705 karma · joined November 1, 2017
I think one of the things that makes it more difficult in the case of facebook is that the ad targeting makes it possible to serve specific ads only to very specific groups.
This means that if the ads say untrue or damaging things, most people will never know, as opposed to newspaper or TV ads. In my mind this argues for at least as strict controls, if not more stringent.
Scenario 1 is that Apple has enough money, time, and manpower that they are constantly doing user studies, in-person and via survey, to see how people currently use and learn to adopt the product.
They find out that moving the cursor is something that people want to do often, but that the current method has some problems. It is hard for new users to discover, and the tap and hold takes a long time if you're doing it frequently, like in a text revising workflow. The magnifier was useful for the old low-res screens, but less helpful now that everything is retina.
They implement a few different approaches, and measure them against the old method. In their previous tests, they've seen that one thing new users try is dragging the cursor directly, so they try making that work, which is more discoverable. It's faster because you don't have to wait for the long press. They add some feedbacks so you can see both where it's tracking your finger, and where the cursor will drop in the text. And if those feedbacks aren't precise enough, you can use the spacebar trackpad method. In their benchmarks, the combination of the methods is easier to discover, and a big speed improvement.
They know that some users will hate being forced to change, because nobody likes being forced to change, but they honestly think it's worth the improvements. They take their findings to management, who personally try out the new methods and approve the change.
Scenario 2 is that Apple is such a large company that nobody really knows what other people or teams are doing, even management. There's nothing pressing for the UX teams to work on - I mean, aside from the AR HMD and the car. So, they decide to change up one of the core interactions of the company's most important product. They don't need to justify the change to upper management (all of whom use the product heavily), so it just sort of slips under the radar.
If you've got a more plausible scenario 2 I'd be interested to hear it, but yes, I think scenario 1 is more likely.
It is very unlikely that people are changing things just for fun.
The story is about how regular people deal with computers, as can be read in the comments.
It's like that story about how one day the google search 'facebook login' took people to a forum page that let people comment using their facebook credentials, and we got to find out how many users just type 'facebook login' to whatever text field they run across, type their username and password in, and then get really confused when it's a random forum page and they can't see their normal feed.
That is the whole point. Amazon doesn't allow multiple sellers of Kindles or Amazon Basics power cords, but it did/does allow multiple sellers of, say, Birkenstocks or Popsockets or Magformers or Ripple Rug. That they don't allow multiple sellers of Kindles proves that this is not an unsolvable problem.
For example:
- If there is a single manufacturer of a brand-name product, Amazon could make it so that only that manufacturer can sell on Amazon, just like it does with its own products.
- They could also make it more clear for commodity items which seller provided the item linked with a given review. Often different sellers sell entirely different goods under the same SKU, leading to wildly varying reviews.
- They could probably do some other things too. I bet if you ask someone who's products are getting counterfeited on Amazon, they have a lot of ideas for what could be changed.
> The lack of some rights for LGB+ people under current law does not prevent Amazon from employing them. In fact, that lack of rights probably actually makes it easier for Amazon to employ them by easily extending benefits beyond what are required. Once those rights are legally granted, all employers will have to extend them, reducing Amazon's advantage.
Yeah, that's a good point. I was assuming that LBGTQ+ people were powerful enough now that they didn't have to stay at a company that didn't believe in their rights, and would leave Amazon for greener pastures if Amazon came out against their rights.
> It takes government to establish regulatory frameworks
Or, a massive cloud provider could establish a policy against certain uses of facial recognition technology on their own platform, tomorrow.
A lot of the letter is of the form "We want someone else to put restrictions on everyone against doing bad stuff - in the meantime, we will continue to do that bad stuff, and/or continue to allow it on our platform"
- The federal minimum wage in the U.S. is too low and should be raised
(We'd like it if Walmart had higher labor costs)
- Human-induced climate change is real, serious, and action is needed from the public and private sectors
- The energy industry should have access to the same technologies as other industries
(Yes, through lobbying and lies the oil companies are fucking over our planet. But we're going to keep them as customers. Somebody should do something, but not us.)
