They’re not. Note how both pedals are on the same side of the frame. That’s wrong!
28,947 karma · joined December 12, 2017
And even that’s being optimistic. I lost faith once I heard that there are people honestly using ChatGPT to ask what to order at a restaurant! If large tech companies like Facebook get their way, you’ll soon be having your smart glasses¹ listen to the conversation, transcribe it, write a response, then show it to you on the lens so you can reply. And that’ll be just for the ones who want to fake it by still moving their lips, because the others will have voice (trained on their own) come out of speakers. “Smart” devices will be having conversations with each other while you are served ads.
¹ The royal “you”, not you literally.
Anyway, Merriam-Webster claims the terms were introduced fairly close to each other, only about a decade apart, in the 80’s (cyber) and 90’s (meat).
It’s fascinatingly devilish, isn’t it? They control the outrage and profit from it. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ bit on marketing.
That’s not the argument. Please don’t straw man.
> Do you also believe that "cultural appropriation" is a thing? On a scale of 1 to Taylor Swift how white and suburban middle-class are you?
Ah, there it is. Your absolute bias and contempt is shining right through. Instead of understanding the words and the nuance of the argument, you straight put people in wrong assumed boxes and then attack the group. By the way, not everyone lives in the USA, that was the most laughably ineffective attempt at an insult I read in years.
That’s not the argument. Instead of reading the words, you’re fabricating an argument in your head and fighting that. You saw an idea, by your own admission were unable to make sense of it, but instead of trying to steel man to understand it you chose the most fallacious wrong interpretation and attacked that. You’re not having a conversation, you’re arguing against a straw man of your own creation.
Furthermore, good faith does not mean positive sentiment. It is perfectly congruent to lament in good faith the bad state of a community.
Perhaps consider that if I invited you to read previous comments, I was aware of what I’d written.
No, you missed the point. It has nothing to do with the entities in the game, it’s about the player outside of it. Look, it’s all well and good to blast your friends in a game and call each other rude names and whatnot, have fun! But you understand that’s OK because you have consent, right?
Here’s a story for you. I have omitted unnecessary details because outing anyone isn’t the point. There was a guy who played a certain competitive game. He was a good person, but he had the habit of describing a big game loss as a “rape”. He wasn’t trying to be malicious, he described himself as having been raped too when he lost big. But he threw it around too casually, and one day he played against a rape victim. Now, can you put yourself in the other person’s shoes and understand how having a traumatic experience thrown back at you casually can make you feel? And even if you believe it wouldn’t bother you personally, can we agree that everyone is different and that we shouldn’t ignore how they feel their pain? That there are little things we can all do to make other people be comfortable, and in turn they may do the same for us?
That’s all I’m saying, that we should practice some empathy. I’m not even saying this game shouldn’t exist, I’m only asking that we recognise that it may affect some people in major ways most of us on this website can’t possibly understand (and we should be thankful for it, not derisive) and that we should take that into account. In short, remember other people exist and share the planet with you, and try to not be a dick to them.
God damn, why must HN always assume the worst? Engage in good faith for once, stop assuming every argument is made by an imbecile and that you understand everything and are the lord of reason.
I’m not offended by it. I am in fact very politely and cordially inviting the commenter above to consider a different perspective, and my approach to this subject in this entire thread has been one of compassion and curiosity, which is easily verifiable. I recommend doing that before launching on tirades of bad faith argumentation.
It’s been my observation that people who accuse others of being offended are themselves the most easily offended. Very much like the people who call others “snowflakes” have the thinnest skins themselves.
> maybe you should just not engage with it.
Despite it not being my case, those who are offended can and should very much still engage. Suggesting otherwise is nonsensical and a tool of those who promote hate. There is no societal progress if those who see something wrong do not speak up.
> (…) Should we take that down because it simulates war? (…)
I said in my comment that we already have thousands of games like that. I didn’t say that was bad. You are arguing in profound bad faith and are not even doing a good job of hiding your repeated straw men. I recommend you learn to engage with the arguments, instead of making up new ones in your head and fighting those.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21602437
Haven’t explored it yet, but it might be interesting to see how the sentiment shifted.
A significant portion of the hate they get is for what they represent and who they’re from, not because they’re “new” or “different” or “not perfect”.
