That makes us about the same age then.

Yeah, I am not arguing “all symbols bad”, more than we are trying to push symbols where it could be questionable. Also these symbols still need to be learned: talking of my mother for instance, I absolutely remember having to teach her that the X was for closing the window, and having to do it multiple times. I don’t argue the usefulness of the X over a “quit” or “close” button btw. Just that this has to be learned too. That’s fine.

That’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation though. Would some settings not be useful to almost anyone, even if they all knew about it? Absolutely, so it should be harder to access. Are there features that would be better for a lot of users but barely anyone knows about because of this? Certainly true too. And that’s being charitable to companies, and assuming that they collect and present data as fairly as possible internally rather than use it in a way that makes a case for what they want to push… And yeah, we aren’t Microsoft target, but I’d argue most companies share this trend. Even some open source projects buy into that when not necessary (imo).

And yeah, there is a good amount of subjectivity here of course. I think we (probably?) both agree with saying that making things simpler is not inherently bad, it’s good even. I was trying to argue we are making a lot of things “simplistic” instead. As an aside, MS developing PowerShell is a form of admission that, for certain tasks, command line is better suited than graphical user interfaces. So yes, automatic jumps between paradigm could, and should, be argued on a case by case basis rather than blindly following it.

Winget is such a half-assed effort. Updating the terminal? Terminal shuts down and you need to open it and run the update again. Updating something else? Maybe it’ll change the binary location and not update the path, just for fun (happened twice with LLVM stuff for me). This update failed for some reason? Try to run update again only to be told no updates are available.

Well, apart from the fact that Win95 is not the “very beginning of visual operating systems”, and it’s not even close (it’s not even MS first, second or third OS with a GUI), I don’t think this is necessarily relevant?

You’ve chosen pretty much the only windows element that has been left unchanged since windows 95, when MS has tried to “simplify” a bunch of other stuff as time went on. For instance, the whole settings situation in Windows 10 and 11 just shows the various iterations of trying to make the settings more and more minimal, but all it’s managed to do is:

• Hide away other options, or straight up not making them available anymore
• Fragmenting the experience by having to keep other legacy settings and control panel…

Or, in windows 11, again in an effort to oversimplify things, by default the right click menu now has fewer options, symbols in lieu of text for common operations, and needs expanding to access other options. This is more work, and a hidden layer, instead of just laying out the options because it’d feel “cluttered” or something.

This is symptomatic of the issues I am arguing about: there is a trend of trying to lay out things flatly and “simply”, but all it does is:

• Reduce what is obvious to what the product people have decided is essential for the user;
• Remove conceptual boundaries that should exists between subsets of tools (when flat design + no “ugly” separators);
• Shove everything else in deep nested menus or a dump-all burger menu. It’s fine, now the clutter is hidden away and you have a “clean” UI.

The funny thing is, it’s still not successful at being user friendly. Phones and tablets are, but it makes the issues even worse. A lot of kids my partner teach only ever use phones and tablets so in IT lessons it’s apparent they don’t know what files are, and “where they go” for instance. Because on iPhone and Android, in an effort to keep the UI simple, the directory structure is pretty much hidden by default.

Computers are complex tools, users should be helped in learning them, not infantilised with a “we know best” attitude.

“But computers are so powerful these days, clock cycles are basically free”

I wish UI design had followed that kind of paradigm to be honest. My high school library had some Sun workstations running Solaris, instead of the shitty outdated Windows computers that would have been the norm then. I was in the minority enjoying it, but that’s how I got to use my first Unix system.

Yeah, I remember going from 98 to XP. My schoolmates and I used to joke that it looked like an OS made by playskool. But to be fair, iirc, that was kind of the trend then and not uniquely some MS bullshit. We were saying the same about the appearance of the GameCube controller (even though it’s objectively great to use).

Not allowing open-source software as a blanket policy sounds pretty unhinged. I feel for you.

You mean in the right upper corner.

Yes. It did. And?

Yeah, the feeling of “just needing that one perfect tool before I can do this” seems terribly common and I feel like it’s being enabled quite a bit in our society. If I just had the right editor/keyboard/notepad/fountain pen/jig etc, then I’ll be able to work on this other thing…

Every modern design trend sucks. Overly minimalistic/simplistic UI harms usability and actively makes users dumber and helpless.

I don’t want rounded corners, transparency, shadows, animations, modern icons etc…

Give me boring panels with clear boundaries between conceptual sections, explicit text on buttons, and no theming. I don’t care if it’s a fugly Win95 grey, I’d rather it be usable than flashy.

I guess Elon won’t be needing gamers’ services to max out his characters anymore.

