Do you already pay a human to do this work?
2,498 karma · joined April 3, 2014
I don't know what gitea or forgejo are, so comparisons wouldn't help me.
I'm not saying your hopes are bad, exactly. I'm interested in what such workflows might look like. Maybe there _is_ a good UX for a web shopping assistant. I have an inkling you could cobble something interesting together quite fast with an agentic browser and a note-taking webapp. But I do worry that such a app will become yet another way for its owner to surveil their users in some of the more accurate and intimate areas of their lives. Careful what you wish for, I reckon.
In the meantime, what's so hard about curating a Notepad/Notes/Obsidian/Org mode file, or Trello/Notion board to help you manage your projects?
> But even if a PM cares about UX,
How can a PM do their job if they don't *care* about UX?
I mean... I know exactly happens because I've seen it more than once: the product slowly goes to shit. You get a bunch of PMs at various levels of seniority all pursuing separate goals, not collaborating, not actually working together to compose a coherent product; their production teams are actively encouraged to be siloed; features collide and overlap, or worse conflict; every component redefines what a button looks like; bundles bloat; you have three different rendering tools (ok, I've not seen that in practice but it seems to be encouraged by many "best practices") etc etc
In my limited experience interacting with someone struggling with schizophrenia, it would seem not. They were often resistant to new information and strongly guided by decisions or ideas they'd held for a long time. It was part of the problem (as I saw it, from my position as a friend). I couldn't talk them out of ideas that were obviously (to me) going to lead them towards worse and more paranoid thought patterns & behaviour.
Personally, anecdotally, I find the black-on-yellow easier to work with than most sites' black-on-white. I just tested it with my screen at two or three brightness levels, and it was more comfortable than similar content against white. I'm over-sensitive to glare because my eyes lack pigment. I _think_ this makes me more susceptible to contrast issues (it certainly feels like it, but I am only n=1 and I've not done careful study). I'm open to being challenged on this but you'll have to come with broad audience data to contradict a lot of lived experience.
It's fair that you might not like the black-on-yellow; you might feel it's a poor branding choice; but I still contest that it's not "wrong" for any technical, perceptual reason.
elem.style.setProperty(‘—var-name’, newValue);
To me, that justifies the name “variable” from the perspective of the CSS.
You can do this in TypeScript and Ruby too.
Constants which you can redefine/shadow in scopes, and change the values of at runtime via JS.
They seem like variables to me.
Academia should be for exploration, research, or preservation/archival. It’s about knowledge, not profit.
Academic attainment should be about the subject.
It’s business that should deal with the application, the short cuts, the “ends” rather than the means.
I’m sure there’s a formulation of this which also allows for AI in acedemia. I’m not srguing for that kind of purity. But I am saying that acedemia shouldn’t be treated as the training ground for employment.
Howvmever: it’s definitely the case that climate patterns have shifted. London used to get some snow, most winters. Since about 2015 it’s had almost none. The transitions from one season to the next used to be clear, now they’re vague. Our summers keep hitting higher and higher peaks.
Elsewhere in the UK we’re getting more rain. Flooding is increasingly common, and deeper, in several regions. Each year for the past 5 it seems to get a little worse. I hear insurance prices are changing to reflect it.
So, I think both things are true. There’s some alarmism, and also the climate is changing. The alarm seems justified to me.
At any point they might insert an advert, a bot, change the UI or the share features, some AI slop, etc. you will have no recourse.
Just by using their platforms they’re able to update their models of you, your family, your friends. The timing of chats, the data they have on you through Insta or FB, all flesh out and refine their model of you. You are doing their work for them, helping them get richer, all whilst they oversee everything you do.
As for alternatives? I already listed several. You rejected most of them for whatever reasons you gave. Those were primarily your choices rather than firm barriers.
Here’s some more options: Discord, Matrix, blogs +RSS, your own mastodon instance, mailing lists, FaceTime, Zoom, WhereBy, MS Teams, irc, Slack, Mattermost, a custom chat server you wrote yourself.
In the cases of special interest groups (think school/club/street/building groups), I just miss out, or ask for updates when I meet people. I am a bit out of the loop sometimes. No-one's died as a result of my leaving. When someone did actually die that I needed to know about, I got a phone call.
Honestly... just leave. Just leave. It's not worth your time worrying about these kind of "what ifs".
