[HN Gopher] What Killed Innovation?
___________________________________________________________________
What Killed Innovation?
Author : speckx
Score : 72 points
Date : 2025-03-25 13:26 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.shirleywu.studio)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.shirleywu.studio)
| Avshalom wrote:
| Unremarked is that while those examples are visually impressive,
| they're also unhelpful.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Exactly. I see a lot of graphs and animations that look cool
| but when you take a closer look, they convey not much
| information .
| findthewords wrote:
| Low interest rates.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Innovation is never constantly increasing. It usually appears in
| bursts, and stops around the point that humans don't need it as
| much, or development hits a ceiling of effort. But it's always
| slowly simmering. Usually it's research or yak-shaving that,
| after years, suddenly appears as if out of nowhere as a useful
| product.
|
| I am hopeful that in my lifetime, the web will die. It's such an
| insanely stupid application platform. An OS on an OS, in a
| document reader (which, due to humans' ability to go to any
| lengths to avoid hard work, literally all new network protocols
| have to be built on top of).
|
| You want cool visualizations? Maybe don't lock yourself into
| using a goddamn networked document viewer. Native apps can do
| _literally anything_. But here we are, the most advanced
| lifeforms on the planet, trapped in a cage of our own making.
| mjevans wrote:
| In HN spirit / guidelines, I'm going to presume the best.
|
| Did you mean: "the web (as an application platform) will die" /
| once again swing back from mainframe / thin client to powerful
| local computing platforms?
|
| In the spirit of empowering the user, I too hope the average
| user once again owns their destiny, the storage, computation,
| and control of their data. Though I think the web as a
| publishing media does empower that user if there are open
| platforms that promote the ability to choose any fulfillment
| partner they desire.
| billyp-rva wrote:
| > Native apps can do literally anything.
|
| That's just as much a downside as an upside. You're putting a
| lot of trust in a native app that you aren't putting in a
| website.
| nullpoint420 wrote:
| What about sandboxed native apps? If the browser can do it,
| why can't native apps do it as well?
| treyd wrote:
| We have sandboxing technology on every modern operating
| system.
| fumar wrote:
| I am exploring an alternative browser-like platform concept
| that would allow for near native performance. However
| established web protocols are hard to overcome.
| pphysch wrote:
| Stagnation in viz design has pretty much nothing to do with the
| shrinking native<->web capability gap, and the web is here to
| stay.
| feoren wrote:
| > An OS on an OS, in a document reader
|
| Versus an interpreted language executed in a runtime running on
| a virtual thread of an OS running on top of a BIOS over a
| glorified calculator!? Insanity! Whatever happened to good old-
| fashioned pen and paper!?
|
| There's nothing wrong with the model of delivering your
| software as a small program to run in a sandboxed browser
| environment. WASM, canvas, WebGL -- you can do nearly as much
| on the web as native nowadays, with a dead-simple deployment
| model. One of the only type of programs that's much harder to
| make in a web application is malware. Calling a modern browser
| a "networked document reader" is as silly as calling a modern
| computer a calculator.
| collingreen wrote:
| The DOM seems fair to call a networked document reader.
| You've suggested a different build target for what would have
| been native apps - I think you and OP meet in the middle a
| bit; you get the power of non-html app development. OP
| laments the overhead of having to shove that into the
| existing web model designed for documents; you appreciate the
| sandboxing.
|
| I think you have similar opinions that mostly overlap,
| regardless of insults about statements being silly.
| slt2021 wrote:
| >>Native apps can do literally anything
|
| like hack your banking account or steal your password...
| ericmcer wrote:
| The web is just a convention that gained rapid adoption so now
| browsers dominate software. As far as conventions go, it is not
| bad compared to some of the stuff humans have landed on. Better
| than paving over everything so we can drive and park cars all
| over, better than everything being single use and disposable.
| Web has it's ups and downs but it is decent based on our track
| record.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I am hopeful that in my lifetime, the web will die.
|
| I'd like to see the www go back to its roots as a way to share
| and browse documents, hyperlinked together. The web _worked_
| when it was just documents to render and click on links. It is
| terrible as an application platform.
|
| It's been 30 years since JavaScript was invented. Imagine what
| we'd have today, if instead of making the WWW into this half-
| assed application platform, those 30 years of collective
| brainpower were instead spent on making a great cross-platform
| native application development and delivery system!
