Keeps on giving

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    Just ran across this now: back in April, Rogue Amoeba redesigned their software-update notifications. This more understated approach is so much better.

    I think a lot of us have grown to regard software-update notifications as annoyances. We’re already besieged by unwanted popups and windows ordering us to stop whatever we’re already doing and do what some external entity wants us to do. Apple’s update notifications, you can’t even turn off; part of my morning ritual is swiping away the stupid “Update iOS” notification that shows up every night.

    It’s unfortunate things turned out this way. Software updates are generally a good thing. It means the software is being supported and improved. Free software updates are even better. The fact that these announcements feel similar to dickovers is, as usual, down to poor—or, perhaps, maliciously self-serving1—UI design.

    Gifts are presented, not thrown in someone’s face. Software updates are a gift. Developers should put more effort into treating them this way.

    1. I’m thinking of Apple here, whose spammy notifications for new operating systems (I consider these ads) cannot be turned off, forcing users who don’t want them to come up with convoluted, albeit very clever, workarounds. Why doesn’t Apple let you turn these off? Presumably because they want high upgrade statistics they can brag about.

      Apple would probably counter by saying that software upgrades benefit users. That is my decision to make, not Apple’s. When a company doesn’t let me turn something off, I assume that whatever it is exists primarily for their benefit, not mine.

      ↩

    When you put it like that

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    Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko on doorknobs:

    Doorknobs are the work of the devil, designed only to make people suffer. “Yes, I would like to apply inordinate force on a small slippery sphere” — statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

    The absurdity of this near-ubiquitous design decision had never occurred to me because interacting with doorknobs is one of these invisible, largely subconscious things one does on an hourly basis without even noticing. But come on—can you argue with the logic here?

    Imagine: Both of your hands are full, and you now have to apply rotational force to one of the least grippable form factors humanity could have invented. Who came up with this?

    Silly Little Plastic Cat

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    Ran across Zack Grant’s Silly Little Plastic Cat on Colossal last night. I really enjoyed it.

    I’d heard about the phenomena before: Since the early 1980s, pieces of bright orange #Garfield telephones have been washing up on the beaches of #Brittany. Locals have collected thousands of them, and in some cases use them for decor.

    Rather than being frustrated at the defacing of their shoreline with cartoon #junk, most Bretons seem to have developed an add sort of affection for Garfield—at least the phone version of him—and have adopted him as a local mascot. It’s a strange combination: a part of #France known for its rustic, unchanging nature, represented by a creation that’s as iconic a component of American kitschy consumerism as Mickey Mouse.

    Cute it might be, but Grant doesn’t shy from the larger, unsettling reality of the Garfield phenomena: the whole reason these phones are still emerging, decades later, is because plastic is forever. “The electronics are melted into the rocks now,” one man says. In 2019, a local farmer revealed the source of these things: a shipping container lodged in a mostly inaccessible cave along the coast.

    As a couple people in the film point out, if the contents of a single shipping container can pollute a shoreline for forty years, imagine the impact from however many hundreds are lost at sea each year. One resident sums up what the unending tide of Garfield phones really is: “…catastrophic toxic #waste [and] an ecological time bomb.”

    head-explode-emoji

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      Someone figured out how to write functional #DOS programs using only emoji. Including a Mandelbrot generator.

      I wouldn’t have guessed this could work if they hadn’t explained it, but the technique is pretty clever: they realized that #emoji code points (each emoji’s unique ID), when translated to raw UTF-8 byte sequences, can also be interpreted as Intel 8088 machine-code instructions. A carefully arranged string of emoji results in a series of bytes that’s both valid UTF-8 text and an executable DOS program. It’s fun to read.

      As an example, here’s the program running in my mind right now: 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

      VocabularAI

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        GPTZero lists words and phrases that are common indicators of #AI. The problem is that the words and phrases themselves are very common: “consequences”, “such as”, “primarily”.

        These supposed AI-detection tools always make me uneasy. It’s hardly surprising that AI has a strong predilection for cliches of formal #writing; that’s what it’s trained on. It wouldn’t surprise me if #Wikipedia content alone has a noticeable impact on how these models write.

        But the upshot is that it’s getting harder and harder to not sound like AI. I try to avoid cliches to begin with, but if I’m writing something boring and technical (like for work), that’s not always easy.

        I understand the suspicion around AI. What’s worrying—and arguably as socially/culturally corrosive as the technology itself—is the superstition around it: seeing AI in every shadow, whether it’s there or not.

