chefandy

You're making a lot of assumptions about who's doing what, what problems they're trying to solve by doing it, and why. The discipline of UI design is figuring out how people can solve their problems easily and effectively. If you have advanced users that need to make five mouse clicks to perform an essential function, that's a bad design and the chance of that being a UI design decision is just about zero. Same thing with icons. UI design, fundamentally, is a medium of communication: do you think it's more likely a UI designer-- a professional and likely educated interactivity communicator-- chose those icons, or a developer or project manager grabbing a sexy looking UI mockup on dribble and trying to smash their use case into it?

Minimalism isn't a goal-- it's a tool to make a better interface and can easily be overused. The people that think minimalism is a goal and will chop out essential features to make something "look designed" are almost always developers. Same thing with unclear icons. As someone with a design degree that's done UI design but worked as a back-end developer for a decade before that, and worked as a UNIX admin off and on for a decade before that, I am very familiar with the technical perspective on design and it's various echo-chamber-reinforced follies.

It's not like all UI designers are incredibly qualified or don't underestimate the importance of some particular function within some subset of users, and some people that hire designers don't realize that a graphic designer isn't a UI designer and shouldn't be expected to work as one. But 700 times out of 1000, that's something dev said "this is too annoying to implement" or some project manager dropped it from the timeline. Maybe 250 of those remaining times, the project manager says "we don't need designers for this next set of features, right? Dev can just make it look like the other parts of the project?"

Developers read an edward tufte book, think they're experts, and come up with all sorts of folk explanations about what's happening with a design and why people are doing it, then talk about it in venues like this with a million other developers agreeing with them. That does a whole lot more damage to UIs in the wild than bad design decisions made by designers.

Normally in this rant I specifically note that non-software technical people are still technical. For genuinely non-technical software, what are the most popular end-user facing FOSS-developed applications? Firefox, signal, blender, Inkscape, Krita maybe… most of those are backed by foundations that pay designers and in Mozilla’s case, actually do a ton of open usability research. I don’t believe Inkscape does but they do put a ton of effort into thinking about things from the user workflow perspective and definitely do not present all of the functionality to the user all at once. Blender, at first, just made memorize a shitload of shortcuts but they’ve done a ton of work figuring out what users need to see in which tasks in different workflows and have a ton of different purpose-built views. For decades, Gimp treated design, workflow and UI changes like any other feature and they ended up with a cobbled-together ham fisted interface used almost exclusively by developers. You’ll have a hard time finding a professional photographer that hasn’t tried gimp and an even harder time finding one that still uses it because of the confusing, unfocused interface. When mastodon stood a real chance of being what Bluesky is becoming, I was jumping up and down flailing my arms trying to get people to work on polishing the user flow and figure out how to communicate what they needed to know concisely. Dismissal dismissal dismissal. “I taught my grandmother how federation works! They just need to read the documentation! Once they start using it they’ll figure it out!” Well, they started using it, didn’t have that gifted grandmother-teaching developer to explain it to them, and they almost all left immediately afterwards.

Just like human factors engineering, UI design is a unique discipline that many in the engineering field think they can intuit their way through. They’re wrong and if you look beyond technical people, it’s completely obvious.

Houdini is a fast-moving target, but it seems like both blender and unreal engine— even in core features, not just in plugins— are gaining on it. For my particular use case, Blender is the least useful of the three (unless I need to do sculpting and don’t have access to a zbrush license), but it’s looking better and better.

In many problem spaces, software developers are only happy with interfaces made for software developers. This article diving into the layers of complex logic we can reason about at once perfectly demonstrates why. Developers ‘get’ that complexity, because it’s our job, and think about GUIs as thin convenience wrappers for the program underneath. To most users, the GUI is the software, and they consider applications like appliances for solving specific problems. You aren’t using the refrigerator, you’re getting food. You’re cooking, not using the stove. The fewer things they have to do or think about to solve their problem to their satisfaction, the better. They don’t give a flying fuck about how software does something, probably wouldn’t bother figuring out how to adjust it if they could, and the longer it takes them to figure out how to apply their existing mental models UI idioms to the screen they’re looking at, the more frustrated they get. Software developers know what’s going on behind the scenes so seeing all of the controls and adjustments and statuses and data helps developers orient themselves save figure out what they’re doing. Seeing all that stuff is often a huge hindrance to users that just have a problem they need to solve, and have a much more limited set of mental models and usage idioms they need to use figuring how which of those buttons to press and parameters to adjust. That’s the primary reason FOSS has so few non-technical users.

