jmclean

Although I agree that there's been a frustrating lack of response to those issues, I think at least part of that muted response was a sense that these incidents were an aberration from a general trend of progress.

The reality that many people are waking up to is that social progress is not guaranteed and a passive approach is not enough.

I share your cynicism regarding many of the marketing moves by the companies you mentioned. At the same time, the fact that doing the right thing builds goodwill with a hopefully-majority highlights the importance of making our views and voices heard.

I might wish for a more high-minded motive form these companies. I also wish that it hadn't taken shock events to make the loss of rights feel real for most of America (though to be honest, I'm guilty of this too.)

But I'm excited to see people mobilizing, and will take the good outcomes where I can find them these days. Progress here could require an uneasy coalition.

I'm disappointed to see a comment like this here. To treat 'feminists' as a monolithic bloc, mutually exclusive from meaningful contributors to IT, is insulting to those of us who try to be both.

Women in tech face real challenges, including but not limited to casual condescension towards the people fighting for change.

I'm proud of her too, and I'm sure she's exactly the sort of role model that a feminist would have in mind.

One problem here is that any outcome (warming or no, human-engineered or no) will impact every nation differently. Under current warming projections, some nations will see massive increases in arable land, whereas others will be completely underwater. Even within nations, some cities and regions will see detrimental effects, whereas others could even see benefits (though this is taboo to talk about, which foreshadows one variation of the problem).

It seems naively optimistic to think we will be able to geoengineer altruistically or with the general good in mind. Even the concept of an 'average good' for the earth is a little morally problematic if some nations benefit and others are hurt. When a nation acquires the ability to affect climate at a large scale, it seems likely that it will be used for political ends as much as for net positive outcomes.

As a designer who also writes code, this attitude really frustrates me. There are a lot of reasons that flat UI makes more sense for software, especially for responsive web.

Flat UI means less code and easier maintainability. It holds up better across a wide range of sizes. It makes it easier to have a style guide in code and create reusable modules. This allows the design team to focus on the bigger-picture user experience instead of perfecting button gradients.

High information density is great in many applications, especially interfaces supporting complex tasks for expert users. However, it takes a lot of work to design a great high-density interface. I feel like most of the high density interfaces I see are more of a case of the design or product teams not being able to make hard decisions about what's really important.

While some flat UIs certainly go too far in the other direction, I firmly believe that minimalism encourages good design by forcing a conversation about what information to prioritize. Especially for the mainstream consumer web, this is almost always better for everyone.

Finally, I don't appreciate this kind of attack on my profession. Good design is far closer to engineering than to taste. I don't think I'm hoodwinking people into hiring me.

Though it's of course anecdata, this is a huge problem for basically every woman I know who's used the service. Not only is it mostly spam, a lot of it is pretty horrible and demeaning. A few friends post the worst of it to Facebook and tumblr and it's cringe-inducing.

Can't speak to the male side of things, as I haven't used it myself. But I feel gross being lumped in with the things that friends have shown me.

I think part of the reason this conversation is valuable, though, is that the inverse omission is far more dominant in the cultural conversation right now. It's certainly mostly true that hard work plays an important part in fantastic success. But it's equally true that even in those cases, the majority enjoyed advantages that are often invisible even to them.

So to be sure, the opposite extreme is just as ridiculous as suggesting that every person exists in a bubble where their effort correlates exactly with outcome. But when the awareness of systemic advantage is absent (as it certainly is), I see staking out a far extreme opinion like this as a challenge to find a more reasonable center.

I do! I have some sketches that I drew up a while back. It's sort of a loose collection of thoughts, though this is inspiring me to think about it with more rigor :)

I imagine it as a combination of an abstraction layer on top of processing and a light IDE. Something like a palette of shapes and objects similar to what's available in photoshop and illustrator. Instead of drawing shapes, though, it would create code snippets for the various objects.

Those objects would be available to modify in an event loop similar to Processing (or Arduino, for that matter). With a strong autocomplete for both object names and the available manipulations for those objects, I feel like you could learn just by playing around.

Live preview like Swift /light table etc would be really powerful. Out of the box support for common things like collision detection would be great too. Color pickers that spit out rgba values? Maybe. Basically a tool palette oriented around building code for visuals.

In terms of the language itself, it probably veers more into personal taste. I'd love to see names of things be less arcane /abbreviated. Dropping some of the brackets and parens would be nice for non programmers too. (Again, taste.) Ruby-like syntax for new objects instead of objective-C-like constructors would be more readable. Basically, the more it could just resemble an English description of what you want to happen, the better.

Processing isn't that far away from this description, but the combination of having to refer to the documentation constantly, no sensible defaults, almost limitless customizability, and having to actually compile the sketch to run means that the initial barrier is really high. It's very difficult to get into flow until you reach a high level of familiarity with the language.

I would love to chat about this further and share ideas with you or anyone who's interested!

Respectfully disagree. I think it's easy for people who have by now built an intuitive grasp of code to appreciate how challenging tools like Processing can be for a beginner.

I have a design background and learned front end code (and eventually ruby on rails) by getting progressively more interested in how the things I was designing were built. I feel like I achieved a pretty respectable level of knowledge in what I had been exposed to.

And yet, many aspects of Processing were a huge leap for me. I spent days looking at code examples just to try and grok how 3D works in processing. I get it now (mostly), but it still feels unintuitive. I can certainly imagine a language that would describe 3D behavior, and a whole host of other things, in a way that a visual artist would describe them.

I definitely believe that there is value in artists learning to think with the rigor that code encourages. It's a fascinating cross-pollination. Creativity often springs from encountering the limits of a medium (and one's mastery of the medium).

But look at the excitement this week among people like me about Swift. It's not about whether it was possible before for me to learn Objective C and build a game. It was. But goddamnit, it's such a pain, and I would certainly understand that someone who is starting from zero in terms of CS knowledge would find it impossibly intimidating.

Design is remarkably accessible. If you can pick up a pen and paper, you can do it. Code is getting way closer to that, but let's not have collective Stockholm syndrome. Our tools are a long way away from where they could be.

Honestly, I wish I had the skills to write a language or build the tools like the ones I can imagine myself. But I have confidence that someone will. It's going to be an exciting time for art, and I think it's coming very soon.

I think the point is that what was formerly a file-oriented task now behaves much more like a service. Netflix would be nowhere near as popular if you had to download the movie file before watching.

Plus, no more external hard drives full of ~1GB movie files.

This hits close to home for me. I was one of those kids who was 'good at math' throughout pretty much all of school. I tested out of Calc I thanks to AP classes and began university in Calc II.

It didn't go well. Somehow this thing that had seemed so natural and intuitive now just seemed totally incomprehensible, mainly because I really just didn't understand the level the abstraction was at or something. I did poorly and it really shook my confidence. I changed majors and wound up a designer instead.

It's not a surprise to me that I've worked my way back into a field with deep math roots, though I think I would have found it much sooner if it hadn't been for that initial roadblock.

It gave me a new appreciation for what many of my classmates were struggling with in the early math that I breezed through in grade school. It's very difficult to see what the concepts you're learning are building towards if you don't have a sense of the bigger picture.