sebular

How do you explain the loathsome UX of software like GIMP?

I'm an American and I love smiling at strangers and receiving a genuine smile in return. It's the perfect minimal conversation: no words, just sharing a moment of mutual positivity and kinship. It's like you said the perfect thing, except you didn't have to think of anything clever.

It sounds as though people in some countries interpret it as if the smiling person is on the inside of a joke and you're on the outside, or even the object of ridicule. As if the default is hostile intent. It sounds like a terrible thing to assume about your fellow stranger, to be honest.

Maybe the point is that if you start off assuming maximum hostility, the reality is more likely to be a pleasant surprise?

At any rate, we have common ground when it comes to those meaningless questions. They're hollow and they ruin the perfection of a nice wordless smile or simple "hi" or "hey". The absolute worst is when you pass a stranger and say "hi" and they respond to your back as they walk off into the distance, "hey, how ya doin?"

You wrote a critique of this blog post that's actually longer than the blog post itself, but you failed to notice the obvious joking tone the author used, so the whole thing sailed right over your head. He's clearly just doing a humorous "get off my lawn" bit about the term "Digital Native". Relax.

How do you respond to the fact that development of the feature was led and announced by a woman?

If you read the post in its entirety you would have seen this:

"Developers must not obfuscate code or conceal functionality of their extension. [...] Minification is allowed, including the following forms:

- Removal of whitespace, newlines, code comments, and block delimiters

- Shortening of variable and function names

- Collapsing files together"

what happens if 100 people move to the same spot? What kind of infrastructure do you have that supports 100 simultaneous video streams?

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I think the main reason you'd expect to see this on iOS is due to the additional Face ID sensors available on most of their devices. Presumably Apple could offer a version of this tech that features higher quality tracking and thus a more realistic and natural-looking final output.

I took too long writing my other comment, but it's all the more relevant given the fact that you were misled by the very article headline that I chose to single out.

Fox News has definitely not turned over a new leaf. Here's an example from the Fox homepage that impressed you so much. It's about the latest developments from the CHAZ:

"Black Lives Matter protestors say Seattle's autonomous zone has hijacked message" https://www.foxnews.com/us/black-lives-matter-protesters-sea...

This seems like a straightforward and believable article. There's infighting at the Zone because a bunch of anarchists have diverted from the core message about police brutality targeting blacks and other minorities, and now the BLM camp is pissed off. Right?

But wait, even though the title unambiguously states that BLM protestors are blaming the autonomous zone for hijacking the core BLM message, the article instead explains that the quote about "hijacking the message" actually comes from a woman who is speaking on behalf of the African American Community Advisory Council, and she's the one being booed and heckled by protestors.

So what's the African American Community Advisory Council? Probably some BLM-related thing, right? After all, if the title of the article states that "Black Lives Matter protestors" are accusing the CHAZ of "hijacking the message" while the actual quote came out of the mouth of someone from the African American Community Advisory Council, then surely Black Lives Matter == African American Community Advisory Council.

Right?

I mean sure, technically they must be two separate things because they have two separate names, but surely they're closely connected. Just to be positive, let's find out. Type that name into a search engine and click on the first result:

https://www.seattle.gov/police/community-policing/demographi...

Wait, the African American Community Advisory Council is actually a department of the Seattle city government. And they "work collaboratively with the police."

So Fox News saw a story about a city government employee scolding protestors. This employee works in a department that is closely aligned with the police and sides with the police, but because the department has a name that evokes blackness, that was enough leeway for them to write a false headline that intentionally confuses the reader into thinking that this is a story about internal conflict and infighting among the protestors.

Sure enough, the bovine reader comments at the bottom of the page confirm the success of this tactic:

"Even the idiots can't agree. What will they do now??"

"I guess nobody told BLM that you can't negotiate with terrorists."

"Leftists arguing over whose riot it is???"

"Eating their own"

Fox News knows that they can trust Fox News readers to glance at the headline, skip the article, feel confirmation of their biases and preconceptions, and tuck another false anecdote in their pocket to use as ammunition in case they get in an argument with a family member, coworker, or person online.

Here's a reminder that we should never be passive consumers of of a biased narrative!