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Native for Windows, Macs, Linux, iPhones and Android devices?
|
| Now imagine trying to update all of those native apps across
| a large enterprise or multiple large enterprises.
|
| Since I do use multiple devices, when everything is on the
| web, you also don't have to worry about syncing or conflict
| resolution like you do with semi connected scenarios.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Native for Windows, Macs, Linux, iPhones and Android
| devices?
|
| > Now imagine trying to update all of those native apps
| across a large enterprise or multiple large enterprises.
|
| With the tools we have now, it would absolutely not work.
| In my post I was imagining a parallel alternate universe
| where native development tools got all the brainpower and
| innovation over the last 30 years, instead of the web tools
| getting it.
| mjevans wrote:
| The web got it because for some _insane_ reason, websites
| were able to convince IT departments to allow scripts to
| run.
|
| That left the barn door unlocked. Suddenly the download
| everything every time (or hope some is at least cached)
| environment of JavaScript / ECMAScript became the ONE
| place a user could 'for sure' 'install' (run someone
| else's unapproved) program.
|
| -
|
| Websites, _really_, should work just fine with zero
| scripts turned on. Possibly with the exception of a short
| list of trusted or user approved websites.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| As opposed to native apps like the parent poster is
| proposing with no sandbox and that need to be created for
| each platform?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Native development's story has been, for the longest
| time, the native way or the highway, which is precisely
| why it failed in favor of web where everyone begrudgingly
| supports a common feature set. No one wants to implement
| the same feature in five different native idioms.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| We have JavaFX and Qt, and they're both better than ever, but
| they don't see much use. With JavaFX you can build and
| distribute a portable .jar file, and I think it can be used
| with JNLP/Java Web Start for distribution if you prefer that
| approach. With Qt, you're likely to be delivering self-
| contained native application packages in the target
| platform's native form.
|
| (JavaFX has been carved out of the core JVM, which is
| annoying, but if the target machine has a JVM installed that
| bundles JavaFX, you're all set.)
| sunrunner wrote:
| The web as it was originally conceived - readable (but not
| interactive) content with linked resources - feels a far cry
| from the web of today, a platform for interactive
| applications that seems to grow asymptotically towards
| feature-parity with native applications (UI, input handling,
| data processing, hardware access) while never quite getting
| there, encompassing the fundamental things that make
| 'applications' work.
|
| If the modern web _did_ reach feature parity in some way the
| real question would then be 'What makes it different?'. As
| linked resources doesn't seem like a particularly strong
| unique feature today the only other things I can think of are
| the simpler cross-platform experience and the ease of
| distribution.
|
| So then the questions are 'What would make for a better
| cross-platform development experience?' (Chromium embedded
| framework not included) and 'How do we make app distribution
| seamless?' Is it feasible or sensible to have users expect to
| access every application just by visiting a named page and
| getting the latest version blasted at their browser?
|
| And I guess that's how we got Chrome OS.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The web gained traction as a development platform because
| for the most part, it broadly works the same on every
| device due to the web standards, and so it's very easy to
| develop something that works consistently on all the
| different devices. Purists may bemoan that things no longer
| respect the "native look and feel" but that is a feature,
| not a bug, for the vast majority of users and developers.
| As an example, I absolutely hate that my work email on
| Outlook does not have the same feature set on Windows vs
| Mac vs whatever, and even in scenarios where application
| developers want to deliver the same features everywhere the
| minutiae of the native development patterns make it like
| herding cats.
|
| It is basically the electrical plug of our era, in that it
| is a means to an end, never mind if 110V 60Hz is
| necessarily the most efficient way to deliver power in the
| home in North America.
