thehardsphere (u/thehardsphere)

thehardsphere commented on What Atari Was Really Like, According to Women Who Were There kotaku.com/sex-pong-and-p... · Posted by u/panda88888

jccalhoun · 8 years ago

he has said a bunch of inflammatory things on twitter. Here is one thread https://imgur.com/gallery/8CBmG Here's another where he talks about pizzagate and how people around the Clintons keep dying https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/minecraft-creator-pizzagate/

I think some things he has claimed were jokes but I don't know.

thehardsphere · 8 years ago

Okay, so, maybe he's a nut or a troll, but nothing really about gaming?

thehardsphere commented on What Atari Was Really Like, According to Women Who Were There kotaku.com/sex-pong-and-p... · Posted by u/panda88888

m_mueller · 8 years ago

I have another question: Could it be that a dose of that early Atari‘s relaxed attitude towards gender and sex issues could be a positive thing? The way I read the article is that the culture there was of respect, mutual empowerment and a relaxed attitude toward human nature in all its aspects. Maybe by erecting walls between genders the baby was thrown out with the bathwater?

thehardsphere · 8 years ago

I'm not so sure. The problem when the only "wall between genders" that's "erected" is consent, you often find out too late that it's not strong enough of a wall. It seems like at Atari in the 1970's it was fine, but there are easily identifiable places it was not, like most of Hollywood in the current decade.

I'm guessing something else about Atari's culture prevented the kind of problems that can crop up when you have a relaxed sexual attitude, but it isn't as easy to identify.

thehardsphere commented on What Atari Was Really Like, According to Women Who Were There kotaku.com/sex-pong-and-p... · Posted by u/panda88888

rayiner · 8 years ago

I’m from Bangladesh, where women face many problems. In many cases they are forced to wear head scarves, the rates of domestic violence are through the roof because it is culturally normalized, etc. For the most part, they don’t feel “disenfranchised” because they don’t know anything else. But I know very few American-born Bangladeshis who want to go back and put on coverings and live in a traditional Bangladeshi marriage.

And obviously working at Atari wasn’t like being in Bangladesh. But the basic principle applies. Taking a poll of disenfranchised people is not useful because one of the central features of disenfranchisement is that most people are resigned to it. The question isn’t what they think. That’s not how you judge the culture. How you judge it is to go to people who have experienced something different, and ask them if they’d trade places.

thehardsphere · 8 years ago

Right, but the women at Atari weren't disenfranchised. Even in the 1970s, their alternatives to working at Atari were numerous. The secretary there who was "stacked" wasn't facing an alternative of no employment or living in Bangladesh if she didn’t like hot tub meetings; she could go work at any company in America that didn't have hot tub meetings, which was all of them.

thehardsphere commented on What Atari Was Really Like, According to Women Who Were There kotaku.com/sex-pong-and-p... · Posted by u/panda88888

geofft · 8 years ago

Do we know what the author of that article's biases are? (Everyone comes with their biases, and I know pretty clearly what Brianna Wu's are because she's reasonably famous, but I haven't heard of Brad Glasgow, I think.)

In particular, the casual dismissal of saying that someone "bills herself as a game designer and activist" and the off-hand reference to "former GDC Pioneer Award winner Markus 'Notch' Pearson" without mentioning Notch's strong ideological biases re social issues and the game industry, make me feel like there's something undisclosed here.

If we're going to be wary of journalists misrepresenting sources to fit an agenda, I feel like we should apply that principle consistently.

thehardsphere · 8 years ago

I've never heard of Notch having strong biases regarding social issues and the game industry. I quickly googled but all I could find were references to some tweets he deleted about some "heterosexual pride" or something that he later apologized for.

Do you have a link or can you sumarize what those biases are?

thehardsphere commented on An Interview with Tom Quisel, Former CTO of OkCupid (2017) logicmag.io/02-algorithmi... · Posted by u/imartin2k

rowyourboat · 8 years ago

> And in fact, for a very long time we resisted allowing people to filter by race—we felt it just wasn’t appropriate. > But then we learned about some use-cases from the other side—someone who is Filipino who wants to find other Filipinos easily. We found that that’s a pretty legit reason to search by race, so we added that feature.

I don't understand. What other side? And why are Filipinos special? How is that fundamentally different from any other race-based selection?

thehardsphere · 8 years ago

I'm guessing that Filipinos aren't obviously "white" or "black", and thus get to dodge all of the baggage that Americans have about the topic of race.

