Please. I have an extensive file with tags I've put into use to "curate" content on mastodon and bluesky. It works somehow on mastodon but the "main" server in their admins wisdom decided recently to remove live feeds to make experience supposedly more appealing. And now users are limited either to trending or manually searching posts or browsing by tags. They seriously limited exploration and interaction with new content there.
Bluesky on the other hand still serves me the content I tried to block or filter out. And whenever I go into other feeds in the end I'll be flooded with never ending stream of x-rated drawn content that I don't want to see. Interests set or not - I can't escape that stuff. My partner complains for same things.
Facebook in my last days there decided to limit posts from my friends because I wasn't active enough to feed the algorithm, and instead filled main activity stream with generated graphics. Instagram was somewhat fine up until bought by facebook - after that interacting with any content would poison your stream with stuff for months.
Reddit has become an interaction and content clown show once they started pushing for this "modern" interface. I won't create there account ever again due to how they started treating their users.
It seems like a lot of your issues with the major platforms are from years ago?
Instagram and X never show me political topics or hype-related things because I am quick to enter related keywords into the filtering mechanisms.
Instagram can sometimes try to force through things but in general my feed has been pretty clean to the extent that rather than showing me random garbage it'll just say I've reached the end of the latest posts from people I follow. Besides, most people I want to keep up with these days post more often to stories. If anything the issue with stories is more frequent ads/sponsored posts but those are different from just recommendation junk.
That's true. I was much younger back then to notice about privacy.
Yeah, it was pretty bad incorporating G+ account to everything. The way the G+ worked (at least in my friend circle), normal people had less business there. It was very hobby focused.
That's like taken from mid 2000s when Netscape did a sort of a full circle picking up Firefox and releasing own browser again. They added some own features but that didn't hold up and give them any serious amount of users to keep with this project going.
That kind of supposedly successful people who you can find on "normal" platforms as well. The difference is that they wrap everything in this weird language.
hn is largely a technology oriented link aggregator with discussions, and probably some would also classify it as a forum. Or as social news site as goes on wikipedia among fark, slashdot and reddit. But beside a voting system, simple profiles there's nothing else - this is nearly an experience unlike anything large social network services offer.
A typical social media platform mainly exists around main stream/feed, sharing content and building profile or groups dedicated to particular topics or around known brands. That's of course the perfect unstained image because everything falls apart when we start getting into the details, such as algorithms in the work, content quality and moderation and so on.
It fitted right these times when everything had that pseudo-3D gray outlook but yet was unique with these small yellow title bars (which you could move), diagonal icons and taskbar that could be placed in both corners and edges of the screen. Now compare that last thing to what MS did to Windows 11 taskbar, and only in last days announced it'll gladly restore previous behavior.
Haiku retained all of this and bring something new like combining various windows into single tabbed one - not sure if any other system has such feature. Or... toolbar in file manager - which is something I really missed back then in BeOS.
Back then BeOS was much more stable and faster than my daily Win98SE, even working in that image file on FAT32 partition.
Kinda makes you wonder, how things would go if Apple would pick BeOS as their OS instead of Jobs' NeXT. Would it still looks same or it would go thru all stages we've seen - with glass, transparency and then flatness and darkpatterns producing minimalism.
As a former Be employee who ended up at Apple by way of Eazel, there are two ways to answering your question about the UI direction; 1. If Apple did not acquire Be, Apple most likely would not be in business or would be a much different company. 2. Assuming Apple did survive, Steve Jobs used the industrial design language of Jony Ive for the look of Aqua. Bas Ording was the primary designer of this and was directed by Steve with daily updates. The further evolutions of brushed metal, skeumorphism, etc. were all directly driven by how Steve wanted things to look with minimal input from others. The current bland minimalist UX disaster (IMHO) would probably not have happened, because for all of his faults, Steve had very good attention to detail and was in general a good proxy for the user.
I remember being very disappointed when Apple went with the NeXT tech instead of the Be tech. I was in undergrad when that happened.
In retrospect though, the company wasn't making a technology decision. They were making a decision between Jobs and Gassee. Jobs came with NeXT and Gassee came with Be.