| LikeBeans wrote:
| MBAs and MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
| officialchicken wrote:
| No doubt due to structural tax changes that changed R&D into
| OpEx
| Zigurd wrote:
| The question I always ask clients is "What's your hypothesis
| for this being viable?" Many are shocked that the 'V' part
| exists.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| Quarterly profit over long term growth
| fullshark wrote:
| The economics don't support innovative web visualizations, a
| slight engagement boost for a day is the return on investment. If
| you're lucky it goes viral on social media, but there's far
| cheaper ways to accomplish that (e.g. inflammatory rhetoric).
| kappasan wrote:
| Perhaps it's just that data visualization has simply matured, and
| the field has converged on a narrow set of designs that are
| proven to work? The earlier, "experimental" examples given by the
| author are indeed beautiful, but I'm not really sure all the
| fancy animations help me grasp the underlying data.
| chiffre01 wrote:
| This basically sums it up:
|
| "Some information will always be best conveyed in a
| straightforward bar or line chart, particularly for audiences
| that don't have time to engage deeply"
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| When a new technology comes along no one knows what ideas are
| good and what ideas are bad, so people try a bunch of things and
| most of them aren't very useful and the few that are become
| standardized. In the case of UX stuff like visualizations users
| also learn the grammar of the technology and get used to seeing
| things done in certain ways, which makes it harder to do things
| differently.
|
| So basically there's less innovation in data visualization
| because we mostly figured out how to solve our data visualization
| problems. If you look at the history of printed visualizations I
| think you'd find a similar pattern. The only somewhat recent
| innovation I can think of there is the violin plot, which became
| possible due to advances in statistics that led to probability
| distributions becoming more important.
| kusokurae wrote:
| My irrational side really laments where many parts of modern
| life are in this process and how...standardised things have
| become. When I look at e.g. old camera designs, they are so
| much more exciting to see evolve, and offer so many cool
| variations on "box with a hole and a light sensitive surface in
| it". Seeing how they experimented and worked out different ways
| to make an image-making machine with that requirement, I feel
| like I'm missing out on a period of discovery and interesting
| development that now is at a well-optimised but comparatively
| homogenous dead end.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| Sometimes something is a "solved" problem. There hasn't been a
| lot of innovation in say, firearms, because we pretty much
| figured out the best way to make a gun ~100 years ago and there
| isn't much to improve.
|
| Not everything _needs_ innovation, and trying to innovate
| anyway just creates a solution in search of a problem.
| garciasn wrote:
| They said the same thing about hash tables. Innovation from a
| single individual blew away (no pun intended) all prior
| expectations and opened an entirely new baseline
| understanding of this.
|
| Just because we THINK we've solved the problem doesn't mean
| coming at it from an entirely different angle and redefining
| the entire paradigm won't pay dividends.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| That's true enough. We don't know what we don't know, and
| there's always the potential for some groundbreaking idea
| to shake things up. That's why it's important to fund
| research, even if that research doesn't have obvious
| practical applications.
|
| But this sort of innovation comes from having an actual
| solution that makes tangible improvements. It does not come
| from someone saying "this technology hasn't changed in
| years, we need to find some way to innovate!" That sort of
| thinking is how you get stuff like Hyperloop or other
| boondoggles that suck up a lot of investments without
| solving any problems.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| What's the history here?
| garciasn wrote:
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/undergraduate-
| upends-a-40-yea...
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| Correct title: What Killed Innovation in the Pretty Diagram
| field?
|
| I keep seeing books with interesting titles like "The evolution
| of clothing" and then see a subtitle like "In Wisconsin. Between
| 1985 and 1986."
| badc0ffee wrote:
| "From jean vests to jean jackets"
| praptak wrote:
| Even a small amount of data literacy makes you aware that
| visualizations can deceive. Pie charts make humans overestimate
| large percentages, nonzero axis is borderline fraud, choice of
| colors can totally warp color scales.
|
| I think that in this context it is expected for data literacy to
| make people suspicious of complex visualizations.
