> I understand completely why this was kept quiet.
Are you suggesting that Apple and Facebook normally have these kinds of discussions in public? Because that is not at all the case.
Possibly there is something nefarious going on here. But the fact these talks were secret means nothing, since all talks between companies are secret by default.
Right now there is a desperate PR push to make Apple look like they wanted Facebook's ad business and that tracked ads really aren't all that bad.
It seems part of a larger campaign to force apple to drop tracking protections by making these efforts appear not as privacy protection, but rather an anti-competitive strategy to boost their own ads sales.
HN is falling over themselves in the process. Anyone that tells you that tracked ads are just about matching your preferences is lying to you on purpose.
The same HN is telling me all Ads are evil, one could argue they are delusional?
Even though I am glad this whole Anti-Ad thing is finally receiving some push back, I do agree and I am slightly suspicious of some PR push behind it. But I will give them benefits of doubt because it could also be people finally waking up to Apple's insane Hypocrisy.
It’s not isolated to Apple. Seeing it against Duck duck go as well.
For both it’s the same faulty arguments that are built around a false equivalence that all types of data collection are the same and aggressively downplaying the harm of tracked ad networks.
They also happen to be full of technical mistakes that are incorrect enough to be intentional lying.
It's a good start, but it's more of an illustration than a logo to be honest. It should work as a single color (white, black), at small scale and in combination with your product name.
I’ve had luck with similar things by being careful about my text prompt. Asking for tiny icon sized images also seems to clue it into the stylistic constraints of tiny icons (like what you mention).
Yes, the main usecase for DALL-E is probably for illustrations next to a story/blog. Logos are much harder to get right, and unsurprisingly DALL-E is not up to the task (yet).
It would need to be turned into a vector to scale properly but I can think of other apps that have complex logos, especially on the MacOS ecosystem. Git Tower comes to mind.
I’m a huge supporters of unions, but Amazon has been very open about their opposition to unions. The fundamental argument for unions is that companies serve shareholders at the expense of workers. Opposing unions is some kind of shocking corporate malfeasance, it’s just the nature of capitalism.
If your ML model is able to predict what consumers are going to buy, the revenue lift would be zero.
Let's say I go to the store to buy milk. The store has a perfect ML model, so they're able to predict that I'm about to do that. I walk into the store and buy the milk as planned. So how does the ML help drive revenue? The store could make my life easier by having it ready for me at the door, but I was going to buy it anyway, so the extra work just makes the store less profitable.
Maybe they know I'm driving to a different store, so they could send me an ad telling me to come to their store instead. But I'm already on my way, so I'll probably just keep going.
Revenue comes from changing consumer behavior, not predicting it. The ideal ML model would identify people who need milk, and predict that they won't buy it.
This is incorrect. You can predict many things that drive incremental revenue lift.
The simplest: Predict what features a user is most interested in, drive them to that page (increasing their predicted conversion rate) -> purchases that occur now that would not have occurred before.
Similarly: Predict products a user is likely to purchase given they made a different purchase. The user may not have seen these incremental products. For example, users buys orange couch, show them brown pillows.
Like above, the same actually works for entirely unrelated product views. If users views x,y,z products we can predict they will be interested in product w and we can advertise it.
Or we predict a user was very likely to have made a purchase, but hasn’t yet. Then we can take action to advertise to them (or not advertise to them).
ML is useful for many things. I'm asking the question of whether prediction is useful, and whether it is accurate to describe ML as making predictions.
The reason to raise those questions is that for many people, the word prediction has connotations of surveillance and control, so it is best not to use it loosely.
The meaning of the word "predict" is to indicate a future event, so it doesn't make grammatical sense to put a present tense verb after it, as you have done in "Predict what features a user is most interested in." Aside from the verb being in the present tense, being interested in something is not an event.
You can't predict a present state of affairs. If I look out the window and see that it is raining, no one would say that I've predicted the weather. If I come to that conclusion indirectly (e.g. a wet umbrella by the door), that would not be considered a prediction either because it's in the present. The accurate term for this is "inference", not "prediction".
The usage of the word predict is also incorrect from the point of view of an A/B test. If your ML model has truly predicted that your users will purchase a particular product, they will purchase it regardless of which condition they are in. But this is the null hypothesis, and the ML model is being introduced in the treatment group to disprove this.
