nonrandomstring

191 ms·

2881.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
Bret Victor article is very good. Thanks for sharing. Some remarks stood out for me: > talk about technology. That's the easy part, in a sense, because we control it . (my emphasis) Yes, I agree with him strongly. But - there&#x
2882.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
No it's not their job, and I'll try to explain why I think that. Apart from the remit being just too broad, designers in any case are part of a complex team that deal with a multitude of functional, non-functional, regulatory and
2883.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
It's called ergonomics [1]. The "crapification" you describe is the creep away from the scientific principles that once underpinned this field. Before UX we had HCI (Human Computer Interaction) which was in turn a developmen
2884.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
I like that too. Simplicity is its own dimension of quality. When I was young I revelled in complexity. Now I see it as an enemy of understanding, security and productive utility.
2885.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> most reposted link I wonder why. What is the fascination with "low" tech? Why indeed is there a "low/high" distinction in technology? What does that even mean? Is there a mirror of high-low culture? Or by &quot
2886.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
This interesting article touches on a wider problem in education. We are losing "sympathy for the devil", that oldest struggle to keep evil in mind. If polarisation and fear of trauma is allowed to drive the wisdom of Milton'
2887.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Does anyone live without a smartphone? I'm the author of this book [1]. I've never owned a smartphone. Working with them early in the mobile social-media days made me realise what was to come, and how addictive and dangerous
2888.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Good points on both sides. All the points are true, so we need to dig a little deeper and be more specific about what is at issue here. Online and Native are quite different trust and utility models. Web applications protect the execut
2889.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> be conscious of the ones that drive us to become mindless consumers and remove other options from us in the market. Nicely put. I see that sort of "choice affecting choices" you describe leveraged/manipulated a lot in
2890.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
You could do worse than go back and make sure your foundation maths is solid. Revise some Discrete Maths books and understand identification, classification, sets, equivalence... Make sure you've a solid ground on concepts like dimensi
2891.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
DDG offers a Tor onion address. That's a feature I like, great for privacy and anonymity, relatively easy to implement, and affords some resistance to bots (who will move on to lower hanging fruit due to the connection set-up overhead)
2892.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
A strangely misplaced whiff of anti-intellectualism seems present and growing within tech/hacker circles (?)
2893.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Who seriously think it is? Nobody. I'm not implying anyone is that stupid. It's obviously a figure of speech. Which you get, right?
2894.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
People have a limited number of boxes into which to fit a very rich set of concepts emerging in the world of applied computing today. Unfortunately "tech people" are no better than average in dealing with breadth and nuance - and
2895.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Google lets you actually find information rather than just wishing you had it. Correct. And that's a problem. The "wishing you had it" part is actually really important. Creativity and understanding isn't just ass
2896.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
I think you'd really like Lewis Mumford too. Ellul, Mumford, McLuhan, Postman and Illich constitute (accessible [1]) Technological Critique 101. I think they are essential reading for anyone who claims to be a "technologist"
2897.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> The market is not working, we just have the tools to realize how badly it's broken. "The market" is not a single thing. It's an idea(ology) from economics, and a cultural mythology, that vaguely intersect at some
2898.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> A convincing display of Pentagon-style "shock and awe", just as Putin was anticipating quick, easy victory, could have stopped the entire invasion in its tracks. And sparked an exchange of tactical battlefield nukes? My g
2899.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Hotelling's Rule [2], given recent rises in the price of fossil fuel. Fair points. Some of the economic language is a bit hard for me to follow, but I always took Hotelling as an explanation for some perverse incentives not explai
2900.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
Best pop-in culture to my mind comes through simple old fashioned IRC with a few utility bots. The pop-in paradigm seems principally a matter of synchronisation/rendezvous. Someone is "available" because they are "holdin
2901.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
Remuneration is only one dimension in this. A certain distance has opened up in modernity. It is between what is accounted for and what is casual. Between the formal and the informal. Official, and unofficial. It is about what it "reco
2902.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
Only ever done one or two US-UK links. Very good results IIRC. When Jitsi (WebRTC) struggles it seems to do a sensible thing and fall back to preserving good audio but temporarily dropping the video completely.
2903.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> 100% fine seems a bit premature. I don't necessarily agree with the "corporate death penalty" (for the same reasons I don't sanction individual death penalty - that organisations like individuals are not necessarily
2904.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> they are doing horrible things to themselves, their loved ones, their descendants. It is like a slow motion mass suicide. I feel like it is significantly more difficult to explain, Excellent points, well worth thinking about more.
2905.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> how they rationalized this aggregate behaviour. Fictionalised, quite accurately perhaps, Michael Cristofer as Phillip Price and Bruce Altman playing Terry Colby in Sam Esmail's "Mr Robot" both do an outstanding job of ca
2906.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was really harmful. You missed the problematic last step. We take technical innovations to a societal
2907.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
Jitsi beats everything. I've set up meetings with first-timers and total technophobes by sending a single URL. The UI and performance is no worse than any other contender like Zoom or Teams. Nobody I've connected with using Jitsi
2908.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
Maybe I'm just a little fussy about words. The Washington Post article, to which the submission linked, hedges its position a little too much for my liking. > Scientists have speculated that factors beyond deliberate dumping could
2909.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
Use Wordnet [1,2]. It's an entirely local database with decent etymology and provisions for synonyms, homonyms, semantic relations and so on. > $ /usr/bin/wn hacker -over Overview of noun hacker The noun hacker
2910.
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> This kind of cartoonish exaggeration of how totalitarian regimes operate only muddies the water on the actual harm done by such governments. What do think you know about "how totalitarian regimes operate"? Worked for some

More ›