Shame, I just played a few rounds in Firefox on a Mac without any mouse tracking or input lag issues and had a blast! Is it possible that you have some Firefox Add-ons installed that are messing with it?

Summoning all of your experience as "a person somewhat close to electronics engineering", you deliver this gem:

> I simply don't see any signs of proper thermal engineering here.

I hope you're joking. If not, you have a nauseating level of conceit.

This is great. To anyone playing around with it: if you decrease your font size, it zooms you out!

Yeah, that was the point of the sentence. A man who wasn't Appalachian was telling a room full of educated Appalachian intellectuals that Appalachians are happy making 24k a year because they don't "need to show off".

Also, it wasn't an "ivory tower" (such a limp, worn-out descriptor) meeting, it was a book launch, and it was literally open to the public.

I've used Termius on my iPhone a few times when I needed to complete a small task and couldn't be at a computer. For that use case, it's been fantastic!

However, Termius on the desktop (Windows, in this case) falls short of the usability threshold for me because of slow performance, especially at high resolutions. When scrolling a large number of characters across the screen, performance is significantly worse than using Linux terminals like gnome-terminal or Terminal.app on macOS.

Every few months I end up installing the latest version of Termius to see if the performance issues have been fixed, but they have not. Instead, I'm using an installation of mate-terminal on Ubuntu for WSL combined with the X410 server. It's much more clunky to set up and use, but performance is great.

I expect that with the introduction of Windows Terminal, Termius will lose ground if it doesn't improve.

broken in firefox and chrome on windows

You contradict yourself. You imagine a school where everyone looks the same but thinks "different", and yet by your own definition that school doesn't have any women, blacks, gays, etc. How would that work? Do you imagine an academy of straight white men, some of which serve as delegates for the types of thought that emerge from groups that aren't allowed to attend?

Your line of reasoning is the perfect example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

"Why are you tolerant people so intolerant of my desire for a world without all this tolerance? I thought you hypocrites were tolerant!!"

It's impossible to take this author and article seriously when he opens by describing "justice for women as well as for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and allied people" as being "politically lopsided".

Not that I see the logic in comparing the cost of an iPhone to Mark Zuckerberg buying buffer properties, but the cheapest new iPhone you can buy on apple.com is the iPhone 7 for $449, and that's without doing any price hunting. It's an entirely functional phone that has all of the same privacy features as any other iPhone, and it offers similar performance to other phones at that price.

Furthermore, there are plenty of people who live near the poverty line that will be buying an iPhone XS Max this year. They deserve privacy just as much as anyone else, and if they're deciding between spending a disproportional amount of their income on an iPhone or the latest Galaxy Note, the correct advice in terms of privacy would still be "buy an iPhone."

I've been hunting for an e-paper coding solution for a while and have yet to find a solution that works well. The best I've seen is the Onyx Boox Max 2, which has HDMI input:

https://onyxboox.com/boox_max2

Unfortunately, aside from being prohibitively expensive they're apparently difficult to get in the US. Amazon and Wal-Mart both have them listed for sale but refuse to actually ship them to my address.

You might be interested in this:

http://www.emuvr.net/

Being a programmer who recently started making sourdough, this is nice to see. But I have to admit that I clicked because I saw Github + sourdough and thought that someone had coded an app to help you track weights and timing!

"An interface is supposed to make things easier"

I disagree with this, but I'm struggling to counter it with something pithy. The problem is that there are so many ways to compare interfaces. The best I can do is point at humanity's adoption of the keyboard, which was a monumental shift. There are so many angles that you could write a book on the topic, and I'm sure plenty have been.

The keyboard predates the computer, but they're so closely connected that it's hard to pick their relationship apart. It wasn't just a happy coincidence that typewriters were laying around with the perfect input method when we invented the computer. Babbage built his computing machines without any obvious keyboard-like device (afaik), but Turing laid the foundation for general-purpose computing to crack the Enigma, a machine with a keyboard.

