Doesn't sound like the liability lies with the library maintainers, sounds up to the government agency to do their due diligence, but also sounds unenforceable as well
I think this is really cool website and love this topic
But I think you might want to test this page on smaller screens, just very limited screen real estate for the content of interest, the top right half lots of padding, the scrollable content basically has 1/3 of the available screen space, the left hand side kind of has another 1/3
Look your website your vision, I get it and I respect your trying something different with the UI but if your goal here is to communicate your ideas, as a reader I'd appreciate having more screen space for the content, when I clicked on the link to see this specific post I'm just not interested in your other posts (or at least until I've read the one I went out of my way to read).
Thanks for the feedback. The idea was to create something between a youtube video and a blog post and something you can consume in bite-sized pieces. I'd like the visuals to do most of the talking but I guess parser combinators came out with a lot of text anway. I'll try to tighten up the UI some and get a smaller phone for testing.
I really enjoyed it and I look forward to trying out the ideas.
I think you are close to every effective presentation format, but the cramped space for the text was the biggest friction. The moving visuals, as helpful as they are, also became a little distracting as I was trying to absorb the meaning of the text. You could solve both issues with a toggle to hide or expand the visual.
Another bad thing is that switching between pages doesn’t enter the browser history, which means you can’t use the browser’s Back/Forward controls to browse back and forth.
Really, inventing a new navigation UI for what is supposed to be a document, on top of a browser and bypassing its navigation conventions, simply isn’t a good idea.
I guess also, what’s happening in the top right is cool but I think as a user you’re preoccupied on figuring out how to view the other content it’s difficult to appreciate and I imagine that’s where you put a lot of effort
> I'd like the visuals to do most of the talking
If you’re aiming for a more curated experience, it might be worth limiting content that is likely to confuse the user for what the intended experience is meant to be. Many users have preconceived ideas of how some parts of the UI behave & which might get in the way to delivering the experience you’re trying to deliver.
We're not talking about capital/labour share, we're talking about which professions are destabilised by technological innovation which are not.
Clearly there is a useful distinction to make here, as clearly some jobs are disportionately robust to technological innovation. Clearly doctors and lawyers have not expected the same amount of replacement as software engineer. Maybe blue or white collar does quite capture it but captial and labour framing provides no explanation for any heterogeneous effects on different trades within the labour force.
> Clearly there is a useful distinction to make here, as clearly some jobs are disportionately robust to technological innovation. Clearly doctors and lawyers have not expected the same amount of replacement as software engineer. Maybe blue or white collar does quite capture it but captial and labour framing provides no explanation for any heterogeneous effects on different trades within the labour force.
I think that's post-hoc. A few years ago, you could have reasonably written "clearly software engineers have not expected the same amount of replacement as factory workers."
The only distinction that matters is worker vs. capitalist. And the jobs that seem "disproportionately robust to technological innovation," only haven't been subjected to it yet. And it's not even that hard to see: the AI companies are gunning for doctor and lawyer work. The main difference between those professions and software engineers, is that they have some level or worker-organization and regulatory protection.
Software engineers as a whole, were really, really dumb not embrace unionization before 2022, when we had a lot of economic power. Instead we got confused by our high salaries, and embraced libertarian propaganda like we were temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
During the transitionary period between WW2 and 2000 we saw massive unemployment in many typical blue collar jobs in the western developed world, yet women weren't impacted to the same degree, why is that?
Is it because women through out the 1960s-2000s had a seat at the table, which men didn't?
Obviously not, they often faced workplace discrimination and their choice of job was limited to what was socially acceptable for a woman to work in and often those were jobs men weren't interested in the 1940-1960s, but they were working in what we now call the service industry and they didn't experience the displacement which came with global trade at the same rate men did.
> Capital/labor in strict sense, sure, but there is also material support, or a “seat at the table”. A decision maker (in service to Capital).
This just is not an informative framing here for why software engineers are more impacted than doctors
> The division is power—-be it Capital or knowledge or labor.
This simply isn't informative, the blog post is clearly focusing on a definite industry and your fixating on a general class (which the impacts are not being felt equally across).
A lot of what makes Canva stand out comes from its IP coupled to their ecosystem/product (templates, assets and stock photography), its otherwise a pretty simple tool with basic functionality (but with good UX) compared with more professional software like photoshop or illustrator, or Figma. I'm sure you can built an open source equivalent in terms of software, but I don't think it's really possible for open source to produce a true replacement or alternative.
THAT ASIDE, it might be worth focusing on UX. This looks vibe coded, maybe it isn't.
