ndespres

It’s a useful signal. As the web becomes more full of noise. I am not interested in having my time wasted reading an article that the purported author couldn’t even be bothered to write. If there is a new guideline, I’d propose that it be to not submit AI-generated content.

Inspired by this I hooked up an old rotary phone to an ATA and got a number from a low cost SIP provider. Now my 5 year old can call his friends and family on his own. He loves when it rings and when he can call his pals to make his own plans.

It lacks the features and network effects of the tin can system but is still pretty fun.

I’ve worked on projects where a lot of work was done in highly collaborative drawings on Bluebeam, in which vendors add their markups and items and the program facilitates counting it all at the end of the phase. My role was only in things like wireless AP placement and low voltage cabling drop locations, not anything safety critical like doors, but I assume those vendors were able to keep track of those items in a similar way. For actual engineering projects I’m glad so many people have to take the time to count.

If they’re using Managed Apple IDs they will have no access at all to the app store and won’t be able to download their own apps anymore. IT department will have to buy and assign any apps that anyone needs, even the $0 ones that only 1 person needs.

It's so mind-boggling that they have control over the default browser home page and the news feed on everyone's taskbar and they choose to show gossip and one weird trick that doctors hate. Don't they feel embarrassed that they pollute their brand like this? Is the revenue from the clicks really worth it, or do they just not care?

There is so much goofiness happening in those web portals (and also the New Portal, and the Legacy Portal) that issues like this don’t surprise me. Every time I click a button in there I worry that the wrong thing will happen to a different object. Sometimes the display reflects the worst possible outcome, like adding a user to a group will show you the new group membership as just containing that 1 new user and nobody else. Quite a few moments of panic.

Some of these complaints feel like they aren’t specific to Firefox at all, but are UI conventions that used to be ubiquitous and no longer are, much to the chagrin of those of us of a certain age.

He also rails against menu items that are greyed out and unusable, where to me that’s a very useful indicator that the action isn’t available here but that I’m looking in the right place.

When I want to click a menu item and find it greyed out, that tells me something. But when I want to click a menu item and it’s not there at all, I’m confused. Did a developer move it somewhere else? Did the name of the action change? Am I losing my touch?

>>It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing.

Miyazaki had a line in a documentary I watched a couple years ago which is now only a vague echo in my mind and I am struggling to search for it, but the gist of it was that early animators had an appreciation and an eye for people, the world, real movement of real bodies, whether reflected in cinema or just in everyday life, while later, he said, were raised on animation, so the product is a second-order imitation.

The same must be true with software. Early painting/desktop publishing/presentation software retains a link to how those things were done with your hands and scissors and paint brushes, trying to fit them into the screen for the first time, to be used by someone who might not have used a computer before. Now it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll be working on the computer, and nobody involved had ever flipped through a literal book of clip art or made a slideshow on transparent paper.

Dell (and IKEA, and others) source from Ecovative who have been working on this for a while: https://ecovative.com/

I’m very happy with my Matias Ergo Pro. No numpad, and reduced size F-row, but otherwise normal layout plus a few programmable macro keys on the side. https://matias.store/collections/ergo

Why would anyone watch a live stream of someone else poking a computer into completing a task? It’s barely more interesting than having someone tell you about a dream they had.

It makes sense that any product written after the advent of these AI code generators, including the AI code generators themselves, will get worse as it starts to eat itself.

Not for this, no.

They have been around for nearly 20 years. I viewed them as an also-ran until Broadcom decided they didn’t need any of us as VMware customers anymore. Now Nutanix seems like a viable path for on-prem VM workloads that need a new home for those who don’t want to part with an arm and a leg on licensing but can’t move to public cloud either. I’m not sure how much of that market Oxide can capture. Not sure Nutanix is still doing the hyperconverged hardware themselves anymore.

You’re asking two different LLMs to help you talk more better to another LLM?

Sep 23, 2004 here! 285k scrobbles. Always been a loyal user. My use goes back far enough that I would have scrobbles queued up for when my dialup connection came online to push the days’ missed scrobbles up.

