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mqrs

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mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
I maintain that we don’t need this article to be true to debate with the response about assuming good intent, precisely because ”assume good intent” is a statement on its own and it is being positioned as general advice, therefore it is independent of the facts of the article. I get what you’re saying but I don’t think it’s relevant because no one is really picking sides between Google and the former employee.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
> why are you engaging in this creative writing exercise?

Because I'm responding to the very top comment about assuming good intent and the people already agreeing with it. I'm not arguing that what happened in the article is verified true.

> Are you really trying to claim that you have traversed the near-infinite space of potential interactions and deemed them all 'NOT OK'? All of them?

I made no claims. I asked the question.

> What if this comment was in context of a sun-tan because you, your new coworker and other people were talking about about their sun-tans and your new coworker pointed out they tan really quickly (or not at all)? Is that too silly? What if your new coworker was the one who brought up their skin tone and you politely agreed with them? Too contrived? Don't like this creative writing exercise? How is that different from what you're doing ... except you're not only taking the absolute worst and most ugly interpretation of a half-a-sentence reference from this article, but also categorically stating that there is no context under which it would be 'OK' for two co-workers to reference skin color. Insanity.

Then you're just assuming good faith on behalf of the offending party in the article based on certain "what ifs" that you conjured, which isn't so different from my engaging in conversation with HN re: the boundaries of workplace racism based on the "what if" that the article is, in fact, true.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
I don’t understand your point here—if I’m traveling to a foreign country and I’m asking about what’s offensive because I don’t want to offend the locals and be an annoying, insensitive tourist, then I’m just automatically being “woke” instead of trying to genuinely learn about the indigenous culture from the point of view of the locals? Are you saying that I should be asserting my own perceptions of the world to the people whom I am visiting?
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
You don’t have to make any judgment about the parties involved in the story. If you want to critically think about both sides of the argument, you’re going to have to ask anyway whether there exist “good faith” motives for pointing out a new coworker’s skin color in corporate America, because if there’s an answer to that question, then doubting (not knowing) the intentions of the former Google employee would be justified.

So, when is pointing out a new coworker’s skin color actually okay?
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
> Google is an international company with lots of immigrants not familiar with modern American norms

Still, doesn’t the responsibility of understanding the sensitivities of an unfamiliar culture fall onto the foreigner who’s coming in?
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
What “good faith” motivation could possibly arise from pointing out the color of one’s skin in America though?
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Check out your iPhone’s Settings > Privacy and scroll to the very bottom. You’ll see “Analytics & Improvements” and “Apple Advertising”, which both contain toggles and details about the data that has been gathered so far. There was also an iOS update in the past where the onboarding flow asked me to grant these permissions, though I vaguely remember seeing it on every major iOS version update.

Now, that’s not to say that the iPhone setting guarantees that Apple is not up to something sketchy. We can’t tell what’s going on under the hood or in their servers, but if we really wanted to be extremists about privacy, then we have to resort to apps that we’ve built and self-hosted ourselves.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
You can still parameterizethe API calls if you want to attribute user activity to a specific flow, and that way you wouldn’t be “feeding the beast” that is GA.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Yes but it’s not necessarily Google analytics.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
If you’re just using analytics to look at how effective UI designs are in making business conversions, couldn’t you still measure that by checking the backend and looking for a spike in activity towards the API endpoint that the UI invokes? Couldn’t you measure effectivity with a spike or drop in sales? I mean, good UX doesn’t so much rely on Google Analytics but on a UX engineer’s depth of knowledge about human psychology.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Are we really supposed to be thinking of all currently available land as being flexibly provisioned for landfills.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
“Do what you love” is not so much a privileged thing to say. It’s just an ideal to aspire towards, a north star of sorts, even if you’re currently in a position where you’re only doing what pays the bills. Doing what you love is life advice on how to live a good, happy, and fulfilling life—do what pays the bills isn’t.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
> Espousing a desire for any change will always be offensive to someone, and so wanting any improvement necessarily includes being deliberately offensive.

This is not true. Whatever you’re disagreeing with another person, you don’t have to call that person any politically incorrect slur, which is really the kind of “offensive” that we are talking about here.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
> We're going to see more fragmentation

Whenever people say this, I wonder whether they are considering the possibility that once the internet goes in the direction of fragmentation, more states would swoop in with regulation to barricade their own internet in the same way that China has a great firewall. There are plenty of incentives into banning US-based tech companies--states would then have access to data about their citizens instead of being at the mercy of Facebook or the US, and local software companies would begin to thrive.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
> A more apt comparison would be a group in a corner having a conversation at a rock concert. Suddenly this argument appears less apt.

This is a tired old argument and it isn't convincing or effective. There's a big difference between having a conversation in a corner at a rock concert, and having a conversation in an online service hosted by someone else outside of that conversation, in a territory owned by a state where the host has to comply with laws which place the accountability of user-generated content on the host. A more apt comparison would be... I don't know, I actually don't have any idea. How about simply not being deliberately offensive or hateful or using whatever rhetoric that could ultimately translate into real-world violence?
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
I mean, I didn’t sleep through 2016 onwards but people threatening violence still get banned, people with bigoted views still get called out or damage their real-world offline relationships, and it’s possible that there’d be even less people who’d be mindful of what they say without those feedback mechanisms.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
It's really not a correct model even at the scale of the phenomena for which it is correct, that's why it can't explain what's beyond its scale, nor can anyone draw a line to clearly define the boundaries of the scale in which it is correct. I'm afraid I don't have a more profound argument than that. The math of Newtonian physics merely coincides with what's actually going on in reality, but what's actually going on in reality is as explained by Einsteinian physics. We're only keeping Newtonian physics around because it's close enough as an approximation of natural phenomenon and therefore it is pragmatic, but pragmatic does not mean correct and it remains an estimation nonetheless. It's not the correct model of what's actually going on.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Doesn't the fact that Twitter posts (mostly) stay incentivize conscientiousness, precisely because it doesn't take away the reality that words have consequences? It's still not an excellent representation of how forgiveness and personal development exists in the real world (i.e. we can forget about the details of what's been done in the past, but what we post stays in some database), but without the longevity of Twitter/FB posts, people just wouldn't think twice about what they're saying and this is a time when we do need more critical thinking.
mqrs
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Newtonian physics is only coincidentally correct. It’s not “wrong” in the sense that the math isn’t sound or that experiments aren’t reproducible within earth, but it’s not the correct model for what really happens in physical phenomenon regardless of scale.
mqrs
·6 tahun yang lalu·discuss
I wonder if removing the Touch Bar has something to do with prepping up the line for gaming. I personally don't dislike the Touch Bar except when I'm playing video games, and Apple Silicon is on a trajectory to be able to run games on a Mac with fairly decent graphics.