skuxxlife

If you see programming purely as a means to an end, then yeah, I get this perspective. But to many there is enjoyment in the _doing_ and the craft of it beyond the end result. It’s why people get into woodworking or knitting despite the fact that it’s much cheaper, faster, and easier to buy a table or a sweater than to make one yourself. Value is subjective, and for some the value of code is not primarily in what you can sell to others.

Purikura is not just taking photos of yourself in a photo booth. There is a strong cultural aspect to it, especially for school-aged girls, and I’m honestly surprised hasn’t really made it over to the US in any big way because it’s pretty fun.

The booths are large and fit 4-5 people. Even back in the early 2000s, they had fancy ring lights, touch screens, keyed-in green screen backgrounds, and automatic face retouching. They all had different themes as well. Arcades had/have whole floors of them, and sometimes would have costumes you could put on. Booths would often change seasonally, putting out different themes or gimmicks so you could come back and see different ones.

Once you take your photos, you get to decorate them on screens on the outside of the booth. You add digital stickers, write/draw on them, tweak the editing, and choose the layout you want. Then you print! They have scissors to cut up the pictures and divvy them out. The printed photos also have sticker backing so you can stick them to your cell phone, your journal, whatever.

Lots of girls collect them, swap with friends, and/or take them to commemorate particular events in their lives. It’s also a popular date activity, much like photo booths outside of Japan. But it’s a pretty far cry from the photo booths you’re describing. Honestly it’s a lot more similar to Snapchat, but like 30 years ago.

Proclaiming LA as “the center of the world’s creative and cultural output” feels like a very LA opinion to have.

Literally billions of people exist outside of LA, and while LA does have a lot of cultural influence generally, you might be surprised how much of the world’s culture and creativity happens outside of it. At the very least NYC probably has a strong argument to make here, not to mention places like Hong Kong, Beijing, or Tokyo.

But the process _does_ matter. That is the whole point of life. Why else are we even here if not to enjoy the process of making? It’s why people get into woodworking or knitting as hobbies. If it was just about the end result, they could just go to a store a buy something that would be way cheaper and easier. But that’s not the point - it’s something that _you_ made with your own hands, as imperfect as they are, and the experience of making something.

This is an extremely simplistic take that ironically ignores the human cultural context around these technologies.

For one, you, like many, misunderstand the Luddite movement. They didn’t break weaving frames because they were against technology, they broke them because they were being used to grossly devalue the work weavers used to earn their livelihood. There was a mass consolidation of textile manufacturing from small groups of tradespeople into a few very wealthy factory owners who used easily exploitable labor (like children) in very poor working conditions and paid unlivable wages to make low quality but cheap garments. The luddites weren’t against technology, they were against the way it was being used. They even only targeted factories that they thought were particularly exploitative, leaving the ones with fairer business practices alone. But they get mischaracterized as anti-technology, anti-progress…but maybe they just wanted to be able to live their lives well and support their families.

There’s really a lot to learn from the luddites and their historical context, and it really goes to show that history is truly cyclical.

My current Bosch dishwasher that I bought almost 10 years ago does almost all of this (no eco mode or self-clean, though it does have a sanitize cycle which I would guess is effectively the same) with physical buttons and a 7 segment display. All of these “new” features seem so needless. They already solved it, my 10 year old dishwasher is a great dishwasher and I will happily use it until it dies.

I realize that that’s maybe the problem when the line must go up, but I am pretty sick of companies putting most of their efforts towards solving problems that no one actually has instead of doing a simple thing really well.

Part of the problem is that when ops is doing their job well, nobody notices. You get a party when the regular devs ship a big new feature, but no-one really celebrates when you have five nines of availability for the year.

Personally I’m a big advocate for devs doing a rotation on an ops-focused team so they better understand the full picture of professional software development. Hopefully they learn that it takes more than code in an editor to create a product.

Beyond Panic, there’s even a surprisingly large community of Mac/iOS developers making their living selling “premium”software with traditional licensing models. Rogue Amoeba, Omnigroup, Flying Meat, along with a bunch of one to two person shops are still around. There’s fewer of them than there used to be (some bought some folded), and many of the bigger ones switched to subscription pricing (1Password), but they’re still out there doing their thing if you know where to look.

The current best practice is to keep the token in memory only and store a refresh token in an HTTP-only cookie.

In my experience though, if you’re only doing web-based auth and don’t _need_ to use JWTs for a specific reason, just use regular session cookies, it’s way less hassle. Coordinating auth and refresh state across page refreshes and tabs is a pain, and using a refresh token means you’re using cookies and saved session state anyway, so you lose pretty much all of the unique benefits of using JWTs and still have all the downsides.

Have you honestly heard any male colleague described as “too bitchy”? How did you listen to your female colleagues’ genuine experience of being unfairly labeled and come away from it thinking it was their fault? And the solution is “don’t be loyal and lie”? Sure you can probably get ahead doing that but yikes maybe it’s the system that’s the problem.

Claims that there is no gender pay gap based on clearly biased sources irks me.

So firstly, you don’t know what the NYT tech guild analysis looked like, so why assume they didn’t control for other factors? It is plausible they could have, given their access to competent statisticians, but we don’t know either way. It seems like you may just want this story to fit your pre-existing narrative.

