263 karma · joined August 11, 2016
"Trust and Safety" is just Orwellian newspeak for controlling who gets to hear which opinions.
When it comes to Drupal, the only gender problem it has is the people who keep manufacturing major incidents out of minor slights, even when the people involved don't mind. Case in point, the Drupal Association member who resigned because he called his friend a pussy, who in turn didn't mind it.
It is disingenuous to uphold a code of respect, diversity and inclusion while simultaneously expecting everyone to conform to the wishes of the most easily offended. More so to act like the only way to be respectful to women is to treat them like fragile flowers. Some people prefer traditional gender roles, in or outside the bedroom, and some are women.
The last thing these inclusion activists want is diversity, it would expose them as the sheltered and privileged upper class they are.
Real harassment is already illegal. Conduct policies can only serve in the gray area where people do not want to get police involved, but still want to exact some form of retribution and punishment, often by playing the politics game. It empowers the wrong people for the wrong reasons. It also creates the illusion that tech is particularly nasty, when the exact opposite is true: despite what activists claim, it is far more meritocratic than most industries, and far more reliant on tools and methods that emphasize work over personality and identity.
The propositioning, this is a fact of life: men propose, women dispose, and it's creepy unless he's attractive. Fact is, people like to date people with similar interests, they meet in all sorts of contexts, and some are more tactful about it than others. That doesn't mean it's automatically harassment to be flirted with outside of a dating site or bar night, or that it's never welcome.
One asshole manager is just one asshole manager, and such crudeness is the exception, not the norm.
Some people would love to receive just an ounce of affection and appreciation just for merely showing up, so being able to complain about it is the luxury of the desirable. Especially when, as I've often seen, it's paired with exasperated stories of how so-and-so just won't take the endless "clear hints" that have been made, but a polite but firm "sorry, flattered but not interested" is never actually provided. We are told we must be more empathetic, but the empathy for the socially awkward or the lonely, those who are bad at reading social cues, that's never on the table. All this talk of "safe spaces" seems to vanish once it's the real nerds and geeks, the 'losers' who need consideration.
Just keep in mind, HR is mostly a female-staffed endeavour, and the passive aggressive and underhanded interaction described is certainly not typical of male interaction styles. If it's a poster child for how not to behave, I don't think those griping about techbros and misogyny are quite thinking through the implications here.
You've only graduated 2.5 years ago, so trying to push yourself as a Product Designer is probably out of your reach, and comes across as unrealistic. This is a senior-level role where experience is more important than ticking off skills. In combination with the breadth you listed this doesn't make you seem like a genius, it makes you seem like a generalist who lacks focus and probably has a touch of ADHD.
Personally your website also doesn't impress me, nor do any of the projects shown. They all have the same blank slate look of plain sans-serif fonts on white backgrounds with little or no colors and virtually no iconography. That might be good to sell consumer goods, but it doesn't demonstrate your skill and it contradicts that you're "passionate about all things visual". There are no illustrations, no flourishes, the artistry and aesthetics are absent.
In fact, what seems to be your "showpiece" for product design is IMO a self-sabotaging demo. Instead of showing off the creative process and focusing on the creative possibility space, it's a long-winded and visually dull story of navel gazing about details, interspersed with random code screenshots and programmer art. The end result, buried at the very bottom instead of pulled out at the start, is an ugly neon monospace table view with only an out of place Mario coin for graphics.
The golden rule is show, don't tell, and to not force people to do the heavy lifting for you. Also, drop phrases like wanting to work "at your cool startup", it screams try-hard. You don't want to join the startup because _it_ is cool, you want the startup to hire you because _you_ are cool.
Don't talk about writing witty copy or designing mesmerizing colors and dazzling typography, just make me laugh, mesmerize me, dazzle me.
I'd bet that the adjacent commenter's idea of "[his racist advocacy] is well documented" comes from Twitter and Tumblr quotes taken out of context, cyclically retweeted in outrage.
