Comment by jordanb

Comment by jordanb 3 hours ago

This is the Californian Ideology in a blog post. The implication that title and intro mean to imply is working for companies that build products that are not evil and hostile to their users.

But the call to action is to.. embed logic in the programs to pluralize properly (in English).

It's possible to write evil software that pluralizes words. It's possible to write beneficial software that does not pluralize words. This blog post is about the color of the bikeshed next to the torment nexus.

canes123456 2 hours ago

I am baffled why you are inserting good and evil into this. He just seems to want to work at companies that value craft and attention to detail. It just like the jobs quote about the back of the furniture also being attractive.

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hshdhdhj4444 an hour ago

Ironically, your comment probably exemplifies the “Californian Ideology” the parent comment is criticizing.
“Why would you consider good or evil when talking about how you want to spend the overwhelming majority of your productive life”.

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- CalRobert 35 minutes ago
  
  I miss when Californian ideology was of the “information wants to be free” and “connecting the people of the world will end tyranny” variety :-( .
  Something really changed after the first dotcom bubble. Maybe it was my own youthful naïveté (as someone living in Sacramento desperately wishing I lived in that much cooler city to the west). Maybe it was the last drops of that wave Hunter S Thompson talked about breaking.
  
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  jordanb 29 minutes ago
  
  "Information wants to be free" was always a pretty marginal part of the California Ideology[0].
  The main difference between now and thirty years ago, is that now they're only "anti-statist" when the state tries to control them personally. They're pro-state when it's being inflicted on their perceived enemies or underlings.
  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
  
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- bobxmax an hour ago
  
  [dead]
  
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abathologist an hour ago

Right? Why would anyone muddy work with morality in this day and age? Morality is so 2010s.

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commandlinefan 2 hours ago

I was honestly expecting the link to be somebody's quixotic rant about software that does "good" in the world rather than serves ads and I was pleasantly surprised to see something I can actually relate to.

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- ctxc 7 minutes ago
  
  Haha trust me, I have thoughts on that too!
  
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cj 2 hours ago

Ironically, I could see the author's logic being used as a justifcation to build more "evil" features:
> Talk to me like I’m used to. Be familiar, be approachable. I want to feel like you care about helping me. Not “me” as in “all the prospective 99,99,999 users”, but “me” specifically. Users shouldn’t feel like they’ve been dropped into a cookie cutter template - a cold, hard reminder that this is clunky, soulless machinery removed from their world.
In other words, the author wants a personalized experience. A personalized news feed. An experience that is tailored to them. (Isn't that what everyone is complaining ruined Facebook, insta, youtube, etc?)
I don't think that's what the author actually wants. I think it's just poor framing / unclear writing.
If the idea is "I want to work at a company that cares about its craft" -- the example they picked to illustrate that point is just odd. Whether or not a company uses a combined singular/plural form like "Uploading File(s)" is not a very good indicator of whether that company values its craft, IMO.

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- John23832 2 hours ago
  
  Personalization != using appropriate common language to express what is happening to the user.
  
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ChrisMarshallNY 16 minutes ago

What I do, is have two different formats in the translation tokens.

As an example, this app[0], is currently only localized in English, but I still use tokens, whenever I do apps, so the base localization[1] has stuff like this:

    "SLUG-CLEANTIME-DIVIDER"                        =   "\nThis is ";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEAR-EXACT"              =   "exactly one year.";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEARS-EXACT"             =   "exactly %d years.";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEAR"                    =   "one year";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEARS"                   =   "%d years";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-MONTH"                   =   "one month";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-MONTHS"                  =   "%d months";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-DAY"                     =   "one day";
    "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-DAYS"                    =   "%d days";

Which is actually composed in this dependency[2].

It's not perfect, but is pretty flexible.

Silly stuff, I know, and the app is not exactly a viral sensation, but the folks that use it, like it.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nacc/id452299196

[1] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/NACC/blob/master/Sources...

[2] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/LGV_UICleantime/blob/mas...

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rdiddly 24 minutes ago

1) You projected that anticipated focus into the title. Not wrongly. But I for example did not. My slant was more about innovation. The title doesn't inherently imply or contain either one.

2) The small, practical thing the post is actually about does address at least part of what you wanted to hear, because declaring "Loading 1 item(s)" IS hostile to users.

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ctxc 9 minutes ago

(author) I can assure you my intentions were much less sinister (and simpler ;))

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cmdtab an hour ago

We want to hire engineers who really pay attention to details and great product experience but it’s quite rare in practice. Hiring is super hard.

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fhub an hour ago

Outside of engineers there is a whole raft of people on a team that should pick up and push back on this sort of copy problem at all phases of building a product.

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John23832 2 hours ago

There's no good or evil here.

Have attention to quality. Do whatever it is that you're doing well.

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ivape 2 hours ago

It seems like a douchey post but it’s not. Just browsing the internet makes me regularly question how difficult it is keeping the tech industry full of people that give a shit. Software ate the world and along with it came a contingent that don’t care enough about it. The choppy first page load, the non-smooth scrolling, the ads janking in, shifting layout and content in unpredictable ways, and finally the bombarding of intrusive ads and popups where the dev didn’t even take a few minutes to construct a sensible UI compromise (yes, we need to show ads, but can we show the ads without anal fucking the user’s eyes? Yes possibly).

So yes, we have a real IDGAF issue in tech, and I can’t imagine this getting better because Gen Z all have a casual drug dealer “this just my side hustle” attitude, and Millennials will not a give a fuck because they are still pissed about the GFC and the cost of housing. The Leetcode people don’t give a fuck because they are burnt out on Leetcode and their entire identity is based on salary and very little to do with quality of their actual work.

There’s literally … and I mean this, there’s literally no one left to care.

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jbreckmckye 33 minutes ago

I think there are those of us who care. It's tough though
It's tough to convince colleagues that they should take pride in their work; that UX quality is an asset not a cost; to chase user goals not OKRs; to focus on outcomes not just processes.
The "carelessness" you describe is self sustaining. It creates a culture where everyone is chasing the illusion of achievement; everyone is measured on proxy metrics; interviews measure proxy skills like LeetCode; developers increasingly outsource their knowledge to subsidised AI plagiarism machines; everything is a con and everyone takes the attitude that honesty is for suckers.
It might just be the consequences of tech eating the world. At some point the success, the money, the scale, the consequent bureaucracy and even the salaries themselves distort the culture irrevocably

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jordanb 2 hours ago

They don't have intrusive ads because programmers "DGAF". They have intrusive ads because they need to juice their clickthrough metrics with dark patterns.
Same with all the bad performance. Sometimes this may be a mistake but almost always it's because the site is firing up 50 prerender tracking scripts.
The author is trying to imply that if everyone focused a little more on making the computer feel like your robot friend, the industry would quit producing shit software. But the reality is the industry creates shit software because it is running an ad-supported malware business model.

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