Gallium Spoon Enthusiast

Gabe, 26, He/Him, fROMOHIO This Station Is Non-Operational

[gpuzzle]

[marusketch]

Quote: "many hoo hoo's and heh heh's were had on those projects"

[not100bees]

Okay I know the quote tweet is supposed to be ridiculous but that is how people talk. I have seen people talk exactly like that. That is not even a ridiculous exaggeration of how certain lefty types talk.

[not-afraid-of-laplaces-demon]

I realize I’m probably the odd one out here but my ideal UI is a cross between early web 2.0 and like. Analytical instrumentation software, like a LabVIEW program running a $200k potentiostat.

You may not like it, but that’s just because you’re weak. This is what high performance UI looks like:

[not-afraid-of-laplaces-demon]

The over all trend from the last 10-15 years is that UI went from a tool you used to do stuff, from being an interface with the underlying software, to being something that is supposed to look pretty.

Instrumentation and productivity software is ugly. Logic Pro, Adobe Premiere, Blender, Autocad, SolidWorks, OBS: even for premium, expensive software, the UI design is always going to be extremely cluttered and messy to someone just starting out. That’s on purpose: the tools you’re likely to need should always be nearby, easily accessed and visible. As you learn the UI, you learn to process the visual noise faster and it stops feeling nearly so cluttered, and having everything available becomes a blessing.

UI has evolved in the opposite direction, into making everything simple, pretty, and polished. Each of these are on their own great virtues. All else equal, simple is better, pretty is better, polished is better.

But I can’t open the post editor without it overlaying the entire screen and stopping me from interacting with the rest of my dashboard. Conversations on this site break up into a sprawling tree structure! I’m not always responding to just what is being said in this exact thread, or even the notes of this particular post. But I can’t access the rest of tumblr while the post editor is open, making going back and forth between reading and writing a pain in the ass.

This is, to some extent, a power user problem. It’s a friction I run into because I’m an internet poisoned lunatic who’s been here following the other talkative internet poisoned lunatic for far too long. The benefit of certain potential UI features just don’t apply to someone who logs on for half an hour in the morning over coffee and just likes/reblogs a few posts without comment, and those people are in the majority. To much UI also scares off new users, which would be a death knell to an advertising dependent platform. 

There is some sense in keeping the UI simple, pretty, and polished. I just hate it. I want my cluttered UI that does everything under the sun and comes with a 324 page manual that doesn’t even cover all the features. I want 3 different feeds and a pane of a post’s notes open, while I write two different posts at the same time, all while my messages and activity pane are in full view, and none of them should overlap at all. The screen real estate is there if you’re willing to tolerate more than 3 UI elements on the screen at any one time.

[sukimas]

really good post. here’s some more analytical instrumentation software

[benjamoomin64]

Good post but I never expected to need to add labview to my list of filtered tags

[not-afraid-of-laplaces-demon]

Hey, LabVIEW sucks for a lot of reasons, UI just isn’t one of them.

[kaiasky]

Imo the real thing about labview is if you need a new piece of UI it’s like a quick 10 minute thing to add it

[beachnet]

I’ve been thinking about Marjane Satrapi all day. This quote by her is one of my favorites

[kushblazer666]

[tpwrtrmnky]

A lot of the time when I point out that some right-wing policy is proven to not achieve the thing it purports to have as a goal, people rightly point out that the real goal is the negative outcomes that do happen.

Which is correct!

But this is often framed as me approaching the right wing naively by the respondent.

That's not the case at all. I know they're evil. The goal is to demonstrate that they're lying by exposing the way the rhetoric fails to line up with reality.

This has to be ongoing work because someone new has their political awakening every day. Every day, someone needs to learn that the right wing position is wrong on all levels, not just the obvious ones.

[realflaminglily]

there will be people out there who still think the war on drugs (as the absolute first thing that comes to mind) is a legitimate social cause against an antisocial blight on society. if you come out the gate with (the very true statement) that it's actually been a deliberate campaign to target minorities and other undesirable groups to the ruling class, you're going to sound like a clueless conspiracy nut

whereas if you come with a very defensible, statistically supported point of "it doesn't work and has never worked" you can open the door to the follow up question of "why did the government do it in the first place, and (in many cases) why are they still doing it?"

[tpwrtrmnky]

This, exactly.

The play is to:

Demonstrate that the policy doesn't work

Demonstrate that the people enforcing the policy have everything they need to know it doesn't work

Provide the context of what the policy achieves in the absence of its "intended" outcome.

Remind people that the purpose of a system is what it does.

Then, instead of being a non-sequitur claim you're just pulling out of thin air, the conclusion is the most reasonable way to assemble the provided puzzle pieces.

[sunderwight]

Yup.

Also a lot of people having a rough time also tend to want to simplify, and sometimes aren't interested in empathizing.

Someone going well what if I just take a fucking sledgehammer to this situation and fuck anyone who gets hit by the debris if it solves this problem, do not need to hear that the sledgehammer will have lasting negative consequences for others, they need to hear that it won't solve the problem.

[aokozaki]

There's a manga that just started on MangaPlus called World Wide Web MIKO!, which features an alternate 1890s Japan where the internet is... a spiritual network accessed by shrine maidens?

[Narration] In modern times, people can browse the web with a click of their mouse...

It's fucking hilarious.

[tsarina-anadyomene]

I don't know anything about AI or how it works really and I think by the time I familiarized myself enough with it, the field will have moved on and I won't understand it again. So basically, people in the know: should I be advocating destroying the thinking machines?

[tsarina-anadyomene]

if the machines do destroy us all then the humanitieslords are going to be owning the shit out of the stemlords in the survivor caves

[onrtrp]

the set of ships is nonempty and finite

(any reasonable notion of) size induces a total order on the set of equivalence classes of ships of the same size

every nonempty finite total order has a maximum

there exists a ship that is no smaller than any other ship

QED

[internet-sentences]

A /r/RedScarePod poster asks why there are so many non-binary people now and another responds “not sure, but +1 to the phenomenon, I see them all the time now working in the New Mexican oil fields”

[internet-sentences]

Happy pride to the oil rig non-binaries

[tsarina-anadyomene]

it really is quite bad for your military to have an image of itself as a warrior class. what you really want is for your soldiers to think of themselves as boring professionals who will fill out a report form if someone gets a little too warrior ethos out there

[selfmaderibcageman]

[symdog]

as much shit as i give phones for being a real computer forced to run evil facebook mcdonald's kiosk they used to take 4000 years to charge and explode into sand when dropped so it's nice their fast and strong now

[gpuzzle]

feeling half embarrassed that I recently just grasped the physical intuition of what is current, resistance, voltage and frequency actually are

[thydungeongal]

Life could be a dream...

[targetedknowledge]