This would be really cool and I’m afraid, like my iPhone 13 Mini and numerous other things I like, bought by a small amount of people compared to the masses. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.
Not only an untrue statement, but also a sadly incurious way to approach someone else's design choice. Yes, it was an enormous amount of work and invention to achieve a desired effect, but the effect is striking in an environment that is otherwise plastered with everyday visual clutter.
Minimalism is difficult and expensive to achieve. Some people consider that effort worthwhile.
I dunno. Premium products are a difficult thing. I can't weigh in because I don't care about cards at all, I'd much rather receive a wedding invitation via e-mail yet people spend hundreds on custom cards on thick card, custom printing etc etc. In fact, some couples are insistent on getting their wedding invitation envelopes "hand cancelled" so they look crisp and clean when they arrive at their destination:
If you're one of those people I could absolutely imagine you'd care about a visible barcode on an envelope. They kind of have to be premium products because if they’re blah then people will just use evites, which are better in a bunch of functional ways. The product relies on its differentiators.
Someone who cares about the barcode tends to care about other details. In some ways it's like the band riders that have silly things like no brown m&m's.
"When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
I think this depends on your goal. You can plausibly make either a cabinet that is beautiful all the way through, or one that is beautiful on the outside without wasting money. Both are pretty reasonable choices.
I literally thought of brown m&ms when I read your first sentence and have to say this way of thinking has to be some kind of mega baloney, no offense. I would be more concerned if someone actually spent time sorting brown m&ms because it means I'm dealing with people pleasers that waste time on nonsense, thus not having time for more important things.
As for the design details, the proof is in the pudding. If they sold well then the person with this idea understood the vapidness of his customers to the point of contempt. But I am reminded of how things like design evolve from being there to solve a problem to over time becoming the problem itself that needs solving and the actual focus. But I don't think this is a good way to deal with things.
From a systems perspective, the brown M&Ms are a "canary" (a.k.a. "sentinel indicator"). If a venue can't handle that or simply decides that it's "mega baloney" and ignores it, one can no longer assume that they've done anything competently, or at all.
This. Van Halen has stated as much - if there are brown M&Ms, chances are really high they haven't paid attention to detail, and a deep dive is going to uncover some serious problems:
And as somebody who has been on the receiving end of funny riders, a simple message to the talent’s team indicating you saw it but that you don’t plan to carry it out is usually sufficient. All they care about is whether or not you were paying attention.
I am aware of the story and the theory behind it, I just don't agree. There is always something to do, and if you have a tightly run competent group, things go smoothly only because the team has a routine built on experience. If you throw a wrench in that and have someone waste time fiddling with m&Ms it will make the other important things worse. For me, asking for something like that and actually getting it would be more terrifying because it would be an indication that you're dealing with amateurs that don't have a routine and no experience. And also like I said, people pleasers that prioritize satisfying important people's whims instead of providing quality work. It's just been my experience those two don't really mix well, you either strive to be skilled at what you do and progress in your career, or you strive to make someone happy, and progress in your career. Think of the Volkswagen engineer that implemented the exhaust gas test cheating device. I expect qualified people to question nonsense, and to disagree. Skilled people are not McDonald's employees flipping a burger after the instructed 90 seconds or whatever. If you run your organization or team rewarding lemming like behavior, just following along with everything everyone else is doing, you will get a team full of lemmings. There's no way around that. How much you can accomplish with that depends on the task. For McDonald's it's fine, but then again it's a shitty product.
We can of course disagree, there's no harm in that.
Not baloney. Someone who thinks they can decide what’s important about a production, not the production designer or manager, is likely to draw the line at the wrong place. Someone who faithfully implements detailed instructions is more trustworthy. A quick way to check if that’s the case helps to determine which kind of person oversaw the work.
I used to work as a developer at creative agencies and saw this all the time. There were developers who had a hard time believing that they should implement designs to the pixel because they thought a bit of padding didn’t matter so long as they got the important items right. They were almost always the ones who ended up missing important details (copy, working forms, performant databases etc.)
I think many failed/aborted projects only seem stupid in retrospect because we assume it proof they could never have succeeded .. but many ridiculous things can and do succeed and find their place. It fizzled after his death without anyone championing it with persistent care and constructive iterations. It may well have ultimately failed, regardless, but it certainly lost its motive power.
Maybe the mafia saw the population curves and realized how precious each customer is now and will be in the future. Something tech companies would be wise to think about...
And the curve is the same across almost all the world. Italy is 1.3, you need 2.1 to even tread water and keep the population you have. Who buys the stocks and fentanyl when each year you have less and less buyers?
There's also the reality of some glimmer of patriotism and care for one's neighborhoods. If Italy nosedives into a fentanyl epidemic, that will both decrease the public image of the Families (which isn't completely negative throughout Italy), and decrease the quality of live where they live.
Sure, they're OK with some heroin addicts. I'm suggesting they drew a line in the sand.
Because people are naive enough to think the huge privacy compromise will be worth the cost to society in order to protect kids.
The better question is why in 5yrs we will have to use ID to buy a product on some random ecommerce site or to play a video game or use Uber or post a comment on Reddit. It will be because people pushed for this for kids on social media and opened the door for the rest of the internet companies to demand it and therefore the government.
I really hate it when some vague "people" are blamed for this bullshit. those who do -- a minority -- do it only because they've been brainwashed by the relentless public opinion campaign ran jointly by the capital and the governments.
the vast majority of people would object to having a camera in every room of their dwelling. they just don't realize that having spyware on every piece of electronics they own is even worse.
They don’t care. Even if you explain everything in details, in a way they understand. We’ve been having that arguments since 2 decades, it’s now pretty clear they don’t care. They will complain about flock, then 2 minutes after sign up for Muse and share all their personal data with Meta, even if told what that’s used for
You shouldn't have to do this and I won't. I'll vote with my dollars and never buy another device from them. It's too bad because I genuinely liked it as well, but it's not worth the invasion of privacy and normalizing sending this type of information to any consumer company.
Think of the children … or are your a chomo? Now hand over your papers for access to information and communications more that all the books have been fed into the AI shredder and paper and writing instruments were done away with to save the planet.
Facebook/Meta has a system that decides if it thinks you are lying about your name or if it just isn't sure, if you get flagged for ID verification. These days it might also be because they think you are under 18, but the ID verification system existed long long before age checking.
If you haven't seen it, it's probably because your account is old and they have scraped enough contact lists to believe your name is real.
Odd. I’ve used a fake name with Facebook since about 2009 and now I have a meta quest and they’ve never flagged my account or asked for id verification.
The facebook "Real Name" policy is from like 2013. You just haven't gotten anyone's attention. Not using your real name is against policy and a bannable offense.
I’m going to be honest, I don’t know if improving Rubsico is possible. Nature has had every reason to and billions of years. It’s optimized as far as it can go and you either lose speed or specificity, I don’t think having both is possible.
Your statement piked out my interest and I went searching for what Rubisco was. My prediction is that this particular one will be cracked out soon, and at around 2045, creating disgustingly efficient variants of RuBisCO along with other photosynthesis mechanisms will be AGIs’ hot hobby.
That there are no more efficient variations of it in nature just tells us that the local minimum is really deep and that natural evolution, as it is, can’t produce anything better, not even with a billion years and 10^30 organisms serving as a “brute force lab”. It’s also the kind of problem an AGI system would tackle for purely ideological reasons, i.e. to prove that it is superior to nature.
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