You can predict a present state of affairs if they are unknown to you.
I predict the weather in NYC is 100F. I don’t know whether or not that is true.
Really a pedantic argument, but to appease your phrasing you can reword my comment with “We predict an increase in conversion rate if we assume the user is interested in feature x more than feature y”
That is a normal usage in the tech industry, but that's not how ordinary people use that word. More importantly, it's not how journalists use that word.
In ordinary language, you are making inferences about what users are interested in, then making inferences about what products are relevant to that interest. The prediction is that putting relevant products in front of users will make them buy more - but that is a trivial prediction.
Exactly. I know someone who does this for a certain class of loans, based on data sold by universities (and more).
Philosophically -- personally -- I think this is just another way big data erodes our autonomy and humanity while _also_ providing new forms of convenience. We have no way of knowing where suggestions come from, or which options are concealed. Evolution provides no defense against this form of manipulation. It's a double edged sword, an invisible one.
If the store knows you will want to buy milk, it will have milk in stock according to demand. If it doesn't have a perfect understanding of whether or not people want to buy milk, the store will over/under stock and lose money.
Also in the age of social media, visual identity is less about the wordmark. For most of these companies, their word mark doesn’t even show up on their social media feeds. Most have guidelines that often include a custom typeface, specific types of photography, editorial layouts, illustrations that define the brand.
It depends on how you define design. Herbert Simon defined it as “to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” And there’s a lot of academic work around that.
The problem is that that’s not how the word is used in practice. I think most people would call that “planning”, and certainly design is a type of planning, but not all planning is done by people who we call designers.
I think a better definition that’s actually used in practice is that design is a way of looking at a product as if it was a kind of communication. The central question is “how will people perceive this?” so any type of art skill—not just visual arts, but theatre, music, writing, etc—is potentially transferable.
Communication is a universal human skill, so it raises the question of why a separate discipline has emerged in companies to handle the communicative aspects of the product. And I think this is because many people who work in tech fields are educated in fields with very specific conventions of communication, and an expectation that the burden of understanding lies with the listener. When these norms inform the creation of a product, especially when it’s aimed at non-technical users, it leads to “bad design”.
I just don’t find it plausible that only certain people are capable of love, trust, loyalty, etc. and we should be looking for those kinds of people. It seems more likely that this level of investment is costly and people already have these kinds of relationships.
The argument seems tautological. A good friend is someone who is loyal, trustworthy, etc., so look for these traits. But in reality, everyone has these traits, they just reserve them for a small number of high investment relationships. So the claim is that to make good friends, look for someone who wants to be your friend. Which isn’t that helpful at the end of the day.
I suspect that Girard’s ideas are a touch more sophisticated than “people are sheep”. Unfortunately if you see his name in a headline, that’s usually all that’s being said.
> He is an incarnation in the flesh of state corporatism and a anti-democracy activist. That I can not stomach
I couldn't see a shred of this. Can you point to a specific example that influenced your stance? (direct source). Thiel has a combination of liberal, liberatarian and conservative views. He strongly opposes authoritarianism of any kind and promotes individualism.
From this clip, he describes himself as an individualist which is literally the opposite of any authoritarian/collectivist society: https://youtu.be/YK3Tzx-S264?t=54
And him directly addressing Democracy which your stance seems uninformed:
> In a Democracy, if 51% of population believes then it is better, there is a certain bias towards majoritarianism, if you have 70% of the population that believes in something, then it is even more true. But if you go from 51% to 70% to 99%, then you've gone from Democracy to North Korea. At what point do we go from wisdom of crowds to madness of crowds?
I do not feel obligated to argue with you. If you hold someone in esteem who questioned female suffrage due to its detrimental effects to libertarianism we will never see eye to eye.
Naive responses like this either do not understand him or listens to mainstream opinion too much. It is neither intellectual, nor inquisitive. I disagree with him very much but there is no doubt he is an independent thinker.
I actually read The Scapegoat and liked it. I’m not sure he could convince me of his thesis due to the unfalsifiable nature of his arguments; but he is an interesting thinker.
However, due to the high probability that blog-like content mentioning Girard shares Thiel’s ethos, I am obliged to pass on principal.