So during the World War II era, it was inevitable that the typed character was the future, but you'd struggle to convince people that there was a point in learning how to use a keyboard. You don't need a typewriter to writer a letter to someone, and besides, it's so much more ugly and impersonal than your own handwriting. Women could learn to type and get jobs as secretaries, but this also meant that their bosses didn't have to learn. My grandfather was an accountant during this time, and just like any other accountant, he did his work on specially-ruled sheets of paper, pen in hand. Even in academia today, we have stuff like LaTeX but people don't actually work in that, right? I claim ignorance but I'm assuming people still do everything by hand and then figure out how to format it on a computer.

So what defines easy? None of that was easy. In many examples, it's so much harder, not to mention more expensive. Most importantly, no interface comes naturally. Typing is a learned skill, and even if you're young enough to have grown up with keyboards, you still sucked at one point. The same is true of handwriting. In my mind, "easy" only comes in to play when you're comparing two interfaces that use the same fundamental principles. If I build a QWERTY keyboard that requires you to apply ten pounds of pressure to register a keystroke, you can point and say, "that is supposed to be easier."

I guess my point is just that you have to weigh the potential use cases. A full-size keyboard is best for programming, or for writing an internet comment, but it's not ideal for keeping a journal while hiking in the mountains.

To me, it seems like the handheld computer is still yearning for the right input method, and the need grows stronger as the computers get more powerful. Forget comparing the latest smartphone processors to the computers that got us to the moon, they're faster than the ones that we bought a few years ago and still have in our closets! But they aren't that useful, and it's so clearly because of that goddamn little touchscreen keyboard (or depending on how you look at it, our own stubby thumbs). We've tried so many things-- even returning to handwriting-- but they haven't worked. So we keep trying.

The way I see it, we're blocked and the only clear way forward is to devise a novel character input method, which is what these guys are trying to do. I hope that works out. If not, maybe we'll eventually be driven to completely discard the typed character in search of something more expressive and natural for human-computer interfaces. Of course, we can just give up and admit that this 19th century invention is the best we'll ever do.

I think you mean "obsolete" and not "redundant" but yes, the common asymmetric encryption methods used for things like HTTPS are trivially cracked with a powerful enough quantum computer.

The good news is that people have been anticipating this for a while, and there's a lot of study in the field of post-quantum encryption. From what I understand, people have come up with techniques that work (meaning nobody's discovered a reason why they wouldn't work).

The bad news is that this does nothing for the data that we're currently encrypting. There's nothing to stop someone from storing today's encrypted web traffic and decoding it in the future when working quantum computers are capable.

Thanks to Edward Snowden and others, we know that the US government is already hoarding and sifting through data, so I have no doubt that there are plenty of agencies planning on doing this exact thing.

There's enough straw in your comment to make an army of men, and almost too much cringe to handle.

For starters, you're putting a mountain of words in Kumail Nanjiani's mouth. It's odd that you must be told this, but when you use quotes to summarize your opposition's arguments, you're supposed to actually wrap them around words that were actually used. A quick Ctrl+F on that page leaves one having to guess at whether you're dishonest, careless, projecting your own securities, or all at once.

Then you go and draw a line in the sand and separate yourself from "regular" people who lack the capacity to see beyond their small and petty concerns. You applaud Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as holy warriors fighting for humanity's "best long term outcome" without providing a single example. You claim that people start businesses not to make money, but to save mankind itself.

All this grandiose talk while you fervently pat yourself (and your kind) on the back, but your only tangible anchors are imagined words and flimsy analogies to humans colonizing Mars.

You are the exact personality that Silicon Valley team expertly mocked in the first season.

"We're making the world a better place!"

And for the record, if you managed to get 5% of the human population on Mars, that would be ~350 million, more than the entire population of the United States. If we put that much energy into moving people to a planet that's currently capable of supporting life for zero humans, you'd think we could've built a pretty damn good defense system to knock asteroids off a collision course with Earth.

Why is it that so many people who describe themselves as forward-thinking are more attracted to the idea of terraforming a planet with a poisonous atmosphere than lifting a finger to keep our little oasis in decent condition? I'm not saying the entire human race should rise and fall on a single planet, but don't try to paint your Mars fantasies as an altruistic plan to save all the coarse-minded sheeple from themselves.

I think the idea is that this is found in nature as a single material. Silicon doesn't do anything remotely brain-like until humans etch intricate patterns in it and run precise electrical currents through them.

