Normally I'd agree with this sentiment: language changes constantly, usage is king. However we're in an era where people (often in the course of marketing themselves or a product) intentionally move the goalposts of word meanings in a way that's generally unhelpful to users of that language. So we describe there is something called X that sounds very impressive and powerful. And there is something else kind of like the existing idea we called X, but it's more mundane ... it's close enough that salespeople can get away with calling it that, so they do, and the definition of X is now hopelessly muddled. I don't know what to do about it, but this does not strike me as being the same as the natural evolution of word meanings over time. I guess really it is still one form of that. But maybe it's one that as a society we should be more careful of - you can't, for example, call one medication by the name of another for marketing reasons.
Maybe AI is not the worst example. But with most buzzwords that are not legally protected, they just get marketed into meaninglessness in a way that harms non-expert consumers.
Wow I like your blog! The landing page is really nice. I did, though, get very distracted by the text-shadow on the headings and links. It makes me feel like I have something on my glasses or something. Everything else looks beautiful to me and the projects look awesome.
Thanks for the kind words. Makes me want to write another entry. I'm sorry for the text-shadow, I tend to overuse them!
The code is available here https://github.com/claisne/claisne.io if any of you is interested.
Google Apps Script is great for tools like this: I have used some at work for a while to manage gig listings for a musician... just the tiny bit of automation happening at midnight let's them add shows via a Google form and forget all about them, knowing that geocoding, and removing of old shows, and other funny business, will all happen without them needing to maintain it. BUT if they ever do need to modify a show, they are dealing with a google sheet, which they understand.
Yep that’s pretty much exactly why they wanted it built around a spreadsheet. Before they had an app somebody built and never maintained. It was buggy and the data was more or less inaccessible.
Now with the spreadsheet they not only have access to the data when/if they want it, it’s also super easy to roll back if something goes haywire.
Last year I lead a project called Paratransit Pal to enter AT&T's Civic Coding Challenge in Atlanta ... the project was all about improving accessibility and clarity of information about trips for users with cognitive disabilities. But it was still basically a hackathon project, which doesn't help many people unless we actually roll out a full production version. (We're working on that!). The twist is that we won the competition, and the whole team had agreed in advance to donate any winnings. So our prototype app for people with developmental disabilities generated $34,000 in donations to organizations in our area who DIRECTLY HELP those people (and another $6,000 towards programming tuition in Mexico, where one of our team members was from).
Right now we are trying to find our niche and cater specifically to those who are left out of UI solutions that target the general user. But even if, like most projects, this does end up fizzling out, it has already done some good and not just been a dead end.
>The best bit about being a developer I've found is when working directly with the customer who is in some distress and the look on their face when you solve the problem and make their life easier, even if it was easy to solve. I'd love to find something where every day was like that!
I used a fundraising tool recently with this kind of passwordless workflow. It's a tool that you only use once a year for about 30 days, and your authenticated session can last about that long. Which means you do the process once on each computer you use, and then you never have to remember the password the next year. It's great.
I would not have noticed that one chart in each set of 4 has a different scale, so things that are the same height aren't actually the same number. It certainly looks nice and tidy but it is indeed misleading.
They specifically referred to the "deterred subset" ... which is much smaller then "everyone".
In any case, the parent's point seemed pretty empty.
> Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed?
This is what research is for. We may never know what is optimal in an absolute sense, but we can figure out some relative costs/benefits of different approaches to problems and choose our tradeoffs appropriately.
"It's your time, and if people are willing to pay, you can charge whatever you like."
Yep! It also helps, for those of us who feel bad charging "high" prices for work we like to do, to not think of ourselves as being paid for "the work". I know a lot of artists who are lovely people and could sometimes be persuaded to do an event for a low fee because they are doing something they love. Then one of them got the advice to think of what they are being paid for - it's not that you get paid to spend an hour on stage in Utah one Saturday. It's all the BS around doing that - traveling their, committing in advance no matter what comes up you will be there and do a good job, having to ignore your family and other responsibilities to get good at your craft. The general disruption and unevenness that it brings to your life to be a freelance anything. If people value your work enough to pay you what you will accept for ALL THAT BS just to have you there, great, you have a career now. But, as they say, the performance is free. It's all the other stuff they have to pay you for.
That's very similar to something Derek Sivers wrote last week. His post was very short, so I hope he'll forgive me posting it here (but his entire blog is worth the read, and his book Anything You Want is one of my all-time favorites):
One time a college far away in Ohio, about a 12-hour drive, asked what I would charge to do a two-hour show.
I said, “$1500”.
She said, “Oh, that’s a bit too much. What would you charge to do just a one-hour show?”
I said, “$2000”.
She said, “No, wait, you’ll be performing less, not more!”
I said, “Yeah! Exactly! What you’re paying me for is to get there! Once I’m there, playing music is the fun part! If you tell me I have to get back in the van after only an hour, and drive home, then I’m going to charge you more than if you let me play for a couple hours first.”
She liked that so much she came up with the $1500.
The problem with this story for software developers is how it feeds into very common mental models of how software development works. Certain people who think configuring a mail client is the same as coding a large-scale distributed system just because their eyes glaze over the first sentence of an explanation of how to do either, and their 12-year-old nephew can do the former, therefore they must be equivalent and just a matter of salesmanship/credentialism.
This is a big thing people don't always get at first with Grid. It only replaces Flexbox where Flexbox was being used in a convoluted way to imitate what Grid does. It doesn't replace the more "natural" use of Flexbox to control the direction, spacing, and sizing of what for want of a better term I'll call "things in lines that may wrap".
Maybe AI is not the worst example. But with most buzzwords that are not legally protected, they just get marketed into meaninglessness in a way that harms non-expert consumers.