You heard 'em GET BACK IN THERE
It was 20 years ago proving they’ve never been any better and will never learn.
People should definitely learn about these, they affect an awful lot of our modern digital environment, not just in subscriptions but all the ways companies try to manipulate our behaviour.
Ever see a cookie popup and “Accept” is a big colourful button, but if you want to decline it’s behind a grey “more options” button, then you have to scroll through a dozen different categories and disable them all, then the button has some ambiguous label like “confirm cookie choices” which gives the impression you’re accepting them again? That’s a dark pattern.
User interface design has long known how to streamline a process and communicate with a user to increase the number of people who complete a certain task, so it’s a simple matter of inverting that logic to make a task hard and obscure to reduce that number.
What’s honestly surprising is that this is actually illegal somewhere. I didn’t realise there was any legislation about this.
I honestly think tech hype cycles don’t work if people can recognise them as hype cycles.
I think there are a lot of business majors out there with access to a lot of capital and absolutely no technical expertise making decisions about where all the money should go in tech, and experts talking about the limitations of that technology do not reach their ears.
And it’s especially confusing for people who use sane measurement systems where “mil” is short for “millimetre”, because it’s just the start of the word. I think anyone that still insists on measuring things in thousandths of an inch should keep their own bespoke lingo too, and everyone else should steadfastly refuse to acknowledge “mil” in this context.
EDIT: I should’ve read the article, but I’m taking the L and leaving this up with a strikethrough. The phrasing “after” in the headline definitely creates the wrong impression here. As for what this says about people, I guess we’ll have to see if the other ten whistleblowers still testify.
And if you think it’s too much to assume Boeing killed these two people, that’s the wrong question. It matters more whether as a fellow whistleblower it’s reasonable to worry about whether Boeing killed them, and I think it is.
Also Boeing definitely killed the first guy at least. “If I die, it’s not suicide.” - man who “committed suicide”. WTAF.
If you ever hear anyone talking about how humans suck and we’re all terrible and will definitely destroy ourselves, just think about the fact that killing whistleblowers was quickly followed by more whistleblowers. Not just lone heros, but ten fucking people said, “hey, fuck you, are you really gonna kill me too?” knowing that the answer could well be “yes”.
You’re right about the problems, but I wouldn’t characterise deregulation as a mistake, it was a calculated plan that achieved its goals which were to benefit capital.
I just think it’s important to understand that capitalism is set up to operate this way and will always devolve into barbarism.