Not that your exactly guilty, but that comes close to the cringeworthy attitude of "haha, what a great troll! Those poor fools can't tell when he's being serious, so brilliant! Wait, wait, you touched my sacred cow? Well, now you're obviously toxic and I've discovered empathy."
>The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.
This ... has been very opposite of my experience:
1) I've seen websites turn into poor imitations of mobile apps that lose all the features of web UIs that I want: ability to open links in tabs, use of affordances to scroll up and down, dense packing of information, ability to edit the size, etc. (Edit: almost forgot how they run the back button too!)
2) Generally, I see that the more UI specialists they have, the worse the UI gets. There's the saying, "developers are responsible for mediocre UIs, designers are responsible for horrible UIs".
This. It was infuriating to find Notepad got updated to a bloated app with rich text and Copilot. It's so different, it just should have been another program. The whole reason I use Notepad is because it's a simple, dumb, fast, predictable program. If I wanted the rich text, I would use any of the numerous other options!
And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
Re "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.
This makes me want to suggest to Microsoft to have AI-enhanced safe mode. "Computer can't boot? Reboot to the Recovery Copilot and have this advanced spell-checker try to troubleshoot it!"
Omg! I had just been thinking about this and had written up a proposal but hadn't published it. We could organically make common usage accept a single-syllable 7. Here's the writeup:
MAKE 7 MONOSYLLABIC
There is a lot of research that, in languages where the numbers have more syllables, native speakers have a harder time remembering sequences of numbers, because your brain has to store the cognitive load of saying it. So native Chinese speakers are much better at it than Spanish.
English is fortunate in in that all the digits are one syllable ... except for seven. If we could fix that, then we could cause a massive amount of good, when summed over all the times people have to remember numbers.
The good news is that we can promote this in a backward-compatible way, without having to coordinate in advance. Just commit to pronouncing 7 as "sen" (pretend you clipped the word as se--n), and eventually it will be the accepted pronunciation and codified as standard. As long as the listener is expecting a number there, they will automatically fill in the missing sounds and parse it as a 7.
Try it out some time! "Oh, there weren't very many, just six or sen."
That runs into the issue I was talking about in the proposal, where it's not backward-compatible and requires people to be informed of and sympathetic to the renaming. "Sen" will already be accepted as referring to 7, without such coordination, so long as it has enough context to be parsed as a number.
I doubt anyone would associate 'sen' with seven: 'sev' would be much more obvious. Whereas 'sept' is already used as a prefix within English to mean seven such as September (Roman seventh month), septuplets (seven children in a single birth) and septuagenarian (a 70 year old).
Anyhow, this discussion is moot as nobody is going to follow any proposal.
The whole point is that you don't need to get anyone to consciously follow any proposal, you just push common usage in the direction of saying "sen" to the point that it becomes correct, and you can take action now to assist it, without having to coordinate, and without breaking your existing communication.
With respect, your comments read as ignoring all the points I brought up in in order to show off knowledge you're proud to have.
Probably not, or they don't go by it, since there seems to be a massive problem with people being unable to hear dialogue well enough to not need subtitles.
It was a real eye(ear?)-opener to watch Seinfeld on Netflix and suddenly have no problem understanding what they're saying. They solved the problem before, they just ... unsolved it.
My favorite thing about Kodi is an audio setting that boosts the center channel. Since most speech comes through that, it generally just turns up the voices, and the music and sound effects stay at the same level. It's a godsend. Also another great reason to have a nice backup collection on a hard drive.
It's a similar thing to watching movies from before the mid-2000 (I place the inflection point around Collateral in 2004) where after that you get overly dark scenes where you can't make out anything, while anything earlier you get these night scenes where you can clearly make out the setting, and the focused actors/props are clearly visible.
