quacked

I am not one to performatively hate Trump, but my goodness it's humiliating to live under his administration.

Are you thinking of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX?

A/B testing does not inherently lead you to good design. If you A/B test what people want based on their revealed user preference, you get gambling apps and doomscrolling.

I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but a lot of software platforms just can't be customized and mastered like they used to. Things like reorganizing columns, setting shortcuts, menus being consistently organized and accessible using the same command, clickable text and elements looking visually different from unclickable, a wide variety of colors being streamlined to color/pale-color/off-white trios, etc. I use a lot of operational software and every platform just can't be mastered like the old stuff. (And animation lags, too!) And I can watch my younger coworkers on the new software packages, they're certainly not faster on the new stuff than I was on the old stuff.

A few months ago my dad and I roused out the old Windows 2000 computer we used from 2002-2010 and while it took about 6 minutes to boot up, once it booted up, the software was all astonishingly fast (no telemetry) and way, way more "commandable" than their modern equivalents. It was like a tool shop.

All of these are examples of the physical performance of software or hardware limitations at the time. I find that software's reliability has increased a thousandfold in my lifetime, but its actual controllability/feel/UI-UX has been rapidly declining for about a decade.

It's incredible. And the labels are all turned into pills or chips. Then they don't allow pivoted views of their lists, or if they do allowed pivots it's a visual nightmare.

Drives me nuts. It makes everything feel like working on a poorly organized desk.

I think it's this cargo cult attempt to tap into what Apple had pre-2010 on the iPod and first iPhone. They're missing that the design leadership and attention to detail was unparalleled at Apple in that era, so they just flatten everything for a streamlined look and miss every signifier Apple put in its UIs in those days

The two things that pain me the most are:

(1) Clickable elements no longer visually signifying that they're clickable. Words aren't underlined or written in a special font, sometimes the profile avatar is the clickable link to the profile but sometimes the name is, etc.

(2) No more clean, compact directory trees. We used to have high-contrast compact UI design to look through nested ontologies. Now it's rounded-edges card-based, often without trace lines, and barely ever compact. RIP

> There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults.

I cannot think that you have a lot of experience with all social classes if you think this. I have extremely disordered family members with mental disabilities and I regularly come into contact with their friends and service-industry coworkers. A lot of adults struggle with memory, comprehension, logic, speed, and reasoning, which I would call "large deviations in intelligence".

I'm in the US and I gave up Amazon two years ago, and I haven't noticed any decrease in my quality of life.

On the night the Onion finally went out of print my friends and I went and took a few of the newspaper boxes they distributed them out of in Madison. One stayed at our friend's house, the other one we used as a distribution box for our own anonymous satirical newspaper we wrote for our high school.

Ending the tax preparation industry as well

I wouldn't say that's entirely true. I've changed my mind reading debates on the internet, and less frequently I've changed my mind months or years after having had a debate on the internet.

Is your opinion that the denizens of a locale ought to have no say in what happens to it?

Then maybe I used to wrong term. It was a building full of singles, built to look almost exactly like the classic 5-over-1.

That's what they're working on next.

As I understand it, NIMBYism is "don't ever build anything anywhere in the neighborhood/town", not "don't build in this one spot we all really like". As I said, there are tons of other buildings going up over town.

They weren't multifamily units.

I live near a small town of about 10,000 people that's about 30 minutes away from a "hot commodity" city. The crown jewel of this small town is the main street, which retains a bit of kitschy Americana that has remained charming for decades and even draws tourists, for whatever reason.

A local business owner bought up one of the blocks in the center of the street and announced plans to demolish it in order to build a 5-over-1 complex several stories higher than any of the other buildings.

Without the public comment process, he'd have been able to do this practically overnight, completely ruining the street. The public fought back long and hard for many months and eventually won by convincing the town council to vote against the rezoning that would permit this construction.

I can't say I'm opposed to the public comment process.

(Note that this was not a case of never-change NIMBYism; tons of other similar buildings are going up all over the town completely unopposed. It was the ugly, generic design and the sheer size put so blatantly in the middle of everyone's favorite part of town.)

I don't understand why this standard is always applied to westerners. When we go to other countries, are they explaining all the fundamentals of western music in addition to the theories of their own? "Yeah our students in Boston don't know anything about Carnatic rhythm, but over in Bengal they all learn counterpoint and fugue before they learn the traditional ornaments"

Sorry, are you saying that small direct action is pointless until you can overturn the entire governmental system?

Yeah, it would mean that the British Crown would no longer hold dominion over the Colonies. I'd insult you, but then dang would get mad at me.

There are other ways of attacking the camera directly, I think.

I've been very pleased to see the reaction to Flock in the US. I was talking to a younger guy, very normal kid who keeps his nose clean, studying criminal justice in his junior year at college. I jokingly mentioned to him that maybe he could bring some anti-surveillance awareness to whatever law enforcement agency he goes to work for and he said, very seriously, "oh yeah, definitely. I've only gotten two cameras so far but I want to get at least five." It turns out that he and his friends all follow an app that marks the location of Flock cameras and there's a whole youth culture around knocking them down.

I wonder if we can win that battle as a society over the decades. A "traditional" human-only surveillance state is bad enough, but with LLMs involved it's just a nightmare. It would be extremely cheap to now have full automated surveillance over cameras, phone lines, etc. "Computer, send me a scored list of any dissident violations conducted on any channel under surveillance in District 14 over the past two weeks. Cut off their credit cards and send a notice to appear in Civilian Oversight Court".

The problem with granting every worker permanent residency is that they would then lose the impetus to perform the work they're so critical for at the low wage they currently take, and the prices of goods and services will rise just like it would if the immigrants were not granted permanent residency and the labor force was scrutinized and protected property. I would rather simply just stop using immigrant labor and go after exploitative companies. I realize this is politically infeasible under the current status quo, but to really solve the problem we should be jailing owners who use illegal labor, perform wage theft, etc.

We also need to end the practice of holding workers to few enough hours that they require supplemental government welfare to thrive, for example the fraction of Walmart workers on food stamps, or who want full-time for benefits but can't get it.

We'll do it ourselves! People are natural hoarders and archivists, as should be effortlessly proven by custom wikis.

I would not. I'm far less concerned about the rights and profits of copyright holders and far more concerned with society and civilization having access to the art that's produced within it.

Since I'm just pitching wild ideas on the Internet of course I have the freedom to make any suggestion I want, but I would like to live in a world where (a) no companies or rights owners are able to play bullshit games with gating access to art that can be reproduced at trivial cost and (b) we can consume all the art we want that's past its sell-by date. It's insane to me that we don't have free, legal databases of every work of art created before, say, 2006.

In theory, the financier or team of financiers would be added onto the list of creating individuals. I suppose some sort of fractional representation might be worked out.

I think that we should change copyright law such that

1) Rights can't be held by corporations, only individuals. So the rights to a piece of art or IP would always trace down to a list of names.

2) Everything enters the public domain after 20 years or the death of the entire list of ownership.