Really enjoyed this read, but also couldn't help but feel sorry for the author still trapped in the labyrinth. "Just one more CMS and I'll be free..."
The jewel in the post is the rejection of Vannevar's acolytes and their hand-wrought memexen. Biology already gave me a perfectly good memex in my skull. If its shortcomings give you anxiety, take 2 YAGNI until productivity resumes.
Or ask yourself how cynical your own line of inquisition is?
Yes, church groups are probably going to be a bit more 'pro-marriage' than some others. I guess the 'anti-marriage' people?
And?
Everything in the press is presented by someone with some perspective they want to highlight.
And the link you referred us to states probably what to most of us a bit obvious - that celebrities divorce more often - but which is thoughtful to have in numbers.
And?
So, what specifically is wrong with the study in question?
Because I think it seems helpful.
I buy that online dating may not be quite as effective at forming 'long term relationships' as otherwise, and that it might be worth looking at in more detail. It could maybe be a matter of 'distance relationships'. Or possibly those individuals may have been less likely to be married in the first place?
I'll wager 5x more people are going to be interested in this issue than 'crypto currency' for example.
It's a group that took statistics from Wikipedia articles of famous people to then run the headline "rock and rollers twice as likely to divorce." That headline is misleading. They didn't study rock and rollers, they studied celebrities.
This older survey similarly has them playing fast and loose with the statistics to get a flashy headline. In their own data it's clear that online dating has cannibalized dating at bars, and shares a near identical divorce rate - 20% vs 19%. In other words the survey is a nothingburger. All it shows is a shift in dating channels. But that's not the headline they pushed.
If their clickbait strategy isn't clear to you yet, don't take it from me. They claim this is their goal on their own website: "Time and again our research department has injected reality and hard evidence into this debate with eye catching research which the media have broadcast."
The headline 'couples meet xxx ...' is absolutely not 'clickbait' moreover, the notion that 'bar dating' and 'online dating' might have some similarities is reasonable, but beyond requirement to include in a report a few sentences long especially given that it's nuanced.
Since most, even 'respected' journalism is a bit clickbaity, this is well within normative editorialization.
Hence the likely bigotry on the part of people ventilating about the origin of the data.
What content blockers do people use alongside Safari on iOS?
I've been trying Firefox Focus but it's barebones, ad-centric, and doing nothing for cookie popups. Now with these Google popups infesting the web it feels like the 90s again and has made me stop browsing the web on my tablet.
I also got a chuckle because the author is a professional AWS architect and still couldn't avoid accidental charges. Well, architect isn't salesman! Thankfully the mistake was corrected by paying the bill in full.
This is my thought too. We are reading articles like this at the onset of a new law because it plays well to crowds who want to have Online Opinions about government oversight.
If the problem is as bad as these articles claim, then these facilities will need to clean up their act or willfully hand over a slice of the market to competitors. We've even already seen this play out in the bread industry with gluten. A bunch of new brands started taking shelf space away from the big brands and a few years later those big brands have their own gluten-free lines. The same could happen with sesame in time. To form an opinion on the new law this early is a recipe for sour milk.
I just don't see it. My pens and my matchsticks work fine. My gloves are still gloves five winters later. Potato peeler, peels potatoes.
I think the author doesn't understand that there's a tier of disposable goods for just about everything and if you don't shop wisely you'll take some of it home.
Appliances for example: don't buy them from web pages and don't listen to Wirecutter. This is just letting marketers tell you what to buy. Instead go to a showroom that also repairs appliances. They'll know exactly which contemporary brands are crummy because they'll have been fixing them.
Specialty stores will also have the entire price range for the product so you can see what quality costs for that good. Marketers prey on us during times of inflation, making their cheap goods look high end before we adjust to inflated prices. If you've only ever shopped appliances at places like Target, Best Buy, or Home Depot, you may have never seen a high quality appliance in your life. And if a brand you like starts showing up in these stores, run. (Famously, Levi in Walmart.)
There are some product categories for which no strong options exist. For example, contemporary, top-of-the-line Kitchen Aid mixers have intermittently been produced with plastic motor parts. Go look at the reviews for sewing machines.
Klein tools, which have historically been super high quality, made in USA, has started mixing in cheaper made in china products. Chippewa boots (Warren Buffet company) same.
These are examples in a sea of examples. This is a trend.
