dusted

I think we need to stop this madness.

The disaster that is "modern UX" is serving no one. Infantilizing computer users needs to stop.

Computer users hate it - everything changes all the time for the worse, everything gets hidden by more and more layers until it just goes away entirely and you're left with just having to suck it up.

"Normal people" don't even have computers anymore, some don't even have laptops, they have tablets and phones, and they don't use computer programs, they use "apps".

What we effectively get is:

- For current computer users: A downward spiral of everything sucking more with each new update.

- For potential new computer users: A decreasing incentive to use computers "Computers don't really seem to offer anything I can't do on my phone, and if I need a bigger screen I'll use my tablet with a BT keyboard"

- For the so-called "normal people" the article references (I believe the article is really both patronizing and infantalizing the average person), there they're effectively people who don't want to use computers, they don't want to know how stuff works, what stuff is, or what stuff can become, they have a problem they cannot put into words and they want to not have the problem because the moving images of the cat should be on the place with the red thing. - They use their phones, their tablets, and their apps, their meager and unmotivated desire to do something beyond what their little black mirror allow them is so week that any obstacle, any, even the "just make it work" button, is going to be more effort than they're willing (not capable of, but willing) to spend.

Thing is, regardless of particular domain, doing something in any domain requires some set of understanding and knowledge of the stuff you're going to be working with. "No, I just want to edit video, I don't want to know what a codec is" well, the medium is a part of the fucking message! NOTHING you do where you work with anything at all allows you to work with your subject without any understanding at all of what makes up that subject. You want to tell stories, but you don't want to learn how to speak, you want to write books, but you don't want to learn how to type, write or spell ? Yes, you can -dictate- it, which is, in effect, getting someone competent to do the thing for you.. You want to be a painter, but you don't care about canvas, brushes, techniques, or the differences between oil, acrylic and aquarelle, or colors or composition, just want to make picture look good? You go hire a fucking painter, you don't go whining about how painting is inherently harder than it ought to be and how it's elitist that they don't just sell a brush that makes a nice painting. (Well, it _IS_ elitist, most people would be perfectly satisfied with just ONE brush, and it should be as wide as the canvas, and it should be pre-soaked in BLUE color, come on, don't be so hard on those poor people, they just want to create something, they shouldn't have to deal with all your elitist artist crap!) yeah, buy a fucking poster!

I'm getting so sick and tired of this constant attack on the stuff _I_ use every day, the stuff _I_ live and breathe, and see it degenerated to satisfy people who don't care, and never will.. I'm pissed, because, _I_ like computers, I like computing, and I like to get to know how the stuff works, _ONCE_ and gain a deep knowledge of it, so it fits like an old glove, and I can find my way around, and then they go fuck it over, time and time again, because someone who does not want to, and never will want to, use computers, thinks it's too hard..

Yeah, I really enjoy _LISTENING_ to music, I couldn't produce a melody if my life depended on it (believe me, I've tried, and it's _NOT_ for lack of amazingly good software), it's because I suck at it, and I'm clearly not willing to invest what it takes to achieve that particular goal.. because, I like to listen to music, I am a consumer of it, not a producer, and that's not because guitars are too hard to play, it's because I'm incompetent at playing them, and my desire to play them is vastly less than my desire to listen to them.

Who are most software written for? - People who hate computers and software.

What's common about most software? - It kind of sucks more and more.

There's a reason some of the very best software on the planet is development tools, compilers, text editors, debuggers.. It's because that software is made by people who actually like using computers, and software, _FOR_ people who actually like using computers and software...

Imagine if we made cars for people who HATE to drive, made instruments for people who don't want to learn how to play.. Wrote books for people who don't want to read, and movies for people who hate watching movies. Any reason to think it's a reasonable idea to do that? Any reason to think that's how we get nice cars, beautiful instruments, interesting books and great movies ?

Fuck it. Just go pair your toaster with your "app" whatever seems particularity important.

I don't understand how the "proof" part works, like, what part of the input to the "proof generation" algorithm is so inherently tied to the real world that one cannot feed it "fake" data ?

My music listening speakers have two built in power amplifiers (one for the tweeter, one for the woofer) and have a DSP feeding right into a DAC, feeding right into those amplifiers.

There's a control box that comes with them, and when you plug a calibrated microphone into that box, and put it in the listening position, you can get it to do some frequency sweeps, one at a time, then they calculate a correction curve for each speaker, based on the actual response of the particular speaker in the particular room, and program that curve into the DSP of the speaker.

It's like night and day toggling the calibration on and off while listening to music.

And yes, as he says, the best hi-fi is just professional audio gear..

My music listening setup is simply a USB->AES converter box that feeds directly into the monitors, the monitors are a pair of Genelec 8050, and then the GLM box and volume knob. Never heard "hi fi" coming even close to it, not at the price, not at five times the price.

