This seems weird when we have ferry, train or bus rides that can take days or even weeks. I get that planes are special in their ability to cross timezones and so warp the usual day-night rythm. But that doesn't seem enough to make this a completely novel problem. Is there something else that makes this unique?

Though I think in the end it becomes too hand-wavey around the question. During inference, it seems relatively straight-forward that one model + current inference context is one agent. Things get murky however in the time between inferences, especially if later an old context is picked up and continued, maybe even with a different model.

That's a very fatalistic take, essentially saying that rich people will always win. The entire point of a strong government is to provide a counterforce to that.

> For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.

Aha, and what kind of jobs would that be? How would the quality of infrastructure be in those areas?

Is this just about not allowing more compact housing like condos or high-rises?

One person's freedom always ends at the point where another person's begins. That's not exactly a new observation.

But if the zoning restriction is "absolutely nothing except single-family homes", this becomes insane. So even if there is a local neighborhood who would like to build a sports field or a community center, they can't because of zoning? This makes no sense for me at all.

Huh? I agree with you that in general it's a mess. (found it fascinating that the hierarchy that Explorer shows is technically not the file system - It's its own thing which works more like the unified directory tree in Linux, complete with mount points and different "virtual file systems". The real file system is only a part of it)

But the Gallery, Music, Videos etc subfolders are AFAIK ordinary folders that just have custom icons and localized names. For reasons I don't understand, Microsoft would like users to forget the home folder exists and only work with those preassigned directories. But that's just a convention and a bunch of UI nudges. The home folder is still there and can be used without problems.

At least that was the case before the aggressive push for OneDrive started. They might have changed it since then...

The other thing that happened is that "UX research" paradoxically became more data-driven and "scientific", with live telemetry that monitors how UIs are practically used becoming standard. We're able to run "experiments" and directly compare the user interactions from two different variants of the same UI.

So in theory, with all that data, we should be making more usable and intuitive UIs than ever.

And we are in a way, just not in a user-empowering way. UI design is evaluated by target metrics, and those metrics are firmly in service of the companies' interests, not the users'.

Hence so much focus on "engagement" and on making certain flows and activities as frictionless as possible - at the cost of consistency and all the rest of activities that a user might be more interested in than the company...

Basically, UX design as a field is alive and well, maybe more so than it ever was - it's "just" not in service of the user anymore...

I've seen some B2B apps which used the Windows look-and-feel and looked absolutely awful: Actions wildly scattered through buttons, menus and context menus, panels and tabs nested several layers deep until the UI started to look like a canyon formation - and no icons or color at all, because I suppose those would have been "unprofessional" - so everything was in dull gray.

(I think it's worth realizing how colorful the stock Windows dialogs and applications actually are through the use of icons, even despite all widgets being gray.)

I still believe the Windows 2000-era UI toolkit is one of the best, because at least it gives you straightforward pathways to build a good-looking and usable UI - but you still have to want to do it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587323

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?"

I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize.

From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.

I feel as if those nontechnical people "won" now. Now all UIs feel as inconsistent and unpredictable even for "techies" as any computer interaction felt to those people back then.

(* repeated from another thread: "nontechnical" in the "not fluent with PC use" sense, which is actually quite arrogant - they can have very high technical skill in other areas obviously)

And weirdly, there was never a peep about this in the press - while the W Social launch was on national news and a bunch of high-profile EU politicians immediately joined. What's going on here?

- https://wsocial.eu

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584497

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48584534

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

I'm a regular at a few coffee shops near my home and I know the staff there "know" me - it's enough to have a pleasant conversation sometimes. But that works, because we have gotten to the "familiar face" part over a longer period and at the same time.

What the restaurant owner wants is that his staff somehow treat everyone like a regular and have spirited conversations about their life events, even if they just entered the restaurant for the first time.

The staff might even be able to pull that off, with a hefty dose of online profiling - but even then, I cannot see how anyone who isn't a completely detached business type wouldn't find this extremely creepy.