devilshaircut

It should be obvious but, limitations, whether they be related to time, budget, or other resources, make stock assets desirable.

For instance, commissioning a custom icon set rather than picking one off-the-shelf is a luxury only some projects will have access to.

Additionally, oftentimes stock assets function as good placeholders until a larger budget comes into play. Suppose you are working on a video game and waiting for environmental assets to be complete; in the meantime, a sample texture may do.

In a perfect world, perhaps every font, icon, illustration, photo, or texture would be bespoke to its exact application. In the mean time, we have stock assets.

If "hyper-rational atheism" were the "Times New Roman of metaphysics", you'd think it would be far more common than it actually is.

Going with your n=1 "I meet people like this all the time." theme, I know far more people of various religious flavors than I do atheists of any kind, "hyper-rational" or not.

I definitely agree that there is a perfect world where designs are fully researched with a battery of user tests and for large companies like Facebook, Atlassian, and Lyft this is critical to their success. Every design decision, large and small, matters when you have an audience of billions of people. Furthermore, there is no excuse not to conduct research when you have the resources to dedicate to doing design right.

That said, if you are a scrappy startup (or in the case of an article, a single founder who may not even be a designer to begin with), it is often necessary to simply do whatever it takes to deliver a product. Money, time, experience, infrastructure, personnel, etc., are all limiting factors.

If I were consulting on a project for a Fortune 500 I would tell them to leverage their resources to maximize their change of success. If I were consulting on a project for a small business or startup I would tell them to be smart and triage key pieces that represent their "special sauce" above features that feel more like known territory.

> In October, The Information reported that Bird was spending $551 per scooter with a goal of reducing that cost to $360.

The full article is gated, but I'd be interested to know where that figure came from. It is possible for a private individual to buy the same scooter tax and import duty free for the lower of those two prices. I would hope that multimillion dollar companies like Lime and Bird would be able to secure better pricing than that.

Agree.

As a primarily JS/React developer, I think there is irony if JS is held as a good design pattern in comparison to CSS with respect to reusability. Inasmuch as what are being called CSS "workarounds" are in fact workarounds, so too has been the case with JavaScript itself. I am old enough to remember jQuery and Prototype colliding over the dollarsign namespace.

Don't get me wrong. I am not a JS (or CSS) hater. I think these "workarounds" are more than adequate in making these technologies easy to work with. Which I suppose is sort of my point. I see a lot of overengineered codebases with Byzantine solutions to relatively simple problems.

Also, to parent poster:

> Let's say you wanted to pull in a button from Bootstrap for one part of your page, a button from Material UI elsewhere, a button from Semantic UI elsewhere, etc.

1) First of all, don't do this. Perhaps you were just saying this to make a point, but obviously don't include 3 monolothic libs with overlapping functionality in order to implement 3 things with the same functionality.

2) It sounds like your problem with this is more with the libraries themselves. When I write a component, I always namespace it myself. Obviously, if libraries are properly namespaced, then you could easily include buttons from three separate button libraries.

Agree. Maybe it is more helpful to think of numbers as adjectives than nouns. Oneness plus twoness equals threeness. The part of speech is sort of irrelevant but it obviates a debate over whether or not instantiation of the unattached idea of a number is important, while still allowing math to occur.

This also surprises me. If for no other reason than I would imagine that authors who are not guilty of plagiarism are interested to some degree in verifying that their original works do not contain anything that could look like plagiarism.

The "How Knowledge Work Happens" graphic is really what resonates with me. I run a dev shop and I hate time tracking for the complexity implied in this image. Questions come to mind.

What counts for time tracking and what doesn't? If I spend an hour emailing back and forth with a stakeholder, none of this is reflected in my GitHub activity. So there is a delta between what is billable time and the actual deliverable.

What if I spend an hour researching a solution for a feature? Or debugging my environment? Again, that implies delta between billable time and the deliverable.

What about my level of expertise? I might be a junior or senior level developer; I might have certain specialized knowledge in an area of programming (or lack it). Again, more delta that tracks closely to the specific logistics of a small feature and less with overall "time".

Suppose I had a machine that strictly tracked the amount of time I spent "doing something project-related" (whatever the specific rubric). At the end of the day, I now have a number. What does this number actually tell me? I am not sure it is that useful and it definitely depends on however the rubric was defined (which would be inherently arbitrary anyway).

To me, it makes sense to just allot hours to devs and trust that they are doing their jobs. When people stop doing their job, peers notice anyway, hour tracking or not.