The griping about the overuse of "fake news" displays a lack of self-awareness too. It isn't just Alex Jones adherents who call the New York Times, Washington Post and BBC fake news. All these major outlets have been caught with their pants down posting untruths, often with an obvious political agenda masked with under the thinnest veneer of objectivity. Corrections and retractions are lost in the maelstrom of the attention economy, and opinion pieces compete on equal footing with 'real' reporting, as the front page is no longer the main source of traffic. The response to the obvious and baited ire from the readership is to double down, censor any comments that contradict the story as being uncivil and harassing, and get ever more offended the plebs aren't eating up what you're serving, seeking out alternate sources in their 'ignorance'.
Respect and credibility are earned, not given. If contemporary journalists want to raise the bar and bring their audience back to them, the solution isn't a war on information, it's a war on their own delusions of grandeur and their inability to step aside to let real domain experts speak. Those who are in it for the job rather than the agenda and attention left the scene long ago, and Gell Mann amnesia remains as true as ever.
Strange because this is exactly why I love OS X. Because it's empowering and gets out of the way.
For instance, it's the only OS where multi-touch gestures for desktop/window management works instantly and controls everything as I'm doing it. A common thing to do is to select some objects on one desktop, click and drag them with the trackpad, then swipe with 3 additional fingers to move to another desktop, before dropping. It just works.
The browser works like a tablet and I can zoom and pan and navigate back easily. The OS is smart enough to reposition all my windows to their previous location when I unplug and replug an external monitor, instead of giving me a bunch of cropped apps in the corner. Renaming or moving a file makes apps pay attention and save to the new location. Preferences apply just by changing them, labels and controls everywhere update to track underlying changes, every listing is live. I can instantly preview anything with a spacebar tap, without losing keyboard focus on the finder window I was working with. Even the little icon in the titlebar of a document window is interactive, letting me drag a file I have open to a new place without making me go find it again, or right click it to get a dropdown menu to all parent paths.
Plugging in devices and drives, managing audio inputs and outputs, managing network interfaces and VPNs, backing up to external devices, it's all right there and instantly accessible, without 3 layers of legacy control panels or a bunch of config files to go dive through.
All of these things preserve my flow state by letting me manipulate the objects and the state of my desktop without having to make a chore out of it, by acting exactly like the natural and traditional objects around me. When I turn on the light, I don't open the "light preferences", click a checkbox and hit "Ok", I don't go edit /etc/light.conf, I just switch on the light. Why "professionals" think it should be any other way keeps amazing me, but then, I recall a study a while back that said that when it takes a lot of small steps to perform a particular task, it seems faster, even if it actually isn't.
I just wanna spray Pomo-B-Gone all over this.
The flipside to all this griping about entitlement is that most open source ecosystems are set up as an explicit groupthink and infrastructure to which you must defer. You can't just grab something and keep playing by yourself, no, you must keep moving in lockstep with everyone else, or things will break. That's why people get frustrated and angry, and that's why they barge into issue queues feeling miffed. They gave up too much control to too big an entity, and it bit them in the ass. Angular 1 should be a big lesson here: people abandoned the entire framework in droves simply because the _promise_ of future updates was taken away. The beautiful carriage turned back into the pumpkin it always was, and now the rot was starting to set in.
Even something like node.js with its fractally versioned npm packages has this problem. Drop-in compatibility is only true as long as you're in the sweet spot of doing what most other people do, on the version most widely installed. Not too bleeding edge that you can't expect StackOverflow to have gotten there before you, but not too far behind that you lose compatibility with the important dependencies.
The author concludes "If we focus on solutions, focus on helping others, focus on sharing ideas, we’ll be in a better place." I disagree, because too much sharing is what got us into this mess. The answer is more self-sufficiency, with enough affordances for going at it by yourself if you want to. Alas, that doesn't jibe with the latest fad of inclusiveness, so I'm afraid the same people griping about civility are the ones doomed to recruit more ineffective members into their congregation.
It's funny though, because the other day there was a free speech debate at the University of Toronto where a gender ideologue explicitly denigrated her opponent's outreach on Youtube as amateurish videos unworthy of consideration. Despite him being a tenured professor. [1]
Then again, both his opponents also expressed how dismayed they were that this debate was taking place at all, after they reinterpreted its topic as being offensive to common decency. They ignored the indecent actions from their camp that led to it though. It seems liberal academicians do not like debate of any kind, official or otherwise, they'll just bang on about empathy and care while denying it to those they disagree with.
