As user-hostile interfaces become increasingly pervasive, I wonder how the tech morons can justify throwing out nearly eight decades of user interface and design guidelines and findings? Some of this stuff pre-dates computers, even, and yet I bet most of the “designers” out there have never read nor even heard of any of it.

Was thinking about this as I’m probably going to read next James J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. If you haven’t figured it out, I do like to know what I’m talking about.

So I’ve been attempting to give myself a better education on human perception, the evolution of user-friendly design, methodological design studies and testing, and successful as well as unsuccessful applications of design in the real world.

I not only want to be smarter than the people I’m battling against, I want to know that I know that I am smarter and more well-educated.

No fancy degree required, but you still have to do the fucking work.

So this is me doing the fucking work.

Could Rogue Software Engineers Be Behind VW Emissions Cheating?

Hahahahahahahahaha, no. Just no.

Check out this latest bullshit from Mozilla.

If something is being displayed on my computer — that I paid for in full — over my internet connection that I paid for, in my house that I’m paying rent for, then I will block whatever the fuck I want to whenever the fuck I want to.

If you make it illegal, I will still do it.

Where this is going is that Mozilla will eventually ban/remove/eliminate all ad-blocking software and add-ons, etc. from the ecosystem.

This was in part why the requirement for add-on signing was recently instated, to please corporate entities in the lead-up to this.

Next will be not signing any ad-blocking add-ons so they won’t run on the browser.

Think that won’t happen? Oh, but it will. Their moves have been obvious and telegraphed for years now. As easy to predict as the sun rising.

Also, realize that what Denelle Dixon-Thayer is paid a lot of money to produce finely-honed corporate legalese. One must read between the lines, behind the lines, and through the lines. What she appears to be saying isn’t actually what she’s saying. The BS about centering the user is a distraction.

Summed up, the post is actually saying, “Blocking ads is harming corporate entities and we must do something about that to ‘protect’ the user from not seeing ads that companies who pay us very want the user to see. We will ‘center the user’ by allowing corporate entities to center ads on the web page her or she is viewing — ads that cannot be blocked (if they pay us).”

What Happens to Your Movies If Amazon Goes Out of Business?

Simple answer: movies, books, all gone. If you don’t have it in your possession, you don’t have shit.

All ya’ll embraced DRM, and one day you’ll feel the pain of that.

And to those who think Amazon can’t go out of business: oh, come on.

To those who’ve been conned into believing that “Nobody coulda knowed!” about the bubble developing in the mid-2000s that was likely to be very harmful to the world economy, check out this book.

Publishing date: October 6, 2006.

Heck, I remember telling people (my SO included before she was my SO) that the housing bubble was really dangerous in 2005.

“Nobody coulda knowed” is a way for the people involved in the financial crisis and the greatest scam since the 1930s to evade responsibility and to convince the rabble that they just had no idea — poor little things — what the risks were.

And it worked.

Why did this surprise people?

Prisons are full of — especially now — a wide slice of people. While on average research shows inmate IQs to be lower than non-incarcerated, this doesn’t mean much.

There’s a very good chance that if I’d stayed in North Florida I’d be in prison now. Would that somehow have made me dumber?

Who makes it to prison is more about socioeconomic opportunities than outright intelligence and that is becoming more true in our society, not less so.

Combine that with the fact that many who make it to the Ivy League are quite dull intellectually (legacy admissions, those who know the textbooks but nothing else, etc.) and these results aren’t really surprising.

I was attacked by a wild boar once.

Luckily, the wild boar was a baby and was only about 8 inches tall.

Injuries, shall we say, were minimal.

Under the TPP, copyright violations will become a morally necessary act of rebellion rather than just something relatively harmless. Get your parrots and don your pirate hats, lads and lassies.

Clarissa writes accurately about the end of the nation-state. This is one of the necessary steps, designed to give corporations the same legal sovereignty as nation-states and to erase borders for companies (but not for individuals unless they are sponsored by a corporation).

The rich no longer have any interest in nations or their restrictions, and are working hard to eliminate them. This is a step in that process.

Why The World Is Getting Weirder.

Some terrible ideas combined with some amazing ones; very odd piece. I don’t feel like a full examination and exegesis, but his ideas about the easy problems being solved causing the long tail of bizarre ones to appear more prominent is a really perspicacious insight.

Like most efforts, 10% of the effort gets you 90% of what you need — and the remaining 10% takes up 90% of your time.

Why Intel added cache partitioning in Broadwell and how it can increase performance by 1.3x to 3x.

To people who think computers aren’t getting any faster just because Moore’s “Law” is sort-of dead: LOL.

Don’t be mislead by the press, and the tech press is in general no better than any other. Read the people actually working in the field to know what’s really going on.

About Google Fiber and fiber to the door in general, I always hear, “Durrrr, no one needs that much bandwidth. There’s just no use for it.”

Well, first, that’s not true. Not many people need it, but quite a few do. Not everyone just clicks on Facebook spasmodically and drools.

Second, bandwidth is something that needs to be present before the real killer apps develop. Broadband allowed Skype and similar tools to exist, not the other way around. Broadband built Youtube, and so many more. Those never would have existed without the infrastructure being there first.

I remember hearing the same argument in the 1990s when the first reasonably fast connections became available — that no one needed that blazing, uh, fast 5Mb/s and that dial-up was good enough for anybody, dammit. (I also heard that the internet was a fad a lot.)

It all repeats. One benefit of experience (though I think the value of experience is over-estimated) is that you get to see the same people make the same mistakes over and over again, and you learn to avoid them.

Ok, ok, yes I did.

But today is particularly geeky. Compiling Samba from source.

Need a feature that the latest package in any distro doesn’t have.

So that’s how you got to do it when you need what you need.