"The lesson isn’t that humane computing is impossible. It’s that humane computing can’t just mean protective computing. It has to mean trusting users with both simplicity and openness."
https://systemstack.dev/2025/09/humane-computing/
Apples, Trees, and Quasimodes - System Stack

a website about computers, mostly

@neauoire It is also important to recognize that simplicity itself can become a hindrance. There's a really basic result in dynamic control theory that says any system that interacts with its environment must have at least as much internal complexity as the complexity of all its inputs put together, or else it won't be able to handle every possible input. This is why "let's start over and keep it simple this time" efforts can never succeed.
@zwol @neauoire @frownland I wouldn't go quite so far as to say, "can never succeed." Rather, the question becomes what inputs you care about from your environment, what "success" means to you. Certainly, most people who blindly accept constraints from their environment are outside the target audience of any minimalist rewrite attempt. But then the category of "commercial mainstream" in OP already captures that.

@akkartik 💯

Simplicity starts with defining the human-computer interface. Not in terms of widgets, but in terms of tasks. If you want the computer to work like magic, then you will have to deal with complexity. Same if you want a program to cover the needs of millions of people. A condition for simple software is a simple specification of what it does.

@zwol @neauoire @frownland