chrisfosterelli
Joined 12 years ago
Joined 12 years ago
My comment was not about touchscreens in general, it was about touchscreens on laptops. The phone touch experience is excellent because everything is designed for touch. Correspondingly, if you plug a KBM into a phone, it's a very poor experience.
If my phone's display is oil repelling, it simply doesn't work very well. I regularly wipe the screen to keep it clean. Luckily, this is very easy to do since my phone is the size of my hand and the display is attached to a solid box with no hinges involved. I can clean it with my shirt when I notice smudges and am in the habit of doing so. A laptop screen is much more annoying to keep clean.
The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different. If you're designing for use on laptop/desktop you need to design for KBM-first -- since the majority of devices will be -- and therefore the touch experience suffers, and users with a touchscreen just use the KBM.
I don't think the average consumer cares that much about this either. I've noticed my grandparents often buy laptops with touchscreens accidentally and then proceed to mostly interact with it by accident.
Part of me wants to believe that a company like apple must/would do this right if they were going to do it but on the other hand there's the whole touch bar debacle and it doesn't seem like their foldable phone is starting off with the best reviews either.
HDR10+ is supported in some players (infuse) but not others (plex) and will fallback to HDR10. Profile 7 DV files do not play properly on Apple TV period even though it will display the DV logo (though frankly very few devices can do this). Profile 5 and 8 DV files will play properly depending on the player and the content mapping level in the content (2.9 is well supported but 4.0 causes HDR10 fallback or black screens in some cases). Apple TV also doesn't support HD audio passthrough great.
I have not been attending as many tech meetups or keeping tabs on tech news like I used to. I've been spending more direct time with friends (tech and not). I've also found enjoyment spending a lot of time in more niche internet communities that are not actually about software dev but tend to attract a lot of software dev people. I've definitely noticed I'm spending far more time on other, non-tech hobbies of mine. It has been a while since I've done any OSS stuff or organized a tech meetup.
There's the whole component of identity you mentioned. I've considered myself a 'computer guy' since elementary school and it's been a bit odd to think what I would be if not that. I'd never have even entertained that idea until recently, but in the short term I think I have developed enough of a product mindset and business skills to stay useful in tech. Maybe I need to think of myself as a 'product guy' or 'entrepreneurial guy' instead.
If AI is soon able to replace everything we bring to the table as the maximalists are claiming then honestly all knowledge work go out the window pretty quickly. If that happens then that is its own scary thought and I don't think we're really ready for that economically / socially. I pay a lot of attention to my retirement funds lately.
So frankly, I think I'm instinctively doing what you suggest... But I think it's also natural to feel some weird feelings about it all!
Nowadays all the development is done at a bigtech lab, and you aren't going to be able to tell anyone about it. Everyone else is relegated to interacting with slightly larger and larger LLMs over an API. On one hand it's cool that the tech is now far more accessible and impactful, but on the other AI has become immensely boring.
It's a little uncharitable take as I know some people are doing some cool innovative stuff still, and not every tech needs to be new forever anyway. I would feel less strongly if it wasn't impossible to not keep hearing about it :)
The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.
Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.
Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?
I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.
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