rablackburn

(in the context of consumer computing)

The unfortunate reality is that because Windows was so dominant for so long you either have to

a) conform to their interaction paradigms to not frustrate users

or

b) create something incredibly polished and simple that it 'Just Works' how users expect it to (ie Apple).

Once you have people on-boarding to your platform you can distinguish yourself and build out your own paradigms, but it takes a long time, and users are unforgiving.

GNU/Linux is fantastic for power users, but the moment a 'normal' user has to edit a text config file, or open a terminal, we've lost them. When they try to do something that they're use to doing (see thumbnails of their files when choosing them) and it's not possible, GNU/Linux stops being a valid alternative.

> I'm not personally moved by a chan board user's gripes about being unable to quickly find their favourite anime memes to post since all their images are `[1-9][0-9]*.png`

You're uncharitably trivialising the author's point. A common user task is selecting an image file from your device (to upload/edit/share). A user will often have many images in a folder and they want to quickly select the one they're thinking of.

There is an almost universally accepted solution (or 'best practice') to this problem, which is rendering each image visually so that the user can select the correct one at a glance (either as a thumbnail view in a file picker, or a literal grid of images as in iOS). GNOME and Gtk have not implemented this widely accepted (in fact, expected) behaviour, despite it being raised as an issue nearly 17 years ago.

Instead you (and others) argue points like "well they should rename and manage their files", "it's just an extra click", "it's not that important or else it would exist already", "its just one inconvenient thing, get over it". And there are conversations to have around those points, but at the end of the day people are going to have a negative experience with the product because "it can't even render thumbnails".

And the point is that this _isn't_ an isolated issue. Every project has something like this (Apple and Microsoft still have these issues), but we're particularly bad at addressing the issue, or even admitting it exists.

I have similar thoughts. I finally swapped to desktop linux last year and tried to be very mindful about all the little niggling issues I ran in to.

I think the difference between an okay piece of software and a great piece of software is how cognizant the designers and developers are of these things. It's partially why I use an iphone now over android. Even if I disagree with how something is done it's usually evident that Apple at least _thought_ about it. It's not perfect, there's still the occasional interaction that's just plain bad, but those moments are much rarer than I encounter on my PCs (Xubuntu/MX Linux).

If I ever have the resources to retire I think I'd dedicate a solid chunk of my time to just work on those quality issues.

Just to preempt the replies, this is how most of these conversations go:

Alice: I dislike [x] because I can't do [a].

Bob: Oh, why are you trying to do [a]? You can accomplish that by doing [b], [c], and then [d]. [a] doesn't really make sense, let me explain the model behind how this all works.

Alice: Thanks for explaining the model to me, but I still just want to do [a]. Could we expand the model, or handle this as an edge case?

Bob <any of the following replies>

  : No! [a] breaks the model! Things are much simpler if you just embrace the model.

  : If you want to do [a] go use this other product that's broken in other slightly annoying ways.

  : If you want to do it, you can open a PR adding it. But we probably won't add it because it doesn't fit the current model, and we consider that 'bloat'.

It's difficult to get into contributing to some of these projects because you come in with a change you want to make, but you have no standing in the project to effect that change (or are out of your depth and need to convince a more established dev to help you). Which makes perfect sense, a project with random contributors adding their own preferences is anarchy.

It really seems like the best projects have a very strong guideline/interactions framework, or a BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) who takes UX very personally. Most open-source projects are founded with a strong technical vision, but not a strong UX one.

The closest I can think of in the open-source desktop space is ElementaryOS. Which is lovely, but I dislike a few of their core decisions enough that using it is a pain.

The dream is a DE that enforces strict UX paradigms...but also lets you customize them easily. But I'm not sure if that's even possible. Even Apple isn't perfect and they're just trying to enforce one 'Apple way' to do things.

Fair point, I was looking up pay withholding breakdowns and that's all that's directly paid to Medicare.

> Point being it's incorrect, and quite misleading, to assert that 2% of your salary 'is for medicare', as a simple breakdown for public health shows that, per-dollar, it's somewhere in the range of 10-25%

I want to push back on this a little though.

