Although I agree that there's been a frustrating lack of response to those issues, I think at least part of that muted response was a sense that these incidents were an aberration from a general trend of progress.
The reality that many people are waking up to is that social progress is not guaranteed and a passive approach is not enough.
I share your cynicism regarding many of the marketing moves by the companies you mentioned. At the same time, the fact that doing the right thing builds goodwill with a hopefully-majority highlights the importance of making our views and voices heard.
I might wish for a more high-minded motive form these companies. I also wish that it hadn't taken shock events to make the loss of rights feel real for most of America (though to be honest, I'm guilty of this too.)
But I'm excited to see people mobilizing, and will take the good outcomes where I can find them these days. Progress here could require an uneasy coalition.
I'm disappointed to see a comment like this here. To treat 'feminists' as a monolithic bloc, mutually exclusive from meaningful contributors to IT, is insulting to those of us who try to be both.
Women in tech face real challenges, including but not limited to casual condescension towards the people fighting for change.
I'm proud of her too, and I'm sure she's exactly the sort of role model that a feminist would have in mind.
I'm sure that many women in tech have problems, although I view them as equal whenever I work with them. Also I am sorry if I hurt anyone's feelings with my comment. I'm just not sure if it helps the general view on women in tech that I read 4 times as many articles complaining about the problems for women to achieving something technical.
One problem here is that any outcome (warming or no, human-engineered or no) will impact every nation differently. Under current warming projections, some nations will see massive increases in arable land, whereas others will be completely underwater. Even within nations, some cities and regions will see detrimental effects, whereas others could even see benefits (though this is taboo to talk about, which foreshadows one variation of the problem).
It seems naively optimistic to think we will be able to geoengineer altruistically or with the general good in mind. Even the concept of an 'average good' for the earth is a little morally problematic if some nations benefit and others are hurt. When a nation acquires the ability to affect climate at a large scale, it seems likely that it will be used for political ends as much as for net positive outcomes.
Additionaly - developing countries are developing because they started to polute later. They are now punished again by being prohibited from abusing einvironment the same (cheap) way that developed countries did before.
That means rich countries will remain richer than poor countries because they can afford massive investment into infrastructure to switch to cleaner alternatives, while poor countries will need to adjust by using less power, producing less goods etc.
You basically ask poor countries to be poorer to stop effect that doesn't matter to many of them (or even could be positive).
Without artifical incentives it will be VERY hard sell. And right now the only incentives proposed are negative (tax on CO2 emmision).
What if developed countries PAID poor countries that would benefit from global warming to switch to cleaner energy sources? But that's taboo as well.
Actually, at least for the global warming issues, the poor countries are going to be the ones that generally get the worst effects and also have the least ability to mitigate those effects with limited human casualties. And the countries that are likely to get some positive agricultural benefit are the northern countries which are among the most developed countries in the world.
Netherlands has cities multiple meters below sea level. The western major coastal cities can be shielded from a few meters of sea level increase - it would cost immense (but still realistic) amounts of money, but the heavily inhabited coastal regions of poor countries will simply drown and cause many millions of displaced poor people.
The effects matter to the poor countries more than everybody else. I'd say there are two reasons why they're not doing anything to stop it - first is the tragedy of commons, as it makes no sense for, say, Bangladesh (probably risking the worst effects from global warming) to stop emissions if China isn't doing the same; and second is simply that they can't afford to pay today for a larger benefit tomorrow; in the same manner as poor people often simply can't pay $10 now to prevent a certain $50 loss in a month.
And what makes you think that random outcomes ("natural" outcomes if you will) are any better ? I mean, didn't we stop believing in a benevolent God at some point ?
Because when I look at the green movement, my mind very quickly feels the need to point out that for the green movement to do any good at all with their pushing of nature, nature would have to be good. Nature is not good, nor is it evil, but let me point out that with very, very few exceptions murderers are not evil either (the large majority are furthering their own ends, not killing for fun or morals).