Same goes for headphones, you can't get much better than the simple and cheap DT990 (or 770 if you want them closed), sure, you can pay about 10 times as much for some Sennheiser hd800s, and those are pretty good, and I do have a pair of HE1000se, which are not only cheaper, but actually sound better too. But I'd never recommend anyone who's not as stupid as myself to buy anything "above" DT990.. And yeah, I EQ my headphones with a dbx 231x two channel 31 band EQ, and while that's not as scientific as the calibrated monitors, for a headphone listening experience, it gets pretty good.

yeh, I remember it being the darkest red too, maybe depended on bith depth ?

The issues mentioned in the article is generally applicable. While modern software does manage to make life marginally easier and simpler in some very specific ways, they generally manage to do so while also looking like absolute garbage, consuming hundreds of megabytes of memory to do tasks requiring kilobytes while burning through multiple orders of magnitude the amount of instructions actually needed to do the work.

Yes, Visual Basic was indeed the pinnacle, and today, it is QT, for what it's worth. But no, let's go write HTML and CSS, and when the Stockholm syndrome gets us bad enough, why not some React or Angular to get the party of pain going again ?

> This is quite the reduction, ...

Thank you, that spawned this notion in my head, I wonder why. It’s funny, I think, how quickly people dismiss the subjective experience of a crackhead having an ecstatic conversation with God or the universe — yet insist that the depth of their own experience of love, religion, or meditation can’t possibly be reduced to neurotransmitters.

That article made as much sense as its subject matter.

In my opinion, you don't get to ask "why is X done by Y" before you've done X yourself by something not Y and not Y by proxy either.

I did a slideshow for presenting some details about my home built C64 (MaxFake64), I drew all the "slides" in petscii and saved them as binary data at the end of an assembly program, which then copies each slide into the right place in VIC memory, I think it draws the entire screen in less than one frame period.

For (that one person) who find that interesting, the slideshow can be run in the emulator at archive.org, press F1 for next slide and F3 for previous slide. https://archive.org/details/hvad_20221229

I did this, I wrote a VGA slideshow for my "NUxT" 8088, and at its 9 mhz, it manages to switch from one full screen color image to another with about 3 fps. I did some optimization to get there, like turning the image upside down so that the first byte of the image data corrosponds to the first byte of vga memory. I was using some period correct-ish borland c, and had to deal with concepts such as "far" versus "near" pointers and page alignment which I never had to do on PC before, it was fun.

problem with simple software in enterprise environment is lack of integration, good sso and policy control

The article is written in an extremely manipulating way, the following phrase will trigger the intended knee-jerk reaction in anyone reading this who is not already pretty familiar with the actual content of the proposal and its implications.

> "The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark. He made it after learning of a new attempt to approve a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM)"

Now that the casual reader has already drawn a conclusion, they're also primed to dismiss the group referenced in the next sentence as as outliers and crazies (probably with hidden motives regarding CSAM):

> — a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance.

So yeah, thanks to Joachim for making this. Of course, it won't actually work, these people don't give a damn about the children, they just want total control, and surveillance and there's no lower bounds for what they will argue to achieve it.

Because I value predictability more than convenience, I'm too stupid to figure out the set of rules deemed "the right way of sorting", I can't even.. the possible ways it can be implemented is nearly infinite, it makes me anxious just to think about it. Sorting by numerical value is simple, I can understand that, I know the ascii table, I can predict what happens, I know where to look for stuff, meaning I can quickly find out where stuff is, because I don't have to look a bit here, then there, and then think "oh, maybe if it starts with a letter, then has a space and then a number they will order them by word - number" but if they start with a word but has no number they won't be sorted along with those, but if they st... nope.

> No-one really likes engineering war stories,

I love engineering war stories

This got me riled up to the point where I blew a gasket and just can't..

I agree with the article.

I liked computers better when everyone hated them, and for the reasons they hated them..

> That argument flies in the face of basic economics.

The first think any economist will tell you about the foundational rationale of basic economics is it's inability to explain the discrepancy between behavior as predicted by basic economics and behavior as carried out by human beings in the actual real world.

The hard truth that I, a human, do not behave rationally and in my own best interest at all time, or at least in those situations in which the risk or benefit to myself is the greatest, is a hard one to swallow, and many people are innately unable to even consider swallowing that, and as a result, to maintain their own illusion of rationality, they must take the stance that humans are as a rule, rational and therefore will act rationally and in their own best interest, if nothing else, as a preemptive defense against the question "if everyone around you is irrational, then what's the chance that you're the only rational one?"

They used to be really popular, back in the ancient times when I was young and full of excitement for all things compute, almost all software was local-first, and.. only :)

But since the entire world economy has turned to purely optimizing for control and profit, there's just no good reason to not screw people over as much and as often as possible, what'll they do ? Switch to someone who won't ? And who would that be ?