MBA types move into companies with brand trust and loyalty built slowly for decades, and mortgage it for shot-term profits by slipping in cost cutting measures. It takes consumers a while to catch on, and by then the execs have a nice line item for their resume. Or the holding company behind the changes divests, leaving a hollowed out husk of a brand behind them.
I believe some of this comes down to the product category being redefined over time.
Kitchen appliances are really prone to this because the major processes actually needed in the kitchen - heat, cool, cut, stir - are all variations on a theme, and some of the processes have been usurped by "service" versions where the ingredient is pre-processed, e.g. instead of grinding coffee, buying pre-ground or instant.
Where pre-processing works well, it becomes the norm, and then what follows is that the traditional product gets cost-cut into oblivion, until, decades later, some kind of artisanal movement springs up and there's interest in quality options again. Coffee really did follow this pattern, the original instant coffees set the norm for most of the 20th century, even though everyone can tell that they're nothing like freshly ground coffee.
With the biggest, most-frequently needed stuff - stove, refrigerator, knives, pans - you can find good options in any year, especially if you search for the "do exactly one thing well" options in the category, like chest freezers. Once you get into a more specific category the pressure is off, though, and companies are more likely to sell you a disposable "experience".
Kitchenaid, Cuisinart, these are the kinds of brands I'm talking about. They had their moment last century but the brand has been transferred to a new owner, or they've switched to volume sales in a big box retailer, or both.
Kitchenaid is not a good brand. They haven't made top-of-the-line anything in decades
When it came to mixers I got a large Kenwood over a KitchenAid because it has a 10 year warranty vs 1 year for KitchenAid. People claim that modern Kenwood mixers aren't as good since manufacturing was moved to China, but if they're still standing by the products with a long warranty then they can't be that bad.
If only. My three-generation appliance store sold me a fancy dishwasher that wouldn't release soap - the little door jammed against the wire rack in operation, opened a quarter inch and finished with a wad of gummy soap still inside. No way it could ever work.
The store claimed it was 'supposed to work that way'. Lame.
I've seen this problem before. While it's not a smart design, it usually works. Your racks are likely not pushed all the way into the dishwasher. It's possibly an installation problem; if the dishwasher is not level, gravity will pull the racks towards the door. Try adjusting the feet under the kickplate to raise the front of the dishwasher.
Don't make your goal to be accurate state across the internet. Game making is all about lies, cheats, steals, and fudge.
In this situation you can stream movement waypoints from remote clients and lerp between those waypoints locally to simulate movement. If latency is low enough you can make predictions about the next waypoint and it won't look bad when you're wrong.
If you're PvE, you're done. Nobody needs to know precisely where their teammate is as long as the game feels fair. (The AI players on the other side won't complain.)
In PvP the opponent will complain, and they're also a customer, so you have to do something about it. This is an entire technical discipline within gamedev if you want both accuracy and player freedom.
Don't be afraid to let technical constraints guide your design. If you don't want to spend your life building remote physics validation or latency-aware consensus algorithms, make your players interact with the world via clicking so you always know exactly where they wanna go next. One of the super powers of being a programmer + designer combo is making trades across disciplines to maximize your output.
I avoid anything by Abrams or Lindelof at this point because they are emblematic of this writing formula. You can see it in Lindelof's The Leftovers, Abrams' Star Wars, and of course LOST. It's also present in any pilot they help create, for example Once Upon A Time.
I agree with your deconstruction: these shows are optimized for selling an engaging pilot episode with only a back of the napkin roadmap for the rest of the show. The finale comes only when there's no more money to be made.
I'm very excited by writers like Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese who are able to write interwoven plots comparable to LOST, but with cohesive endings. Check out Dark for an example.
I really don't think that's a fair take on The Leftovers. It was adapted from a novel, which season 1 follows the plot of pretty closely and completely. The remaining two seasons are entirely new plot but iirc the author was involved.
The novel doesn't resolve the core mystery. I won't spoil whether the show does, but it's kind of beside the point anyway. One of the core themes is how people grapple with sudden loss, something beyond their control, something unknowable. In any case the show resolves itself with a satisfying amount of closure in three seasons. Much fewer open threads and plot holes than LOST. The unresolved aspects of The Leftovers are genuinely thought-provoking and deep.
I wholly agree with Wikipedia's summary: "The first season received mostly positive reviews. However, the second and third seasons were highly acclaimed, with many critics referring to The Leftovers as one of the greatest television series of all time, with particular praise for its writing, directing, acting (particularly Theroux’s and Coon's) and thematic depth."
