Apr 22

Not Alimentary

And the thing is, most of those “food” items taste like absolute chalky garbage ape turds. And people still like them! Even people who can afford better. Just conditioning, I guess.

One time my partner and I were in the supermarket and a woman came up and inquired if we knew where the Pop Tarts were. I wanted to ask, “Why in the world are you looking for Pop Tarts?” But I said I didn’t know, because why would I know that. I don’t eat non-food and Pop Tarts are the most non-food item known to humankind.

I guess I am a food snob, but I didn’t like fare like that even when I was a poor North Florida hellraiser, and wouldn’t choke down a Pop Tart unless there were absolutely no other options.

Apr 22

The Cost

What I learned from the pandemic is people are much dumber and far less capable of handling complex information than I thought. And I didn’t have a high opinion in that regard before!

Was reading some terrible paper earlier where it was clear the person understood nothing at all about how aerosolization works, how fabric works, why masks are worn, how viruses are (generally) transmitted, nor the studies they were citing and their limitations. It was a total shitshow of the worst kind.

But it seems plausible. Kind of. If you don’t read any of the source studies, don’t understand the science, and have no idea how anything works. Which, I’ve discovered, is most people.

Apr 21

Not Just You

Tara, it’s not just you. There are numerous applications and even entire OSes these days that are created and released into the world with no cogent design principles and no seeming understanding that they actually must be used by humans.

I’ve wondered how the situation got so dire but alas I don’t have any sort of unified account for the degeneracy that is UX/UI these days. Do the application and OS makers not realize they are harming themselves? Do they just not care? Maybe the user pool is just so large now that it doesn’t matter, and it’s the case that most people are such propaganda victims that they actually do buy the BS about how it’s “more convenient” to spend 45 minutes doing something we used to be able to do in five minutes flat.

There have been a number of applications I’ve attempted to use and I literally could not figure out how to do the main task they were supposed to allow me to achieve (as with Tara here) so I just gave up. And it’s not just commercial stuff — open source is just as guilty, as with modern Gnome and many others. I don’t think it’s just because I or she is getting older. It has been a complete regression in design principles that is glaringly obvious if you’ve been in the computing space for a while, as we both have been.

Apr 21

Eat

Eventually, there is going to be vast political consequences for how the Millennials and Gen Z has been treated. Too bad most of the Boomers who deserve the consequences won’t be the ones to experience them, however.

Apr 21

Faith Feeling

And always accompanied by “believe science!” and citations of credentialed experts who have never once been correct about anything ever.