I think the use of neural networks is a kind of boring approach to studying this crystal. Of course the algorithm it uses is going to be more adaptable than an arbitrary algorithm selected by the researcher, otherwise they would have chosen a different algorithm to prove the truism.

I'm more interested in hearing about the physical mechanism by which a crystal manages to store and forget information, and some theory about how this could have come to exist without resorting to life-based arguments like survival of the fittest or evolution.

I feel your pain here, but at least USB C is on the way to becoming the new standard. Sure, nobody likes a dongle, but it's been a while since someone did a facepalm because they can't use their keyboard since they left their USB to PS/2 converter at home.

The transition is irritating, but eventually you buy a new compatible peripheral (or you leave the dongle permanently attached) and life is good again.

The unforgivable thing about what Apple has done is insist on keeping that proprietary "Lightning" port around. It was a better design than anything else when it debuted (I've thrown away more broken micro USB cables than I can remember), but now it's just a sad shadow of USB C and it needs to go.

When they killed the headphone jack, they had an opportunity to divert everyone's attention away from that loss by sticking a USB C port on the bottom. Instead of people bemoaning the loss of the perfectly good 3.5mm audio jack, they could have been talking about the exciting possibility of a fully-functional USB C / thunderbolt port, and with a "USB C everywhere" approach across all their devices, they might have actually deserved to call themselves brave(ish).

Whether or not VR becomes massively mainstream depends on whether it can become more standardized, affordable, and most importantly, whether the hardware can be miniaturized. It's clear that we have a long way to go in those departments, but 2050 is still a long time from now-- so it could be possible.

But your comment isn't on topic. The article is about predicted changes in how content is owned, distributed, and made profitable. It's about the trend away from decentralization, and how that's going to hurt certain people while benefiting others.

You're only thinking about the interface to the web, not the web itself: You might as well be saying, "The only way to fix the decaying internet is this new keyboard I heard is in the early stages of development!"

The article's prediction is that the entire web--VR or not--is going to be controlled and owned by Google and Facebook, and because they'll have such total control over information, they'll have a dangerous and unregulated degree of control over the lives of their users

Since your response is, "nah, VR is going to give us a clean start", how do you reconcile that with the fact that Google and Facebook are the two biggest players in VR right now?

If anything, the way that the "VR revolution" is playing out is just reinforcing what the author is saying. If you buy an Oculus, you're strongly encouraged to connect the device with your Facebook account, and the only way to launch a VR experience with the Oculus is through a custom app store similar to Steam, complete with social media integration and all.

VR's current state is looking worse than any other introduction of computer hardware in history. Could you imagine buying a monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, etc. and being forced to associate the device with a social network and app ecosystem?

Welcome to your new mouse! To install, please choose from the following:

[Express installation (recommended)] [Advanced]

Advanced Settings (WARNING: Advanced users only)

Share my mouse movements on Mousenet with:

[x] Everyone [ ] Friends of friends [ ] Friends only [ ] Just myself

I think that they're actually talking right at each other, but Zuckerberg is thinking of the possibilities, while Musk is thinking of the implementations.

"AI is the future" really means that Zuckerberg sees the massive potential of automation, and how it's going to change the face of the world.

"We should be worried about AI" really means that Musk has had to think long and hard about the fact that the software written by Tesla is navigating living human beings around obstacles at high speeds.

This isn't about some accidental super intelligence that becomes self-aware and murders all humans, it's about the consequences of applying today's standards of "let's ship this code" to technology that we're expected to entrust with our lives.

This is two things, combined: "AI" means that code will have more complex emergent behavior that's harder to debug than current code, which is already nearly impossible to completely debug. "AI" also means that this code will run very complex systems that often have powerful hardware components, unfortunately including weapons.

To put it another way: Both men agree that the code of the near future is going to make a massive leap in effectiveness and real-world applications. But Musk has to grapple with being held morally accountable for that code, while the only thing Zuckerberg's ever had to care about is performance. Say "AI" to Mark Zuckerberg and he sees all of the money in smarter data mining and fun home appliances. Say "AI" to Elon Musk and he has nightmares of deploying a wireless update that causes Teslas to confuse people wearing green clothing with green traffic lights.

