Something that keeps bothering me is how there's seemingly no good answers in UI design.
There's high variation in whether people find light or dark themes easier to read. Familiar UI is easier to adopt, but restricts the ability to experiment with new UI mechanisms that could exceed familiarity's benefit in how much easier something becomes to use.
And so the logical conclusion of those sorts of things would be that "UIs should be swappable" but then you just end up at a different version of the problem: having a generic high-level API restricts the experimentation you can do with a UI, yet allowing direct access to internals interferes with long-term maintenance and reliability.
It's immensely frustrating. There's just two evils to pick from at every turn.
Op zondag 27 april geven we weer demonstraties van de radiotelescoop Dwingeloo. Op het programma staat altijd live-signaal van onze 'huispulsar' B0329+54, meestal een ver sterrenstelsel, een supernovarestant of gewoon de zon. De ruimte is beperkt, dus reserveren is nodig, via https://www.camras.nl
i’m not saying that urban zoning policy isn’t important and interesting per se, but i am also grateful that it acts as a nice pressure release valve for engineer-minded sorts turning their gaze to the Public World
if you ever find your eyes glazing over a little at yet another paean to upzoning around transit corridors, remind yourself that the individual in front of you might very well otherwise have fixed on Nutrition, or worse, The Family
CW-boost: uspol, ableism, autism, actionable-ish
The #Servo TSC has decided not to go ahead with the proposed changes to their AI policy, due to community pushback: https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/36379#discussioncomment-12898169
AI stock collapse
A trillion dollars disappeared in a day because someone made a garbage generator that uses fewer irreplaceable natural resources than the current garbage generators, and that makes me think about cobblestones.
Remember cobblestones? You could hook your computer up to a big distributed science project, there were tons to choose from, you could fold human proteomes, you could search for extraterrestrial intelligence, you could map cancer markers, develop better solar cell materials, all sorts of stuff. It took the form of a screensaver - whenever you weren't using your computer your CPU fans would spin up and you'd be folding. Move your mouse and it pauses. Great stuff. Something useful for your computer to do when you step away for a minute.
Anyway, you'd get credit for the work your computer had done. Cobblestones, they were called. They were never used as currency, they were just to show off. A cobblestone was a kind of receipt to show that your computer had done something useful.
We never used cobblestones as currency, but we could've. Instead we got bitcoin, which is a receipt that shows that your computer made a bitcoin. What's the bitcoin for? Being a receipt that your computer made a bitcoin.
It served as proof that you'd wasted some electricity.
Proof of waste.
There's other cryptocurrencies as well, some of which work differently to the proof of waste system, and those are worthless, because they're not proof of waste.
The waste is the point.
Now we get this market crash today, money disappeared, because the new AI thing is roughly as pointless as the old one but nowhere near as wasteful.
The waste, is the point. We saw it with cryptocurrencies and we saw it with NFTs and we see it with AI.
The waste has to be the point, because to some people, waste equals scarcity equals wealth equals power. The waste has to be the point because the machines that process the pointlessness have to be expensive, have to be owned by someone, have to be inaccessible to the average person, have to be manufactured and sold and rented out, the means of production of the pointlessness has to be in the right hands. The waste has to be the point, because otherwise we would've decided years ago that a cobblestone was worth a twentieth of a nice sandwich.
The waste is the point.
The #Servo TSC has decided not to go ahead with the proposed changes to their AI policy, due to community pushback: https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/36379#discussioncomment-12898169
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
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Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.