Imagine an ecosystem where living things don't eat eachother and live in full cooperation and harmony. No chance to ingest the biological building blocks created by other organisms. No evolutionary pressure to develop defenses or hunting strategies, etc...
Now ask yourself if the level of sentience that develops in this environment is satisfactory. Is there even a chance of developing thinking matter that can have a debate about ethics?
I recently read a sci-fi short story that describes an alien forest that has no predation, only vicious instant scavenging the moment something dies. The colonists wear light-suits to prevent brutal death because only the dead indigenous lifeforms create no light.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Mitchell has been a disaster for Mozilla (her only accomplishment is squeezing more money out of Google for the search deal despite an ever dwindling user base for FF - we measure DAU and MAU and the hemorrhaging hasn’t stopped).
Very few people in the org actually work on FF. It’s increasingly other bets that don’t pan out or weird acquisitions: Hubs, Pocket, FakeSpot, VPN, Relay, now Monitor. Eventually these lose enough money and they’ll cut them. Then inevitably Mitchell will run a surplus in the budget by cutting projects early and squeezing more money out of Google, funnel the money back to the Mozilla foundation which she also chairs, and then doll it out to her pet political projects.
> a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c.
For me, the first task would be to make absolutely sure that I block any apps designed by you. Such lack of empathy in your wording proves that you cannot possibly be a decent, half-decent, or even mediocre UI designer.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
— George Carlin
You get that when I was on the other side of that 2 way mirror one of the qualifications to be a user was "can you use a mouse". As late as 2005 people being able to navigate a basic web form was quite the challenge.
Find someone far removed from tech and ask them if they have used ChatGPT.
That IQ 90 user stressed out of their mind isnt that far from reality. Go look at the "bad/poor/low quality" content on Facebook, or YouTube or if your brave tick tock. That is the person you're writing an app for.
I know people with PHD's who can run rings around you on "their topic" and can't cross the street without support.
I know teachers who are smart, and phenomenal at their job who I had to arm twist to go play with chat GPT cause it's not in their wheelhouse/on their radar.
The not so bright person, who is stressed out is likely a user of your app. The same as the absent minded PHD or the teacher who is too over worked to care about your new tech widget.
These are real people. And there are a LOT OF THEM (for there to be an average 100 intelligence there are a fair number of people UNDER IT). You can go look on FB/YouTube/Ticktok and find them. "Stupid" people exist, there are a lot of them. Making sure your app works for them is good for them, for your company, for your customer support costs... The whole point of usability is to get average, less technical people in and get them testing your app.
To put a fine and final point on it, after 90 IQ, the author went on to talk about blind people. Candidly your app working for everyone with a disadvantage is just good business and shows a LOT Of empathy. A point you seem to have missed in your indignation.
The only thing that is wrong is when UI doesn't account for these sorts of user contexts (disengaged, disinterested, distracted, disabled ...)
Chat GPT is about highlighting a breadth of experience. The world has stupid people and smart people who will be baffled by bad UI. It has people who might not have the context that we, the tech community, has around emergent tools.
Many of us live so far in the tech bubble that we forget how people who do "other things" approach technology. This is the gap that UI design should be bridging (and is doing a horrid job at these days)
"sub-90 IQ", when interpreted literally, means the dumbest 25% of the population. I think it's awfully important to remember not to ignore 1/4 of the population.
Sure a segment of the population aims for department head, but another segment is happy just being left alone to do their thing and pay via teaching. It was this less ambitious more self-motivated group who attracted me.
Column staggered and even more so ortholinear are easier for my brain to work with: the layout can be made almost symmetrical and fingers always go up.
One thing to watch for is that many have same size modifier keys as letter keys, which I find not ideal.
We often confuse Free and Open Source with "free beer". We have been using pfsense for years without paying a dime; if we could we would gladly have done it. It's simple fairness.
Also, what we forget is that if we are not paying, somebody else is paying. And somebody else is very likely not aligned with our interests.
There is this conventional wisdom that a lawyer is not really your lawyer until it is you who is paying them. I think it has much broader application and you want to be paying for technology. It is naive to think you can accept services of say Facebook, not pay a dime for it and assume it is all done in your best interests.
It is good mental model because whoever is producing the software is human.
It does not matter if there is zero cost to copying the software.
What matters is that somebody put an effort into doing something and now they are seeing lots of people using it for free. It is in human nature to try to benefit from it and most people have a mental model that they deserve to be compensated for doing something beneficial to another.
