I think another difference is that the Cambrian explosion of web apps vying for user attention meant that many web users had experience using both poorly-designed web apps as well as well-designed web apps and could gravitate towards the latter.
Whereas many Notes applications were internal so there was no "survival of the fittest" and the UI toolkit was passable at best. As a result, many Notes users never experienced a well-designed Notes app.
DARPA projects from more than a decade ago (VSAM/WAMI for arial platforms like Gorgon Stare) used arial imagery to capture ground shadows for gait tracking purposes.
From chatting with some of the researchers many years ago my understanding is that it usually wasn't accurate enough for unique identification and the gait shadow was dependent on shoe type and clothing, so a persistent gait shadow database wouldn't have been useful. But it could be correlated with ground-based surveillance for identification, for example person A and B were identified on a ground-based security camera entering a building, then gait tracking could be used to monitor where they went after they left the building even if they avoided ground-based security cameras after that point.
> I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment
People who loved mixing colors enough to become experts may have been disappointed when their hard-won skills were rendered obsolete by the march of progress.
There are some aspects of my work that are enjoyable on their own and others that I only do because they're necessary overhead to achieve a desired result. I appreciate technology that eliminates the latter but lament technology that eliminates the former.
So when AI obsoletes yet another human skill I suspect a lot of the wildly different emotional responses are dependent on whether someone considers the skill being obsoleted more "enjoyable" or "necessary overhead".
By "excuses for layoffs" I suspect what they meant was that there was an pre-existing desire to reduce headcount and RTO was used under the expectation that some percentage of employees would quit voluntarily so that the company can avoid going through the relatively more costly process of laying them off.
Of course the downside of this approach is that the company has less control over which employees leave, which may result in them losing the employees who have the best alternatives.
Plenty of companies don't "need to exist". A company exists because someone decided to start it (usually to make some money) and lasts until someone decides to end it (usually when it stops making money).
If you're asking why Palantir (and Salesforce, Jira, etc) continue to make money despite not having any novel or complex technologies, my experience has been that these are not prerequisites for solving the vast majority of business problems. Usually network effects, customer relationships, brand identity, user interface, inertia, etc are all more important than the technology.
It is not always easy for a technologist to admit, but companies whose ongoing success is primarily due to some sort of (non-UX) technological superiority are the exception rather than the rule.
> This discounts the value of user experience, which people will pay a premium for.
The people making purchasing decisions at this level aren't the ones using it and don't care one whit about UX.
That isn't to say that it isn't valuable, but it's basically a non-factor. The technology itself is a non-factor. Everything is about connections, buzz words and pretty slide decks.
They literally do, since the people making purchasing decisions are usually the ones that ranked up through a system they used and know the intricacies of, including all the pain points.
As someone who used to teach UX grad courses, I'm happy you feel that way!
But I'm unsure why you feel that my response pointing out that a product's user interface is typically a more important factor in success than the product's underlying technologies was discounting the value of user experience?
> Good design IS technological superiority.
Hmm, I was attempting to respond to someone who wrote "It feels like a big pile of nothing... Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD atop and layers of snazzy sparklines" which seemed to dramatically undervalue good schemas, CRUD implementations, or sparklines as "nothing". So to contrast those I used "technical superiority" as a catchall for the sort of challenging technical implementations that some developers lionize. Does that make sense? Is there a different term you'd suggest for that? For now I've changed to "(non-UX) technological superiority".
> some sort of mechanism for variable-length IP duration is needed
I've always liked the idea of a Harberger tax-style patent enforcement fee:
The patent owner declares the value of their patent on an annual basis and pays 1-5% of that declared value per year for the privilege of relying on the government to enforce their exclusive ownership of the patent. At any point, another party can buy the patent at its declared value, which discourages patent-holders from declaring artificially low values. The annual fee discourages artificially high valuations for indefinite periods of time -- as the patent yields less return over time it makes less sense to keep paying a high annual fee, encouraging owners to lower the declared valuation or end the patent protection altogether when it's no longer profitable.
To discourage hoarding patents indefinitely one could either set a hard upper limit (e.g. 60 years) or increase the fee over time, for example every few years the fee increases by 1% until at some point the patent is effectively publicly owned.
The framing of "low trust" vs "high trust" is useful but another important distinction when conducting business in different jurisdictions is whether *institutions* or *counterparties* are more trustworthy.