Just another guess: "Filipino" is also associated with a single geographic place, unlike most of the other races that Americans typically think about.

thehardsphere commented on Single Page Application Is Not a Silver Bullet blog.bloomca.me/2018/02/0... · Posted by u/bloomca

seawlf · 8 years ago

I've worked on a number of SPA's over the years and I always run into the problem of getting my team to give a shit about performance. "We're not Google," they protest. Frankly for a lot of people it's the trade-off of slow client performance for development velocity. It's much easier to just throw on another state for new functionality than it is to consider what parts of the page can be static and how they can be rendered.

thehardsphere · 8 years ago

See, "we're not Google" should actually mean that you care about performance more. Google can throw millions of dollars worth of infrastructure into making an app go marginally faster. Whereas, all you have is brainpower before you deploy or ship. And it doesn't take that much more brainpower to get big increases in client performance when you're starting from not-optimized-at-all. The marginal payoff is larger and the marginal costs are much smaller.

thehardsphere commented on Single Page Application Is Not a Silver Bullet blog.bloomca.me/2018/02/0... · Posted by u/bloomca

throwaway0255 · 8 years ago

One thing I'm noticing about SPAs is that they're often slower to load, but the slowness and loading animations gives me a higher perception of the quality of the application.

The same application loading and doing things instantly as server-side templates feels comparatively cheap and un-modern.

What is wrong with me?

thehardsphere · 8 years ago

Just a guess: You were alive when progress marched on before your eyes. Animations are "new" to you, and like many people you have some sort of implicit association somewhere in the back of your mind that "new == better"

Do you ever find some animations to be lower quality than others? E.g. a pop up with a progress bar being lower quality than a spinning wheel? That might be another sign.

thehardsphere commented on Single Page Application Is Not a Silver Bullet blog.bloomca.me/2018/02/0... · Posted by u/bloomca

JohnnyCrazy · 8 years ago

TBH most of the cons stated in this article are just because of bad programming, not because it's a SPA

> broken “back” button (sometimes it works properly, but in general people don’t trust it)

If your UX is good, the user will notice data is refreshed when going back. All current top tier SPA Frameworks have support for correct HTML5 routing.

> broken “open in a new tab” behaviour – people like to handle links in onClick handler, and browser can’t recognize it as a link (even if the majority of the links are valid, sooner or later you’ll encounter a non-link “link”)

Again, most up-to-date frameworks have a fallback by adding a normal href so you can still CTRL-Click it.

> sometimes broken “refresh” button – after refreshing you end up in a different UI (usually slightly, but still different)

I don't see a real disadvantage here, since you can simply store your state by manipulating the URL or even localstorage. So you even have the possibility to not store your state...But again, application design, not SPA

I do agree with TTI (at least on the first load) and bad performance on low end devices.

thehardsphere · 8 years ago

> TBH most of the cons stated in this article are just because of bad programming, not because it's a SPA

The worst programming is the result of choosing the wrong tools for the job. There is a class of jobs for which an SPA is entirely unnecessary.

thehardsphere commented on Single Page Application Is Not a Silver Bullet blog.bloomca.me/2018/02/0... · Posted by u/bloomca

andrenotgiant · 8 years ago

I always thought the decision was:

- Content site = NOT single-page-app

- Application = single-page-app

Maybe there's more of a gray area between content sites and applications these days, but I think it's still pretty obvious: If most of the user's time is spent reading content, it's a content site.

thehardsphere · 8 years ago

That's a good starting point. I'd drill down even further and ask "what does the user do with the application?"

If the user needs to look at multiple screens at a time (e.g. like a mail client or something of similar complexity), then they're a candidate for an SPA. If the user does not need to do that, the app is probably simple enough to not be an SPA.

thehardsphere commented on Single Page Application Is Not a Silver Bullet blog.bloomca.me/2018/02/0... · Posted by u/bloomca

thehardsphere · 8 years ago

The problem with SPAs in the sort of cases that the author is talking about is that people don't think clearly about what requirements they are satisfying when writing a new one. If your app actually needs to switch between various screens without a refresh so your users can most efficiently get their work done, then yes, by all means, make an SPA. That requires knowing clearly who your users are, what they want to do, and what constraints they are under (e.g. if they all work on desktops with good internet access, maybe it doesn't matter that your app is bloated and slow on mobile). I think most people don't do that thinking step first. They want to play with the new shiny, either as a sort of fun or so they can add it to their resume.

This I think is made worse by the unparalleled decadence in which the modern, first-world developer now lives. It is absolutely excessive to have to download 2.6 MB just to show a blog or some simple textual information, but thanks to broadband everywhere and terabyte hard drives, nobody under the age of 30 who isn't working in embedded systems thinks about this anymore.