I don't think the technology mattered that much in the large scale of things. Jobs brought with him a strategy for moving personal computing from a technical market category to a fashion market category - either to make technology fashionable or to make fashion technical (however you want to look at it). It's a strategy that started with candy-coloured iMacs and ended with iPhones.
In retrospect though, the company wasn't making a technology decision. They were making a decision between Jobs and Gassee. Jobs came with NeXT and Gassee came with Be.
I don't think the technology mattered that much in the large scale of things.
Yes and no. The core of the purchase decision was really based on the technology. Ellen Hancock (Apple's CTO at the time) actually did a decent analysis of BeOs and NeXTStep. She was actually against some aspects of the purchase, and was not in favor of Be. She was also not in favor of the NeXT kernel. It is painful to say as a Be employee at the time, but Be internals were fragile, some technologies were very shallow, the kernel was brittle and under constant churn and we had big problems with our decision to have a C++ API. Gil Amelio liked Steve and Steve did a good job selling both a vision and the NeXT technology. BeOs was a really cool demo that was getting pulled into the direction of a real OS but had a long, long way to go. There actually was a possibility that Apple could have also gotten the Be code, but the board didn't go for it. As it turned out, most of the primary BeOs developers ended up at Apple via Eazel. The ones that didn't ended up at Google via Danger Research/Android.
Thank you for the Be-related posts. Maybe, one day, you could write a more detailed report of it in a format made for longer articles. I would read it.
I was searching for applications yesterday - which is something I barely do because I don't need much else beside what I have for 15 years. The search results include an ad at the top that takes half of the initial view zone. That was much smaller not so long ago.
Guess ads in Maps will slowly take more space as well and Maps+ tier will be added. Because we know Apple has serious financial problems /s
I expect this will be still buried down within sub-screens of OOBE. MS won't let this go so easily. They already captured enough users with MS accounts and such users won't simply be logged out and given local offline accounts.
For such users nothing will change and they'll be still exposed to all darkpatterns and shenanigans. This "kind" move is just for power-users.
Assuming of course this will actually happens and Hanselman won't be told "no".
What moat does MS still have to prevent an exodus to Linux anyway? We meme that LibreOffice is insufficient for replacing Excel because of its horrible UX but does that matter anymore when ChatGPT can guide you through any scenario in seconds for free? Device drivers are getting better and better literally daily and the number of Windows applications unported to Linux matters less and less as MS actively sabotages its own desktop application development tools.
Since this exodus (year of the linux desktop has been promised every year since 1998) has not yet happened, there is likely an actual reason (or several) that people choose to stay on Windows.
I use both, but prefer linux to stay behind the scenes on my servers. Windows has been a solved problem for me for the past couple of decades. Here's a random 100 day uptime screenshot that I found from 2017, https://imgur.com/a/PRp9L50. These days I usually shutdown more often to not waste power, and my NVMe makes bootups instant anyway.
I'm a LibreOffice user who recently had to use Excel. Most things I was able to figure out, but two things really stood out as problematic with Excel.
First, the keyboard shortcuts have no mnemonic. It's just random letters. No way to actually remember them.
Second, there was no way to have the row and column of the current cell highlighted. This made it difficult to find where I was - very important not to screw that up on a PCBA BOM.
I've not found any objective UI problem with LibreOffice Calc. It's not perfect, but it is intuitive and feels like the people who wrote it, use it.
> two things really stood out as problematic with Excel.
> First, the keyboard shortcuts have no mnemonic. It's just random letters. No way to actually remember them.
That is no more a problem than the fact that there is no mnemonic to remind you what "chaos" means in English. Shortcuts are there to be convenient to use, not convenient to describe.
> ChatGPT can guide you through any scenario in seconds for free?
Does this actually work? I'm just thinking of the people who refuse to learn from an in-person demonstration, much less a written description. But maybe enough of that level of incompetence is filtered out by the time you're doing interesting things with spreadsheets...
(Not that I'm opposed to people mass-abandoning Microsoft, just trying to be realistic about my hopes.)
>What moat does MS still have to prevent an exodus to Linux anyway?
Billions of installed seats, a huge corporate offering, a mature full-spectrum developer ecosystem, instant familiarity for billions, and working drivers for everything (which every vendor builds with their OS in mind).
no stupid "you're using the wrong distro" recommendations to fix issues either...
