Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
Back in the days when it was common for Macintosh to have 640x480 screens (or even smaller), they still fully visible window controls that were impossible to miss.
>Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
And despite things being smaller, there's also white space everywhere so there is less information on your screen.
The trend in UIs is making filenames into discrete icons instead of lists. In outlook this morning all I got 3 attachments and it's 3 icons that all are something almost identical like "<word icon>2026-02-13_A....docx" and I have to hover over them to figure out each filename. I don't get it.
I'm a Solidworks user. It's a 3D CAD program. From about 2012 to 2018, it was unusable with a display higher than 1080p because it did its own bad scaling of UI. Text elements would overlap and be cut off. Since then it works in general but to make 2D drawings I still change to 1080p. Making drawings involves a lot of clicking on lines and vertexes to add dimensions, but the hitboxes are 1 dimension thick, or even 1 single pixel. It's maddening at 4K. There are selection filters that help, but since it's sluggish in general in 4K I just admit defeat and use 1080p.
I launched spotify on my phone today and it had a grid of playlists I could chose from. The grid showed a maximum of 6 characters per playlist over two lines, but there was certainly a lot of whitespace available, and some random album art that told me nothing.
It was basically unusable, but I'm sure some designer thought it was slick.
I’ve been a mac user since 1994, system 7, and it feels to me like the overall Mac user experience and reliability (stability, speed, etc) really peaked with Snow Leopard, 10.6.
This probably has a lot to do with the vastly improved hardware design around then - the touchpad specifically on the “blackbook” Core 2 Duo era macbooks was a step change, and they keyboard was pretty great too. Multi-monitor support was fantastic compared to everything else too.
You have to wonder what the design principles of pre-X MacOS paired with modern Apple hardware could achieve.
My first mac was a 09 MBP with snow leopard, shortly after they updated and started removing random features and closing down customization. For some reason, you couldn't be trusted with more than one right click method anymore.
A solid 15 years later I try macs again, had a nice m3 air at work and bought a personal M4 air. A few months later Tahoe comes out. I bought the thing because modern darkmode macos looked so great and was such a pleasure to use. Now it's full on bubbleboy.
Word must have gotten back to Cupertino that I was back in the ecosystem...
Which was just a couple of years after the iPhone. After the iPhone, the Mac was the new Apple ][, i.e. something they kept around to make some money, but didn't really care about.
I have the feeling the regions are the same since the EGA's 620x200 (and hercules mode!) days of windows 3.x for almost all operating systems. Some window managers have updated it a bit but if you look at the increase in pixel density (640x480 on a 14" crt is 57ish ppi, and that is being very generous, vs my home display of 110ppi and the retina displays with 200+ ppi) I get the idea the regions have stayed the same in pixel size despite display scaling and such.
Or we all go (back) to tiling window managers and get rid of all the resizing with the press of a key, or even no press.
British sports cars in the sixties for safety reasons had to remove toggle switches. The problem was that during crashes people were losing eyes or suffering puncture wounds. This was the story handed down to me by my uncle.
This is second hand account but here are my uncle's credentials...
I think the toggle switch ban can be lumped in with the bumper requirement on imports. Maybe with the rubber bumpers on MG’s. I think these imports requirements started in the 70’s.
I can forgive the circle screen in a Mini Cooper just because it's a heritage thing. What I don't like is, not having physical controls for heated seats, temperature controls, and heated steering wheels. Mini made all those touch screen, which don't work nice with gloves.
Well, it was a heritage thing. The original remakes with the center speedo and plenty of physical buttons were fun. The digital circle thing is an abomination.
I always wonder if the people designing these things have ever lived in a cold climate. They know about cold in the abstract because they put heated seats in, but have they ever woken up in the morning and gone outside to commute to work in a car that's been sitting at -20 degrees overnight. Interfaces that don't work with gloves or mittens on are the worst.
Which is to say, do they know that touch interfaces are bad and do it anyway because it saves money? Or do they go through life thinking they're actually making a usable product?
"Which is to say, do they know that touch interfaces are bad and do it anyway because it saves money? Or do they go through life thinking they're actually making a usable product?"
It's likely the former. Industrial designers are trained on ergonomics so they know the benefits of physical switches.
However, at least in the case of BMW / Mini, they're forced use touchscreens by their management primarily because:
1. Not only it saves money
2. It also enables subscription models for certain features like heated seats and steering wheel. No heated seats? Just remove the UI buttons.
Unless consumers push back (like VW customers did), they will continue to cut costs.
EVs heat up the interior before you get in (very effectively, since they are usually a heat pump for interior heating/cooling and also for battery temp management). Generally you tap a button in an app on your phone about 10 minutes prior, and by the time you get in the car it's nice and toasty. If you keep your car plugged in at home it doesn't even use any battery to do this. Heated seats is just a luxury feature, not a necessity.
When I was street parking in New England winters I was not exactly an EV target customer. I'm sure that's very nice if you have a driveway and home charging though.
