Interesting to see the top comments in this thread.
* "This attack on Richard Stallman feels much like a witch hunt to me."
The "attack" in question is an appendix to a blog post. The original one said, in substance, "I do not know much about the accused, and he certainly didn't say what many press accounts accuse him of, but his recent words deserve punishment." The appendix blog post says, in brief, "oh my, this is all goes way back."
Does that sound like The Crucible or "she turned me into a newt?" Although the rest of the HN comment is more honest, calling what RMS said "questioning the status quo [about the victim status of, well, child rape victims.]"
* "These activists are just power hungry evil people."
Reacting to a blog post written by a person who is (weakly) hiding her full identity, who works in a tech/robotics company rather than in an activist organization, who recently deactivated her WordPress website, and who is not pointing to any means of activism. All very consistent steps to ambitious activism, certainly.
* "These stories are so opposite of horrifying"
Sentence followed by a complete rewrite of the said stories, using deliberately misleading edulcoration (Stories 1 and 2), or showing the same kind of argumentation as in "oh because autism," which is well argued against in the main thread [1], instead of realizing that being that being "awful at asking women out" involves clumsiness rather than suicide blackmail (Story 3).
(Add.) I find it hard to read threads such as this one and not feel that tropes about computer people hold some truth, despite myself feeling close to that group for various reasons.
> it really lacks empathy (or realism) to assume that the same exact UI will be useful/pleasant to literally 1 billion users
You nailed it, but large private sector companies like Google (or Apple) have no genuine feedback loops: they do not care, because (1) vocal dissenters will never represent more than a rounding error of the user base, and because (2) there are no obvious exit options.
It's Fordism ("you can have it any colour, as long as it's black"), only with 21st century tech.
Skipping the "UX Pro" creds, I trust that the rest of your post is correct: Google has well-paid UX engineers from the best places.
That's precisely what I find scary about those UX changes: they to run counter-current of everything I value in UX (clean and compact vs. bloated and spread out).
Now redirects to a page titled "Do you really want to use HTML Gmail?" -- which speaks volumes about the new UI is being much more coercitive on the user than previous ones.
Not too many people seem to care on the reading end, so I guess that's fine.
As another user (kaustyap) posted further below:
> It kind of sounds like marketing pitch by fitbit to let potential clients in health industry know that they have so much of data to sell.
Sounds right to me -- it's a marketing ploy.
In an academic or industrial setting, the data might still be useful, but it would have to get re-crunched with many, many more controls, plus sample corrections, cross-validation against other data, etc. -- than what the linked article does.
> I honestly feel like I've broken the mental spell that Apple had over my mind.
Same here. For me, it was the lack of updates on the MacBook Air, and the horrendous mess that is the OS since 10.10 (10.13 is the worst Mac OS I have ever used. I started with 7.5.3).
> I'm not a religious person but for me paper books are sacred.
Most of my French friends are genuinely revolted by how I treat the books that I use for work.
I highlight, write in the margins (often with a pen, not even with a pencil), then scan passages for students, who in turn, are often revolted by what they see.
> Many cafés do not serve coffee à emporter and do not have paper cups.
Apologies for contradicting you on the sole basis of personal experience, but you are, again, in my own experience, very wrong: you really have to find yourself in the poshest streets of Paris (with only salons de thé in them) not to find at least one café that serves coffee to go (in paper cups), hence my surprise at your point about restroom access.
I do not know enough of the USA to compare, but basically, you can get coffee and pee every 500m or less in Paris (for various prices going from more-than-reasonable to perfectly-obscene).
> If I stop to buy a cup of vin chaud or something, chances are the [kiosk] vendor won't even have a toilet for customers.
Will it be proof of my own defensiveness if I mention that kiosks in the US are also unlikely to have restrooms? (Unless those I saw in Phillie and NYC this winter are outliers.)
> My view of life in Paris compared to life in the U.S. comes from living in both places. It may not match your experience, but you are unqualified to tell me whether my description is "very off" from my experience.
Apologies if you felt that I was denying your experience of whatever country or city. You are absolutely correct: your Parisian experience does not match mine, which is what "seems very off" meant in my original comment.
> If people can pee in any café they stop in at for a cuppa, what's the point of these uritrottoirs? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As mentioned in the article, the uritrottoirs is to stop people peeing on the sidewalk. What those people will be peeing is not coffee but beer from cans bought in grocery shops or supermarkets.
If you have lived in Paris and been to Canal Saint-Martin, bords de Seine or equivalent places, you know exactly who those uritrottoirs are aimed at. That target population does not intersect much with the clientele of cafés.
Apologies for the long post and sorry again if my wording offended you.
I stand corrected, indeed: the OED avoids defining 'to be convinced' as 'to hold a conviction' -- which is what I read in your post: absolute but fundamentally baseless certainty.
> I am convinced that there are more people who would begin to benefit from unprescribed private self-medication with MDMA than who would begin to suffer suffer harm.
conviction |kənˈvɪkʃ(ə)n|
2 a firmly held belief or opinion
belief |bɪˈliːf|
an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof
opinion |əˈpɪnjən|
1 a view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge
* "This attack on Richard Stallman feels much like a witch hunt to me."
The "attack" in question is an appendix to a blog post. The original one said, in substance, "I do not know much about the accused, and he certainly didn't say what many press accounts accuse him of, but his recent words deserve punishment." The appendix blog post says, in brief, "oh my, this is all goes way back."
Does that sound like The Crucible or "she turned me into a newt?" Although the rest of the HN comment is more honest, calling what RMS said "questioning the status quo [about the victim status of, well, child rape victims.]"
* "These activists are just power hungry evil people."
Reacting to a blog post written by a person who is (weakly) hiding her full identity, who works in a tech/robotics company rather than in an activist organization, who recently deactivated her WordPress website, and who is not pointing to any means of activism. All very consistent steps to ambitious activism, certainly.
* "These stories are so opposite of horrifying"
Sentence followed by a complete rewrite of the said stories, using deliberately misleading edulcoration (Stories 1 and 2), or showing the same kind of argumentation as in "oh because autism," which is well argued against in the main thread [1], instead of realizing that being that being "awful at asking women out" involves clumsiness rather than suicide blackmail (Story 3).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20993532
(Add.) I find it hard to read threads such as this one and not feel that tropes about computer people hold some truth, despite myself feeling close to that group for various reasons.