The worst volume control UI in the world | by Fabricio Teixeira | UX Collective:
A group of bored developers and designers has decided to start a thread on reddit to figure out who can come up with the worst volume control interface in the world:
ERmagerd the horrors…
The worst keyboard ever made | Revue:
At this point it’s probably clear that every time I say “the worst keyboard ever made,” I am being cheeky. These are not the worst keyboards ever made. There is no worst keyboard; the world of keyboards is just too complex for this to be possible. Even more importantly, though, I believe there is always something you can learn from a keyboard you don’t like. Sure, the Ukrainian keyboard has an atrocious build quality, the TI calculator keypad is weird to press, and the abKey is far from a Revolution.
I’ve come across the Shift Happens lists before, but the ones here were … Inspiring. So many of us live with our keyboards as tools for significant portions of our lives, but give no thought to what makes them good or bad, or at least interesting.
Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome:
This optimization can yield a nice performance boost for Google’s customers. Assuming the connection only requires a trivial amount of processing power and network bandwidth, of course. Setting up the connection early can be wasteful or slow down the loading of other pages if the user isn’t going to search the web.There’s just one small catch: Chromium checks the default search engine setting, and only enables the feature when it’s set to Google Search. This preferential treatment means no other search engine can compete with Google Search on the time it takes to load search results. Every competitor must wait until the user has started to type a search query before Chrome will establish a connection.
The Regular Expression Edition - by Guest Contributor - Why is this interesting?:
There is an old programmer joke (generally attributed to Jamie Zawinski) that goes: “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I'll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” In accidentally cutting off access to a large part of the Internet for an entire country (and in the process drawing embarrassing attention to Russia’s censorship efforts), our anonymous bureaucrat seems to have proven that old chestnut quite handily.
Via - kottke.org
The Rotting Internet Is a Collective Hallucination - The Atlantic:
Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system, operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. And because the network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize, any of it, the key was for desirable content to be provided naturally by the network’s users, some of whom would act as content producers or hosts, setting up watering holes for others to frequent.
If you care about The Internet, capital I, this is worth a read and think… The systems that underpin everything outside the corporate theme parks of Facebook and Google have stayed alive almost miraculously, but need help…
And yet… The fact that this was posted on The Atlantic may well mean that some visitors will be paywalled from seeing it, one of the great harms that I didn’t see in the essay.
dspinellis/unix-history-repo: Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today:
The history and evolution of the Unix operating system is made available as a revision management repository, covering the period from its inception in 1970 as a 2.5 thousand line kernel and 26 commands, to 2018 as a widely-used 30 million line system. The 1.5GB repository contains about half a million commits and more than two thousand merges. The repository employs Git system for its storage and is hosted on GitHub. It has been created by synthesizing with custom software 24 snapshots of systems developed at Bell Labs, the University of California at Berkeley, and the 386BSD team, two legacy repositories, and the modern repository of the open source FreeBSD system. In total, about one thousand individual contributors are identified, the early ones through primary research. The data set can be used for empirical research in software engineering, information systems, and software archaeology.You
Emacs: smarter search and replace:
While I rarely need to apply additional logic when replacing matches, it's nice to know we have options available in our Emacs toolbox. This prompted me to check out replace-regexp's documentation (via M-x describe-function or my favorite M-x helpful-callable). There's lots in there. Go check its docs out. You may be pleasantly surprised by all the featured packed under this humble function.
Google’s messaging mess: a timeline - The Verge:
If anything is clear in 2021, it’s that Google’s messaging future will likely remain muddled for quite some time.
via - Daring Fireball
Millions Choose Simple Privacy Protection with DuckDuckGo:
Will people take action to protect their online privacy? Duck yes.Privacy skeptics have dominated the discussion about online privacy for too long. “Sure people care about privacy, but they’ll never do anything about it.” It’s time to lay this bad take to rest.
Not only will consumers act to protect their privacy – they already are. Since the launch of iOS 14.5 in April, 84% of people in the U.S. have actively opted-out of tracking after seeing the new prompt being shown on Apple devices.
When made simple and without sacrifice, most people will choose privacy.
via - /.
Daring Fireball: Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy — Read on daringfireball.net/2020/09/online_privacy_real_world_privacy
And, lastly, there’s the explosive growth in demand, which has led to many people doing it who aren’t any good at it. Code is merely a means to an end. Programming is an art and code is merely its medium. Pointing a camera at a subject does not make one a proper photographer. There are a lot of self-described coders out there who couldn’t program their way out of a paper bag. — Read on daringfireball.net/2020/04/cobol_programming_coding
Zoom’s misleading encryption claims are just the latest problem for the popular service - Six Colors:
What Zoom is offering is, at best, “end-to-middle-to-¯\_(ツ)_/¯-to-middle-to-end” encryption.