Let's put aside your absolute and close-minded certainty about the future for a minute. Unless you can provide some quotes, you're putting a lot of words in Elon Musk's mouth. He's made some goofy pop culture references during interviews, and it seems to be a calculated decision on his part to flirt with sensationalism in order to publicize the issue, but he's never seriously argued that the movie Terminator is a documentary about the future.

Call it conscience, intelligence, whatever you want. The danger isn't that some ominously calculating and murderous robotic mind is going to spring into being and hide from humans while plotting our downfall. In order to understand the danger, all you have to do is look at what the US military is already doing with autonomous weapons. Killer robots aren't hypothetical, they're historical.

In fact, you're the prime example of the danger of AI. You probably have a stronger than average understanding of computers, and maybe you know a lot about actual AI implementations, which is what makes you so self-assured that there's nothing magical about them. So you trust them, and you're a big fan of throwing an ever-increasing amount of trust into AI.

You even admit that there will be bugs (there always are) and misbehavior (now who's humanizing programs?), but you fail to see why that's a problem when the stakes are raised from "crap, an app leaked private data online" to "crap, the autonomous weaponized drone mistook backyard fireworks for an attack and bombed a family."

The way I see it, Musk is far from alarmist, and all the kidding about "summoning demons" is almost a way of coping with what's starting to seem like a terrifying inevitability. We've been building "dumb programs" for decades, and there's still a constant stream of breaking news about software that didn't do what it was supposed to. And you want to believe that there's no danger in building software that has increasingly fuzzy logic and connecting it to real-world I/O?

I'm guessing that Elon Musk saw this problem when he first started toying with the idea of self-driving cars. You say he has a limited understanding of AI, but Tesla autopilot says otherwise. And he probably became keenly aware of the stakes when he realized that people would willingly entrust their lives to the decisions made by his company's software, and that without regulation, it's entirely up to Tesla's QA process to make sure their cars don't accidentally kill people.

I don't know anything about your background or area of expertise, but you sound completely disconnected from reality.

> Your diagnosis is at odds with the basis of open security.

> The primary thing that needs to happen is an accepting of responsibility by those who administer critical systems. Mathematically, what we call a developed "exploit" is really just an existence proof that something is already insecure (hence "PoC or GTFO"). The blame needs to be properly assigned to the developers/integrators of these systems for negligence (currently gross negligence - eg relying on Turing-complete languages) instead of scapegoating those who discover the emperor has no clothes, even despite their underlying motivations and lack of full disclosure.

To paraphrase:

"I assert that I am intelligent by using the word 'diagnosis' and demonstrating that I also know of another word for 'exploit'. Therefore, if I sound arrogant it's because I'm actually just intelligent. Moving on:

When malicious hackers take advantage of an exploit to hurt people, it's not fair to blame the CIA, NSA, or any other agency who knew the exploit existed but chose not to disclose it to the people who wrote the software. They wanted the option of using the exploit themselves--which of course is perfectly fine--so you see, it wouldn't make sense for them to disclose it.

It would be silly to blame these agencies for keeping these secrets from the public and from the people who wrote the software, and equally silly to blame them for being unable to keep these secrets from falling into the hands of malicious hackers. Do not scapegoat these people, for they have done nothing wrong.

No, it's the fault of software developers who write buggy code! We need to properly blame the people who try to write secure code but make mistakes. After all, malicious hackers have to maliciously hack innocent people, since that's what they do. The CIA has to keep secrets because that's what they do. The CIA also has to keep the secrets in the pocket of their coat which they lost at the bar. After all, the CIA is just a bunch of people, and people make mistakes.

People make mistakes, but software developers are not allowed to. Any good developer knows how to write code that has no mistakes in it. One of the easiest ways to write mistake-free code is to program in a language that isn't turing-complete. I've been writing code my entire life and have never introduced a single security flaw into a system, because the only two programming languages I use are english and occasionally arithmetic. Any software developer who makes a mistake or uses a turing-complete language is guilty of gross negligence and should be punished and blamed severely. I see no need to provide any sort of rationale for the things I have stated."

