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"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" - Robert J. Hanlon

If you ever tried to setup a martech stack you konw what a PITA is to comply GDPR without any error


yes, the good news is that once recognized the pattern we can work in the opposite direction


when politics ban science you know things are messed up big time


indeed, it is indipendent from scientific consensus


Great books. One of the authors looks like now is a climate denier, so I wonder myself about the existance of technical approach detached from the scientific one


You're letting one thing leak into another too much. This is why I never bother paying attention to political leanings of the actors and musicians that I love. I simply don't care, unless they're out there kicking puppies for fun I don't really care.


Which one is that? Let me guess: the one who's into blockchain now?


Zeldman is dead*, and Nielsen is still running NNG. I don't think he's interested in getting into politics. Enough people hate on him, just for being the skunk at the graphic design picnic.

*[EDIT] I’m wrong.

Glad to be wrong.

'E's not dead. 'E's pining.


Zeldman is dead?! Did it happen in the last 24hrs? He posted on his site yesterday

https://zeldman.com/


Maybe I’m wrong.

I would have sworn there was a big deal about his passing on this site, not long ago.

Happy to be wrong.

[EDIT] Yup. I’m wrong.

Glad to be.


Also I'm happy to hear he's alive, and to infer that he's not the crazy climate change denying crypto bro!


Nielsen hasn't been at NNG for a couple of years and I don't think he was fully engaged in the years before that (Norman isn't there either).

Don't bother with Nielsen today, he's been rambling about how working on accessibility won't matter because AI will create custom UIs for every user.


I hate on Jakob Nielsen for recommending pizza menus over pie menus and hamburger menus! ;)

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menu-vs-pizza/

Not that I have anything against pizza menus, though -- they do have their place. But we both agree to hate hamburger menus passionately. ("Hate the menu, not the burger.")

PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

Seriously though, I've always been a huge fan of Jakob Nielsen, especially for his empirical approach, and he has even said some nice things about pie menus.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930500

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/trip-report-chi-88/

>Some new stuff was presented such as the pie menus studied by Callahan, Hopkins, Weiser, and Shneiderman from the University of Maryland. When used as pop-up menus, pies have the advantage that any menu item can be selected by equally small movements of the mouse and the study did indeed show that users performed about 15% faster using a pie menu than using a linear menu. Pie menus also have some potential disadvantages, especially when used with many menu items or in cases that call for hierarchical pop-ups.

>In spite of this and some other novelty items, the main feel of CHI'88 was that of improvements of earlier stuff rather than revolutionary new discoveries. Every year, I am able to summarize the main theme of a CHI conference and this year I am not in doubt that the theme was that we are currently slowed down to steady, evolutionary progress in the user interface field.

This is the paper we presented at CHI'88 that he was referring to (which is why I appreciate his empirical approach to actually measuring usability and performance and error rates):

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1

>Steve Jobs Thought Pie Menus Sucked

>On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”

Don Norman, on the other hand, has never been a big fan of pie menus, and went even further than Jobs just yelling "That sucks!" to explain that was because of all the disasters, pollution, and urban sprawl he thought they could cause, and he even unfairly blamed pie menus for a nuclear meltdown, when a linear menu actually caused it! ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37907449

X11 SimCity Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA

Don Hopkins and Donald Norman at IBM Almaden's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GCPQxJttf0

Norman: "And then when we saw SimCity, we saw how the pop-up menu that they were doing used pie menus, made it very easy to quickly select the various tools we needed to add to the streets and bulldoze out fires, and change the voting laws, etc. Somehow I thought this was a brilliant solution to the wrong problems. Yes it was much easier to now to plug in little segments of city or put wires in or bulldoze out the fires. But why were fires there in the first place? Along the way, we had a nuclear meltdown. He said "Oops! Nuclear meltdown!" and went merrily on his way."

Hopkins: "Linear menus caused the meltdown. But the round menus put the fires out."

Norman: "What caused the meltdown?"

Hopkins: "It was the linear menus."

Norman: "The linear menus?"

Hopkins: "The traditional pull down menus caused the meltdown."

Norman: "Don't you think a major cause of the meltdown was having a nuclear power plant in the middle of the city?"

(laughter)

Hopkins: "The good thing about the pie menus is that they make it really easy to build a city really fast without thinking about it."

(laughter)

Hopkins: "Don't laugh! I've been living in Northern Virginia!"