The Prodigal Techbro | The Conversationalist:
Ex-Google lobbyist Ross Lajeunesse left the company in 2019 over its censored search engine for China and also because of homophobic, sexist and racist work practices. He’s now running for a Democratic senate nomination, and recently wrote a classic of the ‘scales have fallen from my eyes’ genre, called “I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left.” Its lede is “The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.”Really? Has Google really changed? Lajeunesse joined in 2008, years into Google’s multi-billion dollar tax avoidance, sexist labor practices and privacy hostility and continued to work there through the years of antitrust fines, misuse of personal health data, wage fixing, and financially pressuring think tanks. Google didn’t change. It just started treating some of its insiders like it already treated outsiders. That only looks like radical change if you’ve never thought too hard about what you are doing and to whom.
Daring Fireball: ‘Who Would Have Thought an iPad Cursor Could Be So Much Fun?’ — Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/24/mod-ipad-pointer
See also:
https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/03/in-praise-of-the-ipados-134-cursor/
Further evidence of what I had posted earlier… The new iPad OS pointer is Apple redefining the utility of one of the fundamental interfaces of our time, giving it context and intelligence nobody would expect on the desktop.
Daring Fireball: Convergence on the Laptop Form Factor:
I think Heer gets this right. It’s not about iPad moving closer to Surface conceptually; it’s about moving closer to the laptop ideal. For certain tasks nothing beats the laptop form factor, and quite possibly never will. All computing platforms that are used for such tasks inevitably take on that form. What’s new this decade is the detachable 2-in-1 form — one device that serves as both a laptop with keyboard and trackpad and as a handheld tablet. Microsoft got there from one direction, Apple from another.
I think it’s more than just a direction, but a destination. The iPad was released as an ideal, and for certain things it was perfect on Day One… But for other things, it wasn’t as well suited by itself, and so each release is steering the ship, adding things to make it a little better for edge cases while trying not to lose the spirit…
For Microsoft, the PC was their original ideal, and they’re trying to make it as broad a platform as they can, while truly satisfying nobody.
The fact that today’s iPad OS update is happening on the 19th anniversary of the original GA release of Mac OS X suggests to me that this might be a moon-shot release of sorts.
Daring Fireball: New Android Malware Can Steal Google Authenticator 2FA Codes — Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2020/02/27/android-malware-google-authenticator
Daring Fireball: ‘An Embarrassment From Start to Finish’ — Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2020/01/24/ars-galaxy-fold
Brutal
Daring Fireball: The New York Times’s Hypocrisy on Ad Tracking and Privacy — Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2019/12/27/nyt-ad-tracking-hypocrisy
For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly control commerce on its platform? — Read on anildash.com/2019/12/10/link-in-bio-is-how-they-tried-to-kill-the-web/
Governments that sign on are asked to promise to "ensure everyone can connect to the internet," to "keep all the internet available all the time," and to "respect and protect people’s fundamental online privacy and data rights."Corporate signatories promise that they will “make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone,” “respect and protect people’s privacy and personal data to build online trust,” and “develop technologies that support the best in humanity and challenge the worst.”
Individuals are asked to “be creators and collaborators on the Web,” “build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity,” and “fight for the Web.”
My changing gears from Facebook to Wordpress and other outlets started before this contract was posted, but absolutely in that spirit.
I don’t know that anyone is noticing, but I know…
How to recognize AI snake oil / Boing Boing:
Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan (previously) has posted slides and notes from a recent MIT talk on "How to recognize AI snake oil" in which he divides AI applications into three (nonexhaustive) categories and rates how difficult they are, and thus whether you should believe vendors who claim that their machine learning models can perform as advertised.
Taken together, they show how Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap Facebook users' data — including information about friends, relationships and photos — as leverage over the companies it partnered with. In some cases, Facebook would reward partners by giving them preferential access to certain types of user data while denying the same access to rival companies. — Read on www.nbcnews.com/news/all/leaked-documents-show-facebook-leveraged-user-data-fight-rivals-help-n1076986
Back to windows after twenty years - Signal v. Noise — Read on m.signalvnoise.com/back-to-windows-after-twenty-years/
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What this experiment taught me, though, was just how much I actually like OSX. How much satisfaction I derive from its font rendering. How lovely my code looks in TextMate 2. How easy it is to live that *nix developer life, while still using a computer where everything (well, except that fucking keyboard!) mostly just works.
</snip>
My very favorite quote along these lines is from Brian Kernighan: “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?” — Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2019/11/01/van-rossum-clever-code
I find that python, and Perl before it, are laden with “clever solution” issues which make it near impossible for someone else to pick up a codebase and run with it.
"While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics," company CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted. — Read on www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50243306