people advocating for increased funding for mental health services have started to define all social problems in terms of their impact on mental health, e.g. prejudice as a traumatic experience, the stresses of poverty, etc.

Increased funding for mental health services seems like a poor solution.

What’s being implied here is that the endowments of these elite institutions were created through historical crimes, but activists won’t make an issue of that if the universities support diverse hiring initiatives.

Designers hate Adobe. This acquisition caused a huge collective meltdown on Twitter, and people are saying Figma is dead now. Many people were hoping Figma would kill Adobe.

> I understand completely why this was kept quiet.

Are you suggesting that Apple and Facebook normally have these kinds of discussions in public? Because that is not at all the case.

Possibly there is something nefarious going on here. But the fact these talks were secret means nothing, since all talks between companies are secret by default.

It's a good start, but it's more of an illustration than a logo to be honest. It should work as a single color (white, black), at small scale and in combination with your product name.

I’m a huge supporters of unions, but Amazon has been very open about their opposition to unions. The fundamental argument for unions is that companies serve shareholders at the expense of workers. Opposing unions is some kind of shocking corporate malfeasance, it’s just the nature of capitalism.

That is a normal usage in the tech industry, but that's not how ordinary people use that word. More importantly, it's not how journalists use that word.

In ordinary language, you are making inferences about what users are interested in, then making inferences about what products are relevant to that interest. The prediction is that putting relevant products in front of users will make them buy more - but that is a trivial prediction.

ML is useful for many things. I'm asking the question of whether prediction is useful, and whether it is accurate to describe ML as making predictions.

The reason to raise those questions is that for many people, the word prediction has connotations of surveillance and control, so it is best not to use it loosely.

The meaning of the word "predict" is to indicate a future event, so it doesn't make grammatical sense to put a present tense verb after it, as you have done in "Predict what features a user is most interested in." Aside from the verb being in the present tense, being interested in something is not an event.

You can't predict a present state of affairs. If I look out the window and see that it is raining, no one would say that I've predicted the weather. If I come to that conclusion indirectly (e.g. a wet umbrella by the door), that would not be considered a prediction either because it's in the present. The accurate term for this is "inference", not "prediction".

The usage of the word predict is also incorrect from the point of view of an A/B test. If your ML model has truly predicted that your users will purchase a particular product, they will purchase it regardless of which condition they are in. But this is the null hypothesis, and the ML model is being introduced in the treatment group to disprove this.

If your ML model is able to predict what consumers are going to buy, the revenue lift would be zero.

Let's say I go to the store to buy milk. The store has a perfect ML model, so they're able to predict that I'm about to do that. I walk into the store and buy the milk as planned. So how does the ML help drive revenue? The store could make my life easier by having it ready for me at the door, but I was going to buy it anyway, so the extra work just makes the store less profitable.

Maybe they know I'm driving to a different store, so they could send me an ad telling me to come to their store instead. But I'm already on my way, so I'll probably just keep going.

Revenue comes from changing consumer behavior, not predicting it. The ideal ML model would identify people who need milk, and predict that they won't buy it.

Also in the age of social media, visual identity is less about the wordmark. For most of these companies, their word mark doesn’t even show up on their social media feeds. Most have guidelines that often include a custom typeface, specific types of photography, editorial layouts, illustrations that define the brand.

It depends on how you define design. Herbert Simon defined it as “to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” And there’s a lot of academic work around that.

The problem is that that’s not how the word is used in practice. I think most people would call that “planning”, and certainly design is a type of planning, but not all planning is done by people who we call designers.

I think a better definition that’s actually used in practice is that design is a way of looking at a product as if it was a kind of communication. The central question is “how will people perceive this?” so any type of art skill—not just visual arts, but theatre, music, writing, etc—is potentially transferable.

Communication is a universal human skill, so it raises the question of why a separate discipline has emerged in companies to handle the communicative aspects of the product. And I think this is because many people who work in tech fields are educated in fields with very specific conventions of communication, and an expectation that the burden of understanding lies with the listener. When these norms inform the creation of a product, especially when it’s aimed at non-technical users, it leads to “bad design”.

I just don’t find it plausible that only certain people are capable of love, trust, loyalty, etc. and we should be looking for those kinds of people. It seems more likely that this level of investment is costly and people already have these kinds of relationships.

The argument seems tautological. A good friend is someone who is loyal, trustworthy, etc., so look for these traits. But in reality, everyone has these traits, they just reserve them for a small number of high investment relationships. So the claim is that to make good friends, look for someone who wants to be your friend. Which isn’t that helpful at the end of the day.