It was classic fact-free "women in tech" non-sense. Equality means if you mess up at the top, you take responsibility. What women-in-tech advocates want is all the prestige with none of the flak.
It was also false, horrific and libellous, and he did lose his job over it. Just because the stick used to beat people with was misogyny instead of cheese pizza, doesn't make the act of spreading false information any less despicable.
Edit: BTW, the fact that our media is now staffed by people who are utterly unable to separate their subjective experience from objective reality should seriously worry you. It should also make you reconsider anything you've heard about what's going on in culture wars online and offline, because I guarantee you, the people covering it do not have the statistical and digital literacy to accurately gauge the size and nature of things.
Take The Guardian. They employ people like Jessica Valenti and Laurie Penny who publish feminist clickbait. Then they aggressively moderate comments which explain why those two are ill-informed at best and dishonest manipulators at worst. Then they do a "study" where they demonstrate how much harassment their female writers receive, by considering every deleted comment to be an instance of harassment.
Alternative hypotheses are not welcome, and there is no accountability. Actual studies like Pew's about the magnitude and nature of real harassment are ignored, or spun by cherry picking. The dogma remains: women have it worse, and it's because they are women. This system gets them more traffic and attention, so they are encouraged to continue, even as they insist it's terrible and someone should stop it.
Until the humiliating defeats with Brexit and Trump, the progressive left was so high on its own supply, they wouldn't hear it. Some still won't hear it, they're just covering their ears and panicking, because they think the media's image of Trump and his supporters - the same media that predicted a 93% chance of Clinton presidency - was actually an accurate representation of reality.
Think men aren't horrible oppressors? You're a misogynist, sexist MRA who wants to bring women back into the kitchen. Think "white people" are just a convenient but wrong proxy for class, and that blindly inviting uneducated and illiberal refugees into a service-based economy and libertarian culture is a recipe for disaster? You're a racist islamophobe who thinks black lives don't matter.
Respecting white culture means respecting the values that built western society, and that includes rationality, impartiality, and evidence-based inquiry. Valuing male culture means acknowledging meritocracy, understanding that respect is earned - not given - and encouraging confidence to accomplish by yourself.
There is really a stunning amount of projection stemming from the left these days, and it's left otherwise sympathetic people out in the cold. The progressive left repeats the right words, but they don't seem to understand what they mean or where they came from, incapable of self-reflection.
First off, the KK:H financial success isn't laudable, it's simply predictable and how companies like Zynga got rich off pilfering the creative ideas of others. All free-to-play gambling games, and gambling in general, make their money from a tiny subset of their audience who are addicted and spend enormous amounts of money to keep playing in the face of artificial barriers. The games rely on word of mouth via free players to reach those juicy targets. The celebrity face was the difference between just another copy-cat and a viral success with tons of media coverage.
Second, to deride "pseudo-masculine bullshit" in search of rich meaning while considering Kardashian beyond reproach, that makes the author's already shaky premises particularly lacking in self-awareness. The game is the actual embodiment of vapid celebrity and appearance-obsessed femininity on top of being an archetype of soulless box ticking.
But see, there's nothing _wrong_ with making games that play to stereotypical female interests either, if done well. Compare for example to the Desperate Housewives game, which is a Sims spin-off aimed squarely at female players who want juicy drama and catty social dynamics. It involves real storytelling, while the gamified aspects are only there to support the player agency.
Those games already exist. The author instead preferred to spin a tale of female oppression at the hands of white men, while promoting her own unproven studio. Color me unsurprised.
The Walking Dead on the other hand is an expertly written, uniquely styled game, which is tied-in to its source IP pretty much in name only. It would've won awards without the branding just the same.
Do you see the difference?
Diversity implies differences in class, age, origin, occupation, and so on, and this is definitely the case in the consumer demographics. The fact that some games appeal more to men and others more to women is unsurprising, and irrelevant.
In fact, that you're seeing numbers such as 60/40 despite the game makers themselves being far more male-dominated suggests those men are doing a pretty decent job in appealing to people not like them.