| garciasn wrote:
| Data literacy should come down to the data itself, not only the
| visualization of those data. Sure pie charts are the bane of
| Tufte's existence but even the best data visualizations of a
| particular segment of data can be misleading due to
| misrepresentation of the data underneath from collection to its
| analysis.
|
| People should be far more skeptical of what they are fed. Data
| narratives are often misleading with manipulation of the data,
| its aggregation, visualization, and especially the
| interpretation within context. Data literacy needs to address
| all of these, not simply the how it's visualized; that's simply
| the final step in the entire data and information lifecycle.
|
| I'm not saying "do your own research;" instead, folks should
| think critically about what they're seeing and attempt to
| understand what's presented and put it inside the appropriate
| context before taking anything at face value that they're
| shown, by any organization.
|
| e: just formatting
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > nonzero axis is borderline fraud
|
| This is an outrageously reductive meme that has long
| outstripped its actual usefulness and needs to die. The axis
| and scale should represent the useful range of values. For
| example, if your body temperature in Fahrenheit moves more than
| 5 degrees in either direction, you're having a medical
| emergency, but on a graph that starts from zero, this would
| barely be visible. Plotting body temperature from zero would
| conceal much more than it reveals, which is the opposite of
| what dataviz is supposed to do.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| this is a very rare case where nonzero axis is justifiable
|
| nevertheless >99% of cases where I am encountering nonzero
| axis it is misleading
|
| > The axis and scale should represent the useful range of
| values
|
| this should not be confused for "range of values present in
| data"
|
| often actually useful visualization would show that value
| barely changed - but it makes for more truthful and boring
| news, so is avoided
| teddyh wrote:
| The only reasonable zero-value for temperature is 0K, which
| unfortunately leads to unreadable graphs. (All other
| temperature scales are completely arbitrary.) So for the
| specific case of temperatures, it is in fact completely
| reasonable to have a nonzero axis. But most graphs are not
| temperatures.
| roenxi wrote:
| Pie charts are just as unreadable for medium and small
| percentages. They encode values as angles. Human perception is
| not suited to estimating angles relative to each other.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I have to make presentations on my teams status to boards and
| alike.
|
| No matter how cool solution my team uses and presents, it will be
| rejected.
|
| It will be rejected, because only static reports in two forms are
| accepted by the readers - PowerPoint slides or a PDF.
|
| I would love to get away from pie charts, line, and bar graphs.
| Alas, I am mostly stuck in this.
|
| Any suggestions? I have to show present and over time things.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| > I would love to get away from pie charts, line, and bar
| graphs.
|
| Why?
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Jack Welch.
| geye1234 wrote:
| Great answer. One of the most destructive people of the 20th
| Century.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Maturation killed what is considered innovation in this article.
| Many if not most of the visually impressive but didactically
| confusing innovations fell by the wayside. We're currently in a
| new wave of 'innovation' with LLM-generated summaries and
| 'helpful' suggestions being added here there and everywhere. Most
| of those will disappear as well once t becomes clear they do not
| add real value or once terminal devices - browsers etc - have
| such functionality built-in using locally executed models which
| are trained on user preferences (which will be extremely enticing
| targets for data harvesting so they better be well-protected
| against intruders).
| qoez wrote:
| There was probably a core of 50 people mainly responsible for
| these (with hundreds of thousands in awed aspiration/inspiration)
| who've since retired or moved on to other interests or got
| distracted by politics in the meantime after 2016, or any other
| similar reason. It was probably Mike Bostock's departure from the
| scene in 2017 that was the core catalyst.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Innovation in data visualization? From a purely utilitarian view,
| the purpose of data visualization is to present data in a way
| people can understand it. If you're constantly changing the
| method of visualizing the same thing it's harder to do that.
| Sometimes a bar chart is best.
|
| As far as cool visualizations go (that are better served as
| nonstandard visualizations) there are two recent ones that come
| to mind:
|
| https://youtu.be/TkwXa7Cvfr8 (Especially around 16:56)
|
| https://bbycroft.net/llm
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I'd also argue that even if all else is equal, a flashy
| visualization is worse than a conventional one, as you
| generally do not want to draw attention to the presentation if
| your aim is to convey information.
