oddlyaromatic

> it attracts the type of people that focus on gaming those rules

Can you tell me how you know this or what makes you think it is true? It sounds like a readily available stereotype.

> it's almost impossible to find anyting that's truly finished, not simply abandoned.

This goes far beyond programming. "completeness" is nice but is highly subjective. For work that can be infinitely revised, refactored, recut, "finished" is an idea you impose from the outside, in relation to specific criteria.

The author seems to be saying that there is value in creating smaller, independent modules of things that can be said to be "finished" when they do their thing and no further functionality is added or expected to be added. Further functionality, if needed, would come from connecting "finished" things together, I suppose, or making new things- not over extending a component to handle all cases.

This moves the complexity around a bit and maybe it's more efficient and easier to handle this way.

Artists have a similar problem. It's hard to know when a poem or a song is "functionally complete" but eventually you have to let them go or you never get anything out there.

I'm all for conscientiously abandoning work, especially if the state of the work is well documented so that somebody else could, in theory, pick it up.

I thought that's exactly what insurance was for though. I thought force majeure was something that applies to cancellation of contracts - e.g. I work for a performer and if he can't make it to a show because there are no fights due to weather, both he and the venue reschedule with no penalties paid by either side. Likewise if the venue is snowed in our something. But if they just choose to cancel the concert at short notice, they still have to pay his fee.

Maybe I'm way off but would Scratch or Node Red be the right kind of examples?

>I find them annoying because it reminds me that the content is simultaneously trying to appeal to both skimmers and focused readers but has no idea which kind I am at the moment I’m reading it (I might be either).

This is a good general UI point too I think!

I guess I do that sometimes, though I scroll too quick for pull quotes to matter. Usually I'm going for the comments anyway.

I agree with you. I've always assumed these things were used to catch somebody's eye as they flipped through the pages of a newspaper or magazine, as highlights to draw the reader into the content. I haven't been able to figure out what value anybody thinks they provide online for the same reasons you point out. They are just irritating repetition.

I'm open to learning why you think this. I was trying to accurately reflect the message I believe underlies the sentence that I quoted. If you think the statement "people believe they're going to be fine with diabetes, as long as they love their bodies" implies something different, please be specific. It still appears to me that the message is "people who watch Oprah or otherwise develop a positive body image, even if they are overweight, believe this positivity protects them from harmful medical conditions like diabetes that might be related to their body's general condition."

This is life. We should do our best to be right even though we are probably not. It's that or throw our hands up and quit trying.

It implies you know what doctors do about as well as you know what comp sci people do, by virtue of comparing the two. The comp sci part is at risk of taking your anecdotal experience as too representative of the whole. The doctor part is (presumably) at risk of relying on stereotypes about doctors having "God complexes" ... So to get to an effective general comparison would be quite difficult without more accurate data. Buuut if we see ourselves as smart computer people, maybe we think more highly of our own inferences than they deserve. I would expect doctors' arrogance has a lot to do with their training and respect for their processes and practices as being highly reliable and advanced. Rather than them personally just having a talent for doctoring.

This generalization is pretty large and may itself be an example of arrogance. But I think maybe it's just the brevity of your comment that gives this impression.

The difficulty is that curating involves editorial decision making and some threshold for what you consider to be a fact. There's very little someone won't find fault with. But maybe if the sites editorial standards are also published, people could adjust for that themselves?

>launch a modern web app

It took me a long time to realize that "launching the app" is not really what these tools are for. You can create perfectly fine awesome web apps with just HTML/CSS/ES5.

But as it gets more complex, or you add collaborators, or you feel how much easier/faster certain things would be if you could operate at a different level of abstraction... the world does tend to pull you towards these tools. None of them are necessary though, they just trade a little ramp at the beginning for a lot of saved headaches later on. I still don't use have of this stuff, but I recall recently debugging an issue that was a couple of clicks into an SPA (in an interview no less) and I sure wished I had jumped through the hoops to get hot module reloading on that one! Likewise, I'm kind of ready for tests now, to make sure the rendered HTML is what I expect in various scenarios, rather than walk through the app like a paranoid moron after every change.

I think the way to stay sane in modern front-end development is to not overthink the tools - if your project is already using them, great, use them the right amount for your team. If you don't use, say, Redux, but your state management is causing lots of pain, hey, maybe it's time for Redux now. If you already write only beautiful ES5 that runs correctly an is easy to reason about, who needs Babel.

My favorite situation is when somebody else picked the tools and the build process and I don't have to give a crap about evaluating all the options. Knowing and caring about all of the pros and cons IS a lot of bandwidth!

Mine didn't. I did an MA and got an up close view of the life of many academics and recognized it was not for me. But the general impression I got was there are two good reasons to do a phd:

1. For pleasure/curiosity/enjoyment (as in you are independently wealthy).

2. If you can't see yourself being happy in any other life and you understand the compromises you have to make (poor income, high competition, having to move a lot, etc.)

I know some wonderful PhDs who got doctorates with this very understanding and love their lives. But I didn't have the wealth to do it for fun, and I generally land on my feet and get happy no matter what, so I didn't borrow any more trouble and moved on with my life.

