rogual

I don't have much to add to this right now other than to say this is really fantastic writing. I don't normally enjoy "my journey" kind of blog posts, but this one feels full of valuable insights, and I'm grateful to the author for sharing. It's also just nice to read something written by a skilled writer.

It's funny how "think of the parents" is the new "think of the children".

I do have the "second visual canvas" people here are talking about, but the thing about mine, and I haven't seen anyone say this yet, is that I don't have full control of it.

For example, I have a memory from childhood of visualizing a yellow bucket, and it showed up in my mind's eye with big cartoon eyes. I tried to delete the eyes because I just wanted a normal yellow bucket, but they kept coming back.

Also, when reading Harry Potter as a kid, Severus Snape always showed up in my mind's eye with the head of a crocodile. I remember telling my brain, no, he's just a guy, just give him a normal man's head, but it never worked. Even now when someone mentions Severus Snape I see him with the crocodile head.

Anyone else, or am I just nuts?

Thing is, italic and bold don't have just one meaning.

Italic can mean: emphasis, foreign word, word which is being defined for the first time, title of referenced work, mathematical variable, and many field-specific uses.

Bold can mean: strong emphasis, term that needs to stand out and be found easily while scanning, mathematical vector, and again, field-specific uses.

If a markup language only has tags for emphasis and strong emphasis, then you can't put bold or italics for any of the other reasons you might want to use them, so anyone wanting to do those things can only misuse the emphasis and strong-emphasis markup, so it de-facto starts to mean bold/italic anyway.

It's at least reasonable to propose a markup language where you have to say "this is emphasis, this is a foreign word, this is a title of a referenced work," etc. but not everybody is writing a document that needs that much metadata. At least HTML retained <i> and <b> when it introduced <em> and <strong>.

Styles, like words, can have several meanings, and forcing authors to separate them feels a bit like forcing them to write the word "set" differently for each of its 10+ meanings.

What does it mean "to take max-cash in compensation", and why does that signal a lack of character?

Boss on Windows with a click-wheel mouse: "Make the scrolling smoother"

Devs: "It's because of your--"

Boss: "Other sites do it. Get on it."

This is what I do, these days. Whenever I would previously have reached for X-macros or some other macro hack, I tend to use Cog [1] now instead.

It's quite a clever design; you write Python to generate your C++ code and put it inside a comment. Then when you run the Cog tool on your source file, it writes the generated code directly into your C++ file right after your comment (and before a matching "end" comment).

This is great because you don't need Cog itself to build your project, and your IDE still understands your C++ code. I've also got used to being able to see the results of my code generation, and going back to normal macros feels a bit like fiddling around in the dark now.

[1] https://nedbatchelder.com/code/cog/

They even edited the image to insert their own name.

I think in the minds of not-particularly-literate online writers, "strange" = "bad" and "unique" = "good".

You can see this in venerable software which has lived through the times of "designing for the user" and is still being developed in the times of "designing for the business".

Take Photoshop, for example, first released in 1987, last updated yesterday.

Use it and you can see the two ages like rings in a tree. At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest. It's really special and you can see there's a good reason this program achieved total dominance in its field.

And you can also see, right beside and on top of and surrounding that, a more recent accretion disc of features with a more modern sensibility. Dialogs that render in web-views and take seconds to open. "Sign in". Literal advertisements in the UI, styled to look like tooltips. You know the thing that pops up to tell you about the pen tool? There's an identically-styled one that pops up to tell you about Adobe Whatever, only $19.99/mo. And then of course there's Creative Cloud itself.

This is evident in Mac OS X, too, another piece of software that spans both eras. You've still got a lot of the stuff from the 2000s, with 2000s goals like being consistent and fast and nice to use. A lot of that is still there, perhaps because Apple's current crop of engineers can't really touch it without breaking it (not that it always stops them, but some of them know their limits). And right next to and amongst that, you've got ads in System Settings, you've got Apple News, you've got Apple Books that breaks every UI convention it can find.

There are many such cases. Windows, too. And MS Word.

One day, all these products will be gone, and people will only know MBA-ware. They won't know it can be any other way.

This has been getting some press, but it looks like it's just a small-scale publicity stunt that isn't actually available for people to use. There's no number we can forward scam calls to to connect them to this AI, and this isn't planned:

"Rather than be rolled out on a much wider scale, however, Valcarcel said the project was aimed at raising awareness."

Something about the way Microsoft writes just rubs me the wrong way.

