Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

Lukewarm take: internet search is terrible because it’s too complicated. It’s doing too much.

The purpose of search should not be to answer your questions. The purpose of search is to find cool blogs. If you subscribe to enough cool blogs, your questions will be answered before you’ve asked them.

(Newsletters are uncool blogs.)

As someone who uses hearing aids, I'm asking, no begging, anyone who works at Apple to get a feature added to the iPhone.

Let me *manually* decide to connect to hearing aids. I want to use them sometimes in Bluetooth mode to connect to the phone. But not always. If I'm in a lecture, I don't want a "ding" on my phone muting the audio of the lecture so the phone can grab the Bluetooth of the hearing aids.

Even better: let me select what things the phone will use the hearing aids for.

When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.

But that's not true anymore.

User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.

My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.

#HCI #UX #UI #okdoomer

There's a lake in Poland that can be translated as "Gamer Lake", and it sits in between 2 villages that came be translated as "Large Gamer Girls" and "Small Gamer Girls"

Online anonymity: study found ‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names 

'What matters, it seems, is not so much whether you are commenting anonymously, but whether you are invested in your persona and accountable for its behaviour in that particular forum. There seems to be value in enabling people to speak on forums without their comments being connected, via their real names, to other contexts.

...calls to end anonymity online by forcing people to reveal their real identities might not have the effects people expect'

https://theconversation.com/online-anonymity-study-found-stable-pseudonyms-created-a-more-civil-environment-than-real-user-names-171374

I am begging people, talk to your artists that you appreciate.

Give them some encouragement. Tell them what you love. Gush a bit even.

If it wasn’t for some random DM in my inbox this morning, I’d be taking my internal compulsion to close up shop a lot more seriously tonight than I am.

Artists are tired, exhausted even.

I am *lucky* to do this as a glorified hobby.

Others’ abilities to get bread on the table depend on coin that isn’t coming in.

Don’t leave words left unsaid as well.

#TechWriters matter

Discord is NOT documentation

One thing that annoys me greatly whenever it happens is a mismatch in artist's name spelling in metadata of different albums (e.g "System of a Down" vs "System Of A Down"), causing them to get displayed twice in most audio players.

At least on Linux I can easily `metaflac --set-tag` all of them at once with a single command lol

When we dubbed it the information age I don't think we realized how much of the information would be false.

Holy shit. This from 65daysofstatics most recent Patreon post:

"Here is a major issue we are currently tussling with. Since we started work on Wreckage Systems, the notions of generative/procedural art and, in particular, 'A.I.' have become increasingly loaded terms. As we hopefully made clear in various posts over the last few years (this one comes to mind), we are deeply, deeply sceptical about A.I. and all the algorithmic and technological answers being carelessly thrown at what are actually political and structural problems in the name of progress/infinite growth/capitalism-is-fine-actually-and-will-save-us-from-climate-change-honest. 65LABS has picked a side, and it is Team Luddite. Against us, these tech bros are not only destroying the internet, not only devaluing art, not only making the already-precarious lives for creative workers even more precarious, not only failing to understand that the meaning and magic of art is not contained in its particular combination of pixels or samples but rather created in the ripples of social relations that any piece of art makes as it pushes its way into the world, not only are they failing to understand that making art is, at best, to clumsily capture a snapshot of something larger, a fragile, flawed, always-incomplete communication of intent from one/some humans to others, NOT ONLY ALL THAT, but also (and yes, admittedly more trivially), they have tarnished this curious little space of computer-based art that uses generative tools to make itself. Because they do not use these tools in the name of exploring liquid, impermanent art that flutters around a recognisable core but never achieves a single, fixed state. They are employing them solely to be able to dig faster to the bottom of lowest common denominator Generic Internet Content."

All of this.

I got an email about my Win32 programming tutorial (circa 1999) from a 12 year old girl whose hobby is making "programs in languages used way before i was born" ...

First of all yes, excellent, this is a good hobby.

Secondly, don't mind me, I'll just be over here crumbling to dust.

Just wondering, would it be possible to buy tabacco at this Albert Heijn?

the nice thing about my ADHD is that if my apartment is haunted I will literally never notice it

“silly me, always leaving these cupboards and drawers open and the sink running at full blast,” I say, as a frustrated ghost screams into a pillow in the corner

A new study from Sweden 🇸🇪 suggests that mild COVID-19 can cause several years of "brain fog"

https://www.gp.se/nyheter/sverige/risk-for-flera-ar-av-hjarndimma-efter-mild-covid.f60cbaf7-0ec9-432f-8626-4311a9e2bddd?access=unknown

via: https://twitter.com/killedbyproxy/status/1751280158814715934

Half the U.S. can't afford rent.

But the economy is doing 'better'.

Something is wrong here.

I think this, a discussion of the parallels between "AI" and "crypto", is a good take. I want to dig into the bit on "AI" being different because it has practical use.

"AI" is a marketing term. There's the stuff that was mainly called "ML" up until 2021 or so, which definitely has practical uses. E.g., if you're running a social network and need to help humans find the toxic stuff, ML can help.

But in the last few years there's a wave of hype mainly around the large language models, LLMs, and the large text-to-image models. So things like ChatGPT and DALL-E. It's really not clear to me those have much more practical use than crypto. Certainly not over their costs. 1/

https://sfba.social/@misc@mastodon.social/111754701923644674

Many folks here probably already know this, but it's worth repeating, because I think it's one of the most crucial yet overlooked things about political campaigning:

Always demand *twice* what you're looking to get. People will generally treat 'campaigning for change' like a negotiation, and they will (unfortunately) usually not accept rational arguments by themselves.

If you demand the outcome you want, then your campaign is basically guaranteed to fail; you will get something that's inbetween your demands and the status quo. Doesn't matter how reasonable your demands are, you will not get them.

The purpose of asking for twice what you want is to make the reasonable ask actually *look* reasonable to people, by framing it on a broader spectrum of possibilities.

(If necessary, delegate the "demanding twice what you want" to a separate organization that you can afford to 'burn', so that your main organization looks like the reasonable party.)

Yes, it sucks that this is necessary.