Like, if a bunch of kids caught a stray cat, tied him up, and started shouting in his ears and laughing, would you stop them? And if they complained “no fun allowed”, would you think that was fair? What about if there was a video game in which you beat to a pulp deepfake representations of your friends and family? Do you not agree it would be reasonable for some people to find that in bad taste, including those who have suffered from domestic violence in real life?
You may say that this is just a game, but media affects people too. There are thousands of games where you can shoot at fictional infrastructure, is there really that much to gain from destroying representations of real buildings?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50390997
If your friend would be willing to share their thoughts, I’m interested in learning. Of course, if they don’t want to share or you think it would be disrespectful to even ask, don’t. I’m just thinking the perspective of such people should not be ignored.
Of course, we’d need more than one or two data points. If you know someone (or are you yourself) in that situation, I’d welcome learning your thoughts. No judgement or ulterior motive, just looking to understand another perspective.
Edit: And, of course, the downvotes are already coming. Don’t know why I bother with this community anymore. Call for exploiting and exterminating other people (I’m not talking about this submission) and you are celebrated; but try to be empathetic and learn about others, no sirree, can’t have that, that’s a grave offence to the great hacker blowhards who frequent the big AI News network. This community has become putrid.
Wasn’t that just people misunderstanding incognito as making you private to websites as opposed to private on your own computer (no data persisted locally)? Or are you thinking of something different?
The numbers are meaningfully smaller than that, and decrease even more when the banners are compliant (i.e. as easy to reject all as it is to accept all).
https://justanalytics.app/blog/cookie-consent-statistics-202...
A designer might indeed add more space but not necessarily hide stuff. Design works within constraints, and if the constraint is everything should be visible, then it needs to work like that.
That interface would benefit from more space in areas. Note for example how the descenders of letters (look for “g” or “y”) bleed into the bottom shadow (the “side”) of the buttons. It’s definitely tight. It gets worse with the bold areas. On the top right you seem to have buttons, labels, and a text field, all using the exact same font at the exact same size, all in bold and with no spacing between them. It makes it harder to focus on information, and everything is so close together that you’ll either have misclicks or be slower as you put the cursor in just the right place.
Sure, have that interface for the hardcore users, including those who are going to use the keyboard to interact with every part of that, but it’s not a failing to add more space, and menus aren’t always wrong.
People love making fun of designers, but it’s the toupée fallacy, you notice it when it’s bad. There’s a reason “good design is invisible” is a maxim. Like on every field, there are good designers and bad designers.
That one I do like. YouTube’s homepage (at least without an account and with history off) is a cesspool of uninteresting clickbait garbage so I’m glad to have it off. I do agree they seem to think of it as some kind of punishment¹, which makes it all the more satisfying that it works as I want it.
¹ It’s now entirely blank for me, but I remember when they started doing this (it wasn’t always the case) they showed a message that suggested not having a homepage was undesirable.
I don’t use a Kindle (it’s a Kobo, those are very hackable) and don’t use my tools to manage the reading list, I prefer to do that on device. But sure, I’m not claiming it’s for everyone, there’s a reason I recommend Calibre to other people. My needs are fairly minor, I don’t even use any of the popular alternative interfaces like KOReader.
> I’m impressed but also… that’s a lot of effort.
Not that much effort, and the tools have evolved as my habits did. I’ll give you one simple example of such a tool: I can select an EPUB and press a keyboard shortcut which actions it in Alfred to first convert it to to a Kobo EPUB with kepubify and then upload to Dropbox with rclone. I can then download it from the Kobo manually.
I had another which would take the URL of the frontmost browser tab, download and convert it to EPUB with pandoc, then it’d reuse the same kepubify and rclone steps. That one doesn’t work that well nowadays, with all the websites getting harder to access programatically due to all the LLM scraping.
Neither of those needs a lot of code, and I’m still relying on other tools for the heavy lifting. It’s just that for my specific personal needs, this is faster and more convenient than using Calibre.
Moving on, that example is different because not only is that solution specific to the problem and teaches you something, it’s also not as pervasive. Suggesting a keyboard shortcut to change text size is like teaching you how to hammer a nail, while telling you to vibe code is like telling you to hire a carpenter. Sure, you can hire a carpenter for your problem, but everyone already knows that is an option and it’s too general. It’s not a solution to the problem, it’s a suggestion of an approach and doesn’t even have a helpful guiding direction. Again: not interesting, doesn’t advance the discussion, and no one learns anything.