- Diversity and inclusion are good for business—and more fundamentally—simply right
- We strongly support the rights of immigrants and immigration reform
(It'd be cool if there were more programmers for us to hire, more cheaply)
The rights of LGBTQ+ people must be protected
(We want to continue to employ LGBTQ+ people)
- Governments at all levels—federal, state, and local—should have access to the best technology
(Yeah, we're also going to keep providing services to ICE and China or whoever)
- Governments should work quickly to put in place a regulatory framework for facial recognition technology
(We recognize that someone should do something about this, but it's not going to be us)
- Counterfeiters should receive stronger penalties under federal law
(Nobody counterfeits Kindles or other Amazon brands on Amazon, but somehow the problem is impossible for us to solve for anyone else. Or we'd make less money, which is kind of the same thing when you think about it)
- Consumer data privacy should be protected under federal law
(Fuck facebook)
Not to say that $200 isn't a great deal compared to Luxottica, and he did say that he was very particular about his frames, but $200 still seemed high.
In the US, I have heard that the statistics around biking to work every day is that the median lifespan is higher, but the variability is much higher.
I barely feel safe around other drivers when I'm in my own car, a marvel of technology designed to keep me safe.
But they are doing some things the same as netflix, in that they are also creating exclusive podcasts to drive traffic to their platform.
For example if it just bought two podcast companies?
I assume OP found spotify's actions hypocritical, which is why they posted this.
Then the question is whether we should see spotify's 'time to play fair' website as a true statement of principle, or a cynical attempt to sway public opinion against actions that harm it as a business, but that it would be more than happy to engage in itself if it were in apple's position.
It might be that bitcoin is similar to linux - used as a backbone, but not customer friendly enough to ever be used directly by customers. Like maybe banks use it to transfer large amounts of money between each other or something.
"What if...
- your programming language required you to write useful docs,
- using those docs, it checked your program for mistakes,
- it even used the docs to speed up your program,
- this feature already exists!
And what if it was called static typing."
However, it's very possible that if a smaller company did this that all of their certs, apps, and dev accounts would get pulled. Facebook does still get some special treatment.
Several cross-platform UI frameworks do exist, all with different pros and cons. I don't think it would be possible for a single UI framework to override all other considerations when choosing a tech stack. It would have to be pretty magical.
Otherwise we would all be programming assembly, or heck, just write machine code directly and skip the time-consuming assembler.
Speed is important, but so is good debugger support, productive UI tools, developer productivity, training requirements, available libraries, target market, etc. At the end of the day, most people make pragmatic decisions, taking lots of factors into account.
A good historical example of this is Word vs. WordPerfect. There are many reasons why Word won, but one of them is that WordPerfect was written in assembly. This was helpful at the beginning as it was good for performance, but their developer productivity suffered as the codebase increased. This resulted in fewer features, which is also something that customers care about.
Few customers care how quickly you can do something they don't want to do.
Also, he's conflating toy problems, where getting the big-O right is the only important thing, with real-world applications where the constants are also important.
http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/siggraph/2018/video/sig1813...
RTX can absolutely accelerate path tracers, even for non-realtime applications. The underlying framework is definitely flexible enough to support a variety of rendering algorithms, it's basically accelerated BVH and intersection, with shaders to control behavior.
The biggest advancement I've seen lately is advances in denoising - the ML-based denoisers are incredible, but others are also impressive.
There's only so much of his shtick that I can stomach.
But honestly, we're probably just a blip.
While making games is a great way to learn programming, and is a lot of fun, the working conditions make it an untenable career choice for most.
There may be ancillary benefits, like increased seller competition into their monopsony, but it's not a priority for them to fix, because apparently it doesn't affect their bottom line enough.
It's not like it's hard to come up with a solution to the problem - they have lots of ways of surfacing prime-eligible items, you could have a similar way of surfacing manufacturer-approved resellers for some items. And as others have mentioned, there are no counterfeit kindles on amazon.com