Sadly, this was a thing even before the web, let alone social media. There’s always been people for whom the vacations didn’t even “happen” unless they get to go on incessantly about them when they come back, ideally subjecting you to two hours of photos that mean very little to you. They derive little enjoyment from actually being there, they take it from showing it others…

For some people life is not worth living without external validation. Sad.

At this stage, apart from my medication, I worry the most about my devices and chargers. Everything else, from toiletries to clothes I can buy if it turns out I forgot it and really need it. That lowered my stress with packing significantly (and I am not forgetting more things because of it).

Alan Dix’s book (aptly named “Human Computer Interaction”) is quite good, even if somewhat old by now. HCI is an actual academic discipline with, yes, tons of theoretical and empirical results that govern what a good UI should be. Many of which are indeed grounded in psychology, others in physiology, etc (what we call Human Factors). There is a whole special interest group of the ACM just about it: SIGCHI.

Do not confuse this with fashion/trends/taste. These change, resulting in widely different possible flavors of UI over the years. But the underlying principles are the same.

Another thing to remember is that the fact that Apple, Google, or someone else implemented an UI in a certain way doesn’t mean they are following best practices and guidelines. Novelty sells, even if at the end of the day it does a worse job of things…

Edit: added link to SIGCHI

This is actually a thing. When learning calligraphy, it was one of the exercises we did. If you have good enough control of your hand and pen, then all strokes should be the same length, slanted the same way, and separated by the same spacing. When you manage this apparent “unreadable” thing, it means you nailed it!

The example below comes from this site (not mine)

Neat! I’ve always been a fan of roguelikes!

#Rogule 2024-3-25 🧝 4xp ⛩ 93 👣 streak: 1 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜ ⚔ 🐺🐗🧛 🌰🌰 🍄

https://rogule.com

Yah, I can’t imagine finger being widely deployed nowadays, the huge security and privacy hole it would be!

As for nntp and email… I also remember using email relay proxies for FTP way back when! FTP access to some places was spotty at best, so I sent a GET request to an email server that would get the file, UUENCODE it, and send it multipart by email. Not that files were big back then, but not was it possible to attach more than a few hundred KBs at once, if that.

In fact, I just remembered a funny story from when I was using the Usenet. I used a client that ran on our VAX/VMS mainframe. While browsing the newsgroups, I would get a figure for the transfer rate at the bottom of the screen. It was usually in tens of bytes per second, sometimes a few hundred. Often it stalled, etc. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I see it is showing “1”. My immediate thought as the most plausible interpretation: “damn, one byte per second. this is especially slow today!” And then I noticed the units: one KILOBYTE per second. it was the first time I had ever seen such a fast transfer rate!

A few years later, mid 90s I was trying to download a video that accompanied a conference paper. It was 6MB in size if memory serves. It took me from Friday afternoon to Sunday to manage it. Not only was it slow, but it kept interrupting and I had to start over numerous times. But I did manage in the end, and walked away with it split into a few floppy disks 🙂.

We’ve certainly come a long way since!

So much this! I am old, I guess, but I was on Usenet for years before the web was even invented. When I became aware of the fediverse, I got serious Usenet vibes. A decentralized model, several servers, you access one and get what it sends you, but it syncs with all other servers. You‘re getting everything in the entire Usenet and what you post gets everywhere too… we’ve come full circle, I think, even if we now use ActivePub instead of NNTP… a shame people nowadays know of it as “that piracy thing” instead of what it once was (and was designed to be).

This. Inform was the language/platform developed back in the day to author/interpret Z-code, the basis for Infocom’s text adventures. It went beyond just that in more recent versions, but it is designed from the ground up for text adventure creation.

This is like saying “you can write ransomeware in C++” and implying it is the language’s fault, somehow. ChatGPT is a tool, it does what the user asks it too (or it should, anyway). It has no agency nor morals. The argument that it makes it easier to write ransomware is silly as well. From high level languages to libraries and IDEs, we’ve always been developing tools to make programming easier! This is just the latest iteration.

Yup. Got it last week. Found this shit so disingemuous it almost pissed me off more than the privacy violation itself. I dont use any of Meta’s stuff except for WhatsApp out of necessity (some groups from the kids’ school), but i keep getting dumped into FB by busineses that dont have a proper webpage…

I reluctantly started reading ebooks years ago for a very practical reason: owning some few thousand physical books, I pretty much ran out of room in the shelves in my small apartment. So nowadays I only buy physical art books and the like. Having said this, I actually easily grew to like ebooks, for their ubiquitous availability and, of course, not taking up precious shelf space.

Have to read them in an ereader for a proper experience, though. Tablet/smartphone displays tire my eyes a lot if I read for any meaningful period of time.

One more, then!

My latest one looks different (100% renewable), so I guess it depends on which provider you’re using or the region you live in?

Ditto

I’m in the same boat. Will be replacing my 12 Pro, which will go to my wife, hers to my kid. We get about 10 years out of each phone, by using them like this. The improvements I get for upgrading only after three years are very significant!

Oh my god, so much this! The only apparent reason I see for many of the “return to office” cases I know about is for middle managers to be able to hold court and lord over their subordinates. As for the actual work that needs to be done, I see little advantage (in fact, constant interruptions for management and colleagues make it quite worse).

I wasn’t arguing for Firefox or FOSS. It just seems to me that if your selling point is trust and privacy (at least it is what I see people citing as Brave’s Big Thing), you should be as transparent and irreproachable in that regard as possible. Having said this, of course, good features can be enough for the trade-off to be worth it (this is true of pretty much every piece of software out there, Chrome included), depending t each user finds more important.

That you can is besides the point. You shouldn’t need to. If the first thing I need to think about after installing it is “well, let’s see what garbage is in here that I need to turn off”, then any trust I would have for it has already gone out the window. Especially important odor a browser where that is kind of the main differentiating aspect.

Open. If my kids need help and call out in the middle of the night, I would like to hear them!

Closed, to keep the monsters in…