| borgdefenser wrote:
| I love data visualization but it very much reminds me of shred
| guitar playing, something I also use to very much love.
|
| What non-guitar players are complaining about the lack of
| innovation in shred guitar playing? It is just not something
| that non-guitar players really care much about. Good shred vs
| bad shred is all going to sound the same to the non-guitarist
| anyway.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I thought the youtube link would be this
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwIyd_gsGWA
| ralferoo wrote:
| Just looking at that "512 paths to the white house graphic", and
| I'd argue that it's more confusing than useful. Why is Florida at
| the top? Consider the point where it's "Obama has 255 ways" and
| "Romney has 1 way". What's the point of the massive arrow to
| Florida and then taking a very specific route to success? This
| would only make sense if there is a pre-determined order in which
| the results must come.
|
| The way it's been done in the past in the UK, for instance, is "A
| needs X more seats to win, B needs Y more seats to win, Z more
| seats remain". Simple, clear, and no flashy graphics required.
|
| I know the situation in the US is a bit more complicated with
| different numbers of representatives per state, but it's still
| not especially useful to prioritise one state over another in the
| graphic, because what's important is the relative difference
| between the totals so far received.
|
| I get that there could be some more presentation towards uncalled
| results and the expected outcome, but it doesn't look like that
| graph gives that, which would be far more useful than this thing
| with arrows.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| The US news covers the US elections from a really strange
| angle. They act as though even as the votes are coming in, and
| there is nothing more the candidates can do to change the
| outcome, that they are still "looking for a path to victory"
| and they list all of the "paths to victory" that could be
| possible. As though we're watching them stumble through a dark
| forest.
| lxgr wrote:
| I had the exact same thought here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43473149
|
| Really bewildering from an epistemic point of view, even if
| it's "just a metaphor". (And do people really generally
| understand it to be just that?)
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| > Why is Florida at the top?
|
| As you mention, the number of electors per state varies by
| quite a bit. E.g., in the 2012 election covered by the chart,
| Florida had 29 electors, Ohio had 18 electors, and North
| Carolina had 15 electors, which is why those three states
| appear at the top.
|
| The main important effect is that (with only some small
| exceptions) if a candidate wins a simple majority of the votes
| in a state, then they receive all of that state's electors.
| E.g., if a candidate wins 50.01% of the Florida vote, they get
| 29 electors, but if they win 49.99% of the vote, they get 0
| electors. See: the 2000 election, where the overall outcome
| depended on a few hundred votes in this way.
|
| This means there's a lot of focus on 'flipping' states one way
| or the other, since their electoral votes all come in blocks.
| What the chart is showing is that if Romney won Florida, he
| could afford to lose a few other contested states and still win
| the national election. But if Obama won Florida (as he in fact
| did), then Romney would need every other state to go his way
| (very unlikely!) if he still wanted to have a chance.
|
| That is to say, Florida really was extremely important, given
| the structure of U.S. presidential elections: it would make or
| break a candidate's whole campaign, regardless of what happened
| in the rest of the country. And similarly, the remaining states
| are ordered by decreasing importance.
|
| Of course, while results are being counted, you also see
| simpler diagrams of the current situation. The classic format
| is a map of the country with each state colored red or blue
| depending on which way it flips. This is often accompanied by a
| horizonal line with a red bar growing from one side, a blue bar
| growing from the other side, and a line in the middle. But
| people are interested in which states are more important than
| others, which creates the imagery of 'paths to win'.
| disambiguation wrote:
| The wave of innovation starts with "ooh shiny new thing" and ends
| with camps of made up minds. In the case of data visualization,
| you have the no frills analyzers in one camp who only see visuals
| as distractions at best and sleight of hand at worst, and short
| attention span info-tainment consumers in the other camp that are
| not only easy to please but may even find your overly elaborate
| data driven stories annoying. What remains is a vanishingly small
| venn diagram of data-savvy readers and practitioners.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| The loss of function in favor of form. Examples include
| needlessly complex data visualizations and vague clickbaity
| titles.
