Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

Maybe if I can make a counter-point: a lot of these patterns are common place right now! And much more so than whatever golden era we want to imagine existed long ago.

- Gestures in a lot of applications have made things more confusing by hiding functionality that you now need to stumble into to discover.

- Sound cues are used all over the place. Anyone who's ever worked in a kitchen hears the godforsaken ubereats alert sound in their nightmares.

- About ten minutes ago, I got startled by my phone deciding that the "you should stand up" vibration pattern should be three long BZZZZ-es... amplified by it sitting on my hollow-sounding printer.

- If another fucking god damn website asks me to chat with an AI agent in it's stupid little floating chat bubble, only appearing AFTER I interact with the page so it's allowed to also make an annoying "chirp!" sound, I WILL become a chicken farmer in some remote forest eating only twigs, berries, and improperly-raised chicken eggs.

All of these things annoy me, and actively make me hate computers. A silent glass brick can go in my pocket because I know it's not going to bother me or beg me to talk outloud to it. If it was some sensory-overload distraction machine (which, by default, it is) it would find itself over the side of a bridge rather quickly. It's getting in the way of my human experience! The one where I'm the human, not the computer!!

Also, just to add to that because it's on my mind now, I think there's a ratchet effect to "UI that screams at you" or at least "UI that tries to tap into my senses". The more of it becomes common place, the more people expect to be able to annoying you, via your devices.

It doesn't matter that I can force my phone's vibration motor to only output an anemic "buhhhh..." no mater what coeffienct of bothersomeness some app sends to it. The person causing my phone to make that API call still expects the cacophony of pain to emit from it. We all become numb to how annoying this all is because it becomes the standard TO BE annoyed and distracted.

The uber eats sound is annoying because it conveys nothing except "whatever you're doing is unimportant!!!! PAY ATTENTION TO UBER!! UBER THINGS ARE HAPPENING!!!". There's a million other better ways to do that, so *I* find the information. *I* go to the stupid glass brick when *I* can take on a new order. But because we already set the expectation that the user is allowed to set off an alarm in any kitchen in the city for the low-low price of overpaying for food, the stupid glass brick tells ME when it's time to deal with it.

Spatial computing (like the example of a note taking app) now introduces all of the extra work of cleaning to a digital note. The computer wants me to sort my own notes now. It opens up the potential of being an e-slob for no reason other than my ability to make it as equally messy as my desk.

I don't know why we would expect this even-more sensory-focused model of computing to not also ratchet up the stress and dread of being alive.

I'm 27 going on 95 I guess, just send me to the old folks home now lol

The only solution is to turn off notifications for all but literally a handful of apps. Trust me, you won't miss those apps

This is how I live, and I cannot comprehend how people live otherwise.

I have no work email or slack on my phone. The only notifications that appear on my lock screen are texts, calls, and when there’s a new crossword available. Seeing other people’s phones buzz every time they get an email, or every time their news apps have a new article… seems utterly insane to me. Why would you give every one of those the opportunity to demand your attention, without warning, at any time? How do you live like that?

News apps are baffling, I've worked in the business and couldn't comprehend why colleagues needed notifications for news and socials.

Can't see how it's possible to be effective whilst so reactive in a professional context. For a person who's job doesn't involve keeping tabs on the world it makes even less sense. Damaging and stressful.

I think the 24-hour news cycle in general has gotten too obsessed with "fast" and "breaking" over "news worthy" and "attention worthy". I've realized as much as anything that what I want is slow news and that the old models were possibly best: daily morning paper, maybe an afternoon rag. That's it. Real news doesn't seem to me to actually move faster than that, we've just sort of let "entertainment" and "anxiety" and "engagement clickbait" substitute for "news worthy" for long enough that people think they need the constant attention to it.

Same here, it's insane. The only things that are allowed to play a sound from my phone are the actual telephony apps (I've got two for reasons).

I like to disable most notifications, but I'm confused about the Uber eats thing. If I'm a restaurant and I take orders via Uber eats, I probably want to be notified about new orders. That seems quite important to me. It's not the kind of thing you can leisurely discover an hour or two later. It's on the same level of importance as a customer walking into the restaurant. I can't really imagine many things more important than that.

Similarly if I'm on the receiving end I need to know that the delivery is here. I want my food and the courier wants to get going. I live in an apartment building, so I like being downstairs ready to pick up my order when they arrive.

So that's something I want to get notified about. I don't use Uber eats but I use Wolt, where I can monitor the couriers location and get a notification when they're close. I don't turn those off because these are actually important in my eyes. There's a real person potentially waiting for me right now.

Snapchat on the other hand gets muted immediately. Whoever came up with notifications for someone typing should be locked up. Not to mention all the bullshit like "some influencer or whatever posted something" notifications. I barely want to know when my friends sent me something.

