isolatedsystem

It was Microsoft who had the courage (and, admittedly, need) to come up with a bold new design language. They said, you know what, most people are digital natives these days, let's not infantalise them with fake paper notepads and fake leather textures for their digital calendar. Instead, let's make text itself the highlight, the star, and strip out all the rest.

They had a User Story thingy where their ideal users were busy people wanting to exist in the real world. MS wanted that the ideal user takes the phone out of his pocket, glances at it and instantly recives the information he seeks, and quickly puts it back in his pocket to move on with his life.

Hence Live Tiles. Hence the first widgets. Hence their lovely and ill-fated People app where you could go to one place and handle your Facebook feed and your LinkedIn feed etc. Hence the discarding of endless unicorn rainbow vomit of icons. Nah. Here's a simple text interface in black background for AMOLED battery life. The phone is not an extension of personality. It is a tool. Use it. Put it away.

Lumia phones ran amazingly well on nothing specs because they didn't try to be too complicated with graphical stuff. Battery life was always god-tier. And, though I've never been able to confirm it, around the time of Lumia 710, the MS touch keyboard actually let you type letters in the wrong order and would correct them for you. For example: "atcually". I remember at that time that Android wouldn't. It would only handle near-misses: "axtually".

I fucking loved Windows Phone. Rest in peace.

Tantacrul is my favourite (and, actually, only) example of this. His work with MuseScore, with Audacity, his videos about them, and his takedowns of Sybellius etc. all opened my eyes to the world of designers who do things with hard-nosed analytical thinking, user studies, good principles, and make something useful. Even his little digressions about Paint3D and Ubuntu's Mobile OS are illustrative.

- Quietly/Delve/Tapestry/Landscape: they're all lovely words. I love(d) using them.

- "Serves as": I use this all the time too.

- "The result? Devastating". Perhaps it is a bit stilted, but "Outcome? Predictable." could be a nice turn of phrase.

- "It's worth noting": All academics everywhere use this in papers. See also: "Notably", "Essentially", "In general" and other such fillers that we reach for.

- "Think of it as": This is such a useful phrase to explain something. Analogy is how we learn after all.

- The fucking em dashes. I love them, and screw everyone who suggests one should stop using them. One big reason for using linux is the compose key, so the em dash is never far away.

- Same with the unicode decoration. Nah, screw you. I use these symbols all the time: °, ×, →, ⇒ etc. in my own notes. Again, compose key ftw.

Etc. (the list is endless)

I know what people will say, that everything is contextual, one has to study case-by-case etc. But I can't help feeling that someone is pointing a finger at me and accusing me before-the-fact. Just, AI has polluted the joy of writing.

Because it seems that you're suggesting that thousands (and perhaps two orders of magnitude more than that) should just...grow up malnourished, underfed, lacking the warm comfort of security that is critical for healthy adulthood free from anxiety, depression, repressed rage, emotional dysregulation?

Day to day, I use open source fonts that Butterick recommends. But once in a while, I like using just nice stuff. It's like a nice fountain pen for others.

Alzheimers can lead to all kinds of other issues like impulsivity, or aggressiveness. People gambling away their life savings, not knowing that they are even doing it. Doctors unable to intervene due to rights around patient autonomy. All of this has big consequences in the lives of those affected.

It had a placard in it saying something like "You don't have 100 friends. You have like 4. And that's OK."

The more I'm getting older, the truer this has become. There is something extremely zen-like about letting the past trail away like the wake of a ship, as Watts said.

In an ideal world, those people were dear to me, and me to them, and we would all stay in touch and be one big happy family, n'importe the distance. But it takes plenty out of me just to be there for those that matter most. And for them, putting up with my quirks is burdensome but not an unscalable wall. As it is for me with their quirks in reverse.

As a sibling comment to yours stated, the hardest decision was deciding to stop using Meta.

I have a militant "let the leaves fall where they may" attitude towards stopping relationships with companies I detest (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta...) It all always works out fine.

Meanwhile, my personal machine continues to be Linux.

This is what I'm doing at my work now. I'm lucky enough to have two computers, a desktop PC that runs Linux, and a laptop with Windows 11. I do not use that laptop unless I have to deal with xlsx, pptx or docx files. Life is so much better.

Pandas insist you never use a for loop. So, I feel guilty if I ever need a throwaway variable on the way to creating a new column. Sometimes methods are attached to objects, other times they aren't. And if you need to use a function that isn't vectorised, you've got to do df.apply anyway. You have to remember to change the 'axis' too. Plotting is another thing that I can't get my head around. Am I supposed to use Pandas' helpers like df.plot() all the time? Or ditch it and use the low level matplotlib directly? What is idiomatic? I cannot find answers to much of it, even with ChatGPT. Worse, I can't seem to create a mental model of what Pandas expects me to do in a given situation.

Pandas has disabused me of the notion that Python syntax is self-explanatory and executable-pseudocode. I find it terrible to look at. Matlab was infinitely more enjoyable.

I realised over the last years that my weariness with the internet was born mostly out of Youtube and Reddit. Reddit I've successfully cut out of my life, Youtube is more difficult to do because much of modern culture happens there. But I've drawn the line at the worst offenders. In tech, people like Dave2D and Marques Brownlee have managed to avoid having stupid thumbnails, so I'd rather watch them. Thereafter, I have a CalmYoutubers.md file that has the (few) channels that I find are not idiotic, so I stick to them.

Children are attracted to soy-boy suprised pikachu face on clickbait thumbnails. CHLIDREN are ATTRACTED to EVERY second WORD being IN all CAPS!!! They like the three exclamation marks. They like flashy text on MrWhoseTheBoss videos which repeat the same thing the fucking guy is talking but just with flashy text on screen. They like the whizz-bang animations and ADHD addled three-second shots. They like the Mr. Beastification of Youtube.

I'm not a child. I'm too old and weary for that. LTT wants to do it, he can. Godspeed, and may his next twenty million subscribers fill the hole in his pocket and his soul that the first twenty million couldn't. I just ain't gonna be watching.

As I got more comfortable with Linux, I decided to change things up even at the office. I switched to RHEL on my work PC. Consequently, moved from Matlab to Python. I even got my girlfriend to switch to Linux Mint and Graphene OS. The other day, she said it was joyous to be able to hit the start menu, type "Print" and have "Printer" show up. No drama. She has also discovered a love for the command line, being able to type "pdfunite blah blah" and have her PDFs combined into one etc.

Linux in 2025 is world-class, I have zero regrets.

One evening with Claude. Done. Obviously it's not perfect, but man what an amazing thing to be able to do. I'm not even a software developer. LLMs are the new Excel.

Careless people, indeed.

> It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.

> but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked.

> A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions...

> A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it...

> There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts

> The belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving it. That by storing a thought, you have understood it. That by filing a fact, you have earned the right to deploy it.

> ...the fear of losing track, of forgetting, of not being caught up.

> Nietzsche burned early drafts. Michelangelo destroyed sketches. Leonardo left thousands of pages unfinished.

Frost is incomparable.

CERN engineer writing about cooling systems and simulations.