I don't entirely understand why some people find CSS so difficult to work with. I agree that it has its own challenges, but solutions generally aren't very complex. Global selectors ("variables") collisions? Use namespacing. Specificity is convoluted? Simplify by using only non-nested classes.

Does the annoyance primarily center around the fact that styles cascade to child elements? Hard to tell from the article.

I wasn't really referring to economic value, nor was the quote or the cited article itself.

The proposition was that people will do the least work for the most reward where possible.

The cited article suggested that rewards result in poor quality work.

In your own citation:

"Rewards kill creativity. Some twenty studies have shown that people do inferior work when they are expecting to get a reward for doing it, as compared with people doing the same task without any expectation of a reward. That effect is most pronounced when creativity is involved in the task."

Would this not suggest that people do their best work when they aren't doing it for the paycheck? In other words, given UBI, anything an individual may do would be his or her own prerogative and therefore represent higher quality output.

I am in my mid thirties and would say I definitely do not think I am as sharp now as I was as a teenager.

That said, I am overall much happier now.

For me, mental agility has proven less important to me than a number of things. Example: I have been hit by motorists a few times (I am a cyclist.) and my left knee has really taken a beating as a result. Keeping it in good shape so that I can continue to run and bike is much more important to me than, for example, being able to quickly memorize or learn something. As I see it, mere speed at assimilating information is a luxury whereas physical mobility is a necessity for having a life worth living.

Conversely, certain things have gotten better with age: my financial wellbeing and emotional maturity both come to mind.

Although I try not to worry about the inevitable and live in the now, I am personally more concerned about the point in my life where my body will entirely preclude certain activities.

I'll offer a third opinion here, which is that the book is literally not possible to recreate accurately in film using current technology.

The challenge is that in Annihilation VanderMeer is very interested in the idea of a thing which challenges on a basic level the very way humans sense things. He heavily exploits the format of writing to accomplish this. The descriptions he includes are frequently impossible, contradictory, or non-sensical. Additionally, these descriptions are simultaneously specific and vague - and this tension between specificity and vagueness is itself a property of the things he describes in addition to the narrative technique. This seems very intentional to me - but in any case it relies heavily on a subjective interpretation formed in the reader's mind's eye. It is possible to imagine a thing with these kinds of phantasmagoric, perhaps dreamlike properties, but the film medium, as we know it, doesn't allow for that kind of flexibility - the moment an image is crystallized on film, it becomes a fixed, static thing for all viewers.

So in translating this to film format I think Garland really had to have his own personal take on the ideas in the book. Personally I thought it was a good (but flawed) movie with certain superficial similarities to the book in terms of plot. There were many directions a film based on this book could go; as has been shown by many book-to-film adaptations, a novel can be more tightly packed with information than a 2-hour movie. I think Garland chose some interesting facets of the book to focus on while doing something unique.

To answer your question - "What am I missing that many other people seem to be connecting with?". As someone who thought the first book was good (but perhaps not great), here is what I felt would be compelling to most readers:

1) The book was paced and structured sort of in a Dan Brown esque way. Events move quickly from scene to scene and every chapter leaves you with a lot of unanswered questions with potentially intriguing resolutions (e.g. What is going on in Area X? What is the creature/pit/lighthouse? What information are the protagonists hiding from one another? What happened to the other expeditions? What is the literal writing on the wall?). In short, it is a mystery, which is a good hook for many readers.

2) The book leaves a lot for the reader to fill in for his or her self. You get that impression that the characters in the book are also experiencing something similar themselves in their world. This is an interesting thought.

3) The book does some unconventional things. The main characters are not identified by name, rather their profession. The main characters are all female and they are all scientists. Etc.

I loved this book and I loved the movie too. I really like how it was sort of marketed/positioned as a Leonardo DiCaprio teen movie but ultimately when you see it, the film has a much darker, serious tone like the book.

The trailer, as I recall, contained things like the idyllic/titular beach, pop music of the time (Moby, All Saints), and a beautiful girl (Francoise) - all the trappings of a teen movie. But when you see the movie, it feels much more like Heart of Darkness. The themes of what it means to be civilized, isolation and madness, and travel and foreignness are all fairly sober topics and are perpendicular to what you find in most teen movies.

I would say of the films I saw in that time in my life, it was among the most mind altering.

I was searching through the comments for this one. 100%. I would even go further and say that an invention is more than the sum of the parts. There is a specific mixture that makes something cohesive and ring true. Early PDAs had versions of many of these technologies in various combinations. But Apple got it right as a product. The devil is, as they say, in the details.

It's distressing that Scientific American's editors think pointing out that the iPhone was built of extant technologies is relevant, especially with respect to the topic of invention.