...Imagine a certain model of commercial airliner that's been in widespread use for well over a decade. The planes have their quirks and some parts wear out and have to be replaced, but they are frequently inspected and repaired. One day, the wings completely fall off of every single plane. Anyone unlucky enough to be on one of these planes while they were in the sky dies. The people are shocked and the government pledges to find out what happened.

Some of the best aeronautical engineers in the world had worked for years to design these planes, and the plans had been scrutinized and approved by many people. The manufacturing plants were known for their high standards. Nevertheless, it was discovered that a flaw in the design had indeed been the cause for the wings falling off. The enormous bolts used to attach the wings to the fuselage were incredibly sturdy, but if you blasted them with a specific ultrasonic frequency, they would resonate in a wildly unexpected fashion and quickly explode.

A terrorist group claims responsibility for the attacks, and upon closer inspection of the planes it is discovered that the seat-back TV screens near the wings of every plane had been replaced with ones that contained devices capable of emitting the exact frequency needed to cause the bolts to explode. They were designed with a clock-based system that had been set two years in advance to trigger simultaneously on every single plane on that day. The terrorists had spent years patiently buying flight tickets and performing the replacements en route. Since the devices looked like ordinary tablets, they had no problem getting through security even though it took ages to get everything in place.

The inspection also uncovers a second set of devices, very similar in nature to the screens. These are far more elaborate-- the entire seat base contains a powerful ultrasonic emitter and an antenna tuned to the same communication frequencies used by the plane itself. It's designed in such a way that a special signal from air traffic control could cause the wings to fall off a specifically-chosen plane.

Due to the advanced nature of the second device, it's clear that it had to have been installed by people with far more resources and access to the planes and an intricate understanding of the plane's communication systems. Before the speculation goes any further, the director of the CIA comes forward and admits that they are responsible for the second devices. Having known about the faulty bolts even as the planes were passing final approval for use in commercial flight well over a decade ago, the agency had sent teams to install the systems under the pretense of doing security sweeps. The grim purpose of installing these systems was to give the agency a last-resort method of stopping a hijacked plane from flying into a building or crowded area.

Finally, the director admits that there had been a data breach three years ago, and though they couldn't be sure, it appeared that documents relating to the purpose and design of these devices were among the stolen data.

And now you come along to share your expert opinion.

You say that we shouldn't blame the CIA for knowing about the faulty bolts and installing systems to take advantage of them, instead of reporting the flaw to the company that designed the plane so that the problem could be fixed. After all, they put those systems in place to reduce casualties in a catastrophe.

You agree that terrorists are bad, but hey-- that's what they do, right? They aren't the real cause, just an inevitable outcome. No, there's another party who's really to blame...

Blame the people who designed and built the plane! Simple as that! If they hadn't built a plane with bad bolts, the CIA wouldn't have been forced to take advantage of the mistake and design their secret remote kill system. Those documents wouldn't have existed when the data breach happened, so the terrorists wouldn't have been able to devise their own plan to take advantage of the bad bolts. No bad bolts means no horrific catastrophe, it's as plain as day.

Since you are a world-renowned expert in everything, you are interviewed and asked about how to prevent things like this from happening in the future. Should we put some laws in place to prevent the CIA from keeping such dangerous secrets to themselves? Do they have the right to make their own internal risk analysis of whether it's in the public's interest for them to be able to build a secret system to remotely drop the wings off a plane, even though it means that people have been flying around for a decade in planes where the wings can fall off? Is it worth talking about the bitter irony that the CIA kept the bolt flaw a secret from the public and the plane company, but couldn't keep it secret from the terrorists? Are there legislative steps that might be taken?

You reply, "Nope! Of course not, how silly and stupid of you to say that. Laws don't do anything. The plane company built a bad plane, and they are to blame. Specifically the stupid engineer who picked that dumb bolt. We'll prevent this in the future by building planes where it's impossible for the wings to fall off. Anyone who knows the first thing about plane building knows that it's actually very simple to build planes where the wings don't fall off. In fact, I've been doing it for years, and anyone who doesn't use my method is grossly negligent. You see, I build my planes without any wings! Now just take a moment to look at this excellent proof I've written. You can see that it's impossible for the wings to fall off of a plane that doesn't have any."

By the way, I'm curious: Where do you point your majestic finger of blame in what happened with OpenSSL and Heartbleed?