Norman: "Ok. Isn't the whole point of SimCity how you think? The whole point of SimCity is that you learn the various complexities of controlling a city."

(My joking but also serious point was that in SimCity "Meltdown" is on the linear "Disaster" menu. So linear menus cause meltdowns. But the pie menus has bulldozers and roads, that you can use to recover from meltdowns with.)


[flagged]


While we still have it?


[flagged]


> Did I hit a nerve?

You're choosing to deflect and patronize, but not provide any further credibility to your unwarranted comparison. That speaks for itself.

> Don't you have some NFTs to shill at Denny's Applebee's Max?

You have no idea who I am or what I support, not everyone is a little caricature in your mind. This kind of negative attitude has no place in this forum.


You haven't taken the opportunity to prove you're not full of shit by contributing anything constructive to this conversation. Go reply to my other comments or other people's comments if you disagree with anything I've said or have something to add, but nobody wants to hear financial advice or blockchain evangelism from you, so please stop obsessing about that, because it's not relevant or interesting or credible.


More deflection and moving goalposts, and now ad hominem. Still nothing substantial, and certainly nothing constructive. Just one argumentative fallacy after another.

There is no value in speaking with you any further, your entire demeanor is toxic and ignorant. Take a hike.


You're so close to getting that nobody wants to hear financial advice or blockchain evangelism from you, but you still think the problem is with them, not you. Would you be so persistent and angry about it if your obsession was denying climate change instead of evangelizing fraudulent get-rich-quick pyramid schemes and rug pulls and ponzi schemes and Web 3.0 NFT scams and TRUMP coins, when nobody was remotely interested in discussing it, everyone has heard it all before, and is totally sick of hearing about it, and doesn't want to be your next biggest idiot, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the conversation? Nothing you've said has any relevance to the goalposts of discussing "Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen" whatsoever, yet here you are, still throwing a tantrum about nothing interesting.


> Nothing you've said has any relevance to the goalposts of discussing "Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen" whatsoever

Projection. You're the one who brought up this irrelevant tangent about blockchain. This flags your entire argument as disingenuous.

Its your comment which got flagged and killed. Think about why that is. You are projecting so much right now, and it just looks sad. There is no need to continue this conversation, goodbye.


I have posted several highly upvoted informative comments relevant to this discussion, while you've posted absolutely nothing useful or relevant whatsoever, your own comment was flagged and killed, and you're projecting your own failure and irrelevance on me right now.

And my guess that the foaming at the mouth climate change denier was also into blockchain was 100% correct.

You already said you weren't going to speak to me again, yet here you are back again for more.

Touch some grass, crypto shill.


«Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice.» - Robert J. Hanlon


I'm pretty sure it's the other way around. This way is just stupid and borderline suicidal.


Suicidal for the US - but who is going to act to make it suicidal for DOGE?


This sounds like a very smart idea in a climate emergency era.


I would even say it is necessary. And we need to do much more than that. With the end of fossil fuels, aviation will look completely different. We need to start (re)building train infrastructure yesterday.


The MIDI modulation new features are pretty impressive to me.


It's nice to see, but it's backing Abelton into feature parity with Cubase on the Atari ST in 1989.


Not surprising to me.

The entire logical envelope of digital music tools for western music has mostly been known since then and the goals haven't changed much.

Mostly, it has more, faster, and cheaper since then.

Anyway, I don't want my hammer to sprout a saw blade or corkscrew or a nut driver every six months.


Does Cubase in 2023 still have those features?


Great to see Bluesky getting some love from the devs, is such a nice platform 'till now. Looks like a meeting of all the best people after their escape from other poisoned platforms.


"[in Germany] in 2022, CO2 emission goals were exceeded by 40 million metric tons due to the increased use of coal-fired power plants resulting from the necessary cuts in natural gas consumption; estimates for 2023 assume 38 million metric tons.

The Emsland, Isar II and Neckarwestheim II nuclear power plants supplied a total of 32.7 billion kilowatt hours of low-emission electricity in 2022. German private households most recently consumed an average of 3190 kWh of electrical energy per year. This means that these three power plants can supply more than 10 million, or a quarter, of German households with electricity. The resulting reduction in the amount of electricity required from coal-fired power plants could save up to 30 million tons of CO2 per year."

https://www.replanet.ngo/post/open-letter-save-german-nuclea...


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