davidivadavid

Documenting and communicating motivation and impact are often pretty high up the priority list for PMs, otherwise you're just a context-free ticket factory, which typically results in subpar products.

Isn't going mainstream through various tactics the goal of every political movement?

The trouble many purported "general purpose tools" run into is that what they're doing badly isn't the "marketing approach", it's the whole product. If you don't have a clear use case (or set of use cases) with a consumer in mind when building the product where your product outperforms the alternative, no "marketing approach" is going to save it.

Meh? I mean, some marketing would definitely fit the definition of hacking that is provided here. (Ask a random person in the street if they think the most "creative" profession is ad man or developer.)

The author confuses marketing messages with marketing, which is the act of creating those messages in the first place.

That marketing messages that are specific are more effective than generic ones is a decent rule of thumb, although by no means universal either.

As someone who's not a trained computer scientist, this was surprisingly approachable (and didn't seem to dumb anything down, which is the usual problem with pop science).

Oh boy, I have no idea what Silicon Valley really is like but you sure manage to make it sound absolutely horrifying. Sounding that smug, boring, authoritarian and exclusionary at the same time is impressive.

Wasn't the dream of holographic displays to get rid of screens? I mean, granted, that's sci-fi, but the marginal improvement of depth inside a screen seems minimal at best?

So if you see an ad about something, you never recommend it. Sounds like you let advertising influence you quite a bit.

That's one of my pet peeves in this (recurring) discussion.

If you're a programmer, and you're telling me that every time you work you have to reconstruct the state of a system so large you can barely hold it in your head, maybe you should invest in learning about modularity, abstraction, or just... taking notes?

Pretty fun read, didn't go in the direction I thought it would (guess an essay can only be good if it goes off the rails like that at some point). Often get similar trains of thoughts but relying on slightly different concepts.

"Power"/Agency/Technology vs. "Understanding"/Meaning/Purpose is definitely an interesting dynamic dichotomy/2x2 to explore.

I still don't read it that way, or at least I think there's more to it.

What he's expressing is a structural property ("logical consequence") of representative authority, applied to information, much like it is applied to power in democracy.

The point is that there's always a limit to informed consent, and that technocracy/"government of experts" is more or less an inevitable property of ("true") democracy itself rather than a choice.

That consent can only ever be misinformed is the point or at least the argument debated here.

That's true, but that doesn't mean the argument he lays out isn't grounded on a sound analysis for the most part.

An important insight one gets from Propaganda is that propaganda is an inevitable effect in a society that goes through an explosion of the amount of available information, and it becomes more about how to deal with it than trying to suppress it. That is in fact what the book is about originally, rather than what "propaganda" has come to mean nowadays. In a way, it's more of a book about how to deal with bounded rationality than about how to persuade people for more or less nefarious purposes (there are better books about that).

Right, that seems to be the common thread for fever dreams: something that feels intellectually taxing somehow. For me, it's usually some form of problem solving that can be more or less sensible (from solving chess puzzles to nonsense math to kafkaesque administrative processes).

How much research is being done into exploring "exotic" new invented fake-meats with different textures / tastes / etc. ?

Today reddit chat doesn't work on either old or new reddit, and images aren't loading.

Like... How bad can they fuck this up?

I would second that take. "Affordance" is commonly used to mean at least two different things all the time. I think Don Norman himself recommended against using the word at some point.

Kinda afraid of this at this point. I honestly have no idea how they can get away with the non-old version of the website which is one of the most unstable pieces of shit I've ever seen.

Sure, but that doesn't really change anything about the fact that when an American hears "Coq" they also hear "cock."

There are many similar stories about English words sounding like profanity when (badly) pronounced in Chinese.

They're bad for branding and brands avoid them.

Now, I like "Coq" and the story about the cheeky French people trying to one up anglophones, but that's not really enough to make it a good name.

Then again I recall some people calling a compiler "Stalin" so, could be worse.

Only if it makes sense for the product to make a sexual reference. (Source: myself, French, living abroad, worked in marketing/branding).

Coq is a bad name.

The problem with those kinds of graphs is that the price-based fluctuations in purchasing power are dwarfed by the uncertainty in the hedonic adjustment that should be applied to make the comparisons meaningful across time.

Of course the unmentioned corollary to "keeping your identity small" is that you must want to make everything ground for an argument. Keep your identity proportionate to how much you want to argue about your identity.

There is no such thing as "no design". This misconception just seems to never die. Seems like a lot of people are just happy to repeat that straw man forever and think it's still insightful to say you shouldn't "design for the sake of beauty and organization."

How could you possibly have escaped the Steve Jobs quote about how design is about "how it works" and not "how it looks", even though it's posted a million times a day on every social platform?

You'd expect that kind of thing to be part of the social unconscious at this point. Not to mention that Jobs isn't close to having even invented that.

Looking at it on a 27" 5K screen — not a matter of screen resolution. The font size is definitely too small for comfortable reading, and once zoomed to a reasonable font size, the column width is too large.

At this point can we consider that whenever "Science" is used as a reified subject ("science shows"), the conclusion is almost guaranteed to be bullshit/wrong/politicized, etc.?

I found this essay interesting because I both agree directionally (I think culture is getting richer in some sense) and yet find the suggested arguments highly debatable. Among other things:

a) The author doesn't put things back in context. That a painting can be easily copied doesn't mean that a new painting of the same importance can be produced. That a technique invented in a movie can be reused is not the same thing as inventing a new technique.

b) That we don't just copy or consume things from the past doesn't mean new stuff is any better. I wish there was an endless number of works of the caliber of Homer's Odyssey or Bach's cantatas — there isn't. Most people's experience of the latest show on Netflix isn't that it's the best thing ever, it's that it's whatever is easily available.

c) That Gladwell's prose is better than Smith's is both objectionable and again, highly time-sensitive. To claim that no one knew how to write clearly a hundred years ago is... kind of embarrassing?

d) The last part is probably the thing that's most irritating about the whole "progress studies" movement — the complete lack of rigor in establishing how to even measure progress beyond roundabout figures like GDP. "GDP going up? Must mean everything is getting better." I'm afraid that's a bit short.

In the case of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, there certainly was a perception that something radical was being done.

That didn't seem like a very substantial philosophical criticism.

Pretty much. I'd attribute that common oversight to how natural it is to the average software developer to even think in terms of process vs. the average client they serve.