- The UI is broken in a few places (the tools text in the shapes menu)
- Consider prioritising more important tools based on available space in the ui, the header is a bit cluttered.
- Some of the tool menus are awkward to use, like in Canva those are in a side bar and when they open the have panels that don't disappear when their parent looses focus. Probably worth making sure you're not using their exact icons as well as these look pretty similar.
- Your add page button is creating an awkward scroll which you could probably limit by exposing add page in a way that didn't do that. Maybe remove the add page button below the canvas, as you already have an add page button in the bottom left, you should have more vertical space for the design as a result.
- You've got several different export sharing options in the header side by side. Might be worth collapsing that into a menu to minimise clutter. Both tools like canva and more professional tools layout their UIs like this. By all means do don't it just because they are, but there is some rational here why they would.
- There are two places in the header that talk about the save state on the left and the right (one saying saved, the other saying saved in the browser). Consider having consolidating that.
- do you really want to place the copy "Sign up to keep it forever" next to the sign up button? do you have any reason this is likely to stand out from the rest of the UI features there? I reckon if not get rid of it. Or if it's that important get rid of anything competiting for its attention which right now is a lot of things.
- you have a ellipses for a menu with a ton of options, in most software this is aligned to the left. If you've removed other things frmo the the head it may make sense to break that up in submenus so those pieces of functionality is more discoverable.
- Your commment functionality requires sign up to use, keeping it there may help lead to signs ups, but if you're designing this as an open source tool, maybe you're less interested in growth hacking, it might make sense to remove it from the header as well when the user isn't signed in (at the same time keeping it there signals to people weighing up your product that that feature exists.
- you have 2 layers of headers, is it worth utilising horitonzal space for some of your buttons and put them in the right hand side?
Hopefully you can feed the above back into your agent on a loop lol.
twists and revelations are just unhelpful especially when someone is trying build a mental model, but I do think there's probably some overlap in pacing and I'll pieces together into a complicated model has some overlap with story telling, because there's definitely bad educational writing which is a slog to get through because they front load a lot of stuff without application.
I do find it kind of annoying when someone has a set of side characters they are trying convey the information through. Like it's cute the first few times you see it but after a while it's grating.
I do think some people for whatever reason also have no issue with the front loaded info dumps, maybe they are looking for a specific piece of information they want to pull not sure. I prefer something a bit structured while having the ability to zoom out and look for the piece later on.
Not everyone consumes information the same, so I don't know there's really a objective best way.
> LLMs have made this problem extremely worse. Imagine how'd you'd explain what an MCP is in a couple words and technically, then try to look it up. There's phone books worth of pages and text that never end up getting to the point
Also this, but I think this might be a result of models of poorly designed benchmarks and training that led to claude reading like an inner monologue and an exhaustive noncommittal statement being certain on very few things, leading a ton of unnecessary prefaces.
I really enjoyed "Thinking Fast and Slow", unfortunately it may not be Daniel Kahneman best work, and unfortunately a victim of the reproducibility crisis
None of Kahneman's work was affected but some of the work he uses as examples absolute were. It's not all bad but there are parts that should probably be removed or prefaced to new readers especially since Kahneman accepted (RIP) the some of the criticism, that or some spiritual success without those warts
> I strongly believe A/B testing users without their knowledge and enthusiastic consent is unethical
Look I get it feels weird but in practice most A/B tests are stuff like “does this copy change if ppl use this feature”.
The reasons they don’t is the same reason RCTs for new drugs don’t tell patients either. You end up with selection bias.
> If you don't have enough confidence in your changes to make them carte blanche, then don't make them at all
This is a bit hyperbolic, empirics is something that should be used more by decision makers not just for their own sake but for people who don’t understand why they are making them, especially in government (although It’s harder because finding cases where it’s appropriate is hard).
An A/B test isn’t just about what’s better, it’s about understanding all other things being equal how does one change to X affect Y. Which is information that can be used to inform the design of yet to be build features.
A lot of ppl have bad takes on what makes a product better, and they would otherwise have a greater say in the product design. Some product managers are just really stupid and are there due to nepotism so it’s an external equaliser and allowing the thoughtful ones to have more of a say.
> Users don't want their shit changing all the time.
Yep that’s why you don’t ask them.
I get if you have a specific flow that your use to. It would annoying for me too if that changed (as I’m pretty stubborn don’t like ppl making changes on my behalf), but that doesn’t mean it’s an objective better experience for all users or users who have yet to be familiar with the apps process.
When these products operate in competitive markets and not some winner takes all market these are often about improving users experience.