| lxgr wrote:
| Is it just me, or is this "paths to victory" metaphor for
| presidential elections commonly used by US media a pretty strange
| way to "narrate" an election outcome, all things considered?
|
| The outcome is effectively fixed, although unknown, once the last
| polling stations close, so what's with all the evocations of
| physical phenomena ("blue wall", "battleground states" etc.) when
| everything that's still happening is a gradual discovery of a
| completely determined outcome?
| fullshark wrote:
| It's a way to make sense of chaos and generate a narrative to
| follow, also how millions of individual votes get reduced into
| large scale trends (gen alpha men want X, Boomer women living
| in suburbs want Y, etc).
|
| People are invested in the outcome and want to know if things
| are headed in the direction they desire.
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| I think the parent is trying to point out that it's not "are
| headed", it's "were decided, over 5 hours ago".
| Ragnarork wrote:
| I'm not sure about this. Why do we constantly need new ways of
| presenting data?
|
| My main concern is that eventually it becomes easy to read and
| interpret data, especially for people that are not used to it,
| that are less data- or science-savvy in a way. That it's
| accessible.
|
| It's good to try to find _better_ ways to present certain cases,
| but also it 's only needed as far as it's useful, and otherwise I
| feel consistency is way better instead of keeping churning out
| new ways to look at it that require an effort on the consumer
| part (no matter how beautiful / well presented this is) to figure
| out what they want to know out of it.
|
| Innovation for the sake of usefulness is good. Innovation for the
| sake of innovation feels... definitely not as good (although I
| wouldn't discard it completely).
| nine_k wrote:
| Have we already achieved the absolute optimal ways to visualize
| data? Maybe in some simple cases, yes, but not necessarily in
| all practical cases.
|
| Should new and better ways to visualize data look drastically
| different from what we're used to? Maybe, but likely not very
| often. Revolutionary changes are rare, and incremental
| improvements are important.
| arscan wrote:
| Good ones are expensive to create and turns out there isn't that
| much money in it. It wasn't clear this was the case early on when
| HTML5 came out and really enabled these experiences. But after
| you make a few and realize how much goes into creating them, and
| how hard it is to extract value from them, it doesn't make that
| much sense.
|
| Also, that us election needle from 2016 really turned a lot of
| people off of to the whole genre, I think.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| well, Mike Bostock left to create Observable, and in its latest
| iteration Observable Plot https://observablehq.com/plot/ is
| amazing.
|
| This makes the old data viz examples from NYT accessible to the
| rest of the population who aren't D3.js / canvas / svg whisperers
| like Mike
| jrm4 wrote:
| In _this_ field? The answer is easy. Data, even pretty data --
| maybe ESPECIALLY pretty data -- is not "information," and
| especially not "wisdom."
|
| At the risk of using an odd term -- it's like -- "Data porn?"
| dematz wrote:
| From https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-madrid-built-its-
| metro-... contrast Madrid's train stations, copy and pasted as
| much as possible, vs London's, where each has its own interesting
| and complex architecture. The article claims simple, consistent
| Madrid stations were easier to build. Idk if it's true or not,
| but it's an appealing argument that architects are interested in
| architectural uniqueness and complexity which adds costs.
|
| Similarly, the data viz architect sort of assumes more complex
| visualizations would be helpful if the public wasn't so phone
| addicted and inattentive: "some data stories are just too complex
| and nuanced to be aggregated in bar charts and line charts.
| Surely, they'd be curious about more complex visualizations"
| ...well where's the discussion of if visualization complexity is
| actually good for data stories? If everyone knows how to read a
| bar chart and a line graph, that's a point in favor of standard
| copy and paste visualization.
|
| The one case where imo fancy visualizations actually help is
| maps. Not only is the example of facebook friendships in 2010
| cool, a world map really is the best way to show where
| people/connections are (ofc maybe it's just a heatmap ie
| https://xkcd.com/1138/ idk if they divided by how many people
| live there but still cool). So there are probably lots of stories
| a map visualization helps tell by showing where stuff is.