If institutions such as courts are trustworthy (in that they will impartially adjudicate contracts and help you enforce their terms) then you are able to work with a wider spectrum of counterparties who you do not yet trust. You just have to document and hedge against the risk via contracts and insurance, as you point out.
If institutions such as courts are absent, corrupt, or otherwise captured then you must ensure that you only interact with counterparties that you can trust or have direct leverage over. Perhaps ones with which you share personal or reputational connections.
The country as a whole may be "rich" in terms of GDP but school districts are funded locally and many towns are struggling or underwater in terms of finances.
I lived in a working class town with a school district that built up a great reputation, especially for special needs students, due to the hard work of some amazing teachers and local parents. After I left I found out that the district had to scale back many programs dramatically because the number of students, especially special needs students, was growing significantly faster than the overall tax base and got close to bankrupting the town. Most of that was an increase in the ratio of families (esp special needs families) moving to town for the schools, but apparently there were fraud cases as well.
I have sympathy for the incoming families that sought out the best school they could find for their children, but I also sympathize with the existing families who lost the great programs they helped build because they became too successful.
A better solution would have been to fund education more equitably at the state level, but that was not a lever that the school district had.
> A better solution would have been to fund education more equitably at the state level
Which could only work if the state was "richer" than the local district. So by playing abstract and unnecessary games with money and districting we intentionally prevent schools from accessing the funding which could obviate concerns over this "fraud" issue entirely.
> but that was not a lever that the school district had at the time.
The idea of a parent "fraudulently" getting their child an education from a "district" is still just hilarious to me. What is the point of this system? To make parents play games or to educate children?
> [funding at the state level] could only work if the state was "richer" than the local district
It's not whether the state is "richer", it's whether the state has a more stable percentage of student-age children, especially high cost students (e.g. special needs, behavioral issues).
Let's say the median student costs ~$20k per year and an outlier who needs individualized help due to special needs or behavioral issues costs ~$150k per year. The expectation is that each district is able to amortize these costs across a diverse tax base. But families, especially those with higher-cost students, frequently shop between neighboring districts to get the best schools for their kids, which is completely rational. Even wealthy cities and towns can be bankrupted if they attract a sufficiently high percentage of households with students, especially higher-cost students. (If this is not obvious I'd be happy to provide an example.) Because of this, even when administrators talk about improving their schools, behind closed doors they'll admit that there's a limit to how much more attractive they can afford to make their school than neighboring districts, especially with regard to special needs programs.
However, because it is less common for families to move across state lines for better schools, states are more insulated from this sort of adverse selection (New Jersey notwithstanding).
> we intentionally prevent schools from accessing the funding which could obviate concerns over this "fraud" issue entirely.
Exactly. No family or school administrator wants to play these ridiculous games, but our inequitable funding structure forces them to.
The point of the system is for wealthier areas to have good schools, and not be forced to contribute their property taxes towards poorer minority areas.
> it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.
I agree with this but minimizing the cost changes the ROI.
Personally, I've discovered useful insights tracking various life metrics. But I also found quickly diminishing returns after a few weeks or months -- if an association isn't obvious within that timeframe it's either too much effort to isolate or too slow or small to matter.
At various points I've tracked calories, macronutrients, weight, allergens, supplements, sleep, exercise volume, exercise timing, nighttime screen use, spending/budget, air quality, and mood. Now I know what kind of cooking wrecks the air quality in my house, what foods I don't digest well, what various protein/carb/fat ratios look like on my plate, how much effort it takes to improve fitness, that exercise in the morning or early afternoon improves my sleep while exercise in the evening harms it, and that any alcohol or caffeine wreck my sleep while screens at night have no measurable effect. But once I understand the associations I can alter my behavior and move on.
> The whole "quantified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else.
I would agree that continuing to track metrics every day long after they've stopped yielding new insights is often compulsive behavior. But I think that's an argument for time-boxing experiments, not necessarily avoiding them altogether.
> That only works if your printouts aren’t too long
It depends on what you mean by "too long".
A few folks in my office have binders with dog-eared code printouts for some of the more stable internal libraries in our codebase. A 3" thick 3-ring binder can hold a little over a million lines of code. I wouldn't use it for Firefox (~21M LOC) or Linux (~40M LOC) because you'd need to dedicate several shelves and print it regularly to be useful. And there's no grep. But for things like a stable, versioned library it can be very useful.
Whereas many Notes applications were internal so there was no "survival of the fittest" and the UI toolkit was passable at best. As a result, many Notes users never experienced a well-designed Notes app.
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