These automatic restarts are just the outcome of bigger problem with how Windows Update has been changed initially in W10. Namely the removal of selective updates installing and indirectly lack of QA, are the main sources of problems here.
Windows isn't MacOS that runs on set of verified configurations - it runs on variety of hardware with vendor drivers and other software. That combined may cause issues but so lack of testing - we know that Microsoft in its wisdom dismantled QA and replaced it with this prosthetics of enthusiasts community that all the time suggest "sfc /scannow". Now they put Charlie Bell in role of "engineering quality" position but I have no hope that something will change with a good outcome for users.
And users should be again allowed to avoid updates which were proven to cause issues - that's the fundamental need here. Deterring a scheduled action isn't enough.
Considering Windows behavior, all the telemetry that was smuggled to W7 in poorly described updates, I see how appealing is to Microsoft to use this big updates package format and add features, components which surely would be avoided by experienced users. Since W10 and maybe even partially during W7 they're fighting their users when it comes to control over operating system.
I'm on CachyOS now but I still get calls from friends who struggle with all this MS circus. Recently, this friend lost data to bitlocker encrypted machine because she didn't had backup keys. She's that kind of user that doesn't know what happens on the screen beside text processor and web browser - everything is a nuance that has to be quickly dealt with by "next next done" tactic. Should she be more patient and read what's being displayed on the screen - sure but I've told her that years ago.
Anyway, CachyOS: arch-update renders a popup in KDE about recommended restart, sometimes update process requires restarting services and users can select ones it needs or everything listed altogether. There's snapshots support for updates: https://wiki.cachyos.org/configuration/btrfs_snapshots/ and pretty sure other distributions have this as an option as well.
The difference between the American and European styles has been used as plot point in fictional works, including the 1946 film O.S.S. and the 2014 series Turn: Washington's Spies.[5] In both works, using the wrong fork etiquette threatens to expose undercover agents.
Nuts. Apparently I have been a German spy all this time. I don't have time to waste swapping a fork around.
I’m not even sure what the technical etiquite is. As a right handed American it just seems more natural to have my knife in my right hand but if I’m just using a fork I tend to switch that to my right hand. Didn’t even think about it until right now.
I've always just done the cutting at the beginning of the meal then set the knife to the side. All of the etiquette patterns I've heard about seem wrong to me compared to just cut first and then put the knife down.
"Nuts" is the correct expression to indicate that you are not a German spy as it is a very perplexing Americanism. Go to Germany and try using "Nüsse" as an interjection! See also: Bastogne.
I’m right handed, but eat with the fork in my right hand and knife in the left.
Is the issue that people have difficulty cutting with their left hand? Because if you can the process of eating is pretty efficient: hold with fork, cut with knife, move food on fork to mouth …
I'm in Europe and I did the same as a child because it just felt the most natural. But you better believe our teachers in school would try to force the opposite. The argument was that imagine if everyone cuts with their right hand, but then you cut with your left and cause a lot of annoyance by bumping your elbow info your table neighbor's elbow.
Absolutely a non-issue in reality obviously. But nowadays I do hold my cutlery "properly" as a result. To me it now feels natural to bring the fork to my mouth with the left hand. Or the right one, really, but I default to holding it in the left.
Ahh! Yeah, my teachers were equally unimpressed - but none of them gave the argument you mentioned, which could at least be understood (like elbows on tables).
Fascinating. The difference of the American style where you switch the fork between the left and right hands reminded me of a similar difference in fishing gear - where Americans (to my understanding) mostly cast with their right hand and then switch the rod to their left hand when retrieving, while in Europe (or at least in Italy) you usually just keep the rod in the right hand instead of switching.
Its always extremely funny reading wikipedia articles about a countries customs. For the UK:
>Bread is always served and can be placed on the table cloth itself
This is extremely rare, to the point where I can't remember the last time I saw it. Is bread really.. always served?
> In the United Kingdom, the fork tines face upward while sitting on the table.