|
| But yeah in general I felt like the article spoke to data viz
| only as art to wow data connoisseurs. There was no defense of why
| complex stories getting a new data format each time conveys
| information better than standard bar chart/line graph.
| dematz wrote:
| Part 1 of this post
| https://www.shirleywu.studio/notebook/2025-02-client-comfort...
| probably speaks more to why it's good to do visualizations more
| creative than people are used to. I still get the sense of the
| architect who has more interest in complexity than the client
| (who's both uninterested and disinterested) though.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Steve Jobs discussed "Content vs Process" years ago:
|
| https://youtu.be/TRZAJY23xio?feature=shared&t=1770
|
| While I didn't agree with a lot of his ideas, this one has proven
| true over time.
|
| If you meant innovation in a scientific/startup context, than the
| reasons are as follows:
|
| 1. Space: Rent seeking economies create commodities out of
| physical locations used to build high risk apparatus. Even
| university campus space is often under synthetic scarcity.
|
| 2. Time: Proportion of bureaucratic and financial investment
| pressure constrain creative resources actually used to solve some
| challenge.
|
| 3. Resources: Competition and entrenched manufacturing capacity
| asymmetry. Unless one can afford to play the Patent game...
| people will simply steal/clone your work to fragment the market
| as quickly as possible. Thus, paradoxically degrading technology
| markets before it may mature properly through refinement.
|
| 4. Resolve: Individuals focused on racketeering and tying as a
| business model generally case harm to the entire industry through
| naive attempts at a monopoly.
|
| 5. Respect: Smart people do not choose to be hapless, and simply
| vote with their feet when their communities are not longer
| symbiotic.
|
| There are shelves full of technology the public won't see for
| years, as there is little incentive to help rip off consumers
| with Robber Baron economics. This is why "we" can't have nice
| things... and some people are 10 years into the future. =3
| nitwit005 wrote:
| These are an innovative way to sell New York Times subscriptions,
| but most of us aren't making charts for interactive marketing.
|
| These sorts of animations are cool, but my experience has been
| that if you have to deal with them daily, you'll want a way to
| turn them off. People will jam a bunch of charts with
| considerable data onto the page, and the animations will barely
| work due to the strained performance.
| mncharity wrote:
| > So what next?
|
| LLM discussion of visualizations?
|
| I did guerrilla usability testing around teaching scale, which
| included this video[1] (stop-motion animation using CO
| molecules). _Lots_ of people asked "What are those ripples?".
| IBM even had a supplementary webpage addressing this (which I no
| longer see, even on archive). People could easily ask this with
| me standing beside them, but not so much if viewing the content
| online. Which raised the UI question of how to encourage such.
|
| With LLMs, perhaps people will be able to ask questions of a
| visualization? _What is that? Why is that? What about ...? I don
| 't understand ... Does this mean ...?_
|
| [1] IBM's _A boy and his atom_
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0 Making of:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA4QWwaweWA
| tech_ken wrote:
| The point of data presentation is to gist the most salient
| trends; an interactive chart where you can zoom in to the lowest
| granularity of the data basically defeats the purpose of the plot
| in the first place. Similarly most animation in charts doesn't
| really add any meaningful visual data, it's just distracting. I
| think most consumers of data journalism got pretty bored of
| scrolling through some massive viz after only a few minutes, and
| why would they not? People read the news to have the critical
| points surfaced for them. They don't want to dig through the data
| themselves (and if they do they're not going to be satisfied with
| the prebuilt animation). These kinds of things are IMO more fun
| and interesting to build, rather than to actually try and learn
| something from.
| Animats wrote:
| > That was the year I realized I was experiencing scrollytelling
| fatigue.
|
| She nailed it.
|
| The people who really, really have to look at graphs of numbers
| all day have a Bloomberg terminal. The graphics are visually
| unexciting but useful.
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