The implication that it actually costs 10-25% of your salary is just as misleading, as individual taxes only account for <50% of government revenue [0]. 60% if you include other taxes reasonably attributed to an individual (GST and Superannuation).

So maybe a better middle-ground would be to say it costs 5-12.5%? Even then, I'm not sure where you're getting that upper 25% figure from, a cursory search shows _total_ expenditure on health care (medicare + private together) was <10% of GDP in 2013. [1]

Looking at the budget, it's ~14% of expenditure [2]

So if we assume that all this money is fungible we could expect that ~7% of my salary, or 8.5% of all tax I ever pay, goes to government health expenditures.

Adding on my private cover and out-of-pocket expenses get me to about 10%, exactly what the OP is claiming they pay...but that was paying for _just_ insurance. The US government still spends huge amounts on health care, so a chunk of their taxes are going there too, and there is the out of pocket expenses etc.

As you say, an exact figure isn't easy to determine. But comparing the 2% medicare levy + my private health insurance to the 10% OP's US insurance cost seems pretty reasonable. They are paying more than that for healthcare out of pocket and their other taxes, so am I. The deal in Australia still seems much better than the US one.

[0] See Table 2: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...

[1] https://www.aihw.gov.au/getmedia/3be568f2-d938-4575-bf1f-874...

[2] See appendix B: https://budget.gov.au/2020-21/content/overview.htm#three

> Imaging paying 10%+ of your salary just for health insurance

I decided to actually look at my budget from the last year and see how this compares to my costs.

In Australia I pay about ~28% of my salary in tax. 2% is for medicare, and I have private health insurance on top of that for roughly the same cost again (for dental, which isn't covered in our system because of dentists lobbying an exception back in the 80s). You still have to pay part of most costs in Australia, looking at my budget that's come out to about another ~1% of my income in the past year.

So I pay 5% of my salary for health services. It's pretty much inline with other costs like food and utilities. Doubling it to 10% would be doable, but it would suck.

It seems that the US system doubles the cost and the extra money serves as the very healthy profit margin of their private health industry. Keep in mind Australia manages to sustain a private health sector off that 5%, this isn't abolishing private health by any means.

A proper government health system could probably be even cheaper than the 5% I pay because the US has much better economies of scale. Not to mention the benefit of untying it from employment.

I'm not really making a point here, your comment just inspired me to compare the numbers and it sure is grim...

The problem is always forgetting what is uncommon jargon and what your readers probably already know. We all have our bubbles (tech folk notoriously so).

Ironically the solution already exists but no one uses it because of the editorial overhead: hyperlinking text to their definitions. Also, there are many ‘types’ of linking and they all look the same (blue underlined text by default). I’d love a more subtle “context” link to be natively supported. Maybe one day the semantic web will save us all...

I'm trying to set this up at my current job and my expectation is that those extras hours get to be 'focus time'. As I become a more senior developer and have to take on more managerial responsibilities my time to actually get my own work down is disappearing.

I started working ~1.5hrs early in the morning just so I could get my coffee/hackernews routine out of the way and really get my head in to the work, then by the time stand-ups and meetings start I'm ready for a break and helping my team. Do an extra 30min at the end of the day wrapping things up and there's your extra two hours being used productively.

I'm actually already working this schedule (5 days/week) due to lack of senior staff at the company, I just want to formalise it and get Mondays off...

If I was purely coding my own tasks all day I would probably not get as much use out of the extra time, but my work is varied enough now that it's not an issue.

You and me both. It's hard as a layman to keep track of what's happening in real-time. I love going back to things in ~1-decade intervals and seeing lists and articles etc showing what's happened "in-review".

Usually those kinds of overviews are limited to things like media genres, not fields of science. (eg best video games of the last 10 years, best movies and how they changed the industry etc). Something a bit more academic would be nice...

> I'm not sure I understand your pessimism. Are you legitimately concerned that, unchecked, flat earthers might actually "turn" the entire population?

Not at all, but the fact is that these beliefs are growing at all thanks to the web. There are always going to be some people with completely illogical fringe beliefs. Conspiracy theories were always a thing. It's just not that despite the quality of these conspiracy theories dropping (seriously...the Earth is flat? That hasn't been a topic of debate for a loooong time), their reach and number of adherents are going up. That seems like a pretty clear regression in our society. We shouldn't be complacent about regression.

