Apparently they consider platforming hate speech to be beneficial because it could bolster sympathy for the groups being attacked. I wish I was joking.

https://www.platformer.news/meta-new-trans-guidelines-hate-s...

Alex Schultz, the company’s chief marketing officer and highest-ranking gay executive, suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.

My personal favorites on his blog are the series on how people produced Bread, Clothing, and Iron in the premodern world. The depth there is amazing, going into all the raw materials and different skills and processes required to support agriculture, textile production, and metallurgy. It really gives you a deep sense of the material conditions that shaped life in the past, and how alien pre-modern economic existence would be to 21st century folks (clothing and food were really really expensive, like one new set of clothes a year expensive, whereas housing costs were proportionally low). Highly recommended.

This is partially why UX research typically starts with rough wireframes rather than full application design, even in front of clients. The idea is that the lack of fidelity forces the client/user to focus on the functionality of the app rather than the bells and whistles of the design (especially of the visual kind).

The impression I think is that the more polished a product or MVP looks, the more "finished" it is and therefore the more open it'll be to criticism (there's literally more of the product to criticise). This could be a good thing, since it gives you much more insight into what needs to be improved for the final product

There is never a bad time to plug Egan on HN. Diaspora is one of his novels around just this topic. If you decide to read it, strap in, you're going for a mind bending ride. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156785.Diaspora

I started and ran a science-oriented theme camp out there for over a decade as an impoverished academic, and a lot of my friends in the Bay Area help build or manage the event. I’m neither rich nor a hippy.

To me, the fundamental idea of the event is that we’ve become divorced from the act of creation and civic participation due to being enmeshed in a highly commodified, transactional society and that it’s worth trying to address that. Most people can’t use a torque-driver or recognize a turnbuckle. But people can learn, and when they get involved in build projects or camps out there they do. They start trying. It’s amateur art hour write very large, but the beauty of it is how many people start trying to make something of their own, sometimes with amazing results.

The event is flawed as hell and always has been, but it remains an astounding expression of labor devoted to the amateur’s search for meaning through creation. It’s art will never appeal to the traditional critic who worries more about the statement of art than it’s artifact. They can look down their noses at the idealism of those who thought to try to make something for once, instead of leaving the important job of art to those who know better, who have the right ideals, the right politics, the right message. We’re going to continue to do carpentry, to make circuit boards, to write software, and to teach others to get involved in the art of trying.