Most people are not seeing incremental cost of adding another user (effectively zero or non zero), what they are seeing is total cost of producing the software divided by the number of users. Then they see that some users are paying and some users are not.
There's a huge Kundera biography written by Jan Novák. Critics say it's biased but it's well sourced. It paints Kundera's character as someone who could easily do it.
I guess the main evidence is the police report. Secret police was of course known to blackmail people and fabricate things. Everybody accused of collaborating with them used the defense that all documents were made up. There were other several high profile people that were accused and used this defense but eventually enough evidence was discovered and the people admitted guilt.
With Kundera, the "blackmail" angle is weak. The record was not attached to his file, it was forgotten in the file of pilot Dvořáček who was arrested. Also at that time Kundera was just communist student functionary, not someone famous worth blackmailing.
For someone unfamiliar with the specifics this was an interesting rabbit hole to go into. I was curious what Dvořáček thought about it. It looks like, in the end, "neither he nor his wife had any doubts about Kundera's role."
1. It didn't. He did come back quite regularly. The article simply ommits that.
2. The evidence is mostly based on a police report which names Kundera. You could make a case that the secret police would occasionally falsify these things, but in general they'd also do this for a reason (mostly because they'd use for some blackmail / publicity stunt). This does not seem to be the case here...
Visiting back is not what he meant, rather a permanent move.
The thing is, regardless of him collaborating with regime, is that if you spend decades elsewhere, its very hard to come back. The "back" changes without you being part of it, so technically its impossible and you move into relatively foreign place with people you know and don't in the same time, even if folks still speak your language.
Also, I presume most of you don't know this, but if he had in 90s any longing for home after communism fell, a quick visit would cure practically anybody. Society was a mess, wolves robbing state and society of everything possible, leaving bloody trails everywhere. People were beheaded (in my town one morning a cop's head was found on top of his car), or dissolved in acid (again even people my parents actually knew). Ministers were mafia-style executed in broad day (still not solved). Common folks were robbed in privatizations of state's properties (literally some form of ponzi scheme or worse were happening on state level). Organized crime and top politicians were very tightly intertwined.
This all improved nowadays but not as much as we would like.
If you see this and much much more, why on earth would anybody move from France? That's much more advanced, free and intellectual-friendly society, at that time by mega-parsecs.
Sounds like a strong exaggeration. The 90s were rough in comparison to time before and after, but no, beheadings and dissolving bodies in acid were not normal.
1998 was the absolute worst in the Czech history in regard to murders with 3 murdered people per 100 000 people. In comparison, US rate in 2021 was 6.8.
> This all improved nowadays but not as much as we would like.
There's always room for improvement, but today Czechia is one of the safest countries on earth (safer than France, for example).
I'm pretty sure he means Slovakia. Not sure about any minister, but the policemen is true and there was the Kovac case -- maybe not minister, but president's son.
Yes I meant Slovakia, which for part of 90s, the wilder part of that decade as we all can probably agree, was part of Czechoslovakia.
Jan Ducky was the minister executed, he was connected via corruption to many many politicians still active today, even former Czech prime minister Babis (who comes from Slovakia), he is actually one of the suspects who ordered it back in 90s.
Dissolving folks in acid was done in both states, before and after we split. Of course we only hear about cases which were discovered, back home many ended up permanently "missing". But anyway I don't think I was clear (or you guys misunderstood me) - its not for the crime rate alone that would make people like Kundera not wanting to come back, but overall state of society and state itself. If you paint yourself 90s as some sort of pinnacle of our history where everybody was happy and people were singing and dancing on the streets, we must have lived in different universes then.
I mean its 2023, I happily live in Switzerland for many years, having lived in both Czech republic and Slovakia long term in the past, and I would not go back for exactly same reasons. What most rich folks back there (CZ and SK too) do is create a bubble around themselves to not be part of rest of society - but that's desperate attempt for quality of life which is a baseline in other places. Kind of South Africa approach although you can see it in other places where middle class evaporated. Definitely not a place I want to raise my kids, or grow old with all that it brings.
Purely anecdotal, but I choose not to read the literature on the ethics of animal exploitation because I was still eating meat. But I decided to take the plunge, and now I cannot go back to eating meat.
They have centuries and centuries to settle the question while rearing and killing billions of human beings each year.
N.B. The price of baby meat is higher because it's more tender or whatever.