You say "The finale comes only when there's no more money to be made" ... that doesn't jive with a final season having a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and 98% on Metacritic!
The Leftovers is indeed aware of the show formula I'm critiquing, it's even in the theme song: "guess I'll just, let the mystery be." This is Lindelof indoctrinating the viewer to accept his style of writing, which doesn't burden plots with conclusions. He's still frustrated we asked 'why' of the LOST plot, to which there was no good answer. The Leftovers similarly offers no good answer to 'why'. Making that the point doesn't stop me from asking.
If the show was doing well HBO would have signed a fourth season and they'd have left enough room in the third for yet more surreal diversions headed nowhere. Online review aggregators are meaningless.
You asserted the show had "an engaging pilot episode with only a back of the napkin roadmap for the rest of the show", which clearly isn't possibly the case for a show whose entire first season was adapted from a novel.
The third season was written as a final season. Regardless of whether the mystery is resolved, the show's plot and character arcs firmly concludes in the finale. Professional tv critics nearly universally view it as one of the best seasons of any television show ever made.
Yes, there are unanswered questions. This is obviously intentional (although the theme song you reference was only used in season 2 and the finale in season 3). Similarly in real life you'll never find out which religion, if any, is correct. Or why the pandemic happened. You can still ask, and writers can still explore these topics, even though no one ever knows.
If you didn't like the show, or ambiguous art/media in general, that's fine, it's not for everyone. That doesn't mean it's all part of the same capitalist formula to produce bad art.
As an interesting counter-point, consider Twin Peaks, a show where the network demanded that the creators promptly resolve the core mystery at the end of the first season -- much to the show's detriment.
The thread is about removing the label, not the whole search box.
Which is a sort of silly thing to complain about, but Windows 11 has a lot of taskbar feature regressions. You can't even pin the thing to the left or right edge anymore. So I understand why users are frustrated.
This all represents a philosophical shift in Windows ("the taskbar is Microsoft's, not yours") and it will be a painful adjustment for power users.
If I have a program that emits a painful audio bit every time the user does X and only 0.05% of users disable it by going to a configuration value they need to search for through dozens of (my own) SEO'd results, that doesn't mean that only 0.05% of users want it disabled, it just means that only 0.05% of users were able to figure out how to stop my program from doing X.
I work on a product where our power user base is known for requesting registry options to change/disable feature x/y, and our market research has consistently shown a registry value doesn't enter most people's minds; to further this point, our user base is specifically IT persons. Even our Linux user base (actual day to day linux users) don't consider asking if we have a config file to edit somewhere in any overwhelming way.
The point I take from this data (which I know is anecdata for you) is that most users assume software "out of the box" is what you see is what you get. Making these changes and options and not including a way to remove them is not a good way of tracking interest since the sample size that is actually willing to take the time to complain and post compared to those that just look at other software entirely are far different. You're dealing with a complete unknown in the Power User space; regular users are even less inclined to see how to disable it and hiding it behind registry edits is actually a dissuasion.
MIcrosoft is well known, and one of the first which did extensive user-testing of UIs, video tapped, experts analyzing through one-way mirrors, questioning, ...
I doubt that they removed the side taskbar option without very extensive testing and discussions. In fact, it's a well repeated criticism of Microsoft, that they have TOO MANY options, not too few:
>> I doubt that they removed the side taskbar option without very extensive testing and discussions.
And yet Windows 11 adoption remains low.
The nonsense UI changes to the taskbar are the primary reason I am still using Windows 10.
The issue with having so many features is that people use those features and become reliant upon them. Removing those features means that the product is not as good as its predecessor and thus fewer people move to the new version.
I suspect the TPM 2.0 requirement is the bigger reason. Let's face it, most Windows users are unaware of what exact version they are running. If it prompted to auto-update to Windows 11 they would click yes.
>> I suspect the TPM 2.0 requirement is the bigger reason. Let's face it, most Windows users are unaware of what exact version they are running. If it prompted to auto-update to Windows 11 they would click yes.
I am sure that may be true for some users, but certainly not for all.
My computer meets TPM 2.0 requirements, but I turn down every Windows 11 upgrade offer.
The business I work for buys new PCs to replace old ones, but the company OS image is still Windows 10.
Well, except the article and the argument aren't what we were talking about.
