I spend a lot of time seething at how poorly modern software interaction is, and I've come to the belief that they basically solved most of the window-based GUI computing interactivity problems by around XP, and have just been gutting them since then.
My three most-hated modern trends
- Disappearing scroll bar with content that you have to scroll for
- Pills going across the top of the screen that are "most-used" filters instead of a real filtering menu
- Clickable text and non-clickable text appearing the same. I mean come on. Who the fuck is designing these things? That's the one I can't wrap my mind around. How can a self-respecting programmer put out a UI where the display and clickable elements look exactly the same? What are we doing man
I think the real problem is we don’t have a native-quality UX toolkit on the web - the built in controls are just horrible. So every app has to reinvent the wheel from scratch, or use one of a few hundred (thousand) web component libraries that have all also had to reinvent the wheel from scratch (I guess a div and some text rendering isn’t scratch per se but you get my point)
Well, Microsoft was interested in making it easy to develop Windows applications, and also in making it easy and pleasant to use Windows applications. They had reason to invest in learning how that could be done and in writing utilities that would let you benefit from their knowledge; doing that made more money for them.
Browsers are different. They don't really benefit from being written for, or from being used. This seems like enough to explain the difference. They provide some functionality, and giving your users a good experience is your problem, not theirs.
I feel like I've seen complaints that Apple has forgotten things it already knew about how to design a usable interface; that wouldn't be explained by this model.
It's phones. Nobody uses computers anymore (for some statistical definition of "nobody"). There's no pressure to make precise and consistent UIs because poke poke poke poke.
It will never cease to amaze to me that Apple (under Jef Raskin who also wrote about this in The Humane Interface) observed and fixed problems with interactions like this in SYSTEM 6 in like 1993 or something - only for the same problem to have to be re-descovered and re-fixed decades later.
There was another similar loss and discovery about non-linear geometry of submenus. Most websites build it naively so that once a submenu has opened, you must guide your mouse very carefully toward it or it will close again. There is a better approach that allows for less precise and faster reach, but it requires some geometry when tracking the mouse. It was working on Macs from very early time and remember even reading about it somewhere. Then it was lost.
The rewrite is better! For the engineers who are planning to have a new job in a year. They get a whole year of being able to deflect all questions about how far behind schedule we are and how many of the customers want to burn the building down.
It's a great gig if you can get it. Horrible for the users and investors, of course, but great for the engineers.
Relatedly, my immediate reaction was "tooltips on logos? Just use alt attributes and browser native tooltips, stop reinventing wheels that are already decently handled in HTML".
"they can do that because there's plenty of articles on the web on how that shit works along with all the technical documentation, and we have blog posts explaining how to apply the technical tools to the domain."
Does this imply the future of LLMs is either that they acquire reasoning, or that they (or even engineering itself?) reach a plateau if humans are no longer writing about how to do things because the humans are using AI?
Question EF3. Suppose that you have an emergency expense that costs $400. Based on your current
financial situation, how would you pay for this expense?
Response Percent
Put it on my credit card and pay it off in full at the next statement 37
Put it on my credit card and pay it off over time 16
With the money currently in my checking/savings account or with cash 45
Using money from a bank loan or line of credit 3
By borrowing from a friend or family member 10
Using a payday loan, deposit advance, or overdraft 2
By selling something 7
I wouldn't be able to pay for the expense right now 13
Hard to interpret this. It either shows that 55% do not have enough money to pay the expense, or that 82% may well have the money but 37% would prefer to pay it off after their next paycheck anyway.
Perhaps because 4 in 10 Americans are bad with money. As jandrewrogers stated, Americans are not good savers. (I believe this is a big contributor to our trade deficit as well.)
All "capitalist" economies have very large amounts of central planning for them to function (not to mention state subsidies and other protections from failing to make money), and use taxation and the national debt for that. Socialism plans centrally to the same extent that capitalist economies do, but also has the state owning the infrastructure that the economy relies upon. So it doesn't need to tax for that purpose. Socialism in that sense has never actually been practiced historically though, in the same way as there has never been "capitalism" in the sense of no central planning or regulation. Luckily.
"capitalists" have many central planners each planning the same thing but coming up with different results. Then we reward the ones who are right. Socialism features one planner - they may have helpers, but just one. If one planner gets it wrong in capitalism you can go with a different one.
My understanding on China's coal plants is that it's not the number of them, it's whether they're running that counts. Coal-fired generation is currently cheaper than storage for backing up wind and solar generation and their plants are typically running about 50% of the time right now, expected to run less often as storage and more renewables come online. So China’s coal use could fall despite it adding more capacity.
If (and it's a big if) the human race survives to deal with the effects of climate change, the next great battle will be to prevent waste from becoming the existential problem.
I used to naively think that some kind of PKI/trust network for online media would have to rise up to thwart misinformation.
But anger is the real the reason why people want to believe obviously fake info about how Mexicans are manipulating the weather. We live in a society that tells you that you are free: freedom to work hard, treat people right and do the right thing. Then health, wealth and happiness will be yours.
But what if you do all those things and see the opposite happening to you and those around you? You want reasons. 5G brain control, Bill Gates and the Deep State all look like great explanations because long arcs of neoliberal monetarism and deregulated economics is, well, boring and quite hard to understand. So who cares about some AI fakery when that's going on?
Hell, the reason I have is "capital owners have ensured that under the rules of our system wealth generally accrues to capital more than labor" but maybe I am just seeking data that agrees with my own preconceived notions. Thomas Piketty (Debt In the 21st Century) apparently got his data wrong but he's still referenced plenty.