Secondly, there are so many high-quality studies out there better than an a blog post about a Forbes article about an interview from a conservative think tank that show the very real existence of a gender pay gap that _is not accounted for_ by fewer hours worked, experience, or job type (yes these do contribute but are far from the entire picture). Here’s a couple (read their citations for more):

https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/equalpay/WB_issueb... https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21913/w219...

Lastly, _even if_ womens’ “lifestyle choices” were to explain entirely the pay gap (which they don’t, see above), think about what kind of career choices you’d make if you had to constantly debate about your right to equal pay with your supposed peers.

Wow I can only imagine how unwieldy that was to use. Was it just one big list by date published or did they did they try to order by title/author/publisher? Books in Print nowadays is tens of thousands of (mostly garbage) records monthly - I imagine the volume was a lot less back then, but still had to be a lot to sort through on paper.

As someone who has subscribed to Bowker’s Books in Print data for the last four years, I’d take any stats based on their data with a huge grain of salt. Bowker does issue ISBNs (and the BiP data has tens of millions of them), but they do very little validation, with their data largely input by publishers often long after the ISBN has been issued and with varying standards. For example, their attempt to identify overarching “works” (i.e. The Fellowship of the Ring as a literary work vs its various editions and reprintings) across ISBNs is unusably inaccurate, even for mainstream published titles.

Also as the article mentions, ISBNs are issued for all sorts of things most people would not consider a “book”, like journals (the kind you write in, not the academic kind), coloring books, sales displays, maps, bulk lots of books for schools, box sets, reprints of Wikipedia, calendars, etc and these are not always particularly well distinguished in their data because it’s seemingly up to the publisher to categorize it correctly, and some fly-by-night Wikipedia article reseller is just not going to put in accurate data.

Maybe Bowker has data they don’t include in BiP that would make their stats believable…but I kind of doubt it. LoC seems more reliable, but their corpus is (intentionally) much smaller and more focused, and generally the books libraries care about doesn’t 100% overlap with “all things published that most people would consider a book” since that’s not their purpose. OpenLibrary is doing good work in this space, but it’s still kinda early and struggles with data quality. It does ultimately depend how you on how you define a “book”, but for my money I’d say your numbers are low, though you’re spot on that only a very small fraction of those get widely read.

For US/UK/NZ/Aus/SA, ISBNs are granted through Bowker who does maintain their "Books In Print" data set that, in theory, contains metadata for all of the ISBNs they've granted. In practice though it's a mess. It's expensive to access and relies on publishers to enter in accurate and consistent metadata, which is...variable in quality to say the least. Often publishers buy blocks of ISBNs to use later so no metadata is entered up front and has to be pushed back to Bowker at a later date. To be somewhat fair to Bowker, the history of ISBNs far predates modern data standards and I can imagine wrangling publishers to get accurate data is a difficult task. But on the other hand, you'd think they'd have a lot to gain for doing it right. As someone who runs a book website, it is endlessly frustrating.

This is super cool! I actually have been working on a new book recommendation site (https://braincandy.com) that has a similar-ish (but much smaller scale) visualization for book similarity. It is really interesting how certain genres tend to be much more insular than others and it can be a real challenge to break out of genre boxes when making recommendations. There's so many books out there on the edges and in-betweens that get lost when they don't fit neatly into an existing popular genre, and those indeed can be some of the most interesting.

Like another commenter said, many people are willing to put up with a lot just to work in games, even in a low prestige role. Also the bar for support/QA jobs in pay and treatment is very low across pretty much every industry, so paying a decent wage and offering good benefits (plus annual vacation to Hawaii) is a big plus. That said, it’s still not great - the “flat” structure leads to a lot of really toxic power dynamics where those roles always end up at the bottom with no real agency or recognition.

I unfortunately also have had the experience of being pushed towards management, even though I'd say I have only slightly above average social skills. At a former job I was told I could be promoted to a senior software engineer in "3-4 years" (this was 8 years into my career after multiple years of "greatly exceeds expectations" reviews at this company) or I could become a manager. I held off for awhile since I had no real desire to manage, but I could talk to people and organize things so eventually that felt like my only way up. I did it for a year and hated it, then quit to be a technical founder at a startup, which is actually less stressful and way more enjoyable. I guess it worked out for me in the end (though I should have left way sooner), but I know I am not the only woman who had similar experiences at that company which makes me sad.

The general consensus is it is at least somewhat due to socialization and gender norms for women, which strongly encourage agreeability, friendliness, and deference to authority (at least in the western world), which are not advantageous in negotiation. When men are aggressive, they're seen as assertive and commanding, but when women exhibit the same behaviors they're often seen as pushy, shrill, or difficult. Anecdotally, women do research salaries, they do talk to each other (though often their networks are not as deep and their comparison point may be other underpaid women), but even talented, confident women can struggle to balance advocating for themselves aggressively while avoiding being seen negatively for doing so. It's hard to fight against an environment which says you should act a certain way to be accepted whether you buy into it or not.

So how do we make things more fair? IMO, pay transparency, narrow well-defined pay bands, explicit job duties and expectations, mentorship for women entering the field, and generally reducing the effect of good negotiation skills in roles where negotiation skills aren't critical to the job.