        Ministry of Pomology

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        From Matt Stein (whose post I found thanks to Naz Hamid): USDA Pomological Watercolors.

        In 1887 the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Division of Pomology began hiring artists to render illustrations of fruit varieties for lithographic reproduction in USDA articles, reports, and bulletins. Use of color lithography was critically important to enable the farmer to visualize and comprehend the subjects and principles covered in a particular publication. As a historic botanical resource, this collection documents new fruit and nut varieties, and specimens introduced by USDA plant explorers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

        The work is beautiful. Just look at these details.

        I love stuff like this. Just like I love the amazing achievements of NASA, or the Library of Congress, or any of these other vast, grand, publicly funded endeavors that exist because they should. Not because they make one crummy person richer, but because they make everyone richer.

        We’re only No. 2

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        Vox talks about the Slate, which looks like it is—or at least aspires to be—the Model T of electric vehicles.

        As is inevitable in any contemporary discussion of electric vehicles, #China came up. While you wouldn’t know this to look at American streets, the country with the world’s largest automotive industry is not the U.S., Japan, or in Europe: it’s China, and has been for the past twenty years. China’s electric car industry is vast, with sales worldwide. Moreover, Chinese electric cars are now both cheaper and, arguably, better than American ones, and the American auto industry does not want the competition.

        This is where we get to the quote of the day, from Andrew Hawkins, transportation editor at The Verge:

        In so many ways, the automotive industry is a stand-in for our whole economy. We hold up the auto industry as being this kind of beacon which represents our innovativeness and our leadership on the global stage. And I think that we’ve ceded that leadership now to China.

        China is now leading. They sell the most cars, they export the most cars, and they have the best technology. They’ve cracked the code on cheap EVs. I feel like America is always going to have an outsized reputation, but whether that reputation is actually earned anymore…is a very open question.

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          The #Apple logo banner on apple.com has a distinctly Siri-esque shine to it today.

          This being a Monday, I don’t have time to watch #WWDC, but I’ll be very curious to see if whatever Apple rolls out here fixes anything. #Siri is probably the most conspicuously underpowered product in Apple’s lineup right now, at a time when Apple is—supposedly—working on small wearable devices that do not have touchscreens and will, I assume, use Siri as their primary interface.

          I have one such product already: a HomePod that I never use, mainly because I hate dealing with Siri. The fact that Apple is apparently upgrading Siri with a custom version of Gemini isn’t encouraging; we use #Gemini at work, and I haven’t found it to be nearly as capable as either #ChatGPT or #Claude. Still, Apple is not in a great place AI-wise right now, and the new #AI guy, Amar Subramanya, ran Gemini at Google, so I guess Gemini is the most obvious option.

          Best case, Siri turns out to be like Apple Maps: a rough start, but improving year over year.

          Worst case, Siri turns out to be like Apple Maps: even after 14 years of improvements, it still hasn’t fully caught up.

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            I’ll probably never completely leave #macOS, but given the degraded state of that platform, I’m looking at #Linux a lot more seriously than I used to.

            It’s not even for all the Linuxy reasons that tech people prefer. It’s because I just want a user environment that isn’t overtly disrespectful: refusing to let me customize the UI, throwing ads and popups in my face every damned minute.

            Switching from Mac to Linux because the user experience is better: think about that one for a sec.

            It was as if some occult hand had

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              A good Wikipedia Category: page is my happy place. And I just found one: journalistic hoaxes.

              Some are serious and legendary: Stephen Glass, of The New Republic fame; Jayson Blair (New York Times); Janet Cooke (Washington Post). You’ve probably heard of these.

              Some aren’t as legendary, like Ruth Shalit, another New Republic alum. And I’d never heard about Jonah Lehrer, or Tom Kummer, or Scott Thomas Beauchamp, yet another New Republic writer (seriously, what was going on at TNR back then? Good grief.)

              While Glass et al were trying to pass off their hoaxes as legitimate journalism, a number of these others seem to have been intended as Yes Men-style social commentary. Like Paul Horner, whose fictitious articles may or may not have impacted the 2016 election, or Martin Eisenstadt, or Thatchergate, in which a British punk band faked a damning conversation between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Still others are strange experiments: The Shed at Dulwich, Masal Bugduv.

              The weirdest ones are openly unbelievable enough that whether or not they’re actually hoaxes, so much as absurdist satire, is debatable:

              My favorite isn’t even really a hoax: The Order of the Occult Hand, “…a secret society of American journalists who slip the meaningless and telltale phrase ‘It was as if some occult hand had…’ in print as an inside joke.”

              Let me know if you ever see one of these.