Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
A whole lot of us will be mentally impaired sooner or later.

Our experience with software when that happens is sad for everyone but bad UI designers. For them, it’s justice.

Comment · 2 years ago
… lack of empathy? Where?
Comment · 2 years ago
> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume.

If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for a panel of users from a nursing home, a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c.

I expect the outcome would be a hell of a lot less twee “on brand” UI elements and a lot more leaning on proven design systems and frameworks, including fucking crucially for appearance. And also a lot less popping shit up on the screen without user interaction (omg those damn “look what’s new!” sorts of pop ups or focused tabs—congrats, some of your users are now totally lost)

Comment · 2 years ago
Same. “Oh, it’s just… the obvious thing.”
Comment · 2 years ago
You’ve just made a map of rich and poor areas with extra steps.

Which is effective. If you’re a parent trying to decide which schools you want your kids in, maps of where the money is and maps of school rankings are damn near interchangeable (mostly not for funding-related reasons, though). You could use either and come to similar conclusions.

Comment · 2 years ago
Yeah, sixth film credit… but the second one for which her character had a name.

And that other film appears to have had a box office under $1.4m, with a collection of basically nobody notable attached, including the director.

Comment · 2 years ago
Shrug Google’s router thinks I have it. And it’s on by default.
Comment · 2 years ago
People’d find it outrageous if beanie baby collectors were sacrificing 2% of US food production on altars to their beanie babies, because doing so made the beanie babies more valuable to other collectors. Even if some of the collectors were growing their own food for the purpose, et c, et c—it’d still bother a lot of people. Maybe most people.
Comment · 2 years ago
The typical behavior is that DNS returns an IPv6 address, then whatever-it-is sits there until a timeout, because it’s simply not being routed. I’ve not investigated further because turning off IPv6 fixes the problem and breaks nothing (that I care about). Anything that only returns an IPv4 address from DNS works either way.

My cellular connection supports IPv6, but testing sites report it’s misconfigured in a bunch of ways. I don’t see problems in practice, though. But on my home network, it’s turned off.

Comment · 2 years ago
> the next ouch-hot-coffee-in-paper-cup wacko

Nitpick, but this specific example, despite its place in pop culture, wasn't a case of a lawsuit-happy wacko. McDonalds screwed up, after being warned they were screwing up and failing to correct, and someone got badly hurt.

Comment · 2 years ago
Yeah, IPv6 is shut off on my Google Fiber router. Stuff on the Internet breaks when it’s on (last tested three or so months back when they sent me a new router).

When we first got Fiber, years ago, Amazon’s store was one of the things that broke until I turned off IPv6. Wouldn’t load at all, on any device on our network.

Works fine for VPNs and such, but I don’t talk to the Internet with it, because my experience has been it’s terribly unreliable.

Comment · 2 years ago
The point is to get people in who'll spend money. Governments don't usually create visa programs to be nice—they do it for some benefit.
Comment · 2 years ago
The big question for us to be able to figure anything out based on this: what did that chart look like in other years?

Healthcare and government are enormous slices of the economy. I'd expect them to be at or near the top of hiring much of the time. IDK about hospitality.

Comment · 2 years ago
For one thing, they sounded like absolute shit even compared to digital landlines.
Comment · 2 years ago
1) Kids? You mean only high schoolers, right? I lived that time period and can't imagine any kid who didn't drive having a cell phone, then.

2) I graduated in the early '00s and I think maybe 5% of the kids in my graduating class, at most, had a cell phone by graduation. Mostly some shitty Nokia with a phone-only or low-texting plan (texting was still crazy-expensive), mainly for contacting parents about after school activity stuff.

Middle-class-spectrum car-dependent exurb. Maybe it was different for, like, kids growing up in Brooklyn or something? Or rich kids, perhaps.

A more-common perk for children of free-spending parents, in my town, was still a second POTS line, though I do think that was starting to tip the other way just at the end.

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