The problem comes in when people that aren’t UI designers want to make something “look designed” so they start ripping stuff out and moving it around without understanding how it works affect different types of users. I don’t hear too many developers complain about the interface for iMessage for example despite having a fraction of the controls visible at any given time, because it effectively solves their problem, and does so easier than with a visible toggle for read receipts, SMS/iMessages, text size, etc etc etc. It doesn’t merely look designed, it it’s designed for optimal usability.

Developers often see an interface that doesn’t work well for developers usage style, assume that means it doesn’t work well, and then complain about it among other developers creating an echo chamber. Developers being frustrated with an interface is an important data point that shouldn’t be ignored, but our perspectives and preferences aren’t nearly as generalizable some might think.

> exactly my point

Ok, so you’re saying that because bad things would happen anyway then it doesn’t matter if it’s illegal? So you’re just going to ignore how much worse it would be if there were just no laws at all? Corporate scumbags will push any system to its limit and beyond, and if you change the limit, they’ll change the push. Just look at the milk industry in New York City before food adulteration laws took effect. The “bad things will happen anyway” argument makes total sense if you ignore magnitude. Which you can’t.

> anti capitalist

If you think pointing out the likelihood of corporate misbehavior is anti-capitalist, you’re getting your subjects confused.

> 2021

Anywhere else you want to move those goalposts?

> If you don't have laws against dumping in the commons, yes people will dump.

You can’t possibly say, in good faith, that it think this was legal, can you? Of course it wasn’t. It was totally legal discharging some of the less odious things into the river despite going through a residential neighborhood about 500 feet downstream— the EPA permitted that and while they far exceeded their allotted amounts, that was far less of a crime. Though it was funny to see one kid in my class who lived in that neighborhood right next to the factory ask a scientist they sent to give a presentation in our second grade class why the snow in their back yard was purple near the pond (one thing they made was synthetic clothing dye.) People used to lament runaway dogs returning home rainbow colored. That was totally legal. However, this huge international chemical conglomerate with a huge US presence routinely, secretively, and consistently broke the law dumping carcinogenic, toxic, and ecologically disastrous chemicals there, and three other locations, in the middle of the night. Sometimes when we played there, any of the stuff we left lying around was moved to the edges and there were fresh bulldozer tracks in the morning, and we just thought it was from farm equipment. All of it was in residential neighborhoods without so much as a no trespassing sign posted, let alone a chain link fence, for decades, until the 90s, because they were trimming their bill for the legal and readily available disposal services they primarily used, and of course signs and chainlink fences would have raised questions. They correctly gauged that they could trade our health for their profit: the penalties and superfund project cost were a tiny pittance of what that factory made them in that time. Our incident was so common it didn’t make the news, unlike in Holbrook, MA where a chemical company ignored the neighborhood kids constantly playing in old metal drums in a field near the factory which contained things like hexavelant chromium, to expected results. The company’s penalty? Well they have to fund the cleanup. All the kids and moms that died? Well… boy look at the great products that chemical factory made possible! Speaking of which:

> Just look back over the last 200 years, per…

Irrelevant “I heart capitalism” screed that doesn’t refute a single thing I said. You can’t ignore bad things people, institutions, and societies do because they weren’t bad to everybody. The Catholic priests that serially molested children probably each had a dossier of kind, generous, and selfless ways they benefited their community. The church that protected and enabled them does an incredible amount of humanitarian work around the world. Doesn’t matter.

> Masks

Come on now. Those businesses leaders had balls but none of them were crystal. What someone said in 2023 has no bearing on what businesses did in 2020 based on the best available science and their motivations for doing it. Just like you can’t call businesses unethical for exposing their workers to friable asbestos when medicine generally thought it was safe, you can’t call businesses ethical for refusing to let their workers protect themselves— on their own dime, no less— when medicine largely considered it unsafe.

Your responses to those two things in that gigantic pile of corporate malfeasance don’t really challenge anything I said.

But the whole point of a capitalist society is that competitors that do things better/cheaper start taking customers so the capital moves to the best and most efficient system.