The mapping between natural features and human population/agriculture is generally near a local optimum. If a random grassland would be swapped with a random desert of the same size, from a natural viewpoint it would be nearly the same, but it would have horrible consequences for the people living there.
Any significant changes to the natural features in random direction should be expected to be harmful for us - we can be rather sure that moving 10 steps in direction A is expected to be worse than moving 1 step in direction B even if we don't know anything about the actual changes caused by those directions.
We should prefer small random changes to big changes, unless we're really, really sure that the big changes are actually beneficial.
The sensible people, who can clearly see that there's less a God than there is an Auditor of Reality, an anal, obsessive-compulsive cosmic bureaucrat who doesn't give half a damn what happens to people as long as every atom reports its spin and the paperwork is filed on every chemical reaction.
> The large majority are furthering their own ends.
You sound uncannily like the misinterpretation I held of D&D3.0's moral system. The Morality of Killing people to further your own ends Is highly dependent on what those ends are.
Plus I'm pretty sure if there is a majority among murderer, it is anger problems, not slytherin
As a designer who also writes code, this attitude really frustrates me. There are a lot of reasons that flat UI makes more sense for software, especially for responsive web.
Flat UI means less code and easier maintainability. It holds up better across a wide range of sizes. It makes it easier to have a style guide in code and create reusable modules.
This allows the design team to focus on the bigger-picture user experience instead of perfecting button gradients.
High information density is great in many applications, especially interfaces supporting complex tasks for expert users. However, it takes a lot of work to design a great high-density interface. I feel like most of the high density interfaces I see are more of a case of the design or product teams not being able to make hard decisions about what's really important.
While some flat UIs certainly go too far in the other direction, I firmly believe that minimalism encourages good design by forcing a conversation about what information to prioritize. Especially for the mainstream consumer web, this is almost always better for everyone.
Finally, I don't appreciate this kind of attack on my profession. Good design is far closer to engineering than to taste. I don't think I'm hoodwinking people into hiring me.
Aesthetics are just as much a matter of taste as they are engineering. A lot of code frankly lends itself to such verbosity/elegance/simplicity/density/readability/(...) because of cultural:personal [preference, pedantry, experience, understanding, knowledge base].
Rather, I'm not so quick to have an opinion on aesthetics, because I think philosophically, beauty defines a balance between simplicity and engineering. Every part expresses itself perfectly.
There are ideals that work across the majority, and there are ideals that are appreciated by a niche audience. There is the Ideal, which is never achievable, and there is the expression of the Ideal, which always exists. Engineering or design, I don't see a difference. Different content, same concept.
Looks like they did a lot of other things at the same time (like not creating app-wide singletons up-front). It would have been nice to see numbers just for rendering.
Though it's of course anecdata, this is a huge problem for basically every woman I know who's used the service. Not only is it mostly spam, a lot of it is pretty horrible and demeaning. A few friends post the worst of it to Facebook and tumblr and it's cringe-inducing.
Can't speak to the male side of things, as I haven't used it myself. But I feel gross being lumped in with the things that friends have shown me.
The male experience on dating sites is soul-crushing. It consists mainly being utterly ignored by everyone. Then, when you read profiles and put in effort, you discover that you're shouting into the void. So you move to copy-paste in part because it hurts less and in part because it gets you more responses.
It's a marketing effort. Your goal is to communicate the benefits of your product (you) to your prospective customers. And just like real marketing, there is a ton of other marketing competing for the same customers. If nearly everyone else is sending copy-paste short messages, do you really think doing the same is going to succeed?
Yes, it sucks to actually read profiles, compose thoughtful initial intro messages, and then be ignored. Just like it sucks to come up with a great startup marketing campaign and then not get the results you were hoping for.
Instead of that's too much work, let's change from rifle/targeted to shotgun/blast, I think you just have to keep iterating and changing how you target, change your marketing media (different sites/venues/ways of meeting people), etc.
I understand the "trough of sorrow" of shouting in the void. But I don't think the answer is to start doing what everyone else is doing - unless you want to get the same results as everyone else of course.