That "people are sheep "is merely the first idea that his thinking is based off of. The rest of it is about the mechanics that follow. If you actually read the article you can see that there's a discussion of those ideas beyond merely "people are sheep".
Just to play devil's advocate, surely their approach is more rational than that. They're probably looking at it from the perspective that the business needs to have a profit margin of X in order to justify investing in it.
They probably do understand that cutting costs impacts company culture and morale. But shutting the company down probably impacts that much more.
They do understand that cutting costs will have an impact on culture and morale, they just think the marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost. Keep in mind, PEG managers are chasing a carried interest bonus which they only achieve after covering the minimum return promised to their investors. Plus, leveraged buyouts--which PEGs frequently use--increase a company's risk of failure. Everyone's under intense pressure to perform.
Zizek’s argument is that cynicism is the prevailing form of “ideology”. Cynicism is a position of doubt, skepticism, seeing through illusions, knowing better than the deluded masses. The view that everyone is manipulated while only you see the truth is the ultimate ideological position because it presupposes a neutral and objective position.
The linked article falls into this trap. It sees through “ideology” - meaning political theory - on the grounds that it oppresses the individual. The problem is that this itself a political ideology.
> The view that everyone is manipulated while only you see the truth is the ultimate ideological position
Except Zizek never claims that. Not everyone is claiming "only I see the truth and you are a sheep". Some of us are claiming we are all being manipulated and need to be aware: ourselves included.
I think it is disingenuous for you to make that straw-man, to claim people who say ideology is harmful somehow think they are better than everyone else because only they see the truth.
That only serves to put a spotlight on your own personal axe to grind.
If you remember from the documentary the analysis of the movie They Live, the protagonist puts on the glasses in order to see the truth. For Zizek, the putting on (not taking off) of the glasses is crucial. It is specifically not a gesture of unmasking:
“The key feature here is that to see the true nature of things, we need the glasses: it is not that we should put ideological glasses off to see directly reality as it is”: we are “naturally” in ideology, our natural, immediate, sight is ideological.”
I've been thinking about this for a day and thanks for pointing this out. I remember the scene well, as I've seen the film several times, but I didn't catch the distinction between putting glasses on and taking them off. As you quoted, clearly Zizek said this, but it just never registered this way.
However, I'm still having trouble internalizing your claim that the belief that you have to put on the glasses is in itself an ideology. How? Is it an ideology in the sense that anyone can apply it by saying, "Ah, you don't see the truth," where the truth can be whatever you say it is?
Wouldn't Zizek have noticed that? Or is it intentional since the entire film is about ideology, and that's kind of a perversion of ideology.
Well, it doesn't help that the word ideology is being used in different ways. In non-Marxist contexts, an ideology is a political theory: liberalism, socialism, fascism, etc. When Zizek uses the word, it is in the traditional Marxist sense of the beliefs and ideas that sustain capitalism, especially that persuade the working class to support capitalism. An ideological statement would be something like "rising tides lift all boats" to support cutting taxes for the rich.
Zizek uses the metaphor of parallax to explain ideology. Parallax is the phenomenon where a distant object's position seems to shift depending on the position of the viewer. Two people looking at the same object from different angles will see something different. Zizek's point is that this isn't an epistemic problem where one person is wrong (lying, deluded, etc.) and the other is right. The conflict is ontological—the parallax shift is part of reality itself.
The true ideological move is to claim that you've stepped back from the conflicting perspectives to a neutral, objective standpoint, some kind of middle ground where all differences are reconciled. This move is always epistemic, i.e. "Both sides have good points, but they're blinded by their beliefs and can't see how things really are." The truth is not a middle position halfway between two people who are looking out at a distant object and seeing different things due to parallax.
Zizek says the They Live glasses are like critique-of-ideology glasses, not because they show the that the "true" meaning behind advertising is "Obey", "Consume", etc. It's because they render the conflict visible. Ultimately, one is forced to pick a side-which is a political choice-because there is no neutral objective position.
It's kinda like the "Marxism problem" where the critique of capitalism has a lot to offer but the solutions are incredibly lacking. Just because capitalism is flawed doesn't mean that socialism is the answer.
Are you suggesting that Apple and Facebook normally have these kinds of discussions in public? Because that is not at all the case.
Possibly there is something nefarious going on here. But the fact these talks were secret means nothing, since all talks between companies are secret by default.