If this was something more high stakes like a medial trial I’d get it, but for stuff like filling out a document or watching a piece of media. The stakes for most SASS app are really low.
> This is a bit hyperbolic, empirics is something that should be used more by decision makers
In my experience working in software, empiricism is the only thing valued anymore. Intuition and thoughtfulness is out the window because it's not scientific enough. I would say most software now reflects that - it's almost all bland and statistically optimized to maximize engagement or revenue.
> If this was something more high stakes like a medial trial I’d get it, but for stuff like filling out a document or watching a piece of media. The stakes for most SASS app are really low.
There are plenty of subtle patterns used in SaaS form filling things too. For example notice that the "primary button" is always chosen as the one that will make the company the most money or collect the most data.
Likewise, popups are annoying, but they result in more conversions. Forced logins are the same (how many form filling apps now force you to sign up with an account that you'll never use again, so that you can become a potential lead in future).
Google recently started doing all of these on anonymous searches with a modal overlay and a big bright blue "Continue" primary button that takes you to a login screen, while a "don't sign in" button appears as far less noticeable text above it.
It's at the point now where I'm surprised when any software gives you an option without blatantly telling you which one they want you to pick for their own benefit.
A lot of it seems innocuous but I feel we're at the stage of death-by-a-thousand-cuts at this point.
> In my experience working in software, empiricism is the only thing valued anymore. Intuition and thoughtfulness is out the window because it's not scientific enough.
With things like A/B testing, its not entirely an objective as you need to make assumptions which can be difficult to measure (although typically randomisation solves a lot of them), but you can only measure what you've decide to measure (which isn't random), so you don't know when you're in a local max. So IMO intuition and thoughtfulness is necessary. Sometimes product managers don't listen to data scientists when they say you can't measure Y with X, or the research design violates the required assumptions to make a causal claims (like reverse causality or controlling on a post treatment effect, e.g. employment as control when measuring income after hospitalisation (the treatment)). I think the worse offences I've seen have been from marketing teams.
But proper research design does require intuition and thoughtfulness, because statistical models require thought, like other forms of supervised learning.
I've seen both
- PMs use questionable experiments to justify shipping something.
- PMs dismiss experiments when it was a null result and shipped anyways.
In either case I don't think the methodology is the cause of problems here, although I think shipping with a null result is justifiable if it's a larger unit of work (provided its not a regression).
Sometimes things that have heterogenous effects get measured as a homogenous effect, Like say:
- Your primary user base is X1 and X2 is a larger consumer base but makes up a small portion of your user base.
- Your experiment does poorly with X1, but say there was an increase in user base X2.
- However because X1 dominates the user base and your signups (because say you target ads to X1 over X2), no one drills into the effects on these different user bases, the result gets discarded as it seems to be a bad outcome.
There's valuable information in the experiment outcome but without thought and attention you can miss it.
> Google recently started doing all of these on anonymous searches with a modal overlay and a big bright blue "Continue" primary button that takes you to a login screen, while a "don't sign in" button appears as far less noticeable text above it.
I mean that sucks, but IMO with their market share, the way Google chrome is inclined to develop their product is very different to firms in more competitive spaces.
Perhaps A/B Tests, allows google to optimise the things they are incentivised to pursue, but in the hands of smaller firms with different incentives are willing to tweak things to be more appealing to users when they have far less market power, which I think is probably more the issue in the case of Google.
I just don't think this is a universal problem with the methodology
Oh hey didn't check your name before I replied! I assume this is the akst I know IRL, small world. Hope you are well too.
> I just don't think this is a universal problem with the methodology
In an isolated world I would agree with you, but in the messy reality we live in I think the broader problems with the methodology are two:
1. The belief that everything can be measured. There are many intangibles (user trust, willingness to put up with bugs, "vibes") that aren't easily measurable. Yes, net promoter scores etc, but every company I can think of that uses them builds bland, buggy, largely disliked products that people use only because they have no choice.
2. Focusing on experiments and measurable outcomes creates a tendency to de-prioritise anything that isn't easily measurable. For example larger, riskier projects that can't be quickly tested. Or whimsy - easter eggs that devs added to many products in the past that users remember for years. Rarely added anymore because they can't be justified against a roadmap full of experiments.
Sometimes it feels a bit like we're sitting around so focused on measuring whether guests prefer one dish or the other and arguing over which experiment is best, that we don't notice a forest fire is blazing outside.
To me maybe it's a bit of a question of science vs art. Take the video games industry for example, the AAA studios are largely moving toward the science end of the spectrum with predictable games that extract maximum engagement, while indie studios are mostly building small, unique experiences that don't try to dominate your attention.
