wharvle

Our experience with software when that happens is sad for everyone but bad UI designers. For them, it’s justice.

If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for a panel of users from a nursing home, a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c.

I expect the outcome would be a hell of a lot less twee “on brand” UI elements and a lot more leaning on proven design systems and frameworks, including fucking crucially for appearance. And also a lot less popping shit up on the screen without user interaction (omg those damn “look what’s new!” sorts of pop ups or focused tabs—congrats, some of your users are now totally lost)

Which is effective. If you’re a parent trying to decide which schools you want your kids in, maps of where the money is and maps of school rankings are damn near interchangeable (mostly not for funding-related reasons, though). You could use either and come to similar conclusions.

And that other film appears to have had a box office under $1.4m, with a collection of basically nobody notable attached, including the director.

My cellular connection supports IPv6, but testing sites report it’s misconfigured in a bunch of ways. I don’t see problems in practice, though. But on my home network, it’s turned off.

Nitpick, but this specific example, despite its place in pop culture, wasn't a case of a lawsuit-happy wacko. McDonalds screwed up, after being warned they were screwing up and failing to correct, and someone got badly hurt.

When we first got Fiber, years ago, Amazon’s store was one of the things that broke until I turned off IPv6. Wouldn’t load at all, on any device on our network.

Works fine for VPNs and such, but I don’t talk to the Internet with it, because my experience has been it’s terribly unreliable.

Healthcare and government are enormous slices of the economy. I'd expect them to be at or near the top of hiring much of the time. IDK about hospitality.

2) I graduated in the early '00s and I think maybe 5% of the kids in my graduating class, at most, had a cell phone by graduation. Mostly some shitty Nokia with a phone-only or low-texting plan (texting was still crazy-expensive), mainly for contacting parents about after school activity stuff.

Middle-class-spectrum car-dependent exurb. Maybe it was different for, like, kids growing up in Brooklyn or something? Or rich kids, perhaps.

A more-common perk for children of free-spending parents, in my town, was still a second POTS line, though I do think that was starting to tip the other way just at the end.

Dynamic task dispatch being a relatively recent feature. The fundamental design imposing lots of structure (well, kind of—you can skip lots of it, but it takes time to figure that out) to practically no benefit (and god, is the terminology dumb, made all the more so because half the stuff it names is nearly useless). “Oh yeah the scheduler just crashes or locks up while still health-checking all the time, standard practice to so restart it frequently” posted on a hundred different issues dating from yesterday to years ago (many fixed! And yet…). It’s pretty bad at passing data between tasks (see again: lots of structure, little benefit)

Besides, if it worked like that, training on anything under copyright would have a similar effect. These models have a bigger problem if they get “tainted” by a tainted training source. (Fingers crossed they do! But I doubt it)

QNX Photon wasn’t far off but was never a realistic option for an everyday desktop (even less so than BeOS, which was at least intended as such).

Yeah, just copy BeOS.

Serving things that are mostly or nigh-exclusively used by machines connected to the power grid (and, ideally, great and consistent Internet connections) is a much better use case.

Yeah, uh, they definitely always do that. It "wouldn't be them" to ever not.

(Hell, the monitor even supports True Tone—and it didn't at first, that arrived in an OS update, from Apple)

There is no step 2. The worst parts of social media and ad clearinghouses (Jesus, all the scams Google promotes and makes money off of) are destroyed, anything remotely defensible survives. Personalized "algo" feeds and "algo" suggestions? Untenable. Customized ads served from a system no human monitors or checks to make sure they're not serving blatant scams at a massive scale? Gone. Both the incentives and ability to try to connect strangers with one another in ways they didn't directly ask for? Greatly diminished.

Ad-supported media survives (for better or worse). People can still communicate just fine. People can still publish without trouble.

I lose so very much time to not just the ceremonies, but to wrestling-with/losing-things-in all these bafflingly complex tools like Jira or Asana or "Azure Devops" and such.

Most places I've been use Github or Gitlab. The issue trackers there are fine. They're close to the code, and in a site I'm already using. They're easy to have conversations in. They work well with built-in review processes, and with pull/merge requests. They don't permit enough strict structure that one worries about smashing some PM's carefully-constructed sandcastle by just trying to use them, but have enough filters and tagging and such that you can apply every bit as much logical structure as I've ever seen in Jira and friends, if you want to, it just won't also make it horrible to use when you do.

I wonder sometimes what % of productivity companies are losing by letting PMs pick where tickets & communication about tickets live. Plus the extra cost of the tools themselves.

I gather the version of that I did get was the middle-class version—which some others didn't get and have a similar "wait, that's just normal?" reaction as I do to the upper-middle stuff. Like 90% of that's basically credit-related—how credit cards work and how to use them, how to build credit, how to buy a house (generally with a mortgage, so, still basically a credit-related thing), that kind of stuff.

I've noticed similar things when it comes to paying others to do stuff for me. Having a house cleaner come in for the first time was fucking weird. Still is, really. I can't relax, feel like I ought to be helping. Or paying someone to do work on my house that I could do—tiling, drywalling, some light electrical, plumbing, most general home-improvement stuff. It feels gross—I don't think it does for those who grew up with that stuff being normal. I suspect it's a barrier to advancing in business, because those attitudes carry over. Delegation is weird to me. Being someone's boss is horribly uncomfortable. The notion of starting a business and hiring employees to take over stuff I've been doing feels icky and wrong, and no amount of one part of my brain telling another part to knock it off makes that go away.