Which is what I said, in different words. If you understood the term, why did you ask what it meant?
> If so many people swear by Calibre
There’s no true alternative. A lot of people use Calibre despite how it looks, because it does all the things. The world of messing with ebooks outside the vetted stores isn’t that big.
> It is not only about the aesthetic design trends.
I didn’t even so much as hint that. Please don’t straw man.
> They don’t need to apply a coat of liquid glass and modern icon treatment to make it well designed.
Again, didn’t even so much as suggested that. I personally dislike Liquid Glass.
> toolbox
Again, there’s nothing wrong with being a toolbox nor have I claimed there is.
> This appeal to authority
There was no appeal to authority. You paid no attention to words in the comment, you fabricated an argument in your head and are fighting that.
Fucking hell, HN is tiring. Stop being so angry all the time, we’re not on opposing teams. Not every comment is a criticism or disagreement for you to rally against.
Calibre is great and I’m happy it exists. I recommend it to people despite not using it myself (I make my own tools). When I used it I found it to be very ugly and at times confusing and found it could benefit from applying some basic well-understood and researched design principles. But that’s all my opinion. You’re welcome to have yours, I don’t care, use whatever you like. Just please don’t mischaracterise my words and don’t come all angry and citing misapplied fallacies at me. I didn’t do that to you and would appreciate the same courtesy. Don’t stoke hate.
No one complained about anything, read the parent comment to the comment I replied to. The comment I replied to just suggested vibe coding out of nowhere.
> berating people
Come on, let’s please not be ridiculous. My comment was as polite as can be while presenting a disagreeing opinion. You don’t need to fake outrage, there’s enough of that in the world already and it’s a major reason why everything is turning to shit.
> after all if the purpose of this website is intellectual curiosity then comments complaining aren't in line with the purpose right?
Oof, HN is so tiring. More and more it proves right everyone who calls this “the orange site”. Look, you’re probably not a dumb person, there’s no need to play one and make arguments in bad faith. This is not hard to understand:
If there is something detrimental which you perceive as being done in excess, you should call it out and ask the person to stop, even if you have to go outside the norms a bit, for the greater good of the community. If you are, for example, in a renaissance fair and a couple of guys are being disruptive, it’s absolutely fine to break character to get them to stop; you don’t have to do it while pretending to be a medieval peasant, and it’s idiotic to suggest that would have to be the case.
It’s supremely stupid and frankly embarrassing for this community that I have to point this out as if we’re children. Don’t be Mr Gotcha, he’s not smart and no one likes him.
Lots of people. It’s great that you don’t, really, but Calibre is very ugly¹ and I have no doubt that limits its adoption. Subconsciously, people associate ugly apps with unpolished or unfinished apps.
I don’t use Calibre (I rely instead on command-line and bespoke tools) but I do recommend it to less technical people and I always make it a point of saying “it’s very ugly but it does everything and does it correctly, it’s the gold standard for what you want to do” because I’m pretty sure if I didn’t add that disclaimer the people I recommend it to would think they downloaded the wrong thing or abandon it as soon they opened it.
¹ That’s just personal opinion, we don’t need to have a debate about that. If you find Calibre beautiful, more power to you.
Outsider design? It means it’s designed by someone self-taught or not classically trained in the subject. It’s neither insult nor praise, it’s a classification, though often used as a way to express something as being unconventional and interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_music
> It is design produced by the user and maker of the app. If you hire a designer that's neither, doesn't that actually make them the outsider?
No, because it refers to “outside the world of design” not “outside the world of this product”. It’s two words but a single term.
> He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained.
Your parent comment didn’t claim they were making art. But they are designing the app are are clearly untrained in design. Again, that’s not an insult. How many of us here are self-taught programmers?
> He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.
That doesn’t necessarily follow. If that were the case there would be no designers, everyone would just do their thing. The point of learning design is to understand what works and why and how to apply it. It is perfectly valid for you to have a vision of what you want the thing to do but to need help in presenting it more effectively.