moondance

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” - Brian Eno

In other words: people are entitled to cheap entertainment, but the people who labor to produce that entertainment aren’t entitled to good working conditions. Boo

This really resonates with me. Not to be annoying but I think that the people challenging you in your replies haven’t experienced this as a consistent and problematic pattern in their life in the way that many people with severe ADHD have. It’s a very specific, almost obsessive behavior, and it’s less romantic than they’d like to imagine when observed as a habit.

An amusing quip, but since you brought Neil up- his takes on veganism are generally disappointing and facile.

As others have mentioned, “Bump!” did it 15 years ago and it was little more than a novelty, despite its Google acquisition. iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop) and no one uses it. Curious how that OS-level functionality might conflict with the app-level bumping. That aside, w all respect to the poster, it strikes me that they took that comment and ran with it before doing any research. There’s definitely a better solution to the problem, and I hope they find it.

“Low hum” was the clincher for me. Chatbots just love to talk about things humming.

I have too. You misunderstood me. I find it to be a worthwhile endeavor. I’m not pessimistic, I’m realistic about the ways in which the deck is stacked against seniors in this department. That’s why my UX work is singularly focused in accessibility. But that’s also why I don’t begrudge an old person for saying enough is enough. And I don’t think that living a lo-fi life should marginalize you.

This guy has a flip phone. Seems like that was the last “new” thing he could learn. Its user flows never change and he’s memorized it. The idea that the average old person is so obstinate that they would refuse to learn the new technology if it was easy to do so is not something I can accept. Not being able to communicate and interact with the modern world on its terms isn’t fun for anyone.

I don’t think people understand the scale of the issue. Each decade that goes by we welcome a new class of elderly, and each decade that goes by, we continue to write off those elderly users.

The failure of the well-intentioned but insufficient currents solutions is well underlined by this case. Sure, you could get this guy an android phone with a custom launcher, or an iPhone on Assistive Access, and he might be able to place a call. But good luck setting him up on Ticketmaster, or the Dodgers website, or wherever they expect him to go to redeem and utilize his tickets.

Have you had the pleasure of coaching a technologically illiterate grandparent through the process of learning how to use a smartphone? It’s a never-ending job and disheartening for all parties involved. Modern mobile UX is not designed with accessibility for the elderly in mind, and it is constantly changing in a way that demands constant re-learning. Not to mention the disabilities and neurological conditions often involved.

The irony of your last line. The whole thing of the Neo is that it feels distinctly not glued together—- not true of the $400 “comparables” you have in mind. I’m convinced the people who make these sorts of comments have either never experienced a non-terrible trackpad, or simply don’t care to.

Live gas prices on GMaps is the only feature yet to make it over to Apple Maps, as far as I can tell. Once Apple integrates that one, my phone will finally be free of Google services.

I’ve spent more than enough time writing with LLMs.

“Encountering” is actually a very apt description of the “ah-ha moments” of AI assisted writing, so that was the wrong word for the point I was making.

The joy of traditional writing is that those “ah-ha moments” come from somewhere in you. And I’m not arguing that is preferable out of some sort of anti-AI moralism. Rather, the epiphanies of traditional writing are better because they are informed by your singular experience, the life you have lived, the connections you have made, and all you have gathered along the way. I’m saying that it’s a great disservice not only to a given piece of writing, but to writing as a whole, when those influences are not present to guide the first drafts of the world. Follow the branching paths of your own inspiration to the conclusion, then let the machine take a pass at it. To give it the first crack is to rob your work of the stuff that makes it uniquely yours, and to rob yourself of the experience of invention.

Are you Billy Nonates? Or a fan

I can relate to the inclination, but so many new insights and moments of inspiration are necessarily confined to that painstaking iterative line-by-line process of real writing. When you are simply prompting and editing, you will fill the page (and it might even sound like “you”), but you will not have that delightful experience of encountering something unexpected along the way to filling it.

What’s it made of? How’s the touchpad feel?

It’s certainly “bad design” if we’re designing specifically with the OS convert who has a grudge against trackpads as the target user. But multitouch and its functionalities has been a fundamental part of macOS for nearly two decades now. For better or worse, a traditional mouse makes about as much sense for a macOS environment as it does for an iPad at this point. It’s workable, and it has certain advantages, but it’s really not recommended as your only pointer. At best, it’s used in tandem with a trackpad.

Chromebooks have a fair bit of offline capability in Docs, and some 3rd party apps take advantage of that as well. Still mostly useless without wifi.

It seems like the netbook space was unfortunately so plagued by bad hardware that it lost all credibility as a viable alternative to a laptop-- but there are still very few instances in which I prefer a touchscreen to a keyboard. Even a not-great one.