“Trillions of dollars flow through the human hand,” Agrawal says. “To me, this is the biggest problem in the world to be solved.”
They need to work on their messaging. "Human hands are a problem" is going to make enemies. Perhaps "relieve humans of menial chores" and "take over dangerous jobs" and "enable precision not possible with the human hand" etc.
True, I'm just saying I don't think that's where the problems originate.
In my practice, I'll try a Jedi mind trick, e.g. "Trying to [state larger goal] makes a lot of sense. An even more effective way to do that is to [state alternate, non-toxic technique]."
The OP blames "various idiot web 'designers'" for problems, but in my 30 years of being a web designer I have yet to meet one designer that wants to cause these problems. It's usually people responsible for generating revenue.
As long as the states pay for it. If some people insist on living in the desert, the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for it. Civilization happens elsewhere.
On the topic of getting things done, I’ve applied a bit of software development skills to making music. Instead of creating an increasingly growing body of works I focus on a smaller number of “products” that I improve on over time. I get some ideas that are my backlog and I implement them and release a new version. I think of it as an analog to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; one work that he made and just kept improving over the course of his lifetime.
- Psychologically I remind myself it's OK to feel hungry. I reframed feelings of hunger from a signal that I forgot to eat to a signal that in a few hours I'll need to eat, as if hunting and gathering will take a few hours so my body is telling me to start now :-)
"...what made the people with high vitamin D levels so healthy was not the vitamin itself. That was just a marker. Their vitamin D levels were high because they were getting plenty of exposure to the thing that was really responsible for their good health—that big orange ball shining down from above."
There's a saying that for every trend there's an anti-trend. I do wonder when we'll reach a critical mass of subscription services such that a preference against subscriptions in general becomes a trend.
I thought it was awesome what these Argentinians were doing when I moan about the processing power of my oldish MacBook Pro. And I was impressed with the phrasing of the raps.
But of the two examples I clicked through, one focused on violence and the other objectified women. But the sample size of people they profiled was tiny. Maybe if they sought out a female music producer they'd find the Argentinian Grimes?
Imagine a world where people only bought bespoke suits. You go to a tailor and are measured and pick out your fabric and wait a few weeks. Then you pick up your suit. It's perfect. You pay $5000 and take it home.
Most of us don't do that. Most of us make due with off the rack suits with some tailoring for 1/10th the price.
With programming we have an expectation of bespoke design, so anything less, even if it's much easier, seems lame.
A potentially useful reframing of the question is, "What are all the common use cases that could be solved sufficiently with significantly less effort using visual programming?"