Experimentation always narrows focus down, and I think it's worth considering what's being traded off by doing so.
It's possible I've spent too much time looking at town planning where nothing is really ever measured and when numbers are produced it is it some insane
Like claiming townhouses not facing out into the street somehow produces X $ in mental health costs due to "lack of inclusion" and the footnote links to a study where non-english speaking communities in Australia were having real health costs due to lack of access to translation services. Which is something that passes for "evidence based" planning. Doing experiments in social sciences is a lot harder tho.
Maybe it's too easy to do experiments in Software and like you said
> Sometimes it feels a bit like we're sitting around so focused on measuring whether guests prefer one dish or the other and arguing over which experiment is best, that we don't notice a forest fire is blazing outside
I do think they're a useful tool but I see what you're saying.
Part of me feel some of that is risk aversion, but also maybe some of its process dependence when you have a number that provides strong certainty on a number of things, and because there's that feedback loop they get drawn to the things that cause the number go up. Similar to how people become dependent on LLMs to get stuff done or affirm if they did the right thing, and when they're in a space that's harder to measure they don't know to judge if they've done a good job or not.
I'm spending less time working on software, as I decided to get an econ degree, specifically econometrics, so I do spent a lot of time trying to think how to better measure stuff specifically in public policy, so I might be bias lol
But I do get what you're saying, hope things are well for you
In most cases the A and the B in an A/B test really should otherwise mostly identical, but one thing is different.
If almost everything is different, it’s hard to learn for next time what exactly what led to a change in which ever dependent variable your observating.
Yes, lots of comments that seem to not really understand what A/B testing should actually be. I expect the implementation of A/B testing of video content on YT is unlikely to be done well either though so maybe it's correct criticism for incorrect reasons.
Yeah I don't expect most youtubers to understand that, and much of the guidelines may seem to insist upon themselves without understanding the underlying motivation for the whole approach.
It does sound like youtube will be requiring experiments to pass some sort of similarity test before they can be run as an experiment.
It really doesn't have much to do with planning or zoning, I imagine it predates that. A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.
Zoning and planning distorts land values so georgism alone won't solve land use problems. E.g. Demand for land with fewer property rights (such as single family zoning, or a heritage restriction) will be lower than the site next to it that allowed building a 200 floor residential tower. In turn its land value will be lower.
It might still yield a high rent tho, but maybe not more than a new well maintained apartment.
> A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.
It wouldn't directly address those planning issues, but it aligns the financial incentives of the body politic between residential homeowners and the rest of the community. Normally residential homeowners have huge financial incentive to make housing scare and expensive, the LVT removes that financial gain from causing misery.
LVT is a good reform to do, but if the goal is to improve housing affordability through supply it's quite an indirect measure and occur at a glacial pace without proper planning reform.
Many areas where people want to live and where homes should be built, can sometimes have a large portion of home owners like Mosman, Bondi, Croydon or Woollahra in Sydney. A tax on the unimproved value of land just doesn't get home building started here if no one is a renter (I recall increases in rent were tied to LVT in Progress and Poverty). And if its based on valuations the valuations will again be distorted by planning controls.
If you upzone these areas for towers, the moment the first person takes the gazillion dollar offer from a developer suddenly homes get built, and suddenly everyone else want to exit. And besides if you have LV Tax their land value will got up because their land will have fewer development limitations, higher demand, etc, etc.
Georgism is cool, land tax is cool, but it's not a silver bullet.
If your goal is to make homes more affordable, reforms like the ones they did in Auckland (loosening planning controls) is the way to go. https://onefinaleffort.com/auckland
If your goal is to redistribute wealth Georgism is not a bad option, but again planning controls (zoning, Floor space, height limits, heritage controls, parking minimums, upper setbacks, excessive lower setbacks) can suppress the true size of the tax base.
> As is common in political shenanigans, the draft bill has a euphemistic label ('algorithmic opt-out') - what it actually does is allow unspecified bureaucrats such as the Minister for Communications to designate any individual piece of content as 'harmful' and have it banished from the internet.
Not a fan of the paternalistic/nanny state attitude of the current government or that ministers track record, but isn't this two separate things which they intend to do?
> isn't this two separate things which they intend to do?
Precisely. This bill is being sold to the public under a benign label, but smuggled along with it are some dubious affordances. The same was accomplished with 'age verification for U16s', which, if named correctly, would have been called 'everyone (not just U16s) must present a licence or use a VPN to use the internet'.
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