I like Apple's growing approach of distinguishing "Time Sensitive" notifications and "Live Activity" notifications from all the other types of notifications from an app.

An Uber Eats delivery is a "Live Activity" with a tracker that is sticky on the lock screen (and Apple Watch "activity area"). That makes a lot of sense. "Deals" and other random garbage Uber Eats wants to send to me aren't "Live Activity" so can be filed to later/slower delivery.

A buzzer notification from my condo buildings front door is a "Time Sensitive" notification that gets priority. But that same app's "weekly neighbor updates" isn't and can be filtered differently. Those things are great.

I can send most notifications to "Notification Summaries" which give me digests of all the notifications in roughly ~4hr chunks. There are very few things that I need faster than that (esp. when apps properly support "Time Sensitive" and "Live Activities").

Of course, with great power comes great responsibility. I've caught LinkedIn abusing "Time Sensitive" notifications (because of course it would, LinkedIn loves notification spam too much not to) and entirely revoked its privilege to send them.

That sounds pretty great, especially if it's handled from the developers side and we don't have to customize it.

I know I can customize notifications for my apps but when I go to look at it an app has like 50 different types and I just don't care enough to deal with that so I just mute the whole app instead.

When iOS had a couple gestures to get away from needing physical buttons, things were pretty good.

However once you realize that you can add new gestures without having to defend adding a physical or screen real estate button, it takes a lot of discipline to avoid adding more. I like to think that Steve would have told most of their people to fuck off and we’d have one or two new gestures now, instead of twice as many. They would have found some other way.

Good points...

For me personally a similar thing was when Ableton Live transitioned from having a more "direct" interface to having popup menus for absolutely everything, and it took time for me to adapt to it for live performances. To be fair I never really adapted and just moved to something else.

Rather than coming up with creative solutions like they did before they just kept adding things to those popup menus. The app went from magic (by enabling me to perform live effortlessly) to frankly difficult (by having the interface become difficult to memorize and getting in my way).

Coincidentally was when they also started racking up bugs so much that they needed a couple years without new features just to clean up bugs.

I think it’s a damn shame that so few apps have made serious use of dual screen modes.

If you’re doing something like a sound mixer you should be able to move more things to a second screen. Run the main app on your new tablet and the ancillary functions on your old one. Or a small monitor if it’s view only.

What did you move to?

I stuck with it for a few years, but eventually moved to a Sampler (MPC) + hardware synth, plus I learned how to use my Looper pedal properly.

My usage of Live was just hosting VSTs plus augmenting the band's sound, while retaining the ability to improvise.

Today I use Mainstage, which has no pretensions of becoming a production app, so I guess it will remain simple.

Even Google ended up adding more stuff to their homepage in the end. For a long time they tried to keep it super minimal- and it still is, but there's footer links and signed in header and a whole bunch of other links as well.

Mind you in the early days pages used to have hundreds if not thousands of text links all over the place, the only sites that do this now are the hardcore conspiracy sites where the author just adds several new links a day.

So in this dimension at least web UIs have changed for the better.

When divisions are rewarded with prestige and that prestige is numerate in public visibility, you either need a site per division or a very, very busy homepage, where the links aren’t organized by user need but by political clout.

It’s almost like your aunt and uncle who always bicker at family reunions. Keep that drama shit out of public spaces.

Agreed.

> I WILL become a chicken farmer

Chicken don't hold a reputation of being calm and considerate about what noise at what level they'll emit during the day or the night.

If I can advise, silk worm farming could be it

Chicken/Cattle farming is too old fashioned and cumbersome for today's climates.

If for real mental breakdown vineyard farming is where you should be.

You can also sip away your woe by rewarding yourself with a glass of wine at the end of the day.

A bug farm.

This is interesting, chickens mostly sleep at night and the roosters crow at day break. I wouldn't call it calm or considerate - but at least they know when to keep it down!

Yes. The only exceptions I can think of are intrusions in their enclosure and surprising events (fireworks etc), in which case it's probably justified.

Now, "day break" can mean 5AM during the summer for instance. It can be tough at times.

Hum, no. Roosters have each one a favorite time.

Most concentrate around the break of the day, but plenty will pick the middle of the night or random times during the day.

If there are multiple roosters on a farm, living in the same coop or different coops within hearing distance, they will trigger each other to crow earlier, like it's a competition.

Especially young roosters will try to establish themselves by being first. The big old rooster who knows he is the rooster in the henhouse can afford to wait, with his big testes energy.

Yeah, my roosters get started 1-2 hours before dawn, and they'll crow now and then throughout the day for various reasons, usually something like, "Hey, stay away from my hens, buddy."

Hens are pretty quiet. They'll do some clucking after they lay an egg or when one of them finds a worm, but you'd have to be a very sensitive neighbor to be bothered by their nose.

Hens are pretty quiet, except the first half of the daytime.

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