(Not meant to you specifically, Kalium; "you" is meant in a general sense above)
What you've missed - and I implied instead of stating outright - is that the "same results as everyone else" is in fact more desirable. Mainly because it is something other than the null set.
The copy-paste-spam method produces better net results that the thoughtful, targeted approach. The only other more successful method I've ever even heard of rests on data mining OKCupid's users, carefully crafting your profile for them, and so on. Described here: http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/
EDIT: Also, getting meaningful data is nearly impossible here. Generally all you get is positive response/no response. When most of your iterations come up with a lot of no responses, you've really got nothing to go on. You cannot target without data. The blast approach compensates for that.
Imagine doing a dozen very different marketing campaigns and being greeted with an identical total lack of response from all of them. Hard to learn from that.
Someone mentioned "HerWay" in another comment. I checked it out, and one unique thing they offer (if you are a male user) is, a limited form of analytics on your profile. Important, because men can't initiate contact.
This had one really important piece of information, that seems counter to what a lot of people are suggesting in these comments: a short initial message is all you need (if the match is good.) He finally settled on a single initiating message “You seem really cool. Want to meet?” and it worked.
I was the one who mentioned HerWay. In fact, men can initiate contact to any woman whose profile they can see. Think about what it would take for a site centered on the idea of taking power from men and giving it to women to make that product move.
The guy basically data-mined OKC and gamed the matching system. Then suddenly the site began working for him, since he looked like The Perfect Match to a sizable number of people.
OkCupid is one of the few dot-com companies whose customers have a bad experience (for example by getting no replies), and then blame themselves rather than blaming the company.
If more guys blamed OkCupid, maybe they'd be willing to try things like Dating Ring instead? That'd put pressure on innovators to innovate, rather than stopping at "men need to try harder."
I know what you mean, "traditional" sites like eharmony and Match.com are truly awful. I haven't tried tinder yet, so I can't comment.
But is OkCupid really the best we can do? Is there no combination of computer bits and human processes that would result in fewer guys getting ignored and more getting dates?
The problem is that men and women want very, very different things from dating sites. Now I'm going to follow this by generalizing terribly, mostly because it's easier and faster than couching everything in the most appropriate disclaimers. As other conversations today show, someone will certainly take truly horrible offense to my doing so. That's their prerogative. I'm just trying to communicate the tendencies of groups.
Men want to be able to contact the women who interest them (read: are attractive). Men desperately want to not be filtered out, and will stoop to basically any amount of lying to get around filters.
Women only want to be exposed to the men who interest them. Women want sites and systems to do their filtering and selecting for them.
Right there, there's some substantive conflicts. You have very different strategies from the get-go. But that's not all. It gets worse.
Women don't want to do any of the work or take any of the risk. Women expect men to approach them, and then they will sift through the suitors for the promising ones. And at the same time, men will lie, cheat, and otherwise bullshit to avoid being filtered out so they can spam dick-pics at every woman in range. Think of your typical hormone-driven bar scene.
You'd think you could change these patterns, by putting women in control on a site and inverting the central power dynamic. It turns out that when you do that, people still behave the same way. You wind up having to re-introduce the dynamic you were explicitly trying to avoid in order to get people interacting with one another at all.
In short, the world of online dating is a clusterfuck of opposing strategies and people who will systematically subvert any system you use to impede those strategies. OKCupid wins by not trying to force people to behave a certain way. The result is a shitshow for everyone, but all the alternatives seem to be worse.
No matter what you do, the pattern of men-as-supplicants/women-as-gatekeepers re-emerges. At a guess, it's because that's the culture we live in and it's what people are most comfortable with.
Also, people will be exactly as shallow as technology allows them to be.
I got on okcupid a few years ago after being alone for years and years b/c of depression and social anxiety and in a matter of weeks I was swimming in dates, and in a matter of months I met the woman who's now my wife.
There's a lot that's unpleasant and stressful about online dating, but with a few classes of exceptions it's not society, it's not women, it's not the site, it's not anything else but you that's keeping you back.