Games can offer a free space to explore, play and excel, away from the judgement of real life, often with a completely arbitrary character. For the entire bottom half of society, that's very appealing, and it's not "pseudo-masculine nonsense". Relationship mechanics are popular with men too, with Mass Effect's crew of cameraderie and romance being a hugely popular AAA example. So popular, the lack of a respectful ending pissed off its fanbase, whose desire for meaning and depth then got spun into an accusation of entitlement and obsession.
What we've seen the last 10 years is games have become more shallow, favoring gambling systems and skinner boxes over mechanics and systems. Ironically, it's mostly women playing these social and mobile games. In fact, it is hilarious that she talks of "rich, deep experiences" but then holds up "Kim Kardashian: Hollywood" as an example in the very next sentence, which is literally a cash-grab celebrity reskin of an existing game.
She complains that "we've stopped listening to each other", that the conversation is "evolving slowly" and that people don't think "women are human", but she pulls the same dehumanizing routine by painting the entire existing industry and its customers with the same tired old brush. Perhaps she should consider "that what [men] like is not less worthy nor boring nor wrong nor hard to understand". And if she wants "compassion and respect and fearlessness", she could start by practicing what she preaches.
If you want to bring moral imperatives into it, one would think a basic commitment to truth and statistical literacy would be included, but it very rarely is. You'd also imagine diversity of thought would be included as a point of intellectual honesty, but in practice, it is the exact opposite.
As for software projects routinely failing, that has numerous possible explanations. One is that it's one of the most abstract forms of engineering around, in the sense that the material we manipulate and the arrangements we construct cannot be seen or touched, and hence are invisible to outsiders. It must rely entirely on explicit and deliberate communication, unlike more practical fields. The onus is entirely on the engineer to make himself understandable, and it is rare to find people gifted both in abstraction and verbal thinking.
Another is the recurring observation that schools are particularly bad at teaching the practical skills required to deliver software projects, being taught by people with little to no industry experience. It goes beyond basic project and code management skills and goes into product design and usability: people learn to build code when they should be learning to craft tools. But just because currently applications focus more on theory than practice, doesn't mean we'd get better results by turning to people who lack the theory entirely.
It's a vicious cycle based on a kafkatrap. If you don't agree that women are discriminated against in tech, you're discriminating against women. Culture committees, diversity consultants and women-only groups are set up to "address" this problem, yet all they do is create more division and alienation, holding up the most stereotypical fragile princess as representative for every woman on the planet.
They keep throwing all sorts of accusations and aspersions on every single guy in the field, shriek and pearl clutch when they receive blowback, and have the gall to call this empathy, in a field where the average worker is an undersocialized and overworked code janitor. Whose preferred communication styles, hobbies and accomplishments are fair game to ignore or bulldoze over.
Pointing this out gets you labeled as "horrible". Fine, then. Yet another word to add to the pile that has lost all meaning. Misogyny used to mean "hatred of women", now it just means "something a woman hates". Which appears to include the average mid-rung nerd.
It seems disingenuous to accuse them simultaneously of throwing credibility to the wind and of carefully phrasing sensitive on-going matters like the disruption of Assange's internet access.
They're also not claiming this attack "as one of theirs", they're saying a third party who supports them is _and asking them to stop_. That distinction seems pretty clear, and is not an endorsement, it's a call for de-escalation.
From where I'm sitting it's the US state machine continuing their mission to destroy Wikileaks' credibility, by misrepresenting their M.O. and cherry picking tweets like this... only now the left-wing public is eagerly joining in as opposed to only the right-wing calling for their heads for being traitors. The thing about negative associations is, it's posts like yours that create them.
But when Palin called it "palling around with terrorists", the US left-wing was rather opposed to that tactic.
Excuses from above about it being good for the community strikes me as eerily similar to the "national security" argument: in order to defend a free community from those who seek to harm it, we don't need to uphold the principles that it was founded upon. Hm.
Double standards, must protect the m'ladies!
Most right wingers would e.g. see the dominance of left-wing thought in academia and entertainment as its own form of elite power, an unearned and unwarranted influence not based on merit, which only pays lips service to its own ideals of rationality and impartiality.
Either way, every time I've seen it happen, the thread is young and still rising, so this flagging mechanism cannot possibly represent a meaningful slice of the HN readership, who are prevented from finding out.
That sounds like plain old censorship and information control to me, and I'm pretty sure the moderators know it.