Dave T-W @davoloid@social.cleverlibre.org

Freud and Oedipus walk into a bar and the bartender asks, "What is this, some kind of motherfucking joke?"

If our civilization collapses, extraterrestrial archeologists can look at this and be impressed. Three satellites following the Earth in an equilateral triangle, each 25 million kilometers from the other two. Each contains two gold cubes in free-fall. The satellites accelerate just enough so they don't get blown off course by the solar wind. The gold cubes feel nothing but gravity.

Lasers bounce between each cube and its partner in another satellite, measuring the distance between them to an accuracy of 20 picometers: less than the diameter of a helium atom! This lets the satellites detect gravitational waves - ripples in the curvature of spacetime - with very long wavelengths, and correspondingly low frequencies.

It should see so many binary white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way that these will be nothing but foreground noise. More excitingly, it should be able to see mergers of supermassive black holes as far as... the dawn of time, or whenever such black holes were first formed. (The farther you look, the older things you see.)

It may even be able to see the "gravitational background radiation", the thrumming vibrations in the fabric of spacetime left over from the Big Bang. This radiation was created before the hot gas in the Universe cooled down enough to become transparent to light. So it's older than the microwave background radiation, which is the oldest thing we see now.

It's called LISA - the Laser Interferometric Satellite Antenna. And we're in luck: ESA has just decided to launch it in 2034.

When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was people asking me for tech support help and me having to slowly, patiently explain to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.

But that's not true anymore.

User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.

My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.

#HCI #UX #UI #okdoomer

Here's a thought. Why don't they make easier, simpler games for elderly people to play? I'm sure there would be a market for those.

𝓖𝓵𝓸𝓼𝓼𝓪𝓻𝔂

Blockchain: a slow database

Crypto: an expensive slow database

NFT: an expensive slow database to store URLs

AI: a way to write slow and inefficient algorithms

LLM: a database that stores text in a slow and inefficient way

Chat GPT: an expensive imprecise query language for slow and inefficient text databases that often returns wrong results

I find it strange that governments focus on identity verification for accessing the Internet while rejecting the most basic technical controls to address the worldwide leading cause of death for children – traffic accidents. Use existing identity infrastructure to check the right to drive, payment of tax, valid insurance and safety certificate before the car can be driven. While doing that, impose appropriate speed limits. This could be done in a privacy-preserving way. https://english.elpais.com/technology/2024-01-19/experts-warn-of-the-dangers-and-difficulties-of-a-government-instituted-anti-porn-app-this-has-never-been-successful.html

They don't want homeless people concentrating, forming communities, and establishing themselves in one area, because that starts looking less like isolated "bums" and more like a capitalist refugee camp.

This is some serious cyberpunk dystopia shit, where poor people live below ground and the rich up high.

'The most important thing to keep in mind is that the entire concept is essentially nonsensical on multiple levels. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of this supposed headroom as a pot of money ... In reality, what is called headroom is simply the gap between the government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules, which the government itself sets and which have been changed almost annually over the past decade.'
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/24/uk-budget-tax-cuts-jeremy-hunt