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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
I wish that would work. My Epson was always on and the ink kept drying. After it clogged the print head once too many times and I could not fix that in less than 10min, I just gave up on the piece of crap. I now go to a print shop to print what I need which, admittedly, nowadays is just a couple of times a year.
Neat! I’ve always been a fan of roguelikes!
#Rogule 2024-3-25 🧝 4xp ⛩ 93 👣 streak: 1 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜ ⚔ 🐺🐗🧛 🌰🌰 🍄
While I’m not entirely sure wat it actually means, the message you get on that site right now might be the reason (some kind of experiment gone wrong artificially inflating the numbers):
I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far. We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.
All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed. The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.
I trawled unintentionally.
Is federated authentication being considered for the future? The federated model of the fediverse is great, but it runs into problems when instances “die”, you want to access different servers as they federate with different things, etc. leading to the need of having multiple accounts. If there were a decentralized network of auth servers, could use the same credentials everywhere.
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!
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).
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.
Yup. Got it last week. Found this shit so disingemuous it almost pissed me off more than the privacy violation itself. I dont use any of Meta’s stuff except for WhatsApp out of necessity (some groups from the kids’ school), but i keep getting dumped into FB by busineses that dont have a proper webpage…
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.
One more, then!
My latest one looks different (100% renewable), so I guess it depends on which provider you’re using or the region you live in?
I’m in the same boat. Will be replacing my 12 Pro, which will go to my wife, hers to my kid. We get about 10 years out of each phone, by using them like this. The improvements I get for upgrading only after three years are very significant!
I have read them all, and find them all excellent. I wouldn’t recommend Use of Weapons as an introductory book for a new reader, though. It is rather dark, and it may put off some people. I think The Player of Games would work better, and give a new reader a better introduction of what the ethos of the Culture is, and what to expect (to some extent…) from the other books.
Unlike others, I did’t like Consider Phlebas that much, when compared with other (IMO) stronger Culture books.
Oh my god, so much this! The only apparent reason I see for many of the “return to office” cases I know about is for middle managers to be able to hold court and lord over their subordinates. As for the actual work that needs to be done, I see little advantage (in fact, constant interruptions for management and colleagues make it quite worse).
I wasn’t arguing for Firefox or FOSS. It just seems to me that if your selling point is trust and privacy (at least it is what I see people citing as Brave’s Big Thing), you should be as transparent and irreproachable in that regard as possible. Having said this, of course, good features can be enough for the trade-off to be worth it (this is true of pretty much every piece of software out there, Chrome included), depending t each user finds more important.
That you can is besides the point. You shouldn’t need to. If the first thing I need to think about after installing it is “well, let’s see what garbage is in here that I need to turn off”, then any trust I would have for it has already gone out the window. Especially important odor a browser where that is kind of the main differentiating aspect.
I was over the 11 year mark when I left on June 30, feeling abused and offended, never to return. Not gonna lie, I am still mourning the loss of some communities. Lemmy has helped a lot, though!