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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Alan Dix’s book (aptly named “Human Computer Interaction”) is quite good, even if somewhat old by now. HCI is an actual academic discipline with, yes, tons of theoretical and empirical results that govern what a good UI should be. Many of which are indeed grounded in psychology, others in physiology, etc (what we call Human Factors). There is a whole special interest group of the ACM just about it: SIGCHI.

    Do not confuse this with fashion/trends/taste. These change, resulting in widely different possible flavors of UI over the years. But the underlying principles are the same.

    Another thing to remember is that the fact that Apple, Google, or someone else implemented an UI in a certain way doesn’t mean they are following best practices and guidelines. Novelty sells, even if at the end of the day it does a worse job of things…

    Edit: added link to SIGCHI



  • I reluctantly started reading ebooks years ago for a very practical reason: owning some few thousand physical books, I pretty much ran out of room in the shelves in my small apartment. So nowadays I only buy physical art books and the like. Having said this, I actually easily grew to like ebooks, for their ubiquitous availability and, of course, not taking up precious shelf space.

    Have to read them in an ereader for a proper experience, though. Tablet/smartphone displays tire my eyes a lot if I read for any meaningful period of time.


  • Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.

    So much this!

    I see myself a bit in all those stages, but i don’t think i ever really ever (temporarily) outgrew “childish” things. Always liked cartoons, always read comics, always played games, and always told those that chided me for not growing up to fuck off. Now entering my 50s, the biggest difference is that people don’t have the courage to bother me about it anymore (and in the rare occasions when they do they don’t argue back after being told off :P )








  • I say a variation of this to my kids almost every week. It boggles the mind how, with such an easy access to all the information in the world, they don’t know something and just shrug it off instead of searching for information (90% of times a simple google search would do). I imagine myself at their age with such resources at my disposal: I’d have been a much happier (and knowledgeable) kid!





  • I’ve been feeling the same pain, of small, less active communities just not showing up in the feed. While in principle I am very much against “the algorithm”, this will lead to a feedback loop where small communities remain small because they will be much harder to find and revisit, even more so as large ones grown even larger.

    We need a kind of sort that is able to get posts of smaller/less active communities interspersed with the rest. This does not/should not be a user profiling algorithm, etc. Just a blind “show the latest post from every community unless it is over x days old, and only then show the second newest,etc” or similar would help.

    As things stand now, I’ve considered unsubscribing from some communities so that they do not overwhelm the feed, but it feels like a bad solution.