Me, an idiot: “So, kids, by setting the thermostat a little lower and eating less meat, we’re doing our part to make the world more sustainable”

VCs, very smart: “We just raised $100 billion dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of three petrostates to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer. It uses as much power and water as Guatemala and the primary use case is for management consultants to autogenerate powerpoints for justifying mass layoffs.”

My series of apps bringing FTP, S3 and Git over REST APIs to the Files app has a built-in file manager for situations where the Files app is lacking.

You should try it out. https://apps.apple.com/dk/app/s3-files-bucket-storage/id6447647340

🌱 The #Umbraco Sustainability Team is making splashes -fFeatured on the Green Web Foundation blog for making use of the Co2.js library in the Umbraco.Community.Sustainability package: https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/news/co2-js-case-study-umbraco/.

And it’s great to see the #sustainability package is already helping developers identify easy wins in their Umbraco projects - even though it’s only in alpha. Check out this great writeup by @CodeBunTes 👇
https://codebuntes.entrah-net.co.uk/2024/04/04/subsetting-icon-fonts-for-sustainability/

There Is No EU Cookie Banner Law, by @[email protected]:

https://www.bitecode.dev/p/there-is-no-eu-cookie-banner-law

'From time to time we all get a bit restless
With no one advertising to us constantly
But the tribe at the former airport
Some nights has meat and dancing
If you don't mind gathering and hunting
We're all still pretty good at eating on the run'
'But there are some visionaries among us developing some products
To aid us in our struggle to survive'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHpfkou1o5g

When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.

But that's not true anymore.

User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.

My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.

#HCI #UX #UI #okdoomer