> ... a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time.

But I don't understand how decentralized tech is somehow going to be more immune to this than the current web, which is already decentralized in most ways. Anyone can host a blog on their PC and publish what they want. We thought the blogosphere was the start of this golden age. But people aren't techies, they choose to centralise with providers like Google for gmail (email is a federated, decentralized protocol!) and Facebook for social media.

If IPFS takes off, what makes it immune from people going with the same massive provider all their friends and family are on? There's no hard barrier stopping everyone from moving off Google and Facebook tomorrow with the current web, but they won't. The big players understand this, that's why Google pays Apple billions a year to make Google the default search engine. That's all it takes to ensure everyone keeps using Google. Competition is literally a click away, people just don't click.

That said, I do support the decentralization efforts. It seems like an improvement over the current technology. I just don't buy into the hype that it's going to cure any of the problems we're seeing now. Our problem is less one of censorship, more overload of bots and bad actors.

> If everyone agrees that the earth is flat it may as well be so.

Except that it's a real, measurable regression in our knowledge as a species. I get the point you're making but that doesn't give me comfort, hence the pessimism.

Fair point. I wonder if my prioritization of the echo-chamber/fake news balkanization problems the web is facing now is purely because it's a more novel threat than authoritarian government overreach?

But it seems like there should be some level of compromise that can address both risks. We restrict other natural freedoms in all sorts of ways in modern society, why not free speech at all? As an example that's repeated so often it's practically a cliche: even with the second amendment in the US, citizens are still restricted from owning nuclear weapons.

A new class of weapon was invented and society decided that no matter what they said in the past, this was too powerful to treat like any other weapon until now. Seems like this new form of hyper-speech could qualify for a similar approach?

Now this is the kind of comment I was hoping to find in this thread.

I'd like to highlight what I think is one of the more insidious "challenges we have to prepare ourselves for": bad-faith communicators.

I have faith in the ability of people to have a meaningful discussion given that all participants are taking part in "good faith". That is, I am trying to convey an honestly held idea or question using language to you, and you are trying to parse that communication in a manner to grasp my intended meaning. This is the hard problem in all communication as language is inexact and none of us perfect. But if we all buy in to this system, it's amazing at how well it works at building consensus and fostering useful debate. This good faith buy-in lies at the heart of functional democracy.

We all know that it's harder to communicate over the web. As OP mentioned, lack of eye contact and physical presence reduces the available bandwidth we have to get our point across. But the fact that we can talk to so many more people than before seems to make up for the deficiencies.

But we're seeing more and more bad-faith actors abusing this system. They don't want to explain a point so that it can be discussed and debated. They want to implant a thought or idea in an audience in order to alter behaviour in a way that benefits them. We're seeing nation states conducting manipulative campaigns against their rivals' (or their own) population. If you're a democratic nation this kind of campaign is tantamount to an attack against you (it's degrading your nation's capability to make the best decisions it can, doing real harm). But even if you're not a democracy, having a foreign nation convince your population something like COVID isn't real causes real-world harm to you.

Combined with our highly connected social media networks these attacks are growing increasingly effective. How does anyone fight this?

I'm somewhat cynical that education will turn out to be the solution. Is there really any way to train a population to spot and negate bad-faith communication with such proficiency that these attacks are nullified? When nations start hitting each other hard enough to do real damage, but not enough to unilaterally wipe each other out, my bet is that they're going to fall back to the historical solution for balancing power: demarcating zones of control, ie "borders".

...and this is why, despite sharing the same concerns as the author of the article, I think I still come down on supporting the decentralized web. We're in a unique point of human history where we can communicate irrespective of borders, and I would hate to lose that capability because of hordes of trolls. Maybe if we just keep the UX real shit we can avoid another eternal September? (only half joking)

> Within this network, you may have a pocket of users who espouse Flat earth theory, but I believe if you were to rely on such users for trust ratings, the picture of the world created would be so incoherent, it would simply be unbearable.