Fucking AI taking valuable jobs away again.

He’ll try it right after he’s done tweaking his NeoVim config so he can finally start doing some meaningful work in it.

Helix and Vim/NeoVim? Muscle memory is overrated anyways.

prove it!

I tried really hard but I think I may have stumbled into the inconsistency of arithmetics instead. Oopsie daisy.

I read your meme diagonally, so I’m not sure I got it all.

Remind me in 3 days.

Georg Cantor in shambles.

Just in to say, I know exactly what you mean, and I love the subject, to the point I did a PhD in pure maths. The whole “golden ratio” in nature, and a lot of other adjacent stuff, leaves me indifferent at best, and really irritates me at worst. It’s often cheapo mathy wank to feel clever when you talk to your friends. There is nothing wrong in being interested in it, but I’d hope someone into maths would eventually go beyond that.

I also am not a fan of several very useful branches of maths, like calculus, but it’s a tool you need to have. Some people love it though, and I scratch my head at it as much as you do, if not more probably, because I have had to use it so much.

There are probably as many reasons to find maths beautiful (or ugly) as there are people, but for me it boiled down to the fact that:

• with relatively few assumptions, we can logically and iteratively build an abstract machinery that is consistent (well, with caveats…);
• a lot of these abstract theories provide good enough frameworks for other sciences to base theories on and be successful at explaining the world with these (I could talk about the fifth axiom of Euclid, non-euclidian geometries, and how we eventually arrive to something that is a formal setting for the theory of relativity for hours, it’s fascinating);
• it provided me with abstract objects that I could reason about, explore in different ways, and with different points of view, until something clicked and I got to understand the objects better;
• some proofs, even of quite complex theorems, have such a simple and elegant initial idea (when others can feel quite forced), that it is hard not to marvel at how things fall neatly into place (sometimes…).

So to me maths provided a setting in which things worked and made sense, and you could essentially just enjoy an endless supply of puzzles in that setting, whose solutions you could formally prove.

Unlike a lot of maths nerds, I don’t necessarily think that that’s totally limited to maths though. I think most people do their abstract thinking and puzzle solving on whatever it is that they find beautiful. Or I hope they do, it’s a wonderful feeling. The formal aspect of proofs though (and I don’t necessarily mean computations), that’s the unique thing that can set it apart.

The toys situation annoys me so much more now that I am a parent. Also it does not matter how hard you try to avoid certain things, we keep getting gifted clothes that would turn our daughter into a free walking advert for Disney princesses and our son into a truck and heavy machinery enthusiast.

Which, there wouldn’t necessarily be anything wrong with if they were into that to begin with, but that’s really not the case. The push is unreal.

Yeah, by “where I live” I meant the country I am currently in. I am not saying there is no sexism where I am from, far from it, but from what little I can tell, the specifics that I am describing seem to be more prevalent in English speaking countries. Sexism expresses in different ways, that’s definitely a culture thing.

And yes, here in the UK, fathers are only entitled to two weeks paternity leave which only makes things worse. I was very lucky to be working for a company which had a great parental leave policy when both my children were born (3 months full pay) so I could do my part and bond with my children at a very early age. I remember after two weeks thinking “how do fathers even go back to work at that stage?”. And that’s not even taking into account a difficult birth, like needing a c-section, and the mum needing at least 6 weeks to start being able to safely do anything remotely straining again.

It’s just insane.

Most, if not all of them, should just die to be honest. But the one that is targeted at me and annoys me most at the moment is the following.

Where I currently live, there seems to be an assumption that if you are a man, you’re going to be a deadbeat parent.

The bar is in absolute hell to be considered a “good dad”. Change nappies? You’re so “hands on”. Spend time with your kids minding your own business? Mums out of the blue coming to tell you “you’re doing great”, with optional condescension. Thanks, I didn’t ask. Or conversely if my child is crying, get offered help insistently, because yeah, you must know better than my sorry man ass, even though you only met my child 5 seconds ago.

When my partner is present, any questions from doctors or childminders about our children are by default asked to her, and if I don’t (repeatedly) chip in, I don’t even get a look.

No, I’m not “babysitting” to give my wife a rest, I’m enjoying spending time with my children. No, I don’t feel emasculated having my baby in a carrier/sling or pushing a buggy. Also no, I don’t need to be advertised “manly” looking dad gear (you know the one, looks like you’re cosplaying a spec ops soldier).

This seems to be getting better as my children are getting older but during the baby phase it was absolutely mind blowing how I felt I either had to assert my presence quite a bit, or paradoxically get infinite praise for doing the bare minimum.