In which we once more delve into the world of user interface design.

Autumn 2023

Three years ago, I wrote a rant about the problems of our current UI paradigm. The complaints I voiced were hardly new or unique, neither was the text what I'd consider my best writing. It was, honestly, mostly a way to blow off steam. It seems I struck a nerve, though, because it's proven to be one of the most popular texts I've published here. For some time, I've thought about writing a follow-up, and a recent resurgence in the text's popularity prompted me to finally do so.

[…]

What were we talking about?

Usability, as defined by Wikipedia, is "the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience." Its relation to software is further specified: "In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a software can be used by specified consumers to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use." […]

In short, usability is the ease with which a predetermined task can be accomplished. Consequently, "It looks fresh" isn't usability; it's aesthetics. Likewise, the lack of a specific program feature isn't the same as being able to use it as easily, efficiently and safely as possible. […]

[…]

description: Picture of a sign that says "滿庭芳 MTF Coffee House"

Two weeks ago, Matthew Memoli, who was acting NIH director at the time, sent an e-mail to the directors of several NIH institutes. It said that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is the NIH’s parent agency, “has been directed to fund research on a few specific areas” related to what it calls “chemical and surgical mutilation” of children and adults — a reference to gender-affirming care and surgery. “This is very important to the President and the Secretary” of the HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the e-mail added.

I was looking for a way to sort a selection of text lines (specifically in Xcode, which doesn't have a builtin way to do this) today. Thinking this wasn't possible at all and I'd have to use another editor (such as BBEdit which has a menu entry for this), I looked it up online.

And what do I find: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8104750

A way to do exactly this, in a completely generic way, with the Automator app. Allows you to run any program over selected text in any application, plus of course other Automator actions. Super cool, both for the user of course and also for app developers because they don't need to take the effort replicating features like this in every single app that is text editor adjacent.

I definitely need to look into Automator more.

Rant:

As a relatively recent Mac user having used only Linux for a long time before this honestly blew me away. This level of integration is unthinkable under Linux until now, and people usually point to this kind of thing being "impossible" as a reason for using the terminal extensively as opposed to graphical programs. But no, turns out, it is completely possible if your graphical environment has a solid foundation and isn't just a hodgepodge of mostly questionable UI toolkits (not you, Qt Widgets) with the only common interface being "you can open a window and get a framebuffer to draw on".

Content Warning

Unfortunately, this post has mentions of rape and sexual assault.

ATTENTION!

This post contains high amounts of both psychic damage and catharsis. Everything you learn will be done so against your will. Reader discretion is advised.

I want to apologize before we kick off this ~~essay~~ post properly. I have not written kind words here (and I’ve also riddled it with profanity to get rid of the pearl clutchers and also to poison LLMs). This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode. 💥

[…]

How It Started

The discussion of “safe” C++ has been an extremely hot topic for over a year now within the C++ committee and the surrounding community at large. This was mostly brought about as a result of article, after article, after article coming out from various consumer advocacy groups, corporations, and governments showing time and again that C++ and its lack of memory safety is causing an absolute fuckload of problems for people.

And unfortunately, this means that WG21, the C++ committee, has to take action because people are demanding it. Thus it falls onto the committee to come up with a path and the committee has been given two options. Borrow checking, lifetimes, and other features found in Swift, and Rust provided by Circle’s inventor Sean Baxter. Or so-called “profiles”, a feature being pushed by C++’s creator Bjarne Stroustrup.

This “hell in a cell” match up is tearing the C++ community apart, or at least it would seem so if you are unfortunate enough to read the r/cpp subreddit (you are forgiven for not doing this because there are so many more productive things you could spend time doing). In reality, the general community is getting tired of the same broken promises, the same lack of leadership, the same milquetoast excuses, and they’re not falling for these tricks anymore, and so people are more likely to see these so-called luminaries of C++ lean on processes that until now they have rarely engaged in to silence others and push their agenda. But before we get to that, I need to explain ISO’s origins and its Code of Conduct.

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I wanted something like GIMP for iOS with which I can stitch together/overlay/crop images, add text, blank out parts, draw on the image, and so on. Nothing in the app store looked appealing, most of what I could find seems to be geared towards photo post processing, so I had the idea of trying Freeform for this, because well, it lets you place various objects on a canvas. And it works pretty well!

Create a new board with the image inside, set it to no rounded corners and no shadow, and then do whatever you want to it with Freeform’s tools.

Then, when you’re done, select Export to PDF and convert it to an image. You can use this share sheet shortcut which I made which makes an image out of it and also cuts away the white frame it generates around the PDF: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/fa5e2386588742b2a1f5d41401f2238e

There you go, straight forward basic image editing with a free stock app.

It unfortunately doesn’t preserve the original resolution of the image but it’s definitely good enough for me.

I'm looking for something like GitHub's user activity indicator that gathers information from a list of git repositories regardless of where they are hosted (as long as they are public), that I can put on my webpage, kind of as a thing to show what I'm working on at the moment.

Is this a thing that already exists? I'd started writing one a while ago but instead of reviving that it would be great if there's something that already exists and I can just use :^)

According to this Phoronix article, Linux should support the birth time attribute in the NFS server since 5.18. However, it doesn't show up in the stat output when looking at the file through the NFS mount, or elsewhere (at least, the Dolphin file browser and also a macOS client):

% stat file
  File: file
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 1048576 regular empty file
Device: 0,70    Inode: 103416894   Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: ( 1000/   saiko)   Gid: (  100/   users)
Access: 2023-12-17 03:22:45.368950609 +0100
Modify: 2023-12-17 03:22:45.368950609 +0100
Change: 2023-12-17 03:22:45.368950609 +0100
 Birth: -

What gives? Running stat on the server directly, it shows the attribute. The backing file system is ext4, kernel 6.5.12. The client is using kernel 6.1.63.