- some options have moved to menus which make no sense at all (e.g. all the toggles for whether a panel's menubar icon appear in the menu bar have moved off the panel for that feature and onto the Control Centre panel. But Control Centre doesn't have any options of its own, so the entire panel is a waste of time and has created a confusing UX where previously there was a sensible one
- loads of useful stuff I do all the time has moved a layer deeper. e.g. there used to be a top-level item called "sharing" for file/internet/printer sharing settings. It's moved one level deeper, below "General". Admittedly, "the average user" who doesn't use sharing features much, let alone wanting to toggle and control them, probably prefers this, but I find it annoying as heck
- following on from that, and also exhibited across the whole settings UI is that UI patterns are now inconsistent across panels; this seems to be because the whole thing is a bunch of web views, presumably all controlled by a different team. So they can create whatever UI they like, with whatever tools make sense. Before, I assume, there was more consistency because panels seemed to reuse the same default controls. I'm talking about use of tabs, or drop-downs, or expanders, or modal overlays... every top level panel has some of these, and they use them all differently: some panels expand a list to reach sub controls, some add a model, some just have piles of controls in lozenges
- it renders much slower. On my m3 and m4 MPBs you can still see lag. It's utterly insane that on these basically cutting edge processors with heaps of RAM, spare CPUs, >10 GPU cores, etc, the system control panel still lags
- they've fallen into the trap of making "features" be represented by horizontal bars with a button or toggle on the right edge. This pattern is found in Google's Material UI as well. It _kinda_ makes sense on a phone, and _almost_ makes sense on a tablet. But on a desktop where most windows could be any width, it introduces a bunch of readability errors. When the window's wide, it's very easy for the eye to lose the horizontal connection between a label and its toggle/button/etc. To get around this, Apple have locked the width of the Settings app... but also seems a bit weird.
- don't get me started on what "liquid glass" has done to the look & feel
For the record (not that I'm in any position of note or have any real impact on any of this): I _liked_ iOS7's flat design. It felt to me like it got quite close to its intention: to highlight content, and withdraw the UI only to the bare minimum to get stuff done. It was sparse and clear enough that I didn't think about much. There were some "rules" that apps applied inconsistently (or couldn't actually be rules anyone could follow), such as where the primary action button should be (the "back" button was pretty obvious, but the "new"/"next"/"go"/"submit" would move around all three of the other corners depending on app - maybe there's no one-size-fits-all solution for that.
Sure, it lacked discoverability. I don't have a ready solution that solves for the "content-first" and "discoverable options" that I can offer.
But the flatness, the tidy icons, the slide-over layers that were at sensible and consistent illusions of height above one another all "worked" for me.
I accept that if someone data-mined every comment by said user, they might be able to build a picture of said user clear enough to identify them (e.g. posting times might indicate likey country of origin). Possibly, depending on the content they posted.
(I'm just thinking around the problem. I'm not a security/privacy researcher designing systems I'd like others to use, just an interested user curious where the lines in the law lie, and also what the threat models might be to me as a user.)
- If I scroll a web page, and then decide to close it, I have to wait 'til the browser finishes scrolling the page before it'll open the menu with the close button
- every single time I watch a video my eye is drawn to the fucking stupid glass-y diffraction patterns and away from the content I was watching, or the play/pause icon I was interacting with
- every single time I use the home screen on iOS, or CMD+tab in macOS, my eye is drawn to the glass-y highlights around the icons, distracting me from whatever I was trying to do and causing me to think about the OS (and how much I hate the new look)
- I keep noticing the stupidly wide rounded corners on apps
- I keep noticing how the glassy icons and controls and stuff don't consistently change color with dark/light mode. They sometimes change if the content behind them is light/dark (which you'd think is a contrast improvement but it wouldn't be necessary if they had boxed out the toolbars like before). Often half the buttons have changed to contrast with the background and half haven't. This makes all the icons harder to read because I have to interpret the whole set to work out why it's suddenly slightly confusing
- I keep noticing how the toolbar icons have this insane shadows making them appear about 5meters closer to my face than the rest of the scree, which pulls my attention away from whatever I was looking at
- I keep noticing how some icons have those annoying highlighted edges and some don't and wondering why that is, and if they'll all come in sync...
- ... and the glassy-highlighted icons look like shit because the highlights are all the same (same color, same angle, same spread around the edges of the icons), which wouldn't happen if they were actual physical things under natural illumination
- since iOS 26.2, the increase contrast and reduce transparency modes have got worse: they seriously mess with the colors, in many case the light/dark relationship is inverted from what would be most useful (I can't think of examples now - it was so annoying I actually switched back to glassy to allow my eye a sense of comfort when using the thing, and now I try to put up with the "eye candy" distractions instead). I used to have "increase contrast" turned on with the last several major iOS versions. The new scheme has made it slightly harder to use the phone.
And I'm not even getting to how everything is harder to read, harder to see. It's _dreadful_ and they should fire everyone from the C-level who signed it off downwards.