I played the original a lot, and lots of modding, but I prefer Luanti these days. There are lots of great games in it, and many of them are very much Minecraft, others explore entirely different approaches which can be very interesting as well. I'm spending some hours playing with my 5 year old too, and it's great.

Honestly, 4o was lame.. Its positivity was toxic and misleading, causing you to spiral into engagement about ideas that were crap. I often stopped after a few messages and asked o3 to review to conversation, almost every time it'd basically dismiss the entire ordeal with reasonable arguments.

Perfect little text, that article is.

Same site has this article about "bedrock platforms" which resonate deeply with me https://permacomputing.net/bedrock_platform/

Software does not rot, the environment around software, the very foundation which owes its existence: the singular task of enabling the software, is what rots.

Let's look at any environment snapshot in time, the software keeps working like it always did.. Start updating the environment, and the software stops working, or rather, the software works fine, but the environment no longer works.

I'm not saying never to update software, but, only do it if it increases speed, decreases memory usage, and broadens compatibility.

I like things better the way they were.

I like things better now than how they will be tomorrow.

I can't remember the last time I saw a software update that didn't make it worse.

probably.. I was at a range and took a quick snap of my target, because I wanted to review it in a bit calmer environment.. I remember standing there, seeing the bullet holes in the paper, and I distinctly recall two holes that had multiple hits. When I opened the picture on the phone to look, lo and behold, those were generic bullet holes, they except, not mine.. I zoomed in and nope, they're fake.. I have had so many experiences with this on different Samsung phones.. that stuff is just OFF, like, a picture of my kid in low light, and the phone just decided part of his face was probably the wallpaper, so it just put wallpaper pattern there instead of skin.. I've been over every setting I can dig up, can't find anything that should do this..

I'm generally annoyed with the amount of processing going on in modern phone cameras, they often take pictures that "look fine" on the screen, until you zoom in to native resolution and discovered most of it is some fever-dream of approximations, it's amazing that we (people) are accepting this.. Lots of fine memories degraded by cheating cameras..

It's annoying especially because at a glance, the pictures taken by my S24+ look just fine, and it sometimes makes me not pull out the aging DSLR.. but then when I get the pictures onto my PC and want to actually look at them.. I always regret my mistake.. Even a 10 year old DSLR on automatic no-flash mode kicks its butt so bad it's not even a comparison..

If it's for 2D I like librecad.. I can't get my mind wrapped around freecad.. If it's 3D, you can get surprisingly far with just sweet home 3D, or even blender (you can do accurate enough things with blender if you decide what a square is, and snap to grid)

Looks great, I like the clean syntax and in particular the defn is pretty.

I lost interest before I got to implementing proper functions, so mine only has variables that can be executed, if you're interested, it's here http://dusted.dk/pages/slispRepl/ but it's a mess, and only interpreted.

Nothing really at the moment, job and family takes most my time and energy. Last thing I made was this semi-vibe-coded a local-storage-only site for helping myself plan stuff, I made so it works offline as a progressive web app too if you install it, but it's not suitable for phone at the moment, I don't know if I can be bothered to make it suitable for phone either..

https://dusted.dk/pages/ordeal/

Two features are missing, I might find some energy to make them at some point: 1. right now only the entire "ordeal" can be moved, so situations with multiple fix points are annoying, I'd like to be able to "anchor" multiple tasks and have the tasks between stretch and shrink as needed. 2. I want to add a red horizontal line that's moving and shows the current time.

of course I would have the variable name saved, but and I'd probably require the to be somewhat unique too, but I'd save them as metadata, and I'd let people decide how they want them presented, for exampled with regard to casing.

For example, a variable holding a.. users actions per second. Say I've set up my editor for camelcase, I'd type in userActionsPerSecond, the editor would save the metadata as user,actions,per,second. Another programmer prefers underlines, their editor presents it user_actions_per_second, and a third user prefers it space seperated, but with a box drawn around it to indicate it's one thing and it's presented [user actions per second] or whatever. I'd maybe add a comment as metadata to the variable too, the comment could easily be shown above the variable, just as it is today, but they can never get detached by someone adding another item between the comment and the variable. Some people would prefer no comments at all, others want them always visible, others want them visible on mouse over.. lots of options.

I know I _can_ have almost all I'm asking for, but the hoops we jump through to get them due to storing program descriptions (source code) as plain text directly, with no really good way to add additional information to it (see the many horrors we have with annotations in different languages, for instance javadoc where comments are abused to embed a different kind of language carrying metadata which is only incidentally coupled to what it tries to decorate).

Instead of doing tricks to separate content and presentation, it should be the default approach.

Our entire infrastructure, grown organically over the past what, 40+ years, arrange itself around individual bytes arranged in text files, arranged in folders.. And I get that thinking this must be the best and final form is easy, because, honestly, software development tooling and infrastructure is some of the best and most solid software ever written, no doubt because it's written by the people using it.

