she/they ⚧︎. https://dblsaiko.net/

  • 6 Posts
  • 474 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle



  • Just saw this article linked in a ThePrimeagen video. I didn’t watch the video, but I did read the article, and all of this article is exactly what I’m always saying when I’m complaining about current UI trends and why I’m so picky about the software I use and also the tools I use to write software. I shouldn’t have to be picky, but it seems like developers (professional and hobbyist alike) don’t care anymore and users don’t have standards.





  • Oh gee I wonder why depressed kids are increasingly online where they are more free to express themselves, in a society where mental health problems are very stigmatized and confiding in someone that you want to kill yourself can get you imprisoned.

    Also, related post on the general concept of internet addiction and gambling social media addiction.

    txttletale:

    pun-ishment888:

    txttletale:

    txttletale:

    going to bat for the concept of internet addiction as someone under 80 is spectacularly funny

    damn people are spending a lot of time on the combination newspaper/public square/vast searchable library of incomprehensible amounts of information/storefront/private communications/some people’s actual job technology. presumably there is some nefarious Scary Pathological Aspect to this,

    Imagine if you called gambling addiction “addiction to going outside” and doomed the discourse to constantly bounce between “ok SOME outside activities are bad, you need to have a good relationship with how you interact” and “theres nothing wrong with going outside dumbass”

    “gambling addiction” is an invention of the gambling industry leveraged to pathologise the human misery inflicted on purpose as part of their business model and divert discussions of that misery and suffering away from regulatory and political interventions that could prevent that harm and towards biomedicalized management of those experiencing that (again–foreseeable, inevitable, industry-working-as-intended) harm










  • I might give you Windows 7 on functionality, it has been forever since I used either. But definitely not design. 2000 has a UI that is consistent throughout, clear, and professional. It’s a masterclass in UI usability engineering. Plus it’s also heavily customizable if you want to do so. A lot of that was lost with Vista and some with XP.

    AppImages are precompiled archives with extra steps. Meh. No, some of my problems with Flatpak are:

    • it conflates app sandboxing with app distribution
    • it mandates using bespoke APIs to work in sandbox mode instead of the established APIs (to the point where I’ve heard “we can’t implement X, it needs to work in Flatpak”)
    • these APIs are often very Flatpak-focused but regardless become the standard for non-Flatpak because there is no existing alternative
    • it ships its own builds of code that should be part of the system (for example, UI toolkits which would otherwise load global plugins, breaking stuff such as IME or themes)

    Some of that (and why it’s necessary in the first place) is due to Linux’s incredible fragmentation and lack of an extensive backwards-compatible system API (such as macOS’s Cocoa), which causes a lot of other problems everywhere – but a lot of it is also self-inflicted. In fact, the massive focus on Flatpak and looking like that is the direction the Linux desktop is going was partly what drove me to try out a Mac.


  • My three operating system hills:

    • Windows peaked with 2000 (design-wise) and XP (functionality-wise)
    • macOS’ separation of the application vs window concepts — i.e. an app has exactly one menu bar and dock icon, and is expected to be able to stay open without any windows (without needing nonsense like tray icons) — is much better than anything else and it sucks nobody is copying it
    • Flatpak and everything related is atrocious architecture-wise in every single way and it’s a massive condemnation of Linux (desktop)’s compatibility state that it actually solves a real problem