Absolutely heated seats are a luxury feature. That doesn't change the fact that if put heated seats in a car and then have touchscreen only controls, you have created a stupid product that's made to be comfortable in cold temperatures but not usable in cold temperatures.
Of course they should be making cars usable in cold temperatures whether or not it has cold weather luxury features, but the addition on heated seats in a car that you can't operate with gloves on just highlights the stupidity of the screen interfaces.
The manufacturer is considering "what would be nice for a car in cold temperatures" and then skipping over "it would be nice if you could turn the heat or defogger on."
I would have literally bought a mini if not for the daft screen and lack of button. Bought a Smart Fortwo instead, happy camper with all my tactile interfaces.
Article is mostly GPT vomit after a couple bullet pints. If it’s not as easy for others to tell I’ll stay my blade runner style shop that tells who NOT to hire
I'd personally rethink about applying some advice in that section. Here's my take.
> Time-boxing AI sessions.
Unless you are a full-time vibe coder, you already wouldn't be using AI all the time. But time boxing it feels artificial, if it's able to make good and real progress (not unmaintainable slop).
> Separating AI time from thinking time.
My usage of AI involves doing a lot of thinking, either collaboratively within a chat, or by myself while it's doing some agentic loop.
> Accepting 70% from AI.
This is a confusing statement. 70% what? What does 70% usable even mean? If it means around 70% of features work and other 30% is broken, perhaps AI shouldn't be used for those 30% in the first place.
> Being strategic about the hype cycle.
Hype cycles have always been a thing. It's good for mind in general to avoid them.
> Logging where AI helps and where it doesn't.
I do most of this logging in my agent md files instead of a separate log. Also after a bit my memory picks it up really quickly what AI can do and what it can't. I assume this is a natural process for many fellow engineers.
> Not reviewing everything AI produces.
If you are shipping in an insane speed, this is just an expected outcome, not an advice you can follow.
It's easier to build trust for such a safety-critical service when you're more open about how it works an performs. For the complete opposite approach, see Tesla.
Given the announcement from a few days ago of google trying to get external investment, this is their follow up, showing what that investment is good for. Also, it’s pretty light on details that are of much use to competitors. “We made an accurate simulation system to test our system in before deployment” would be pretty mundane if you were talking about any other field of engineering.
Under the same circumstances (kid suddenly emerging between two parked cars and running out onto the street), it could be debated that the outcome could have been worse if a human were driving.
I don't know about the remote driver conspiracy, but waymo slowing down and that kid surviving a crash after jumping on the road from behind a tall vehicle was the best PR waymo could have asked for.
Agree on the valuations. Most have come down and many have overcorrected imho.
As expensive as some of these software seem in terms of cost per seat, most of the subscription contract rarely exceed a few hundred thousand / year if even $1mm, which is drop in a bucket for many companies. (vs running on-prem servers, having staff to support them)
You'd think Atlassian would be printing money given everybody under the sun is using them, but they only make $5B in annual revenue.
I've worked at fortune 50 companies for a while and custom enterprise software is still alive and well for things that are too business specific to buy off the product for. But they're not going to be in a rush to create their own Workday, Salesforce, Jira, Figma, SAP, etc.
Not a fan of Altman, but I don't think the ad will serve Anthropic well in long run.
They may not run ads for foreseeable future, but there will come a point where they introduce a different tier service that does, whether they want it or not.
You're right. As long as they don't make a long series of these ads and espouse it as a virtue like Google did with their 'don't be evil', no one will care.
Hate to say it, but no one will remember or care when that time comes. It costs them very little to say that if they have no plans in the immediate future to serve ads.
Anyone with long experience trading commodities would have expected this.
This is like the least surprising thing ever.
It is amusing reading the comments on here. Silver dropped 50% in 1980. Silver is the original memecoin. I think people care less though about market events that happened before they were born. It is like the way I know the entire story of silver in 1980 even though I was a little kid but nothing about the Nifty Fifty a decade earlier.
Nothing for me with commodities will ever top -$37 per barrel during Covid with oil. That was a level of market shell shock for me that I just can't imagine being topped.
Correct, momentum acceleration is generally a mean reversion signal in futures, and can be effectively combined with momentum signals i.e. you go long when it goes up but when it starts going up a lot you reduce your position.
And these signals are usually very compressed in time because acceleration is actually just an acceleration in the number of decisions being taken, which tends to blow off quite spectacularly.
Something that has changed is the large retail participation, which is making the scale of these moves quite crazy. Will be interesting to see what happens next, as with crypto the scale of the wipe seems so large that it is hard to see how that participation continues.
Healthy for markets but I am guessing this will conflict heavily with the politics.
Back in the days when it was common for Macintosh to have 640x480 screens (or even smaller), they still fully visible window controls that were impossible to miss.
https://erichelgeson.github.io/blog/2021/03/23/ultimate-syst...
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