CoryAlexMartin

I don't find these anti-capitalist arguments very compelling, because the downsides of capitalism aren't nearly as bad as the downsides of other economic systems. However, mobile apps are generally trying to occupy as much of your time as possible in order to increase ad revenue, so it's no surprise that people are so glued to their phones. You can imagine, in capitalism's stead, some hypothetical authoritarian economic system where technology and mobile apps are optimized for "living a spiritually rich and diverse human life".

Yes, that's my point. Tools are tools, and there's benefit in making them good whether they're used by 1 person or 100 million people.

The idea of polishing dev tools used to seem counter-intuitive to me, but I’ve come around on that. The last thing you want is to dread doing your job, and if you can make parts of your job joyful, then I think you’re likely to be more productive and do better work.

Maybe you're not sensitive to choppy UI rendering and high input lag, or you simply don't value responsiveness. In which case, perhaps the devices that came in the iPhone's wake were adequate to you.

> That may be because Apple's implementation was absolutely lacking. The first iPhone was a vibrant, shiny feature phone disguised as a smartphone. They put their bet towards marketing and fashion, not tech and revolution - which paid off for them, as it turned out that was enough. Don't be surprised that techies aren't impressed by that though.

They bet on coupling capacitive multi-touch technology with a novel and responsive user experience that takes advantage of that technology to the fullest extent.

> I'm certain that we would have similar devices soon afterwards had Apple not go into mobile phone market at all.

It took competitors a considerable amount of time to even approach the iPhone in terms of quality of implementation, and that's in a timeline where they had the iPhone to use as a benchmark. How long do you think it would have taken them without the iPhone? Would they have ever? Would we have to use scrollbars, like on the LG Prada? Would we still be using miniature keyboards? How much baggage from the old days of cell phones would we still be carrying with us?

I remember telling people in 2007 and 2008 that every phone was going to become like the iPhone, and still encountering plenty of doubters and naysayers. Some people simply don't get it.

I'm not the biggest fan of Apple these days, and I think touchscreens are overused, and I think some of the things the iPhone did have resulted in a decline in user experience, but it's absurd to confidently proclaim that the iPhone didn't cause a dramatic shift in the cell phone industry and beyond.

A problem that I've come to notice with a lot of tech people is they either don't notice or don't value good implementation, even if that implementation is leagues ahead of everything else. It's important to develop taste and be able to look beyond feature lists.

It doesn't matter that the LG Prada had a capacitive touchscreen or that the Nokia N95 had a web browser: the iPhone had a smooth, vibrant and responsive multi-touch operating system with natural scrolling and a surprisingly good touch keyboard.

On the LG Prada you're poking at list items and dragging scrollbars while the device beeps at you and choppily redraws those lists like a terminal.

On the Nokia N95, you're navigating the web with a jumpy cursor controlled by directional buttons, and typing with a numpad.

There was nothing like the iPhone, and now everything is like the iPhone.

> “I guarantee that every single person who liked and shared that post about bringing Instagram back to what it was, would spend way less time on Instagram if it reverted back to how it used to be”

I'm likely not in the majority here, but my average usage of Instagram these days is me scrolling through my feed for about 20 seconds before getting frustrated and closing the app. All the ads and things I never opted into seeing make it an unpleasant and uninteresting experience. I was far more engaged when it was just a reverse chronological timeline of images from people I follow.

An established social media platform's most valuable asset is the size of its userbase. Even with the reach of Musk, I think it would be hard to attract a large enough userbase to make the product more compelling than Twitter.

I also find his writing very unnatural and hard to read. It makes me seriously doubt his method, which he claims he's been using for twenty years.

The first thing that stood out to me was the robotic nature of his writing. It seems like he's going so far out of his way to remove "unnecessary" words from sentences, and remove "unnecessary" sentences from his paragraphs, and to stringently vary his sentence lengths, that he winds up writing unnatural language. If you write in a way people aren't accustomed to, your readers are going to have a harder time understanding you.

"Sometimes short. Sometimes long." "Cut three lines. Paste them up above."

This isn't how English is used.

I'm running a copy of iTunes 8 right now, and I disagree.

I also disagree that the old style of design is less suited towards complicated software. Apple's iWork software feels like it's suffered the most in terms of usability as a result of modern UI design.

Humans evolved in a world where things have depth, light and shadows. Even you admit that back when user interfaces were designed with that in mind, those interfaces were more friendly to novices. By ignoring these aspects of our visual perception, you're requiring prior knowledge on the part of the user, while simultaneously making it difficult to acquire that knowledge. That's not a good thing, even if you assert that "flat" interfaces are no worse once you get used to them (which I clearly disagree with).

Why do you prefer the new UI? I can make a list of reasons why it's bad. The only reason I can see why anyone would prefer it is because it looks "cleaner", but that cleanness is artificial and gets in the way when trying to parse and use the software.

A good UI designer makes buttons look like buttons so our brain can quickly recognize them as such, without mistaking them for something else. A good designer has the window title in the same place no matter the application, so we know where to look before we even look. A good designer gives us a place to reliably perform common actions such as dragging the window.