If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? Would they just see the products on store shelves? What about services? Would labels be ads? Would how stores merchandise things be advertisements? Could businesses negotiate for specific product placement? How would you find out about stores? Would store signs be ads? How about really big ones? How about at the edge of their property along a road highway? Could the sign say what the store sold? If you were to start a product guide to help people find what they need, how could you possibly afford to buy enough products to be useful and up-to-date enough while slow crawl word of mouth got the business off the ground? Would asking people to tell their friends be an ad? If not, could you pay someone to spread the word about your product? Would traveling sales reps be ads? What if they wore head to toe logo gear? Could you just pay people to do that without selling things? Ads suck but I don’t see how a capitalist society could survive without them.

If that’s the only data point you look at in American industry, it would be pretty encouraging. I mean, surely they’d have done the same if they were a branch of a large publicly traded company with a big high-production product pipeline…

Let’s see… of the top of my head…

- Air Pollution

- Water Pollution

- Disposable Packaging

- Health Insurance

- Steward Hospitals

- Marketing Junk Food, Candy and Sodas directly to children

- Tobacco

- Boeing

- Finance

- Pharmaceutical Opiates

- Oral Phenylepherin to replace pseudoephedrine despite knowing a) it wasn’t effective, and b) posed a risk to people with common medical conditions.

- Social Media engagement maximization

- Data Brokerage

- Mining Safety

- Construction site safety

- Styrofoam Food and Bev Containers

- ITC terminal in Deerfield Park (read about the decades of them spewing thousands of pounds benzene into the air before the whole fucking thing blew up, using their influence to avoid addressing any of it, and how they didn’t have automatic valves, spill detection, fire detection, sprinklers… in 2019.)

- Grocery store and restaurant chains disallowing cashiers from wearing masks during the first pandemic wave, well after we knew the necessity, because it made customers uncomfortable.

- Boar’s Head Liverwurst

And, you know, plenty more. As someone that grew up playing in an unmarked, illegal, not-access-controlled toxic waste dump in a residential area owned by a huge international chemical conglomerate— and just had some cancer taken out of me last year— I’m pretty familiar with various ways corporations are willing to sacrifice health and safety to bump up their profit margin. I guess ignoring that kids were obviously playing in a swamp of toluene, PCBs, waste firefighting chemicals, and all sorts of other things on a plot not even within sight of the factory in the middle of a bunch of small farms was just the cost of doing business. As was my friend who, when he was in vocational high school, was welding a metal ladder above storage tank in a chemical factory across the state. The plant manager assured the school the tanks were empty, triple rinsed and dry, but they exploded, blowing the roof off the factory taking my friend with it. They were apparently full of waste chemicals and IIRC, the manager admitted to knowing that in court. He said he remembers waking up briefly in the factory parking lot where he landed, and then the next thing he remembers was waking up in extreme pain wearing the compression gear he’d have to wear into his mid twenties to keep his grafted skin on. Briefly looking into the topic will show how common this sort of malfeasance is in manufacturing.

The burden of proof is on people saying that they won’t act like the rest of American industry tasked with safety.

I don’t think that’s true? Tons of stuff from that era had been digitized, even before newer more relevant stuff and older rarer stuff, because the acid paper had a short shelf life and there were so many ads in printed stuff then. I might have a skewed perspective from working in the digitization world for quite some time. I think they’re selling what they sell with all their other content— discovery, curation, preparation, and easy delivery.

Ads range from a (necessary, in a capitalist society) nuisance to a scourge, and people justly put up increasingly thick boundaries to shield themselves from their influence. When waning cultural relevance or whatever dilutes that influence, you can more easily see the ads for what they are— often manipulative marketing tactics implemented through often genuinely beautiful art and design. Both aspects are fascinating to consider and the art can be quite enjoyable. Early modernist posters from Paris are beautiful. Watching collections of mid century television ads in the prelinger archives is fun, and tells us a lot about the ways we are influenced by modern ads speaking to current perspectives, fashions, and concerns.

I think the real key is figuring out how to turn the hand-wavy promises of this making everything better into policy long fucking before we kick the door open. It’s self-evident that this being efficient and useful would be a technological revolution; what’s not self evident is that it wouldn’t benefit the large corporate entities that control even more disproportionately than it does now to the detriment of many other people.