You were talking about % of users using an option and the cost of using it, to which I argued that it's quite difficult even with perfect telemetry to know whether people are not using an option because they don't want to use it or they just cannot find it. Telemetry data like this just tells you N% of users do X; you don't know why just from the fact that they do it. The user base for my product does X which is contrary to the intended design all the time, and we don't know why until we get to one on one discussions as to why they tried it that way, and even that is very difficult data to get.
Your article here is not really related, it's about choices in UI that are confusing (and also cannot be enabled/disabled from the UI), and in fact I even understand this point to undermine the first; even if Microsoft continues to do large amounts of user testing, are they doing anything meaningful with the data if they continue to have too many choices?
I don't think there's a lot of sense to speculate on why Microsoft made a choice unless they publish a claim as to why they made a choice; we can point to data and anecdata endlessly to support positions but it doesn't actually make a case for the affirmative in either way.
What I am to say is that even with user testing, countless options, and so on, at best you can say that on a vanilla installation, N% of a sample group did X. With extrapolating statistical math, you can assume with a margin of error that if N% of users from Z sample set did X, then Y% of users will likely do the same with some margin of error.
From anecdata I can know from other persons who call themselves Windows power users and/or technical persons, I know that the common response to most Windows changes is not that it's good or bad, but that you just learn to deal with it after awhile. Personally I take this as more negative, that is it's not active adoption it's begrudging acceptance, but that's a personal take.
> Your article here is not really related, it's about choices in UI that are confusing
But remove any of the shutdown options, and someone who uses it will complain saying that it's the perfect one for them.
> know that the common response to most Windows changes is not that it's good or bad, but that you just learn to deal with it after awhile.
So what's the alternative, not changing nothing ever? We would still have the Windows 3.1 interface (no taskbar) according to this logic, I'm sure the transition from the 3.1 model to the Windows 95 model was extremely disrupting to Windows 3.1 users who had muscle memory for it. Yet in retrospect it was the correct choice. Should Windows 95 kept as an alternative the Windows 3.1 interface? Forever? Should it still be present in Windows 11 just because there are 10 users who loved it?
I got your point about hidden features and removing them, I sometimes discover wonderful features in software I've been using for years, but at the same time, I accept that progress also means losing things sometimes. You get 10 new features or improvements, you lose 2. Other say "no, I can't lose nothing, I will chose the existing 2 features versus the 10 new ones". That's ok too, they can keep using Windows 10.
That's not how Microsoft historically operates. Programs I wrote 20 years ago still work on Windows using ancient apis that they carry, because they care about backwards support. Whatever obscure msc or exe you ran in the 90s is still there, still runs, and still configures the OS. To this day you can check weird boxes deep in your disk config to put buggy behavior back into Windows, because it fixes a bug a single customer had decades ago.
My theory is simpler: it was too hard to add new features to the taskbar (like wide search bars and now text fields) when you had to think about a tall and a wide configuration. So they cut the tall way. Now they can cram all sorts of features into your taskbar.
It represents a shift in MS philosophy, closer to how Apple mandates progress in their OS.
I've always thought that TiVo was way ahead of its time. The company is still alive but it feels weird to talk about it in present tense when we've got Roku, Chromecast, Firestick, and Apple TV. Even the era of cable provider DVRs made me feel like TiVo was ahead of its time!
Tivo nailed the user experience which is why it took off. In the early years, the response time on the interface was nearly instant for everything. This made it delightful to use because it felt like an extension of your intentions. Today, even with all the content in the world available, there are far more delays and wait times because the content is streaming and not local. Even YouTube TV, which could have the same 10ms response time as Stadia, is slow in many places.
The idea of the actual device seems very tied to a particular time, not ahead of it. The point was to record broadcast TV (so, reliant on the time when broadcast TV was the main way of getting TV) and the ability to skip ads (nowadays any streaming service worth watching doesn’t have ads anyway).
footnote:
The TiVo UX was superb but, for my money, ReplayTV was superior, technically.
And, worth mentioning, its UX was not lacking in any perceivable way; OK, maybe less flair & eye candy than TiVo, but also really, really good in its discoverability & daily usability.
The jewel in the post is the rejection of Vannevar's acolytes and their hand-wrought memexen. Biology already gave me a perfectly good memex in my skull. If its shortcomings give you anxiety, take 2 YAGNI until productivity resumes.