I suspect that Girard’s ideas are a touch more sophisticated than “people are sheep”. Unfortunately if you see his name in a headline, that’s usually all that’s being said.

Just to play devil's advocate, surely their approach is more rational than that. They're probably looking at it from the perspective that the business needs to have a profit margin of X in order to justify investing in it.

They probably do understand that cutting costs impacts company culture and morale. But shutting the company down probably impacts that much more.

Well, it doesn't help that the word ideology is being used in different ways. In non-Marxist contexts, an ideology is a political theory: liberalism, socialism, fascism, etc. When Zizek uses the word, it is in the traditional Marxist sense of the beliefs and ideas that sustain capitalism, especially that persuade the working class to support capitalism. An ideological statement would be something like "rising tides lift all boats" to support cutting taxes for the rich.

Zizek uses the metaphor of parallax to explain ideology. Parallax is the phenomenon where a distant object's position seems to shift depending on the position of the viewer. Two people looking at the same object from different angles will see something different. Zizek's point is that this isn't an epistemic problem where one person is wrong (lying, deluded, etc.) and the other is right. The conflict is ontological—the parallax shift is part of reality itself.

The true ideological move is to claim that you've stepped back from the conflicting perspectives to a neutral, objective standpoint, some kind of middle ground where all differences are reconciled. This move is always epistemic, i.e. "Both sides have good points, but they're blinded by their beliefs and can't see how things really are." The truth is not a middle position halfway between two people who are looking out at a distant object and seeing different things due to parallax.

Zizek says the They Live glasses are like critique-of-ideology glasses, not because they show the that the "true" meaning behind advertising is "Obey", "Consume", etc. It's because they render the conflict visible. Ultimately, one is forced to pick a side-which is a political choice-because there is no neutral objective position.

If you remember from the documentary the analysis of the movie They Live, the protagonist puts on the glasses in order to see the truth. For Zizek, the putting on (not taking off) of the glasses is crucial. It is specifically not a gesture of unmasking:

“The key feature here is that to see the true nature of things, we need the glasses: it is not that we should put ideological glasses off to see directly reality as it is”: we are “naturally” in ideology, our natural, immediate, sight is ideological.”

https://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=397

Zizek’s argument is that cynicism is the prevailing form of “ideology”. Cynicism is a position of doubt, skepticism, seeing through illusions, knowing better than the deluded masses. The view that everyone is manipulated while only you see the truth is the ultimate ideological position because it presupposes a neutral and objective position.

The linked article falls into this trap. It sees through “ideology” - meaning political theory - on the grounds that it oppresses the individual. The problem is that this itself a political ideology.

I said mostly. Some die without medicine, but I'd argue that the number is small in comparison with people who are affected economically. By focusing on deaths, you're effectively minimizing the problem.

It's similar to issues like homelessness: 0.15% of the population are on the street, but the number of people affected by housing costs is much larger.

Or police shootings of unarmed black men: 100-200 per year, which pales in comparison with millions of incarcerated black men.

We hear so much about these tiny problems is because political activists have chosen media-centric strategies to influence policy makers. The idea is to use outrage to get on the news, and then bring up the bigger issues. But in practice, policy makers just solve the outrageous problem: body cams for police; more shelters. Then the media goes away.

92% of contributors to the Linux kernel are paid by companies: https://www.suse.com/suse-defines/definition/linux-contribut...

Most major OSS projects are controlled by a few companies who pay developers to work on them. They're more like industry consortiums than DIY anarchist collectives.

> “If you're going to die and you're being denied the medicine that can save you, would you rather break the law and live, or be a good upstanding citizen and a corpse?”

It's obviously better to risk using DIY medicine than to die, and it sounds appealing—mutual aid, neighbors helping neighbors, saving lives with free medicine! But framing it this way significantly misrepresents the issue of for-profit medicine.

People mostly aren't dying because they can't afford life-saving medicine. They are selling their homes, emptying retirement accounts and their kids college funds, going into debt and going bankrupt to pay for life-saving medicine.

These guys have given people a new option. You don't have to go into debt—you could instead choose DIY medicines of dubious quality that could have costly medical consequences for you.

This isn't quite as appealing. It isn't some radical, utopian alternative. It's just how the system works today for poor people in so many areas of life: education, housing, food, medical care, etc. The rich can afford quality, while the poor have to make hard trade-offs and take risks to stretch their dollars.