CoryAlexMartin

Apple seems like the kind of company that would greatly benefit from having someone opinionated at the helm to keep the different teams oriented towards a unified vision and to intervene when a team produces something crappy

Meetup has become the worst service I use, bar none. They pretty much doubled our group fees from $200 a year to $400 a year, then started putting giant banner ads at the top of all of our member emails, then started locking essential features (like seeing RSVP lists) behind a member-level membership and started begging our members to give them money directly.

You cannot use bold or italics in plain text mode in TextEdit. It is truly a plain text mode. If you try to switch from rich text to plain text, and you utilize any rich text features in your document, it will warn you that you're going to lose that information.

You can use the time to think and process, or to rest your mind. Hardly useless!

There may be some screaming into the void, but at least some of it breaks through. I was someone who, for years, bought into the idea that being idiosyncratic and self-expressive and following my passions and self-interested dreams would lead to fulfillment. I was the last person you would have expected to have been receptive to the idea that starting a family could be a means to a meaningful life. Nonetheless, I started to see the cracks in my worldview, and that made me more open to listen, and here we are.

Also there is a biological urge, so it's probably not that much of an uphill battle. Though unfortunately people also contend with biological clocks and realize that they want kids when it's already too late. I feel very bad for those people, and so if you can re-normalize the idea of starting a family, then maybe you can reach those sorts of people while they still have time.

I've seen the sentiment building over the last several years. Though I think part of why it's such a prevalent sentiment now as opposed to a few years ago, is very obvious signs of cultural breakdown started to show strongly in maybe 2017 or so, and people started questioning the prominent messages in our culture and seeking answers, and for many, finding those answers takes time.

There are probably other related factors too, like increased awareness of population decline, but I think both reasons are intertwined.

I think it's a pushback against the emphasis on individualism in our culture, which many find does not lead to real fulfillment. When you start a family, you're giving up your own glory, but in doing so you become deeply integrated into something greater than yourself, which makes you greater by extension.

And I say this as someone who doesn't have kids either, and as someone who used to not be so excited by the prospect, but I've witnessed how it's transformed my friends and family members.

It is certainly a stronger argument in the gun case, since defensive usage significantly outweighs criminal usage and most people don't even shoot anyone. Here we're dealing with a situation where being addicted to your smartphone is the norm, not the exception.

I think one problem is some people don't realize that some of these models and implementations are so highly agreeable that they practically are mirrors. This kid seems to have been treating it like a therapist. Though this isn't a problem exclusive to chat bots: it's obviously mirroring how an overly-agreeable, enabling friend would act.

Yeah a big reason I started doing pixel art back in 2009 was because it enabled me to do lots of trial and error by changing pixels until I got it to look good. It's much harder to do that with more traditional art, because there are way more options. That's not at all to say that pixel art doesn't require skill, but the skill floor is definitely lower.

I was at a Honda dealership in late 2021 looking for a car, and I mentioned to the car salesmen how I don't like how touchscreen-dependent cars have become. Then ten minutes later he's showing me the touchscreen climate controls in a 10th gen Civic and talking about how cool they are.

I wound up getting a new 11th gen Civic since used cars were ridiculously expensive at the time, and I was very pleased to find that the touchscreen is only used for iOS/Android and some settings. The climate control knobs are imperfect though: for some reason they decided that the user should select which vents are active with an infinitely scrolling knob, so you can't utilize muscle memory, and you have to look at it while you're turning it. An improvement over the previous generation, but a step down from my dad's 1992 Civic.

I wish they would provide useful customization features, such as adjusting the drop shadow on the app names that appear under the icons. Look at those images in the article; the "News" text is way less legible because it's over the highlight of the dog's ear. This has been an issue for years.

Mac OS 10.7 was a downward turning point. That’s when the iOSification started.

It’s very funny and strange that one of the defining characteristics of modern GUI design is that everything is very large. Lots of whitespace, buttons twice as tall as the cursor, windows that have to be maximized in order to see more than seven lines of content, and yet the scrollbars are the size of a toothpick.