If there are any fully-autonomous cars on the streets of nyc, there aren’t many of them and I don’t think there’s any way for them to operate legally. There has been discussion about having a trial.

Sadly, we live in a society where those executives would use that impunity as carte blanche to spend no money improving (in the best-case scenario,) or even more likely, keep cutting safety expenditures until the body counts get high enough for it to start damaging sales. If we’ve already given them a free pass, they will exploit it to the greatest possible extent to increase profit.

We’re talking broad-stroke statistics here.

I’m not an HR person, but I’d be surprised if the ATS bouncer algorithms even have access to the eeo information, and making assumptions about ethnicity based on name seems unlikely to be a feature. Sure, someone could code their own solution easily enough but I really doubt that’s a common enough occurrence to warrant discrimination accusations at the auto-reject level.

I haven’t researched that but I have read there is significant comorbidity with a low tolerance for “kids these days.”

Not commenting on the rest of their assumptions, but to be clear, auto-rejecting candidates that could reasonably fill roles in your company isn’t a defense against incompetence accusations— it supports them.

It’s surprisingly common. Additionally, it can develop as a secondary symptom when temporary neurological impairments induce self-exposure to YouTube comments sections.

This is not my area of expertise. Do these models have an explicit notion of the end of a conversation like they would the end of a text block? It seems like that’s a different scope that’s essentially controlled by the human they interact with.

I respect the ambition. I thought I was combining chocolate and peanut butter a few times, but after sinking a few days into it, realized I was building a Homer car. All of those projects were driven by my desire for some way of interacting with some common data or whatever rather than solving a unique technical problem, so I now force myself to define a very granular UI spec and start with the front end code, and the profile of the homer car reveals itself way earlier in the process. Popping open the code editor and banging out the scaffolding for a back-end always feels so productive, but if it’s a fundamentally flawed idea, it’s very much the opposite, in reality.

> Well, you take up the lawsuit with not much. You get most of the evidence during discovery. And this is quite a common thing someone says "This happened to me" they sue and get discovery. So this universe.

> I said if _ALL_ they have is him it lacks legs.

... so you're referring to instances where discovery didn't yield anything useful but the attorney keeps litigating against a company with a ton of resources based on unsupported assertions made by one person. Ok, sure. That sounds like a great point that's germane to this situation.

> It was all relevant, you just seem to be extremely ignorant of the subject.

Ok, Perry Mason. Re-read the single sentence question I asked and then tell me how that implies I'm some sort of conspiracy theorist.

> You said the case was damaged, however, it appears you're starting to realise it may not be damaged at all.

What?

> So the other side can cross.

Are you seriously implying testimony does not influence the outcome of a trial without cross-examination. You should see how much thought attorneys put into what they wear because it influences outcome.

I'm done here.

Nah. They're trying to eliminate the threat of content creators, artists, designers, animators, etc getting paid for their art and hard won skill instead of google.

It's got a lot of potential as a way for google to get paid for other people's skills and hard work instead of the people that made all of that "data".

Nobody in this space gives a fuck about anyone or anything further upstream than the file sitting in their ingestion queue. If they can see it, they 'own' it.

Yes, that dichotomy is present everywhere in the real world.

You need lye to make proper bagels. It is not merely harmless, but beneficial in small amounts for that purpose. We still must make sure food businesses don't contaminate food with it; it could cause severe — possibly fatal — esophageal burns. The "A little is beneficial but a lot is deleterious" also applies to many vitamins… water… cops?

Trying to turn this into an “it’s either always good or always bad” dichotomy serves no purpose but to make straw men.

Few things frustrate me more than so many developers’ compulsion to baselessly assume that their incredible dev ultrabrain affords them this pan-topic expertise deep enough to dismiss other fields’ experts based on a few a priori thought experiments.

a) In what universe would any attorney take up a lawsuit against a moneyed company with nothing but testimony from one person?

b) I made none of those other arguments and they're irrelevant to my single-sentence question.

c) If testimony doesn't impact trials and it's all a matter of competing paperwork, why do we have testimony at all? Well, juries for one. Court cases aren't merely about dispassionately weighing competing facts: they're adversarial pursuits of persuasion.

Do all lawsuits that are damaged by losing key witnesses lack legs, counselor?