It's not like I've talked with god and come with a list of solutions to problems nobody is having, only that, while I'm not really dissatisfied, I've stumbled into this way of thinking about building programs, it's partly due to some brain damage I must have gotten from learning and thinking about lisp, and while lisp does lots of things wrong, it gave my brain this twist that the models we hold of how to do things can be very different from what we're used to.

I think it's worth at least once in a while, to put some ideas on the backburner and entertain ourselves by imagining other approaches other approaches than arranging individual characters in files, which is the lowest form of computer interaction you can imagine outside of writing bits and bytes directly into memory cells. And it's a bit ironic that as we do this very high-level, high abstraction work that is composing a program, using the most primitive interaction with the machine that's still available through user-programs: manipulation of the arrangement of bytes in files.

If you look at modern development, there's still a fairly noticeable part of it that's centered about ascii-art, either directly by hand, or by instructing the editor to do it, and there's a lot of procedure that's there not to describe programs, but to help derive the programs out of the source texts.

but is it ever going to be time to kill the CSS ?

It's slightly insane that computer programs are still mostly derived from plaintext files.. but what's absolutely insane is that we, the people creating those programs, do so by modifying individual characters in those very same plaintext files..

Yes, text is a good interface medium for exchanging program descriptions between humans and machines.. but it's not a very good medium for storing and exchanging program descriptions from machine to machine, or even human to human.. Humans have opinions, sense of aesthetics, habits, and so on.. some more than others, but still, most people care about at least some part of the.. non-important-to-the-actual-program-compiling stuff, such as casing, indentation, placement of brackes, variable naming and so on.. all stuff that's there for the humans, the compiler don't care what you name your variables.. It's insane that there's no abstraction here..

Just think about how much code we've written to wrangle characters in text files.. formatters, beautifiers, linters, preprocessors, templating systems, lexers, compilers.. It's natural, the amount of development invested in this, and the, honestly, pretty good tooling we have to manipulate those individual characters in files, makes it seem like the only way..

But it shouldn't be.. We should be able to describe programs by typing text, but the text shouldn't be there both for us and for the machine, it should be there only for us, the machine should present text to us, that describes the program, but we should be in control of how that is presented to us, far, far beyond choosing a color scheme in our glorified typewriter emulators. I should be able to tell my programming editor how _I_ want things presented, and that presentation should be a setting in _MY_ editor, not something that has any effect on the program descriptions I'm working with.. Like, the browsers default stylesheet in an alternative world where HTML only described what, and didn't allow the webmaster to overwrite the style. Power to the user.

If I wanted variables to be blue and blinking, and I want the function keyword to be a fire emoji, that's on me, that's just presentation..

We shouldn't have directories with plaintext files as our program storage, we should have dedicated program description files, and we should have dedicated tooling to work with them..

We will never have that.

> It's a shame I cannot remember what brand it was! I remember the iPod because it was a luxury good, but I think I owe that old Walmart MP3 player a lot more.

Indeed. My first portable music player was a walkman, not a sony I think, but anyway, a portable cassette tape player.. I made my own mixtapes from other tapes, cd's and ozzy ossbournes "bark at the moon" vinyl.

The next device was a portable CD player, I got a CD burner quite early on, damn, at that point in time, my harddrive was only maybe two hundred megabytes larger than a cd.. But it was good, I could do (sometimes less than perfect) cd-to-cd copies, and when I got MP3 files, I started being able to fit enough songs on the harddrive to make mix-cds..

The next device was my last portable music player, it was a "King" brand "mp4" player, which was a, still, tiny little 512 mib flash based device with some hardware buttons and an early oled color display.. I still have it, I don't use it too often, because I almost never need this type of device anymore, I listen to CDs in the card and at home I listen to CDs, vinyl and flac.. and at work it's a "hifi" headphone setup.

As soon as I saw the images, I was reminded of these, in Denmark we called them "skrammel-legeplads" lit. "junk-playground", they were still fairly popular when I was a kid.. I remember the one I visited most often had a (mostly) gutted jet-plane (some gauges, seat, sticks, flaps, lights, some tubing and wiring was still intact) that we could crawl around in, I was small because i remember being able to crawl into the wing! The amount of cuts and bruises was astounding, and very helpful in teaching my young self to keep track of where hands, feet and head were, and how they moved :D

Here's a short black/white movie that seems to take place at the one pictured in the article: https://www.danmarkpaafilm.dk/film/skrammellegepladsen

I'm glad to see that, at least here, consensus is to not wrap the kids in quite as much bubble-wrap as was the norm in the early 0s. I'm okay with my son playing and learning about his body and it's relation to the world around him by getting hurt, to a degree.. I generally step in if I determine the consequences of a likely accident to have ER potential.