I wish I had your optimism... :(

I've never heard anyone use the Rwandan genocide as an analogy for what's going wrong with the modern web but I think you've hit the nail on the head.

It seems that the most ardent supporters of unrestricted free-speech are the most optimistic in their belief in humanity to come to a stable, moral consensus if we all just say whatever we want.

The Rwandan genocide shows the darker truth that we're just as likely to talk ourselves into horrific violence and war over arbitrary divisions. Cultural and societal pressure over what's acceptable to discuss seems like a very real, and very useful bulwark against that possibility.

I agree that it seems like the problem is more a lack of reputation and trust than decentralization. But how do we build trust in a decentralized network the size of the human population? How do I know if this username on my screen is publishing in good faith without some kind of transitive trust?

I might trust someone my real-world friends trust when it comes to local gossip. If I want trustworthy national news my only recourse seems to be to go through a centralized journalism institute. But which one? Well I'll probably look at what people around are looking at.

If there's a national broadcaster or dominant cable news channel in my country I'll probably look at that, but if I don't like what I see I may be biased to go search out another institution that I find more agreeable. Then you get things like Macedonian teens running sites dressed up to look like US-based newspapers posting straight-up bullshit because there's always a market telling people what they want to hear.

How can we build a decentralized system to overcome people's biases and laziness? People are going to gravitate to sources their friends and family use, and collectively to sources that fit their preexisting beliefs. It's no wonder we're in this situation where people are struggling to agree on reality.

>> Only a decentralized approach to trust and reputation will scale well enough to regulate decentralized content

But what if a decentralized network of trust collectively agree that covid is a hoax and the Earth is flat? I'm not sure if the (de)centralization of the underlying technology really has an impact on that problem.

> Just spare us the long description of how other people are lesser human beings that should have their rights restricted for their own good

That seems like a particularly uncharitable reading of the post. From the article:

> Many of you reading this will not agree with me, and that’s fine. I’m not going to try and change your beliefs with this blog post. Rather, I’m looking to explain why, while I respect that others might have differing opinions, I stopped doing anything that would actively advance a technology whose ethics I question. To put it in other terms: your freedom of speech isn’t my obligation to enable you and give you a platform.

The author isn't advocating making the distributed web illegal? I'm not sure what rights you think they're advocating restricting either? The article simple raises the question of if this technology would on-balance improve or harm society based on the experiences we've had with the web so far and the kind of content that can _already_ be found on IPFS.

The author says it doesn't stack up for them, and so they aren't working on it any longer. They call for others to put more thought into what they work on and how it may be used. Seems pretty reasonable.

By all means, disagree and explain why you think the scales are different than the author. But when you say something like:

> Just spare us the long description of how other people are lesser human beings

I don't know man, you clicked the link to read a personal blog. If simply reading someone's thought process as they come to a different conclusion than yours is such a sufferance for you maybe exercise some of that freedom and don't read it. As it is you're just coming across like a troll.

Hacker news discussion should be of higher quality than that.

I still remember the furore it caused when I asked for a copy of the 業務規則. (because the new overtime pay policy was paying ~$3/hr worked after 10pm and I wanted to see the section that covered that calculation)

I just wanted to read the actual language around hours worked and overtime because it was never stated what the policy was.

Turns out you couldn’t read it without a director sitting next to you, and it was in a binder that you weren’t allowed to touch.

My conversation with the CEO:

“Why would you need to read that?”

“Because my contract says ‘in accordance with the 業務規則’ and I’d like to know what my contract is”

“Well you can ask me a question and ill tell you if it’s in there”

Glad I got off that sinking ship.

Yep, one of the core value propositions for bringing in consultants is “they tell the exec what your staff already know. But because it cost a lot of money to have them say it people are more likely to listen”

It’s a real service that provides real value. But companies can avoid the cost if they have a strong culture of trust internally (which is no simple thing to foster)

Agreed, I originally thought this might be an older project from a couple of years ago because of the ES5. “Vanilla” doesn’t have to mean “supports IE11” in 2020 (before anyone jumps on me, yes, depending on your users you may very well still need to support it, but it’s very clearly on the way out - finally)

I love the motivation behind the repo though. The author’s write-up is fantastic and refreshingly reasonable in the dogmatic webdev world. It gives great insight into the places where real value _is_ provided by frameworks and build tools

Is there a jurisdiction somewhere where using plastic straws has been made a criminal offence with jail time as a punishment?

