Viewing profile — samizdatum

Maximin is probably better for avoiding those pesky "torture/enslave half of humanity" scenarios.

Yes, a utility monster is conceivable under both theories. It's amusing how a utility monster represents a serious objection for utilitarian philosophers, but is a total non-concer…

> See, in this family, we DON’T just want to maximize the overall quantity of individual happiness (like Bentham). No… In this family, we want to maximize the overall quantity AND …

I'm pretty confident that Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, composed the greatest single-sentence ode to toothpaste ever written: "In the pipefitters’ sheds, icicled, rattling when th…

In a banal sense, it's correct to say that there's no searcher, no goal to evolution. As far as we know, "natural selection" isn't "real" in the sense that electromagnetism is "rea…

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that evolution is a tautological collapse of the "why" in "why do we exist". Let me explain: evolution is a massive, groping searc…

I think I was addressing attitudes towards new technologies, rather than their actual impacts, which you quite rightly focus on. I'm less convinced that the impacts of these new te…

Virtual reality is perhaps an unfortunate moniker, because it encourages a dichotomisation of reality into the "virtual" and "real", and conceiving of these as opposing, or at leas…

I think societal condemnation is inconsistent, poorly calibrated, and largely rooted in exogenous/historical factors. The outrage over isolated killings of charismatic megafauna is…

I'm baffled that this sort of discourse is considered acceptable. Not in an "I-feel-appalled" sort of way, but in a very literal, "why doesn't society treat this like racism or sex…

Location: Melbourne, Australia Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies (Ranked 1-3 experience [3 is highest]): - Web: React/Redux (2), Angular 1x (3), Gulp (2), protracto…

You're implying that if something can be outdone it doesn't have a purpose, which seems to rule out purposes for pretty much everything. I'm sure there's always someone that can wr…

Voting is compulsory in Australia.

I find this is one of the biggest problems with object-oriented programming. The object is a terrible unit of abstraction, because it forces you to carve up your domain into rigid …

Fair enough, but I think that's a separate issue. If we go down this path, we'd be diluting the term "UX" to homeopathic levels. I wouldn't criticize an iOS-only app for bad UX bec…

Fair enough. Do you think informal discussions benefit from a focus on thematic engagement, rather than logical minutiae?

Virtual reality is perhaps an unfortunate moniker, because it encourages a dichotomisation of reality into "virtual" and "real", and conceiving of these as opposing, or at least or…

Why not? That's a very strong statement. I could think of a countless number of bets that trivially match your criteria (i.e. even odds Facebook will not stop selling ads this year…

Yeah, this article reads like someone was forced by their employer to write a blog post. If it was for self-promotion you'd think they'd put a bit more effort into it. Would be bet…

In theory, the only irreducible UX distinction surrounding logically separate pages in a traditional website vs a SPA is that the SPA doesn't do the full postback, which is arguabl…

Fair enough, you meant to refer to a subset of web development, rather than the entire field. It's a significantly weaker claim, though. I could pick out subsets of any field of wo…

Saying an application has a "horrendous UX" because you refuse to run its code seems strange to me. You could disable CSS and images and call the result ugly, but I don't think tha…

Really? Functional reactive programming, immutable data, unidirectional data flow, application state as a fold over a stream of actions... it seems like web development is seeing a…

SPAs don't need to have horrendous UX?