türkçenin kötü kullanıcı deneyimi

İyi bir kullanıcı deneyimi için tasarım içerisinde kullanılan cümlelerde en önemli kelimelerin en solda olmasına dikkat etmek gerekiyor. Kullanıcılar soldan sağa doğru hızlıca tarama yaptıkları için sağda kalan kelimeler gözden kaçabiliyor.

Genelde cümlelerin en önemli parçası fiildir ve dilimizde fiil hep en sonda gelir. Dolayısıyla bir cümledeki aksiyonu anlayabilmemiz için o cümlenin tamamını okumamız (ya da duymamız) gerekiyor.

Tabi her dil böyle işlemiyor. Mesela İngilizce'de fiiller hep ön planda, dolayısıyla İngilizce diliyle iyi bir kullanıcı deneyimi yaratmak daha kolay.

Acaba bu durum Türkçe'de daha fazla kısa ve devrik cümleler kurulmasına sebep oluyor mu? 

Son gözlem için Betül Avcı'ya teşekkürler!

advices to a budding mathematician

Most of the following advices are derivatives of those given by my own advisor Prof. Janelidze.

- Be very careful with drawing shapes while visualising your thoughts. They can lock you into a subset of possibilities and miss some of the generalities involved.

- Work at home, wherever you are comfortable.  

- Read whatever you want. However, it is better to not read anything at all! Just keep creating and rediscovering.

- You need a good sense of aesthetics to find the right problems, good strategic skills to launch the most efficient attacks against those problems and good technical skills to flesh out the details of those attacks.

- Think while walking.

- Applied math and pure mathematics should be conducted by different people. Excelling at them require different kinds of personality traits.

- Each step in your argument should seem like the inevitable next thing to do given the previous step.

time-symmetry of personalities

I spend very little time thinking about the past. I never dream about the future neither. The latter fact often bothers my wife. She considers me insensitive for not dreaming about the future of our family. Interestingly, she is also the nostalgic one in the family. (She keeps large boxes of old printed photos and regrets about her lost digital archives.)

Today I learned that this dichotomy is perfectly normal!

Apparently, thinking about the autobiographical past and planning about the future both exercise the same parts of the brain. In other words, one's relationship with time extends symmetrically in both directions.

This squares well with the fact that remembering is an active reconstruction. We simulate the past just like we simulate the future.

“There is a kind of symmetry between looking forward and backward, though we seldom think of it that way. We know that in plotting our next move, we are selecting paths into the future, analyzing the best available information and deciding on a route forward. But we are usually not aware that when we look back in time, our penchant for pattern-making leads us to be selective about which memories have meaning. And we do not always make the right selections. We build our story—our model of the past—as best we can. We may seek out other people's memories and examine our own limited records to come up with a better model. Even then, it is still only a model—not reality.”

Ed Catmull - Creativity, Inc. (Pages 177-178)

gamification of business

There are four levels in the business game:

Money. Everyone works for money at first. 

Power. Once they have enough money, they start to seek more power. 

Fame. Once they have enough power, they start to seek attention outside business circles.

Despair. Once they have enough fame, they go into a despair mode.

Those who end up realising the game-like dynamics of the entire scheme either quit the game and find refugee in conservative values, or embrace the game and replay it by giving their wealth away or by making a drastic career change. The rest spiral into darkness.

necessity of wasting time

People who are afraid to waste time are characterless sons of bitches, dragging humanity backwards.

They have serious commitment problems. They never marry to a single idea, business or person. They diversify their time and investments to the point of extreme shallowness.

They cover up their cowardice with terminologies borrowed from bullshit business books, marketing their personality weakness as intellectual depth.

ridiculousness of naming people

The act of naming a child is an unjust imposition fraught with extreme simplifications and impossible guesses.

Naming is a crime committed for pragmatic reasons which will hopefully be overcome in a future where people will be communicating telepathically, sidestepping language and its reference problems all together.

Naming someone is problematic for several reasons:

• Each person is unique, but names are not.
• Personalities are context dependent, but names are not.
• Personalities change through time, but names do not.
• Unlike pets we have the ability to name ourselves.
• Names influence the name holders' preferences and even their career choices.

forecasting the past

Explaining what happened in the past is as hard as predicting what will happen in the future. Why? Because to predict what will happen in the future you first need to build a model of how things work and to build a model you only have past data to work with.

In fact, it is a common practice to reserve away a certain portion of the past data during the modelling process, and use it to quickly see whether the constructed model has any predictive power. (This eliminates the need to wait for the future to unfold.)

Once you have a good model of the past, you can make predictions about the future.

Those predictions may require you to plug in certain initial conditions which may lie far back in time. In that case, you will need to run your model backwards to predict what may have happened before the beginning of your data set.

Make no mistake. Building a model from past data is a tough business. Each of those past moments was once an amorphous "Now". How they unfolded into each other was a total mystery back then, and it still is.

Ignorance is time-symmetric. Only "Now" is certain. The rest is a matter of speculation.

feeds vs. recommendations

There is a subtle difference between consuming a continuous feed of media content and discretely browsing through recommendation after recommendation. 

Think of Facebook feeds vs. Youtube recommendations. Both are algorithmically curated, devilishly optimised and extremely addictive. 

But their addictivenesses are for entirely different reasons! Facebook is addictive in the sense that TV is addictive. Youtube, on the other hand, is addictive due to an elation that is similar to the one induced by gamblers' illusion of control.

That is also why Youtube attracts a younger and "smarter" crowd consisting of people who place a greater value on controlling their destinies.

blurry depths

Mathematics clarifies but also trivialises whatever it touches. Its arrival often signifies that the problem at hand is solved.

That is why frontiers of all disciplines are non-mathematical. 

Mathematics can not touch things that we only "half" understand, but it is always there when we fully understand.

Students are taught completely dead material in schools, not the frontier stuff. They are bombarded with solved problems in neat mathematical forms. Many smart and creative students get burned out in this process and leave academia for good.

I find this really troubling. Depths are non-mathematical and the problems there require collaborative efforts of all sorts of different minds. 

Here is my career advice: Know your math but dive in blurry depths as soon as you can. (Warning: This may decrease your hireability!)

Stop analysing stock price movements, become an entrepreneur instead. Stop reading physics, engage in philosophy of physics instead. Stop doing conversion optimisations, become an user experience designer instead. You will feel more fulfilled. Trust me!

disadvantage of being a copycat

You can only copy what you can see. But, in creative matters, what matters most is the set of choices that were not made and features that did not make it to the final product.

For instance, in math, when you read a proof you need to ask why it is concerned only with the specific class of structures mentioned in the statement. Once you understand the reason why, then you will be able to play with the proof and copy the techniques used in it elsewhere. 

In software product design, what looks like a missing element is often deliberately left out. Inexperienced designers have hard time reverse-engineering the simplicity achieved by their experienced colleagues. That is why they can copy the existing product but never be able to carry it to the next level themselves.