Japan is bad, but South Korea was the stuff of nightmares when I lived there with a Mac. So awful you had no choice but to laugh.

IE6, ActiveX controls, and mandatory keyloggers for online banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_So...

I had no idea! We used to have mandatory keyloggers for online banking in Brazil not too long ago, but this is gone now.

WTF?! What's the reasoning behind mandatory keyloggers for online banking?

"there are so many fraudsters and scammers around, so we need our own good keylogger on your machine"?

Basically, yes. I believe the logic was "our keylogger will hook into the OS before any malicious keylogger does so it can prevent those bad guys getting your keystrokes"

it got so bad, even their _free online games_ needed to authenticate using a bespoke popup where you clicked in your pin number

towards the end it shuffled the digits after each click

truly cat and mouse

The young'uns all cut their teeth on the web, where every project tends to reinvent the wheel (poorly).

It's funny (depressing) to me that there is now "web app" design language and a "native app" design language, and most new desktop apps are following the web because they are built in html and CSS.

I wholeheartedly agree with this perspective.

As with most creative pursuits, the best things happen when there's a clear point of view.

Unfortunately, the best things aren't always the most commercially successful, because products are only a small part of what makes a company successful. I think we're seeing this play out in the software market.

JIRA might be objectively awful, but it still manages to print money!

Same -- fastmail is excellent and great value.

An example of a company that does exactly what I pay them to do and respects me as a customer.

Remember: it's not your machine, it's Apple's. You just get the privilege of using it.

> "what would happen if we only designed for large monitors?" What would it unlock if there were desktop designs that ignored laptops and only focused on widescreen monitors?

There's something to this thinking. Large workstation monitors are very much their own thing.

A real example l I've found: Niri (scrolling window manager) is really nice on a laptop but awful on my 6K display. The windows are way too tall, and the induced motion of large windows on a big screen is too much.

Have you tried turning your screen vertical, if it supports that? Way underrated. Instead of useless side space that would make lines too long to read if it was used, you get useful vertical space to display more of a document at once.

That's actually the opposite of my problem. Even in landscape, windows end up way too tall to be useful.

In a traditional floating setup I would have multiple smaller overlapping windows wherever I want them.

Whereas with a tiled/scrolling layout, windows can end up way too big to be useful. It's fine on a laptop though.

I initially used Niri on a laptop and thought it seemed great. Then plugged in my large monitor and realised it was awful there!

Something I learnt from doing research in this space is that spatial memory is quite powerful, and a hierarchical filesystem taps into that.

Whereas tagging doesn't align as naturally with the human brain in the same way.

But episodic memory (the timeline so to speak) is powerful too. Consider "list all pictures I watched in the last two days". Both are important. Combine it by saying "distribute them on the screen from left to right sorted by how long I looked at it in ascending order".

I think local AI would come in quite handy to tag files and keep the tagging consistent..

Personally, I think a lot of the enjoyment comes from learning to overcome challenges. Jumping in to an unfamiliar problem space, sucking at it, then grinding until it all clicks.

Generative AI takes away the grind, which takes away the learning. How do I master a new language if I'm expected to code via an LLM from day 1?

It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens. You have new ideas, opinions form, and so on. I think it's the same with writing code. But when you're not writing code any more, you don't go through this process.

I wonder if an LLM-authored project would even end up solving the same problems that a human-authored project would? If a human didn't write the code, then a human didn't have the chance to think in the same way. They didn't spend time trying to think of a good variable name, which made them realise the whole premise was wrong...

Agreed, there may be people working with their LLM tool to learn something new. In my experience this isn’t the way these tools are marketed, from where I sit it looks like this is being discouraged. If you aren’t really learning anything then all you get at the end is the product. For a certain type of person this is just not enough.

I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.

> I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.

Exactly!

And to be clear, you can learn a ton from LLMs. An expert teacher with infinite patience -- what an amazing thing. But there's a different kind of learning that only happens with practice, and that's what you don't get when a computer does the thinking.

Your brain is hardwired to find shortcuts. Once you have an LLM at your disposal, it'll be real hard to abstain from using it to do the hard bit.

Someone on Twitter put it well: using an LLM to learn is like using a forklift to lift weights in the gym. Yes, action is happening but the point of going to the gym is not to ensure weights get displaced up and down.

That's a bizarre analogy. If you're actually committed to learning (vs having the LLM spit out code you don't read), using an LLM as a teacher is more like working out using weight machines vs dumbbells. Just two different methods of arriving at the same destination, with different pros and cons.

>It's also well understood that the act of writing is when thinking actually happens.

For me the more interesting and productive thinking happens when I'm trying to understand what I want the code to do, not when I'm thinking about the implementation details.

> Leaving things alone is an underrated engineering skill.

Truer words have never been spoken.

It’s an underrated life skill and was discovered by Lao Tsé probably around 2500 years ago

"It is often easier to not do something stupid than it is to do something smart."

It's funny, as a 20+ year macOS user, I've really struggled with file managers that are not Finder.

I don't think it's that Finder is brilliant -- it just encourages a unique set of power user workflows that aren't replicated elsewhere.

For example, Open/Save panels that act as drop targets, and navigate to the dropped file's parent folder. I use this all the time, and it drives me nuts when I can't do this on Linux (Nautilus) and Windows. Enter to rename, too. These habits are very hard to break!

You probably know this already but some don't (I certainly didn't for an embarrassingly long time): Rename is F2 in Windows and Linux (well, most distros File manager anyway).