Actually no, I hated the Vista era UI design. Linux themes were positively garish, add MacOS looked like a candy store. CDE greatly impressed me back then. It looked like it was made by adults for adults. Highly legible, and the pastel colors are being emulated by Solarized.

I’m sure that those UIs were a product of the times. The 90’s and noughties were loud and colorful and exciting and everything looked like a comic. Now that we live in more depressing times, we can look to the science of perceptual psychology.

You see, we have an attention budget, we need to process what we see. Visually complex UIs need to be parsed, and that takes mental effort, and that robs us of mental energy to focus on our work. It’s not a crippling effect, but it’s there.

Look at street signs and corporate logos, they easily lodge in our mind. Effective advertising has a clear and simple visual language, and this is what UIs should strive for.

Just stop!

But what helped me: often smoking is part of a daily routine or ritual, so mix up your routine. Take up a new hobby or take the bus instead of the car. Go for a walk after lunch. Giving up smoking is a big change, so don’t be afraid to make big changes. Get new clothes. Make new friends. You have discarded your old identity as a smoker. Still smoking? Doesn’t matter! You already want to stop - you’re becoming that person already.

And don’t be so hard on yourself if you have a smoke now and then. Be conscious of what situation or routine triggered the reflex, and change it in future. If you have a smoke every few days or weeks, don’t sweat it, you’ve broken addiction as far as I’m concerned!

Thanks. Damn autocorrect.

Back in the 80s, Don Norman popularized the term affordance. Humans need something to push, pull, turn or otherwise interact with. We are physical beings in a physical world.

Driving vehicles is potentially life-endangering. Just because the technology is there and cheaper does not mean that humans can push aside their physiological limitations in a critical situation.

Take the emergency blinker. You know where it is, you see it all the time - it’s right there in front of you! But when a real emergency happens, you’ll be fumbling for the button, concentrating on the situation at hand. Now imagine that button on a touchscreen.

Just recently saw a video of an experimental self driving vehicle from Bosch - from the 90’s!

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

You could imagine we’d be much further now, considering how far computing power, computer vision and AI have come.

Also not exactly cheap!

If you’re into self-hosting there’s Wallabag, but it’s not half as slick as Omnivore.

Could someone eli5 to me old fart why it’s a good idea to restrict content to a certain time? Increase engagement, OK, but why so much effort to create content that disappears after two weeks?

I’m out of the loop since I’ve been using a self hosted Miniflux, but Raven certainly is an alternative.

Actually, there is a company that makes resin printed children’s glasses for about €200 a pop. My son tried them at the opticians and I was impressed by the finish and flexibility. Just to say that 3d printed glasses are really commercially viable.

I had to check Wikipedia to be sure. OK, the S got updated motors or restyled taillights, but they’re all externally indistinguishable for the non Tesla nerd. Look at how the Corvette and Mustang changed over the years, or the F-Series trucks. They went with the zeitgeist, and the S is still visually stuck in 2012.

What I don’t get about Tesla is: when will they ever update their existing vehicles, like every other car company does? The Model S has been around for over ten years. Aren’t they planning an S2? Or this all the RnD they have?

The Internet Archive is being DDOSed for the lulz.

https://mastodon.archive.org/@textfiles/113279179271574005

I’m worried that the boat is full of water.

Pihole is good for a private network, but you can forget it in a work setting, especially corporate networks.

You could install ChromeOS, but afaik you can only install Android apps on certified devices.

Keep in mind that that was a demo to sell Copilot.

The issue that I’ve got with GenAI is that it has no expert knowledge in your field, knows nothing of your organization, your processes, your products or your problems. It might miss something important and it’s your responsibility to review the output. It also makes stuff up instead of admitting not knowing, gives you different answers for the same prompt, and forgets everything when you exhaust the context window.

So if I’ve got emails full of fluff it might work, but if you’ve got requirements from your client or some regulation you need to implement you’ll have to review the output. And then what’s the point?

Wait, so you think nuclear reactors spew out uranium?

Didn’t say that. But I also don’t think that it magically appears in the plant.

While coal powerplants don’t spew out radioactive coal ash??

Please stop this whataboutism.

Nobody cares to recycle concrete.

Not true. Making concrete creates huge amounts of CO2 during production. Sand is becoming a valuable resource. Recycling concrete for aggregate absolutely is a thing, but that’s a different topic.

I wont talk about storing waste, because I dont know why it is marketed as prohibitively expensive.

Convenient. Then I will because I’m not finished. You have to ensure containment of the barrels for decades, if not centuries. The mine has to be in geologically inactive area, and you have to be certain that no ground water will seep into the mine in the foreseeable future. We don’t want ground water in the mine, its cold and wet and seeps through everywhere.

And you have to figure out how to keep idiots from breaking into the mine in 150 years and using spent rods to heat their homes. If you think that’s far fetched I encourage you to read about the Goiânia accident , one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters. Some kids found the radioactive source of an abandoned xray machine while playing around.

Solar panels are mostly aluminum and glass and about 90% recyclable. More importantly, they are inert and not radioactive.

You can’t seriously compare nuclear waste to solar panels.

Uranium is a heavy metal and of course its poisonous. Just like lead, but radioactive. Why aren’t we using uranium glassware or uranium paint anymore if it’s supposedly not poisonous?

When was the last time a solar farm or a wind park had a catastrophic accident leading to large parts of land being uninhabitable for decades, even centuries?

Of course they are explodey. It’s a fission reaction that has to be constantly modulated and cooled to not go critical.

The other argument is the cost of properly storing waste and decommissioning the plant, which is often conviently ignored. Not much of a NPP can be recycled, unlike solar.