While I appreciate the attempted positive message, it's pretty clear to me that it's simply not an accurate reflection of reality. The common experience for guys on OKCupid does not involved any amount of "swimming in dates".
Where do you live? The gender balance on OkCupid varies a lot by region, and needless to say when your gender is rarer (lower supply per demand) you'll have a better experience.
Pretty sure OkCupid is worse for guys in the Bay Area because the influx of software engineers (who are both mostly male, and the kind of people to try online dating) skews the site's demographics.
This is exactly what I've found and exactly what I used to do. So much less painful and so many more dates. The dates themselves, however... didn't always get me what I wanted.
Yeah, that's the risk you take. That said, you're more likely to get what you're after with many runs at a high-risk process than no runs at a low-risk process.
I think part of the reason this conversation is valuable, though, is that the inverse omission is far more dominant in the cultural conversation right now. It's certainly mostly true that hard work plays an important part in fantastic success. But it's equally true that even in those cases, the majority enjoyed advantages that are often invisible even to them.
So to be sure, the opposite extreme is just as ridiculous as suggesting that every person exists in a bubble where their effort correlates exactly with outcome. But when the awareness of systemic advantage is absent (as it certainly is), I see staking out a far extreme opinion like this as a challenge to find a more reasonable center.
The work ethic narrative is immensely useful to employers, but in too many situations it's almost totally disconnected from real opportunity and reward.
Ultimately it's a political problem - but not necessarily in the obvious sense.
The most successful and fun cultures reward inventiveness and positive social contributions, and include some element of challenge and competition.
But using money and markets to make decisions about the kinds of activities that are rewarded turns out to be an inefficient, short-sighted and often surreal way to manage what does and doesn't get valued.
And I'd appreciate it if downvoters justified their downvotes.
I'm quite happy with the idea that an economy where it's possible to raise $1 million in funding for an app like Yo! while the many apps that do something with longer term benefits struggle for commercial support has some issues with rational resource allocation.
Not to mention the outrageous bubbles and the epic acquisition disasters that litter the Internet ruins.
If you believe otherwise I'd like to see you argue why.
Respectfully disagree. I think it's easy for people who have by now built an intuitive grasp of code to appreciate how challenging tools like Processing can be for a beginner.
I have a design background and learned front end code (and eventually ruby on rails) by getting progressively more interested in how the things I was designing were built. I feel like I achieved a pretty respectable level of knowledge in what I had been exposed to.
And yet, many aspects of Processing were a huge leap for me. I spent days looking at code examples just to try and grok how 3D works in processing. I get it now (mostly), but it still feels unintuitive. I can certainly imagine a language that would describe 3D behavior, and a whole host of other things, in a way that a visual artist would describe them.
I definitely believe that there is value in artists learning to think with the rigor that code encourages. It's a fascinating cross-pollination. Creativity often springs from encountering the limits of a medium (and one's mastery of the medium).
But look at the excitement this week among people like me about Swift. It's not about whether it was possible before for me to learn Objective C and build a game. It was. But goddamnit, it's such a pain, and I would certainly understand that someone who is starting from zero in terms of CS knowledge would find it impossibly intimidating.
Design is remarkably accessible. If you can pick up a pen and paper, you can do it. Code is getting way closer to that, but let's not have collective Stockholm syndrome. Our tools are a long way away from where they could be.
Honestly, I wish I had the skills to write a language or build the tools like the ones I can imagine myself. But I have confidence that someone will. It's going to be an exciting time for art, and I think it's coming very soon.
It's a fascinating discussion. Maybe we can meet half way?
> I definitely believe that there is value in artists learning to think with the rigor that code encourages. It's a fascinating cross-pollination...
I agree!
> Design is remarkably accessible...
But this... Well it depends on the point of view. Design can be as intimidating for geeks as programming is for artists.
I have nothing against making programming tools more user or artist friendly. In a sense Photoshop is such a step - it allows many creators make sophisticated images without learning to draw and without learning to program. And certainly many many amazing works were created with it and similar tools.
