I'm not so sure. The problem when the only "wall between genders" that's "erected" is consent, you often find out too late that it's not strong enough of a wall. It seems like at Atari in the 1970's it was fine, but there are easily identifiable places it was not, like most of Hollywood in the current decade.
I'm guessing something else about Atari's culture prevented the kind of problems that can crop up when you have a relaxed sexual attitude, but it isn't as easy to identify.
Here's my take on it: From the way it is described, 70s Atari allowed both men and women to make passes at each other. For some reason it seems to have mostly worked in that people respected a simple 'no' - there were enough ways out for everyone to keep face. Meanwhile today it appears to me that this courtesy is only allowed one-way today (i.e. for men it's generally verboten outside the accepted dating arena). The egregious offenders like Weinstein are still out there and they seem to find ways to get around these issues, but for everyone who isn't in a completely lob-sided power relationship or who has normal levels of decency this is out of the question. My point is: By not allowing it even in a respectful way, men get fearful of women in the workplace and would often rather just surround themselves with other men in order to not be exposed to any risks of being accused. Since men still hold most power positions this could have a chilling effect on women moving up. My hypothesis (and I do acknowledge here that it's only a hypothesis, but I would love to get some evidence either way) is that the two issues are related: Free love coupled with respect could be a strong enhancer of mobility in hierarchies, both for women in male dominated and men in female dominated fields.
Right, but the women at Atari weren't disenfranchised. Even in the 1970s, their alternatives to working at Atari were numerous. The secretary there who was "stacked" wasn't facing an alternative of no employment or living in Bangladesh if she didn’t like hot tub meetings; she could go work at any company in America that didn't have hot tub meetings, which was all of them.
I've never heard of Notch having strong biases regarding social issues and the game industry. I quickly googled but all I could find were references to some tweets he deleted about some "heterosexual pride" or something that he later apologized for.
Do you have a link or can you sumarize what those biases are?
See, "we're not Google" should actually mean that you care about performance more. Google can throw millions of dollars worth of infrastructure into making an app go marginally faster. Whereas, all you have is brainpower before you deploy or ship. And it doesn't take that much more brainpower to get big increases in client performance when you're starting from not-optimized-at-all. The marginal payoff is larger and the marginal costs are much smaller.
Just a guess: You were alive when progress marched on before your eyes. Animations are "new" to you, and like many people you have some sort of implicit association somewhere in the back of your mind that "new == better"
Do you ever find some animations to be lower quality than others? E.g. a pop up with a progress bar being lower quality than a spinning wheel? That might be another sign.
That's a good starting point. I'd drill down even further and ask "what does the user do with the application?"
If the user needs to look at multiple screens at a time (e.g. like a mail client or something of similar complexity), then they're a candidate for an SPA. If the user does not need to do that, the app is probably simple enough to not be an SPA.
The problem with SPAs in the sort of cases that the author is talking about is that people don't think clearly about what requirements they are satisfying when writing a new one. If your app actually needs to switch between various screens without a refresh so your users can most efficiently get their work done, then yes, by all means, make an SPA. That requires knowing clearly who your users are, what they want to do, and what constraints they are under (e.g. if they all work on desktops with good internet access, maybe it doesn't matter that your app is bloated and slow on mobile). I think most people don't do that thinking step first. They want to play with the new shiny, either as a sort of fun or so they can add it to their resume.
This I think is made worse by the unparalleled decadence in which the modern, first-world developer now lives. It is absolutely excessive to have to download 2.6 MB just to show a blog or some simple textual information, but thanks to broadband everywhere and terabyte hard drives, nobody under the age of 30 who isn't working in embedded systems thinks about this anymore.
People always say things like this about despotic regimes while they're in power. Yet, every time they fall, we almost invariably learn that things were actually much worse.
Like, I remember in the original gulf war, we were told that soldiers were taking infants out of incubators at leaving them on the floor. An Iraqi refugee testified before congress that this was happening. Turned out to be total bullshit.
"Everytime" as the OP says is too strong. But we have often learned that things were bad beyond belief, as in the Holodomor and The Great Chinese Famine.
Also with Iraq there were incredible actions carried out against the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds and also chemical weapons were used by Saddam Hussein. The thing was a lot, perhaps the worst, were carried out when Hussein was an ally of the West against Iran.
Both sides are full of examples, the same thing happened before both Iraq wars but at the same time there were vocal doubters of the early information about the Rwandan genocide and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.
We can never be certain how bad things are, but we do know how bad countries look after US intervention.
> In her 1974 memoir, ''Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'' (Bobbs-Merrill), she wrote that she was ''perplexed'' that the West had accepted ''The Gulag Archipelago'' as ''the solemn, ultimate truth,'' saying its significance had been ''overestimated and wrongly appraised.''
> Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.
That book was quite literally written by the KGB [0], and his (ex-)wife had KGB ties [1].
From [1]:
>In 1974, shortly before The Gulag Archipelago was due to appear, Natalya Reshetovskaya was recruited by the KGB to try and persuade Solzhenitsyn not to publish.
That's all according to a defector (which brings us back to the original conversation) and a member of MI5. The notes that form the basis of those claims are still classified.
I was born in USSR, and lived in it enough to be able to reassure you it was not possible to publish a book there in 1974 just because you decided it for yourself. Even authors of fairytales were forced to make ideological "corrections", not to mention anything even distantly political.
Solzhenitsyn's typist hanged herself after she was compelled to give up one of three extant drafts of the book to the KGB. Who would do that over a collection of "camp folklore"?
I'm guessing something else about Atari's culture prevented the kind of problems that can crop up when you have a relaxed sexual attitude, but it isn't as easy to identify.