America's universities maybe may be different but this is how it was in Ireland!

I really like this. I get overwhelmed by the options and want to be prudent yet have freedom to screw up.

>Even in the press, a guy is more often smart, funny, successful and a girl is beautiful, elegant, and so on. Not always, but more often than not.

You present this as though it supports your point, that you "cannot cheat biology with feminism". To me it's actually more evidence that there is this complicated system running, with multiple feedback loops on multiple levels.

I'm not saying that there is nothing here in terms of biology, of course there is, but the relationship between biology and culture is subtle and complicated. Little in life (maybe nothing) is as pure and simple as many people seem think this issue is.

Lots of people do this to connect loosely related sentences because to them the "..." reads like a little pause. I guess it feels more comfortable, less formal, and let's them get the words out without worrying about structure too much.

Yes! It's confusing seeing as it is the top comment but clearly everybody gets it and appreciated the joke. It's perhaps just too chillingly accurate ;).

This seems to be code golf, which would answer most of these questions I think. Maybe I'm missing some sarcasm in your comment, it's early!

Interesting. I would have thought always that yes, if I'm moving an image around, its metadata goes with it unless I've specifically taken steps to strip it. I guess we've all had different introductions to this stuff.

>b) none of those have a metasyntanctic function that specifically speaks to how the words should be interpreted

Separately, I think they do have that meaning in most contexts. "actually died laughing" "really fell apart during interview" "totally lost control" "he was absolutely insane" etc

>And being insensitive to the needs of those different from us is a core part of being human. But there are better and worse ways to be human, and better and worse ways to make metaphors.

This is a really good point, and I agree. There are many ways to use language "correctly" and still end up being unclear. I am in favor of clarity of meaning. Irony/metaphor plays with that but good communicators can use them to have more fun an enhance a message.

I really like your perspective though. I need to fold that in to how I think about this stuff.

Could mean:

- literally blue (painted blue or colored some other way)

- literally blue (skin blueish from lack of oxygen)

- he was really cold or something (exaggerated metaphor)

Or probably other stuff.

Like most things, you need more context to determine the relationship between the statement and reality. None of these meanings depend on the word "literally" it can disambiguate between two related statements but nothing in language can escape the idea of being used in a metaphorical context.

It always bugs me when people "correct" this totally fine use of language. We don't freak out nearly so much about similar words like actually, really, totally, completely, absolutely, etc being used in the same way.

It's no big deal. Metaphor is a core part of our language.

"Literally" being used in both senses goes back a long, long way, though. My take is that when used in the straightforward meaning, it is usually pretty clear, and when used with the contradictory meaning, it is also pretty clear. It COULD be confusing if you use "literally" to mean "figuratively" and your very purpose is to clarify that you do not mean the thing itself literally ... but that's not what happens. The figurative use of "literally" is almost always in the context of exaggerating a metaphor. Example: "I literally died laughing" ... it's already a false statement, being heightened by the claim that it is literally true. Usually, if you see the word "literally" applying to something that's not literally true, somewhere nearby a heightened metaphor is lurking.

Weight gain is kind of part of the disability if you have a mobility problem, or, you know, actual paralysis. This is a ridiculous transfer of responsibility from those who design and maintain the environment, to those who experience disabilities caused by the failures of that environment's design and maintenance. I want to be polite but also clearly express how angry this idea makes me. Also I disagree on how much the physics of a power chair would be affected by this. Yes, maybe it would be marginally easier if heavier wheelchair users were less heavy... In fact, it would be even better if they could walk. That's about as practical an idea.

We cannot control the person's physical size or abilities. We can broaden the range of humans for whom we design things by doing better work. That's all we can do. That's what we should do.

Sure. It's like driving to to the gym to run on a treadmill. But I'm not sure that other people doing something for themselves for their own reasons needs to be corrected because you or I would find it suboptimal for ourselves. If the person wants the thing, let them do the thing. What are we, the thing police?

> it would probably help the woman in this article if she lost some weight

You know how awful this sounds, right? I'm not sure you meant it the way it sounds. Please clarify. Do you mean that by reducing the physical weight of her body you think the sidewalks would somehow be easier for her wheelchair to navigate? Hopefully not because that's absurd.

> It should definitely be possible to make a wheelchair that can go up a single step. Especially for $30k.

It's not like there is no innovation in this area (see the "tank chair" for a good example). But there are many obstacles, of many kinds, here. Of course.

This is not just your comment: All through this thread people who haven't thought the issue through in detail seem to be waving their hands at the real problem (environment is not suitable for all users) and proposing these ad hoc solutions as though nobody has thought of them before.

Until we can all float around in hoverchairs, we need the damn sidewalks to be functional. I have no problem thinking outside the box but at some point you have to come back to reality

I guess it comes down to what the user prioritizes, but I think it's good to have the option of running something on the desktop if I feel like it.

I'd love to know how it goes, I haven't actually tried it yet. Not sure how one would go about "releasing" the exported file.

Does Nativefier help you? https://github.com/jiahaog/Nativefier