Here (Australia) it was implemented as a civil fine and I assumed it would be similar elsewhere. But if that were the case where you live I’d agree that’s awful.

If that’s not true then you’ve just made a straw man argument.

Hell, even if there _was_ a place where they locked someone up for providing plastic straws to customers I’d argue that the issue is that particular law. Not the broader issue of legal ‘nudges’ to foster positive cultural changes.

Personally I (a developer) use it most as a metaphor for business people explaining why we need to schedule time in-sprint for work that isn't explicitly tied to a new feature.

We have debt, we need to service it. Repayments come in the form of developer time. If our debt is well-serviced it enables us to keep up a nice quick pace of feature development.

If a feature is politically important and our tech-debt is under control we can fast-track its implementation knowing that we'll have time to polish it up later and it isn't likely to break too much.

If our debt is too high we can't borrow anymore. Sorry, that super important feature that the board wants by end of sprint simply can't be done. We're at our credit limit and if we try and borrow more to get that done we'll go bankrupt (the product crashes and burns).

All of this is the language of business

and if you don't want to go that extreme, just using a different virtual desktop can work wonders.

Ironically one of my todos is to hack my xfce to swap out panels (and maybe somehow browser profiles?) when changing to certain named workspaces. So I could have my 'coding' workspace with a panel of work-only applications ready to go, only work-related bookmarks in the browser, etc.

The idea of logging out and in as another user seems to have just a bit too much friction for my tastes, but maybe I should just embrace it.

I think they're referring to this thread itself.

I've been lurking on hacker news for years and I've never really seen anything quite like it.

It's a different phenomena.

I experience the running out of RAM problem that you describe as well and take basically the same approach to you. That's much closer to how I read code.

My issue really is just a tendency to keep reading even if I didn't actually parse the sentence properly. It seems to be a complexity threshold rather than a volume one.

I think it's just what happens when I try to read a text at the top of, or beyond, my reading level. I imagine that anyone who struggled in school with reading comprehension may have a similar experience, or perhaps its like that feeling when you read a garden path sentence[1].

I struggled to even recognize that I was facing this issue because I found reading very easy during school. Facing a text that was too difficult to instantly parse and understand was rare enough that I never had to develop the mental tools to deal with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

There definitely seems to be a balancing act between:

* stopping all progress until you fully understand the point

* continue moving forward so you don't get stuck and give up

Interestingly I've found that leaning towards 'just keep going' seems to be more effective when learning a second language. Whereas slowing down and doing some background reading helps much more with technical topics.

Language seems much more natural to learn from pure exposure. So easy a baby can do it :)

>The single most helpful thing in figuring out what to write down was noticing when my reading was slowing down (...)

> If I have one piece of advice, it’s “learn to recognize the subtle drag of something requiring your attention.”

This really resonated with me, but perhaps not in the exact same way as the author. I've recently become more consciously aware of how I react when reading more complex text or parsing more complex points.

I read along at a fairly constant speed, not having much trouble following the author's mental model. But at some point the complexity seems to grow beyond what I can comfortably hold in my head without stopping and really trying to parse what's on the page in front of me.

I can react to this difficulty in two ways:

1. I let the inertia carry me past the sentence, not really grokking it, instead it becomes a sort of buzz in my mental model (or a 'drag' in the author's words), something like step 2 in south park's famous step 1: do something - step 2: ??? - step 3: profit. I continue on with the text, but now my understanding of it is compromised.

2. I recognize what I'm doing, stop reading, and start re-reading the sentence much more slowly. Look at the surrounding text for illuminating context (sometimes this snag isn't because it's an overly complex point, it's just a poorly structured sentence and the next line clears it up). I may need to start taking notes to parse it.

My problem is I'm quite lazy (and I'm usually reading in bed to relax) and tend to default to strategy 1. But I'm trying to change that bad habit and react with strategy 2.

I like that physical button solution. Do you have a github repo or blog post documenting how you did it anywhere?