The point I am trying to make here is that the visual/artistic power or possibilities of generative art and design are very much driven and dependent on the artist's fluency to program. There were many attempts to create programming tools [1] that let you avoid having to slog through typing the code, but seems like none of them would match the expressive possibilities of 'raw' coding and gain any wider adoption. In other words all of them have significant limitations and this would be a step back from the point of view generative artist.
And just to make it clear, I don't think that using any of these higher level tools is wrong or produces works of lesser value. It's just that these works are outside of unique possibilities of generative art driven by traditional coding.
Have you seen the "Stop drawing dead fish" and other Bret Victor talks? Those are not high level tools, they allow you to build generative animation and graphs from scratch.
Photoshop-like visual tools are indeed limited to pre-built concepts, but Victor has found a way to make coding possible without textual syntax; that's a powerful idea that may be the basis for a tool allowing artists to program without requiring the programmer's skill to keep the parse-tree-plus-AST in your head while building automations.
Take a look at the topic of End User Development and Programming by Example[1], it's a quite comprehensive research field dealing with ways that programming-like activities can be done without any traditional "raw coding".
I do! I have some sketches that I drew up a while back. It's sort of a loose collection of thoughts, though this is inspiring me to think about it with more rigor :)
I imagine it as a combination of an abstraction layer on top of processing and a light IDE. Something like a palette of shapes and objects similar to what's available in photoshop and illustrator. Instead of drawing shapes, though, it would create code snippets for the various objects.
Those objects would be available to modify in an event loop similar to Processing (or Arduino, for that matter). With a strong autocomplete for both object names and the available manipulations for those objects, I feel like you could learn just by playing around.
Live preview like Swift /light table etc would be really powerful. Out of the box support for common things like collision detection would be great too. Color pickers that spit out rgba values? Maybe. Basically a tool palette oriented around building code for visuals.
In terms of the language itself, it probably veers more into personal taste. I'd love to see names of things be less arcane /abbreviated. Dropping some of the brackets and parens would be nice for non programmers too. (Again, taste.) Ruby-like syntax for new objects instead of objective-C-like constructors would be more readable. Basically, the more it could just resemble an English description of what you want to happen, the better.
Processing isn't that far away from this description, but the combination of having to refer to the documentation constantly, no sensible defaults, almost limitless customizability, and having to actually compile the sketch to run means that the initial barrier is really high. It's very difficult to get into flow until you reach a high level of familiarity with the language.
I would love to chat about this further and share ideas with you or anyone who's interested!
It seems there's no way to send private messages here at Y Combinator. Send me a mean of contact to twaway00 at gmail if you wish to continue conversation.
I think the point is that what was formerly a file-oriented task now behaves much more like a service. Netflix would be nowhere near as popular if you had to download the movie file before watching.
Plus, no more external hard drives full of ~1GB movie files.
This hits close to home for me. I was one of those kids who was 'good at math' throughout pretty much all of school. I tested out of Calc I thanks to AP classes and began university in Calc II.
It didn't go well. Somehow this thing that had seemed so natural and intuitive now just seemed totally incomprehensible, mainly because I really just didn't understand the level the abstraction was at or something. I did poorly and it really shook my confidence. I changed majors and wound up a designer instead.
It's not a surprise to me that I've worked my way back into a field with deep math roots, though I think I would have found it much sooner if it hadn't been for that initial roadblock.
It gave me a new appreciation for what many of my classmates were struggling with in the early math that I breezed through in grade school. It's very difficult to see what the concepts you're learning are building towards if you don't have a sense of the bigger picture.
The reality that many people are waking up to is that social progress is not guaranteed and a passive approach is not enough.
I share your cynicism regarding many of the marketing moves by the companies you mentioned. At the same time, the fact that doing the right thing builds goodwill with a hopefully-majority highlights the importance of making our views and voices heard.
I might wish for a more high-minded motive form these companies. I also wish that it hadn't taken shock events to make the loss of rights feel real for most of America (though to be honest, I'm guilty of this too.)
But I'm excited to see people mobilizing, and will take the good outcomes where I can find them these days. Progress here could require an uneasy coalition.