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thatsenoughon Neumorphism in User Interfaces

> This shot by Dribbble user alexplyuto gained over 3000 likes and pushed the trend forward. [1]

That mockup is aesthetically pleasing, but from a usability perspective it's terrible: every UI element looks like a button. The progress bar (?) looks like a slider. How do users know which elements they're supposed to interact with? Why do we make the same mistakes over and over?

[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/3200/1*gza8htfpZ-5eDabA7_kTJw.pn...

thatsenoughon Dive into Deep Learning

It existed at CMU, but it seems like even CMU has moved over to PyTorch. I think Amazon just doesn't want to seem like an "also ran" by conceding to one of its competitor's frameworks.

thatsenoughon Which Emoji Scissors Close?

Move fast and don’t deduplicate things.

thatsenoughon Amazon threatened to fire employees for speaking out on climate, workers say

An “appeal to authority” argument isn’t automatically a fallacy.

On the other hand, there’s been a rise in activist workers who believe they’re victims of authoritarianism whenever their subjective demands are not met immediately and in full. They often present themselves moral authorities, and by using an “appeal to authority” fallacy, they justify breaking policies, speaking on behalf of their coworkers, doxxing coworkers whom they don’t agree with, making false claims in the press, etc.

Whether or not I’m aligned with the underlying cause, the tactics and behavior on display has become increasingly indefensible.

thatsenoughon Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

We’re the best, but we’re still not good.

thatsenoughon Which Emoji Scissors Close?

Move fast and duplicate things.

thatsenoughon Downsides to working at a tech giant

Its not pessimism. People should just get to hear both sides, and know that VCs typically offer this advise because, first and foremost, it benefits the VCs.

The VC typically has enough money to be set for life, several times over. They bet on many companies simultaneously to diversify their own risk. Most companies will fail, and the employees will go down with the ship, but the VC only needs a handful of bets to pay out. None of this is the case for the employee, who bets all in on one company.

thatsenoughon UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

Merely that it evidence against the idea that this is something which is naturally occurring.

Ah, yes that’s true!

thatsenoughon Downsides to working at a tech giant

A cynical reading is this: he missed out by not buying a $200M lottery ticket, so the next generation of engineers and designers should buy lottery tickets.

Conveniently, the author is now in the business of selling lottery tickets.

(Then again, if he’d stayed at Microsoft he probably wouldn’t be in a position to sell lottery tickets).

thatsenoughon UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years

Radar jamming is pretty well-known, isn’t it? For instance, you blast the target with noise across radar’s bandwidth, drowning out the return signal.

There are various techniques and countermeasures, but it’s not alien technology.

thatsenoughon NeurIPS 2019 Notes [pdf]

Which? Her technical talk on how humans learn [1], or her keynote address on sexual harassment and the #metoo movement? As far as I know, only the latter got a standing ovation.

[1] https://www.nips.cc/Conferences/2019/Schedule?showEvent=1548...

[2] https://fortune.com/2019/12/09/sexual-harassment-issues-high...

thatsenoughon San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and Hating Itself

I wish it were, but it's not. The author presents a myopic and one-sided view of the situation, scapegoating the city's numerous problems on a single group of people. It's not nuanced at all.

thatsenoughon San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and Hating Itself

That doesn't answer the question though.

I'd say, in the early days, programmers were more geeky because computers were newer, rarer, and much harder to use. Most kids didn't grow up with computers in their homes. If they did, the computer was a big, ugly, unfriendly beige box, not a sleek sliver of glass and aluminum. When you booted it up, you were greeted by a blinking monochromatic command prompt, not an welcoming graphical interface. You had to learn cryptic, non-intuitive commands to operate it. Only a certain type of person would have the interest, focus, and abundance of free time to master it.

Nowadays, kids are raised on computers. Software engineering is widely seen as a viable career path. The act of programming hasn't changed much, but we've removed some of the barriers to entry and made the career path accessible to a broader group of people.

thatsenoughon San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and Hating Itself

What made San Francisco what it is today?

It's not the soft-on-crime District Attorney who cleared out the prisons by releasing criminals back onto the street.

Not the soft-on-crime SFPD, who barely enforces the law because what's the point? The DA won't prosecute anyway.

Not the fact that the hippies grew up and moved to Marin, and marijuana and mushrooms have been replaced with fentanyl and methamphetamine.

It's certainly not the bustling drug market that operates in 24 hours a day without police interference in the Tenderloin around Hyde and Golden Gate, making the city a go-to destination for drug addicts from across the region.

It's not the hundreds of millions of dollars the city hands out each year to homelessness advocacy groups that have no accountability and deliver no results.

It's not the entrenched NIMBYs who fight housing development tooth and nail.

It's the tech bros.