Tines down isn't uncommon in the UK either
>if a knife is not needed – such as when eating pasta – the fork can be held in the right hand
I mean it can be, but its fairly uncommon
>it is permissible to place a small piece of bread at the end of the fork for dipping
Its also 100% fine to dip bread in a sauce with your fingers. Putting bread on a fork if you've licked the fork and then dipping the bread would cause everyone to hate you, so *don't do this*
At any kind of formal dining? Yes, absolutely, I would expect there to be a bread roll & a pat of butter served at the beginning of the meal. Both in restaurants & formal dinners in my experience.
It's not an absolute rule though & you generally wouldn't expect bread to be served like this at home in the UK. I think the French are more likely to serve bread at home as well.
> >if a knife is not needed – such as when eating pasta – the fork can be held in the right hand
> I mean it can be, but its fairly uncommon
So the norm is that if you're eating one-handed, you use your non-dominant hand? That seems really counterintuitive to me; is it because you're so used to having the fork in the non-dominant hand that it feels awkward the other way? Which hand do you use when eating with a spoon?
Spoons always go in the right hand (eg fork and spoon), but yes I'd say people usually use the fork in the non dominant hand. Fork in the right hand is slightly 'uncouth', possibly due to its american associations
I use to have a routine with a friend where we paid close attention to the table manners of his wealthy upper class relatives. Then when they did something wrong we would point it out loudly as if it was the end of the world. Best was 3+ mistakes in a row. Bonus points if you can point out the mistake and add something like we are not in Belgium!
Yes! Hardly anyone knows it all, and even people who know the basics adjust their behavior based on the situation. Eating out with your high school buddies requires a different level of observance than the dinner at which your girlfriend is introducing you to her parents.
This makes total sense to me. There is no monolithic “culture”— there are multiple related cultures, differing little in essence but differing greatly in the details. And each individual is usually only partially ignorant anyway.
Culture changes, too, and asymmetrically. So the “done thing” may be done be very few anymore.
For some reason, you're reading things into the original statement that are not there. "An etiquette exists in a culture" does not mean everyone has to follow or even be aware of it.
If mentally adding an "s" to the original comment enables you move past this issue and actually consider the comment as it was intended, then I would say that is well done and worth the effort to get to this point. :) Have a great Sunday!
I feel like there was a brief period when middle class came to existence and started mimicking customs of the upper class, which were very complicated because the upper class was mostly bored and had invented this shit to kill the time. Then two things happened:
1. Upper class stopped being formal because formality stopped being a signal of upper class.
2. Middle class stopped having social gatherings in general.
So, like, "it is a part of the culture" in the same sense as traditional outfits are a part of the culture - most people have very vague awareness, nobody really cares.
This is unnecessarily flippant, trivializing, and reductive.
The upper classes had the time and position to refine manners. I think one mistake people make is to think manners are arbitrary nonsense. But manners, when fitting, honor the self and others with conduct that suits the dignity of the human person and functions as a sign of that dignity. You cannot tell me that a man hunched over a table cramming food down his throat gaping at a television is no different than one who eats according to the above custom of etiquette.
I’m not one for stiff artifice especially when slavishly applied, but I don’t think manners as such are arbitrary. That nobody cares would explain why so many people look like slobs and behave like boors.
If we begin with human nature and then view the virtues as perfections that actualize the fullness of that nature, then it becomes clearer that some behavior is more fitting and honored better by certain practices.
This phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because what one considers basic etiquette another considers a theatre. The end result is often that people gather in order to perform the spectacle of manners rather than use manners to facilitate a social gathering.
One of the true markers of being upper class is that you can get away with literal atrocities (see Epstein and co) as long as you're discrete enough and/or polished enough when talking to underlings and wannabes.
The upper classes in the UK regularly practice tone policing, where legitimate dissent is waved away as uncouth, even though what they say and do is far worse in private, and sometimes in public.
If you're looking for human dignity, I don't think this is its natural home.
> You cannot tell me that a man hunched over a table cramming food down his throat gaping at a television is no different than one who eats according to the above custom of etiquette.
Cramming is the only real problem there because it implies not experiencing the food. Seating position does not actually affect dignity or honor, and "gaping at a tv" can be worse or better than the alternative depending on the purpose and mood of the gathering.
And the rules applied to utensils in particular are a waste of thought.
Poland has honorifics that are probably on par to those in Japan, but since the language is difficult to learn and frankly speaking nobody cares about Poland, barely anyone even knows this.
