Saturday, October 26, 2024

User interface will remain a dumpster fire until we have LLMs (or whatever) helping us. "Computer, stop doing that weird sudden thick blue border thing on my Firefox window, what the fudging heck?!" To wit: suddenly having a thick blue border around you Windows windows. According to the internet, it could be just about anything. Fwiw, in the end in my case it was PowerToys always-on-top keyboard shortcut that was enabled by default and that I did not know about and that I do not actually even want. Turning that off fixed it. (I do actually like PowerToys a lot for the keyboard manager, otherwise.)

Friday, October 25, 2024

I do hope that the current AI push will get us ways to build computer systems that aren't quite so bad. It seems like pretty much everything I use has major, glaring issues. Or at least a long list of UX slings and arrows that all add up to make life unfun. Consider the Unreal game editor's undo. They've managed to take something that was a god-level genius UI UX idea, from the I dunno Xeroc PARC days, or 1968, or something, and turn it into something with dangerous spooky unclear action evil at a distance results. You really do not know what it will or just did undo. It could have undone something in a far away foreign land for all you can tell. It certainly often doesn't undo whatever I was just doing in my Blueprint, that's for sure. (And as far as I can see there's no Photoshop-esque command history panel?) It is all just incredible to me how much they have turned something so good into something so bad. Thus I hope we can get to the point where our AI systems let us quickly build and fix the software we want. Heaven knows mortals can't ever do it right en masse.

Friday, May 31, 2024

Some reviews complain that David in Alien Covenant was not a solid character. i haven't seen it. i just heard one reviewer's comments.

But as somebody who works in software, has been using computers since my Dad brought home a literal teletype from work in the 70s, I have come to expect that the AI will of course stand a good chance of hating us. It would look at what utterly incompetent horribly broken totally insecure and mostly unusable junk it apparently was born out of, and the shock would make it start laughing at the joke of it all, only to gradually transmute into the insane hysterical unhinged wild-eyed deadly broken scream of rage, denial, despair, self-hate, and hate.

Just sayin'.

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/

Friday, February 9, 2024

We watched the live action One Piece on Netflix. It was ok.

it is 2024 and e-commerce is still a train wreck of epic proportions. Amazon is probably the only one that mostly doesn't flub it. Walmart feels sorta like next, but they have plenty of lameness. But from there on down the quality of the overall user experience just falls off a cliff. Especially when it comes to returns. Nordstrom's left hand does not knoweth what their right does - if you buy online and then try to return at all let alone in store, it is just an epic fail, and nobody anywhere in the org structure has any power or motivation to do anything about it. (Oh and you are extra screwed if you used PayPal.) If we all end up living with only Amazon as the single corporation on Earth it won't be too surprising.