We use our computers daily, and even imperceptible improvements to cognitive load and the amount of time it takes to perform actions make a difference over time. When I use my 2009 iMac running Snow Leaoprd, I perceive a reduction in friction compared to the latest macOS versions, and even compared to Catalina, which I use as my primary OS.

Regardless of how bad it is, it's a step up from touchscreen interfaces, which means it actually is acceptable by modern vehicle standards.

But I agree that by objective standards, it's unacceptable.

I'm thinking some manufacturers might be catching on to the downsides of touchscreen controls. I did a test drive of the previous generation Honda Civic, and it had touchscreen climate controls. I wound up getting a 2022 Honda Civic which has physical dials for all climate controls.

Though, as an aside, dials for temperature and fan speed are fine, but they also use a dial for changing which vents the air comes out of, which makes no sense. Also, the dials rotate infinitely, even though the ranges are finite. It means I still have to look to see what the setting is at, instead of being able to tell by feel.

By comparison, the 1992 Honda Civic climate controls are way better: https://i.imgur.com/r8JjjNw.png

Some degree of caution is warranted on the part of the individual when unwelcome side effects manifest following a drug or vaccine. Doubly so when you can find cases where others have reported the same side effects.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CovidVaccinated/comments/nnqm8u/lon...

We are also dealing with a novel (and evolving) virus and an even more novel set of vaccines. We're still learning about both. I find it silly that one could possess hubris about their stance on such a matter.

I may have misspoke when I said "bad" flu-like symptoms: they were on par with symptoms from the flu, not relatively worse (although, unpleasant), and they were all expected side effects and began the night I got the vaccine. The several months of lethargy accompanied with random pains was the unexpected part.

I was quarantining at the time and hadn't gone anywhere except the place where I got the vaccine. It would be ironic if I wound up getting COVID there, which lengthened and intensified my side effects. I hadn't considered that before.

I was 28 when I got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine last April. I had bad flu-like symptoms for a week, which was followed by 3 months of lethargy, among other things. I can't even begin to imagine how much time I lost from that. Needless to say, I opted not to get a booster.

Right, if time to solve were included in the shared results, you’d be able to pick up on skill variation a lot easier, and players would start to regard speed as something to improve at. I think it would make the game more interesting (not that it isn’t already).

Games with less complexity are generally easier to balance, so one shouldn't be too surprised.

I'd consider Tetris to be far more impressive design-wise in that it's a easy to learn but difficult to master, despite its simplicity. It's a mind-blowing experience to watch the best Tetris players in the world. The skill gap between a beginner Wordle player and the best in the world simply cannot be that great, by nature of the game's design. I guess a large part of the reason is because the player can't alter the game state: they can only gain information. It doesn't allow for complexity to emerge.

Building a website without JS is not hard.

If you think cat videos are the most impactful videos on Youtube, you must have stopped paying attention to the website 15 years ago.

All I ask is that my web browser's appearance fit in well among the other applications in my operating system. Unfortunately, Firefox stopped caring about this a long time ago, along with pretty much everyone else. Australis was the last version of Firefox's interface that I enjoyed using.

I disagree. Candid photographs are way more natural and interesting than ones in which everyone is posing. I would much prefer people not to ask permission before they take my photo. In fact, the photo I use as my profile picture on social media was taken without my knowledge, and it’s better because of that.

A few years ago I had decided that I was going to deactivate my Facebook account. In the process, there was a page that displayed the names and profile pictures of a few of my friends, and told me, explicitly, that each of them would miss me.

"John will miss you." "Mary will miss you." "Steve will miss you." "Greg will miss you." "Suzy will miss you."

It was so transparently evil that I couldn't believe it.

> With all that, why don’t we simply remove borderline content? Misinformation tends to shift and evolve rapidly, and unlike areas like terrorism or child safety, often lacks a clear consensus. Also, misinformation can vary depending on personal perspective and background.

This is a weird way to say "ideas that we suppress for being misinformation are sometimes actually true."

One thing that worked for me was to have a friend hold me accountable if I didn't work a certain number of hours per day. My punishment for not working enough was that I'd owe him money.

Ideally you want to get to a point where you're able to hold yourself accountable, but I'm not entirely convinced most people are able to do that reliably, sustained indefinitely.

You may enjoy Ripcord if you're not happy with Discord's UI. I've been using it for a few months, and it's made Discord enjoyable to use.

I do have to open the official client whenever I do voice calls though, because there's currently an issue that can cause incoming audio to sound terrible. But for text chat, it's great.

https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

If I take a photo or a video on my iPhone, it's uploaded to iCloud automatically, and afaik there is no way to remove it from iCloud while still keeping it in the photo library on the device without opting out of iCloud Photos entirely.

I use Notational Velocity on my Mac, FSNotes on iOS, and have them both use .rtf and sync via iCloud.

This is a very common mistake. Lots of people are unaware that they're supposed to change acronyms depending on whether or not daylight savings time is in effect.

It's far easier to make something worse than make it better. There are few good solutions to problems, but infinite bad ones. Sometimes change is called for, but it needs to be done carefully and only when necessary.

Fundamentally, you need a healthy balance between conservatism and liberalism. Software companies don't have enough reverence for the former, and perhaps they're structured in ways that incentivizes the latter far more than they ought.