isolatedsystem

Metro design being amazing, refreshing, beautiful and delightful is a hill I will die on.

It was Microsoft who had the courage (and, admittedly, need) to come up with a bold new design language. They said, you know what, most people are digital natives these days, let's not infantalise them with fake paper notepads and fake leather textures for their digital calendar. Instead, let's make text itself the highlight, the star, and strip out all the rest.

They had a User Story thingy where their ideal users were busy people wanting to exist in the real world. MS wanted that the ideal user takes the phone out of his pocket, glances at it and instantly recives the information he seeks, and quickly puts it back in his pocket to move on with his life.

Hence Live Tiles. Hence the first widgets. Hence their lovely and ill-fated People app where you could go to one place and handle your Facebook feed and your LinkedIn feed etc. Hence the discarding of endless unicorn rainbow vomit of icons. Nah. Here's a simple text interface in black background for AMOLED battery life. The phone is not an extension of personality. It is a tool. Use it. Put it away.

Lumia phones ran amazingly well on nothing specs because they didn't try to be too complicated with graphical stuff. Battery life was always god-tier. And, though I've never been able to confirm it, around the time of Lumia 710, the MS touch keyboard actually let you type letters in the wrong order and would correct them for you. For example: "atcually". I remember at that time that Android wouldn't. It would only handle near-misses: "axtually".

I fucking loved Windows Phone. Rest in peace.

Well stated, but I will say, it is not impossible to do both.

Tantacrul is my favourite (and, actually, only) example of this. His work with MuseScore, with Audacity, his videos about them, and his takedowns of Sybellius etc. all opened my eyes to the world of designers who do things with hard-nosed analytical thinking, user studies, good principles, and make something useful. Even his little digressions about Paint3D and Ubuntu's Mobile OS are illustrative.

Great! Hope that works out for you! You seem competent at making sound decisions.

I always have a tinge of...perhaps 'sadness' when reading such articles because they are a lot like those large fishing nets that drag along the bottom of the ocean catching and destroying in quantities unneeded. From this list:

- Quietly/Delve/Tapestry/Landscape: they're all lovely words. I love(d) using them.

- "Serves as": I use this all the time too.

- "The result? Devastating". Perhaps it is a bit stilted, but "Outcome? Predictable." could be a nice turn of phrase.

- "It's worth noting": All academics everywhere use this in papers. See also: "Notably", "Essentially", "In general" and other such fillers that we reach for.

- "Think of it as": This is such a useful phrase to explain something. Analogy is how we learn after all.

- The fucking em dashes. I love them, and screw everyone who suggests one should stop using them. One big reason for using linux is the compose key, so the em dash is never far away.

- Same with the unicode decoration. Nah, screw you. I use these symbols all the time: °, ×, →, ⇒ etc. in my own notes. Again, compose key ftw.

Etc. (the list is endless)

I know what people will say, that everything is contextual, one has to study case-by-case etc. But I can't help feeling that someone is pointing a finger at me and accusing me before-the-fact. Just, AI has polluted the joy of writing.

Your defiant and cock-sure "Yes it should do nothing" seems myopic, lacking in empathy, and just not very well thought out. Can you explain why you believe this is a good idea?

Because it seems that you're suggesting that thousands (and perhaps two orders of magnitude more than that) should just...grow up malnourished, underfed, lacking the warm comfort of security that is critical for healthy adulthood free from anxiety, depression, repressed rage, emotional dysregulation?

This is rubbish. By that token, computer development is also facilitating biological weapons development. A better MacOS (or Windows, I don't know) leads to better weapons. They should clearly stop developing computers and OSes. Developers of nice test-tubes are also facilitating bioweapons. Your local O-ring manufacturer, your local medical-grade freezer manufacturer etc. are all culpable. The problem is the bioweapon, not the LLM.

I'm a mechanical engineering PhD who works on numerical computing, data analysis and the like. I've spent several hundreds of dollars on fonts. Because I like things being just so, because I like seeing the artefacts I produce being nice to look at, and because they're just plain beautiful.

Day to day, I use open source fonts that Butterick recommends. But once in a while, I like using just nice stuff. It's like a nice fountain pen for others.

This is an infuriatingly clueless comment. It gives nothing? It allows people to set their affairs in order, and that is an invaluable thing.

Alzheimers can lead to all kinds of other issues like impulsivity, or aggressiveness. People gambling away their life savings, not knowing that they are even doing it. Doctors unable to intervene due to rights around patient autonomy. All of this has big consequences in the lives of those affected.

This is fucking fantastic. I wish the whole of the internet was like this. People enthusiastically sharing their own enthusiasm about learning something cool, and other enthusiasts finding it and going down their own rabbitholes. The internet is multimedia. It should be nothing _but_ people sharing knowledge. Thanks for writing this up.

There was an old YouTube video of a young guy standing around somewhere in East Asia, placards in hand, recording himself showing messages on those placards about why you should quit social media, set to Marching The Hate Machines.

It had a placard in it saying something like "You don't have 100 friends. You have like 4. And that's OK."

The more I'm getting older, the truer this has become. There is something extremely zen-like about letting the past trail away like the wake of a ship, as Watts said.

In an ideal world, those people were dear to me, and me to them, and we would all stay in touch and be one big happy family, n'importe the distance. But it takes plenty out of me just to be there for those that matter most. And for them, putting up with my quirks is burdensome but not an unscalable wall. As it is for me with their quirks in reverse.

I'm in Europe, with a bunch of non-geeky friends, coming from all walks of life who have Signal installed.

As a sibling comment to yours stated, the hardest decision was deciding to stop using Meta.

I have a militant "let the leaves fall where they may" attitude towards stopping relationships with companies I detest (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta...) It all always works out fine.

Now adjust it for inflation.

I think the point is rather what percentage of people will continue to need to have a phone that is Apple or Google, due to death by a million decisions like these.

You might be being a tad uncharitable to the GP. Competition isn't an inherently bad thing. Many engineering endeavours (and engineers) have been made better by the crucible of competition. The first space race, Formula 1, even the competition between the different experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, for example.

Easy answer to your last point: Work machine and Non-work machine. If I'm working for a company and the company needs MS Office, they will give me a machine with MS Office. I will treat that machine like a radioactive zone. Full Hazmat suit. Not a shred of personal interaction with that machine. It exists only to do work on and that's that. The company can take care of keeping it up to date, and the company's IT department can do the bending over the table on my behest as MS approaches with dildos marked "Copilot" or "Recall" or "Cortana" or "React Native Start Menu" or "OneDrive" or whatever.

Meanwhile, my personal machine continues to be Linux.

This is what I'm doing at my work now. I'm lucky enough to have two computers, a desktop PC that runs Linux, and a laptop with Windows 11. I do not use that laptop unless I have to deal with xlsx, pptx or docx files. Life is so much better.