Those icons were well-designed for the newly computerized office employee of the day. The new school of icons are made by graphic designers for other graphic designers.

Others have brought up the Office 97 style for good reason. Everything has an icon, on an icon toolbar. Every command can also be on a file menu but most of them there don’t have an icon. The ones that do are special or intended to draw your attention.

And there’s a consistent metaphor: for example the web browser is represented by a globe for the world wide web. So the “hyperlink” function is a globe with a chain. This the “preview as web page” is a globe with a magnifying glass (whereas the print preview command is a sheet of paper with a magnifying glass.).

This icon language hints at function through its form and helps serve as a cue, a reminder, or a visual representation of its function.

And it all worked on 640x480 256 color screens. They are thoughtful and useful. These plain flat uninformative icons are just rude.

I agree with the author. I understand many of the reasons others give here for why icons could be beneficial- localization, literacy, vision issues, etc. all are great reasons to supplement text with icons, theoretically. But I disagree that these icons, I mean those shown as examples in the Apple menu, Safari menu, or Google Docs menus- actually convey anything useful and really do prove the authors point that they’re poorly implemented.

I realize it may be generational and privilege based, as I can read English and have a good deal of computer literacy. To my eyes the icon trend of flat, minimal icons paradoxically ask a user to possess a higher degree of computer fluency to successfully parse the artistic intent of the icon and map it to its function. When these icons don’t accurately convey their function (the Paste icon is a blank clipboard. What’s that do?) and when the design language is inconsistent within the same application and OS (do cogs mean Preferences? Services? you’re building a very confusing world for most of the user group types you claim to be helping.

Growing grains is no longer relevant. You can just walk into any supermarket and purchase packaged cereals, breads, and cakes, and you don’t have to deal with operating a tractor, cultivating soil, or sowing seeds.

The article is too optimistic in its view of how short-form video allows everyone to partake in these trends. In an attention-driven culture where nothing cool can be kept a secret, as the very essence of coolness would be defined not by the thing itself but by how many people watched your tiktok about it, you end up with these nonsense low-quality “viral trends” that everyone is talking about because everyone is talking about it.

Very little of it is actually good. So what then, if it’s able to spread faster than ever before? It stinks!

Plenty of search overview results I get on Google report false information with hyperlinks directly to the page in the vendor documentation that says something completely different, or not at all.

So don’t worry about writing that documentation- the helpful AI will still cite what you haven’t written.

Oh, that’s quite alright, the way I do it is to browse the site on my phone which lists the file names for each download, then just type them in to the FTP program. You really need to browse the site to know what everything is, anyhow, as there are multiple downloads for each program- demos, different languages, patches etc. Thank you though!

If it helps, Macintosh Garden has a FTP server, but everything is un-organized in one of 2 folders, apps and games. Too slow to get a directory listing on these older systems but you can get a file directly if you know what you’re looking for.

Very cool and much needed. I run an iMac G3 on OS 9, and it’s a bit of a challenge to download files on because most websites don’t work, and the FTP directory listings on Macintosh Garden are so long that they never finish loading for me. Granted it’s nothing compared to the file transfer difficulties of the past, but it’s nice to see a period-correct workaround.

There’s so much value in consistent, expertly-written technical documentation that outsourcing it to the hallucination machine is a pointless exercise in aggravation. I do not wish to read machine-mangled slop. I want an expert to write expertly.

I guess I don’t see it as merely technology about which I might be reasonably enthused. Everything cool becomes bad or harnessed for evil in rather short order these days. The destructive potential of widespread deployment of LLMs seems so obvious that I don’t see why anyone would rush employ it in their work, let alone book a trip to a Meta-hosted hypefest for it.

I never have and I never will!

We don’t need to “live with this”. We can just not use them, ignore them, or argue against their proliferation and acceptance, as I will continue doing.

Don Hopkins, who also posts here, has an interesting essay on the design and implementations of pie menus from 1991: https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-...