Also lots of corporations prefer "american style" approach of just refering by name (even to the CEO), so this dissapears.
Probably could write few pages about this, but nobody would care to read.
I'm interested in learning more about this! As a Finn I love Poland and have been there multiple times (most recently just two weeks ago). I don't know the language, but details like honorifics reveal interesting tidbits of the culture and society. I guess I should prompt an LLM about it.
If you are a Fin in Poland and a lot into nerd stuff, in Polish language some words are spelled with letters "h" and some with "ch" - where both have the same pronouciation now, but supposedly 150 years ago there was a difference.
Supposedly in Finish language you retained this difference and it can be heard in some words e.g. "raha" ("money" in Finish?).
Personally I never "heard" it - sounded as a regular "h" sound for me.
>> Poland has honorifics that are probably on par to those in Japan
> I'm interested in learning more about this!
It's very simple, actually.
For strangers, you use the third person and the title « Pan » or « Pani » (Sir or Lady). You avoid pronouns, « The Lady has forgotten the Lady's purse on the table ».
For friends, you use the t-form ("ty", thou), and use a diminutive rather than the full name. « Johny, you've forgotten your bag on the table ».
For work colleagues, you traditionally use « Pan » or « Pani » with the full form of the first name. « Mister John, the mister's bag is on the table ». This is perceived as old-fashioned, and is increasingly being replaced by the t-form.
The v-form has fallen into disuse, as it was promoted by the Communist regime.
(The old-fashioned honorifics still exist, but they are only used in administrative correspondence: the only time when you're "the respectable gentleman" is when you need to pay taxes.)
Calling someone Sir or Madam also exists in English and is nothing special.
You left out most of the interesting things.
For example the vocative case is partially dissapearing. Someone from Finland can actually understand this topic, since Finnish has multiple cases - more than in Polish language (meanwhile English has one case and if we try very hard we can squeeze something similar to a case - so let's say it has two).
> English has one case and if we try very hard we can squeeze something similar to a case - so let's say it has two
This isn't a correct way to describe English grammar. You can either say it has no cases or four cases with no inflections (because it definitely has subjects, objects, indirect objects, and possessives).
Presumably your native language doesn't inflect in the nominative or something like that and your English teacher once gave you your statement as a convenience fact, but the vast majority of native English speakers have never heard of grammatical case (ones who have, have typically studied inflected foreign languages). In Linguistics, it might be used to describe English and other uninflected languages (it depends).
> You left out most of the interesting things. For example the vocative case is partially dissapearing.
The grammar is changing in many ways (for example, the inanimate masculine is being replaced with the animated, kroić kotleta), but this was about honorifics.
It's possible in Polish to use "pan" in vocative "panie" form with strong vocal emphasis not followed by name or last name, to give it more rude sounding - but it won't be an insult.
Yes, true, I've heard that, it's like putting emphasis on the fact that you want someone to pay attention or something like that. A bit like the guy saying 'Sir!' in the Blues Brothers restaurant scene but not quite the same.
There's nothing more humiliating than a Warsaw taxi driver who looks at you as you try to work out how to operate the door handle and says "Panie!" with a left-bank accent.
While historically Polish honorifics are one of the most elaborate in Europe because of its noble culture, I wouldn’t say they are as elaborate as the Japanese, at least not in the same manner.
I wonder what will become of our honorifics in upcoming decades. Our language changes so much under influence of English, imported sociopolitical trends that surely made some of our bards spin in their graves.
On a side note, I find interesting is that Czech language still naturally uses that plural form we abandon due to popularity of pan/pani forms.
Bluesky on the other hand still serves me the content I tried to block or filter out. And whenever I go into other feeds in the end I'll be flooded with never ending stream of x-rated drawn content that I don't want to see. Interests set or not - I can't escape that stuff. My partner complains for same things.
Facebook in my last days there decided to limit posts from my friends because I wasn't active enough to feed the algorithm, and instead filled main activity stream with generated graphics. Instagram was somewhat fine up until bought by facebook - after that interacting with any content would poison your stream with stuff for months.
Reddit has become an interaction and content clown show once they started pushing for this "modern" interface. I won't create there account ever again due to how they started treating their users.
So there's this "curation" for me.
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