Watch An American Werewolf in London, Strange Days, True Lies, Blade Runner, or any other movie from the film era all up to the start of digital, and you can see that the sets are incredibly well lit. On film they couldn't afford to reshoot and didn't have immediate view of what everything in the frame resulted on, so they had to be conservative. They didn't have per-pixel brightness manipulation (feathering and burning were film techniques that could technically have been applied per frame, but good luck with doing that at any reasonable expense or amount of time). They didn't have hyper-fast color film-stock they could use (ISO 800 was about the fastest you could get), and it was a clear downgrade from anything slower.
The advent of digital film-making when sensors reached ISO 1600/3200 with reasonable image quality is when the allure of time/cost savings of not lighting heavily for every scene showed its ugly head, and by the 2020's you get the "Netflix look" from studios optimizing for "the cheapest possible thing we can get out the door" (the most expensive thing in any production is filming in location, a producer will want to squeeze every minute of that away, with the smallest crew they could get away with).
Was that because of Prop 65, though? The day-to-day effect seems to be alert fatigue and people ignoring the warnings because they're everywhere.
I read the links to find the proposed mechanism (NIH link is dead btw), and it says that businesses pre-emptively reformulated to avoid having the label, but the LA Times story also says this is a mixed bag, often resulting in a switch to less-tested, possibly unsafe substitutes simply because they weren't on the list.
>>But swapping one chemical for an unlisted substitute has sometimes resulted in its own consequences.
>>For example, when bisphenol A, an ingredient in plastics, was listed in 2013, chemical concentrations in blood and urine samples subsequently fell by 15%. However, that was followed by a 20% rise in bisphenol S — a closely related chemical also linked with reproductive toxicity.
I mean ... there's a continuous scale of how much effort you spend to express gratitude. You could ask the same question of "well why did you say 'thanks' instead of 'thank you' [instead of 'thank you very much', instead of 'I am humbled by your generosity', instead of some small favor done in return, instead of some large favor done in return]?"
You could also make the same criticism of e.g. an automated reply like "Thank you for your interest, we will reach out soon."
Not every thank you needs to be all-out. You can, of course, think more gratitude should have been expressed in any particular case, but there's nothing contradictory about capping it in any one instance.
That's a good point. The hour hand moves continuously as an artifact of technical constraints on the original clocks -- which I think is a great example of achieving a balance between UI and technical feasibility -- but we don't technically need them to work that way anymore, and digital clocks work exactly like that.
With that said, it's not obvious that we should use the jump hour UI[1]. It's desirable to have the hour hand be close to 4 when it's close to 4 o'clock. Like the neighbor comment says, that prevents you from confusing 4:58 with ~4.
Having discrete jumps on a mechanical analog clock is not a particularly hard problem. Certainly easier that shrinking an accurate mechanical time keeping device down to wrist watch size.
For that matter getting a purely digital display out of a mechanical clock is not diffucult either either.
If there was a strong demand for such a product, they would have caught on before the 7 segment display made them the cheapest option. Possibly as a luxury or status symbol depending on how the cost worked out.
IIRC there was a Slashdot discussion about it that went "Oh yeah, obviously you need to black out the face entirely, or use a randomized Gaussian blur." "Yeah, or just not molest kids."
This. Similar issue if you introduce someone to how you can "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website. They're like "omg haxors!"
True story: one time I used that technique to ask for a higher credit card limit than the options the website presented. Interestingly enough, they handled it gracefully by sending me a rejection for a higher amount and an acceptance for the maximum offered amount (the one I edited). And I didn't get arrested for hacking!
Using view-source to accomplish something could be considered hacking in the old school MIT sense* of curious exploration of some place or thing for clever purposes.
*: disclaimer, I didn't attend MIT, but did hang out with greybeards on 90s IRC
I have helped someone get an executive job at a Fortune 500 company... by teaching them how to use the dev tools and edit the DOM to replace text and images.
They had been asked for an assignment as part of the interview process, where they were supposed to make suggestions regarding the company's offers. They showed up on the (MS teams) interview having revamped what looked like the live website (www. official website was visible in the browser bar).
The interviewers gave them the job pretty much on the spot, but did timidly ask at the end "do you mind putting it back though, for now?", which we still laugh about 5 years later
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