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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

There's a note at the bottom about the use of the word heresy.

But it's still stupid. The system is still deciding.

It’s worse than that. It forces the user to decide what’s most important from an interface design perspective at each moment while also doing the task. The fluidity is cool, and it helps maintain an understanding of hierarchy and context, but at some point the “system” needs to decide what’s important, or you’re just outsourcing design to your user.

I agree with the overall idea that users should have a lot of control over what they see and how, but just presenting this idea as the only good one (as implied by contrarian or heresy or whatever) is not the way to go. This could work for specialized creative workflows, and there may be a version of this that you could use for a window system, but I think as shown it would need to be targeted at very engaged and specialized users who can put in the work.

Is there a version of this idea that could work for general computing for a typical user? Maybe! But it would make a lot of decisions for the user at the end of the day; it would just need to feel like it didn’t.

I've been using beautiful.ai to make slides. I like it, but it takes control over font size, and does so poorly - it frequently chooses a font size that is just too big for the space, in which case it blots out the text with an error message telling me I have too much text. If I ADD another character or word, it pushes the font size selector to the next smaller font size and now my longer text is ok where my shorter text was previously too long. There is no direct control over the font size, just this badly implemented system-controlled size picker.

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