• 0 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023
  • InfiniteFlow@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is the deal with Graphical User Interface/app psychology?
    9·
    2 years ago

    Alan Dix’s book (aptly named “Human Computer Interaction”) is quite good, even if somewhat old by now. HCI is an actual academic discipline with, yes, tons of theoretical and empirical results that govern what a good UI should be. Many of which are indeed grounded in psychology, others in physiology, etc (what we call Human Factors). There is a whole special interest group of the ACM just about it: SIGCHI.

    Do not confuse this with fashion/trends/taste. These change, resulting in widely different possible flavors of UI over the years. But the underlying principles are the same.

    Another thing to remember is that the fact that Apple, Google, or someone else implemented an UI in a certain way doesn’t mean they are following best practices and guidelines. Novelty sells, even if at the end of the day it does a worse job of things…

    Edit: added link to SIGCHI

  • InfiniteFlow@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•‘Ramen noodles budget’: EU moves to end exploitation of unpaid internshipsEnglish
    13·
    2 years ago

    This takes many forms. A recurrent one is for the take place right out of college (or while still in it!), taking advantage of the naïveté of those just entering the job market, and often as a precondition to access any kind of paid job some months later. The employer gets free qualified labor, the intern eat lots of ramen… families put up with it as a natural extension of paying for college, for a few more months… it’s exploitation pure and simple.

    A “joke” I’ve heard several times over the years (not recently, though) summarizes the level of assholery that’s going on (warning: some may find this offensive)

    “joke”

    “it is better to have an intern than a slave, because you don’t need to feed, house our clothe the intern”…

  • InfiniteFlow@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•The rise and fall of Usenet: How the original social media platform came to beEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    Yah, I can’t imagine finger being widely deployed nowadays, the huge security and privacy hole it would be!

    As for nntp and email… I also remember using email relay proxies for FTP way back when! FTP access to some places was spotty at best, so I sent a GET request to an email server that would get the file, UUENCODE it, and send it multipart by email. Not that files were big back then, but not was it possible to attach more than a few hundred KBs at once, if that.

    In fact, I just remembered a funny story from when I was using the Usenet. I used a client that ran on our VAX/VMS mainframe. While browsing the newsgroups, I would get a figure for the transfer rate at the bottom of the screen. It was usually in tens of bytes per second, sometimes a few hundred. Often it stalled, etc. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I see it is showing “1”. My immediate thought as the most plausible interpretation: “damn, one byte per second. this is especially slow today!” And then I noticed the units: one KILOBYTE per second. it was the first time I had ever seen such a fast transfer rate!

    A few years later, mid 90s I was trying to download a video that accompanied a conference paper. It was 6MB in size if memory serves. It took me from Friday afternoon to Sunday to manage it. Not only was it slow, but it kept interrupting and I had to start over numerous times. But I did manage in the end, and walked away with it split into a few floppy disks 🙂.

    We’ve certainly come a long way since!

  • InfiniteFlow@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•The rise and fall of Usenet: How the original social media platform came to beEnglish
    20·
    2 years ago

    So much this! I am old, I guess, but I was on Usenet for years before the web was even invented. When I became aware of the fediverse, I got serious Usenet vibes. A decentralized model, several servers, you access one and get what it sends you, but it syncs with all other servers. You‘re getting everything in the entire Usenet and what you post gets everywhere too… we’ve come full circle, I think, even if we now use ActivePub instead of NNTP… a shame people nowadays know of it as “that piracy thing” instead of what it once was (and was designed to be).

  • InfiniteFlow@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Will ChatGPT write ransomware? Yes.English
    22·
    2 years ago

    This is like saying “you can write ransomeware in C++” and implying it is the language’s fault, somehow. ChatGPT is a tool, it does what the user asks it too (or it should, anyway). It has no agency nor morals. The argument that it makes it easier to write ransomware is silly as well. From high level languages to libraries and IDEs, we’ve always been developing tools to make programming easier! This is just the latest iteration.

  • InfiniteFlow@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Do you prefer digital or physical books?
    7·
    3 years ago

    I reluctantly started reading ebooks years ago for a very practical reason: owning some few thousand physical books, I pretty much ran out of room in the shelves in my small apartment. So nowadays I only buy physical art books and the like. Having said this, I actually easily grew to like ebooks, for their ubiquitous availability and, of course, not taking up precious shelf space.

    Have to read them in an ereader for a proper experience, though. Tablet/smartphone displays tire my eyes a lot if I read for any meaningful period of time.

  • InfiniteFlow@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Does anyone feel like an actual adult?
    6·
    3 years ago

    Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.

    So much this!

    I see myself a bit in all those stages, but i don’t think i ever really ever (temporarily) outgrew “childish” things. Always liked cartoons, always read comics, always played games, and always told those that chided me for not growing up to fuck off. Now entering my 50s, the biggest difference is that people don’t have the courage to bother me about it anymore (and in the rare occasions when they do they don’t argue back after being told off :P )