hliyan

Perhaps this is where the question of "what is a human right?" becomes important. A human right is not where you are automatically entitled to the thing in question (e.g. food, water, education), but where no entity can prevent you from your pursuit of the thing. Whether the thing qualifies as a human right depends on whether a human can function in society without it. In the earliest, most basic societies, food and water qualified, but not necessarily education, clothing or even permanent housing. Fast forward to the twenty first century, I think now electricity, internet and access to the financial system qualifies. Perhaps in the future, access to machine learning models would qualify too.

Did not realize Pascal is alive and well!

Once the responsibilities of creating a UI is divvied up between a visual designer and a domain expert, I doubt there is much for a UX designer to do. At least not at each product/application level. Perhaps at an industry level, there may be a need for a small number of these roles to advance the state-of-the-art of human-computer interaction, but it is not a problem that needs to be re-solved at the level of each product. In the 80s and 90s, these roles existed within the operating system companies and they came up with things like scrolling, pull-down menus and tabbed interfaces.

I wonder whether this type of situation is an artifact of the US system of law being focused on codification / literalism / textualism, as opposed to the UK and similar systems where common law or judge made law has more weight, which permits the injection of some level of common sense into situations where a literal interpretation of the statutes would lead to ridiculous outcomes.

I think there was an internet meme somewhere, that suggested something along the lines of: if you consider pain to be an essential learning signal, and that beyond a certain level of wealth, you can more or less eliminate pain, then the cognitive effects of such wealth is like being kicked in the head by a horse on a daily basis.

I always thought that the great filter would be the "lotus eater" scenario -- that species always eventually discover that the entirety of their happiness lies in their brains, and once physical dangers are eliminated and base physical needs are met reliably, they can spend their entire lives in either an electronic or chemically induced simulation of a world of their choice, thus ending all exploration. But now I wonder whether they discover that all creativity can be emulated through matrix math, and they simply stop trying to do anything, or lose ability to do anything after a generation of delegating to machines.

Agreed. It is impossible to make an interface that works well for smaller screens with touch input, and larger screens with pointer input. You will always end up sacrificing information density and precision on the larger screen.

This adds to a belief that I have that UI design undergoes cycles like fashion, just that we haven't yet seen a complete cycle.

What would be dumb is to not discontinue an unsafe product because there are more dangerous products out there.

I feel now there's growing support behind the idea that advertising that (a) bypasses a person's volition and (b) consumes a significant amount of their daily attention quota, should be illegal. I think the boundary is crossed somewhere along this progression:

1) A sign atop a storefront

2) A merchant yelling at a public marketplace

3) A prominent display by the roadside

4) A flyer delivered to your home

5) An advertisement alongside a news article

6) An advertisement that interrupts a radio and television broadcast

7) An advertisement alongside a digital written content (analogous to (5) but somewhat more intense)

8) An advertisement that pops up while you read content (analogous to (6) but more intense)

9) An obvious product placement within written/audio/visual content you consume

10) A non-obvious placement of an an idea, thought or bias toward a product within the content you consume

11) Content that evokes intense emotions that are presented to you alongside an advertisement

12) Content that activates involuntary addictive pathways in your brain, presented to you alongside an advertisement

Whatever it is that you're writing this comment on, runs on something that is written in C. Whatever that is responding to your posted comment on the server side, runs on something that is written in C.

Thank you for this. Incredibly simple.

I was just having a similar debate with someone whose point boiled down to "but the GDP", to which my reply was: what is the purpose of GDP if it does not translate into quality of life of the population? This should not be a controversial position, but apparently it is, and it has been the case at least since the 80s or 90s, which is when I think the word "society" began to get replaced with "economy" in popular discourse. I could be wrong.