Not: "Please wait for ... an update" But: "Please be patient and wait for ... an update"

It's not just their staff here, it's all over the docs and UI too. They can't write two sentences without saying something condescending and rude.

Like in Word, if you look for how to turn off grammar checking, they'll tell you, but they just have to add "Remember to run spell check. Spelling and grammar errors can seriously undermine what you're trying to say, especially when your boss, your teacher, or that person in HR sees them." [1]

They can't help themselves.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/turn-spell-check-...

It sounds natural to me only if you're expecting exactly one star. For example:

The Three Wise Men are back. But this time, there's no star in the sky to guide them.

There's a bit in Ender's Game where he plays this computer game that has a dreamlike quality to it. It seemed it could simulate a response to any player action, and continue the story along that path. I think in the book it was a tool for introspection, like dreams can be? I can't really remember.

Anyway, as a kid I thought, silly author, that's not how computer games work. But it turns out Orson Scott Card is smarter than me. Give this kind of thing a few years and we'll have it.

Recently I found myself looking at an old alarm clock with a seven-segment display, but the segments were lit up arbitrarily, making an unreadable pattern instead of a time. But then I remembered, oh yeah, that's right, I do have a broken old alarm clock that does that, it's probably just that, I'm not dreaming. And I fell back into the dream.

The funny thing is, I really do have an old alarm clock that does that. It's the most useless alarm clock ever, because not only can it not tell you the time, it can't even tell you if you're awake.

This is what JavaScript is for.

Right, "said to" is doing an awful lot of work here.

I had a look for studies but all I could find was this: https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN85247318

So, looks like a study was done, but the results not published.

I had to try this on my favourite piece of internet bullshit, that surreal Mozilla blog post from a few years back that contains the words "there was also a need for our tools to address the whole body experience of what it means to be a person." [1]

Output: "I worked at Nordstrom. Now I'm at Mozilla. Both companies pretend to care. I helped people buy overpriced clothes. Now I'm selling you a browser and calling it 'addressing the whole body experience.' Because apparently, Firefox is now an extension of yourself. Retail therapy, browser therapy - same BS, different day."

Brilliant.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/introducing-new...

I can't help but notice that the homepage has at least a hundred pictures of humans, and zero pictures of any diagrams or charts.

Pick a minor flaw, and immediately start expounding on what you do to mitigate it. For example, "I can't always keep all of a complex thing in my head, so I've learned to do X, Y and Z to keep up -- Z is a really cool tool, actually, have you heard of it? I've found that, in my career as a..."

You know, like malware.

I'm leaning towards genuine, to be honest. Just thought it was interesting that I even questioned it, which I wouldn't have done before.

I received a nice email the other day after one of my blog posts got posted on HN.

It said:

Hi -

Just a note to say I'm a big fan of your writing. I always learn something and love your voice, which is hilarious and singular.

Write a book!

Best,

{Name}

{Link to sender's startup}

{Link to sender's substack}

New to writing online, it made me feel really good that someone enjoyed what I wrote and took the time to write and say so.

After reading this piece, though, I went back and read it again, and I just don't know. It's not quite GPT's usual voice, but it is strangely non-specific.

The startup is an AI startup, the person's Substack is full of generative AI illustrations, and they do seem like an AI fan, but reading their posts, they also seem like someone who's genuinely interested in preventing a dystopia.

I suppose receiving encouraging emails from strangers is just another situation that'll have us looking over our shoulders now, on guard, trying to walk the line between naivety and paranoia.

The preview pane is also powered by the QuickLook service and has had the same corner-rounding behaviour added.

My initial reaction is "if there's one thing this world and this industry doesn't need any more of, it's people half-assing it."

But, who knows, maybe that means I should do the exercise.

I have this with grammar. When I read modern websites, articles, papers, emails from HR, etc. with their sloppy English and comma-splices everywhere, it annoys me way too much and it's a real challenge to push on through and keep reading.

It feels like walking through a maze, with an uneven floor and bad lighting, full of dead-ends, compared to walking down a pleasant, well-lit corridor.

And to read the opinions that other HNers spout. The comments are often better than the articles. Also, I know I'll be able to read them without fending off popups and dark patterns.

"However" isn't a conjunction. It should be "Not many academic philosophers discuss magic. However, five centuries ago..."

Using "however" the way the author did will trip up a reader expecting correct English -- once you have "Not many philosophers discuss magic, however" you expect the sentence to end, but it doesn't and you have to go back and reinterpret.

There must be so many people who give up on the "fire hydrant" ones. In my country they're all underground. The knobbly ones they expect you to recognize as such are a distinctly American phenomenon.