Readit NewsI see you've came to the same conclusion i did years ago. I look at it not as paying for software, but buying my time back at this point.
Linux "open source"/free professional software seems to lack the Je ne sais quoi needed to make it worthwhile. It works, but the software is in the "uncanny valley" so to speak compared to polished Mac/Windows paid professional software.
In a (healthy) company, you have PMs and executives who will tell the overly opinionated engineers to STFU and actually implement things that move the needle and solve problems users are facing.
This is also why most open source projects have terrible UI/UX and any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.
What could it be? Near-zero term in the Drake equation? The dark forest? A great filter?
To understand different possibilities, they decided to determine the cause using a computer simulation. However, due to hardware limitations, they were only able to simulate one civilization at a time.
We can only speculate what the final answer was.
We have all the elements for answers if we focus on what we know, and forget the hand wavy sci-fi speculation.
1) Complex life is rare.
2) Reaching a space faring stage is even rarer. (we’re the most minimal definition of “space faring” you could come up with, and even then we got really lucky with so many things)
3) The universe is huge. It’s like, the hugest thing there is, man. And except for some little bits of interesting dust here and there, it’s mostly empty. As empty as it is huge.
So, does life - in any form - exist elsewhere in the universe? Almost certainly.
Are/were there life forms elsewhere in the universe that escaped their home planet gravity to go explore their moon or other planets in their solar system? Seems quite probable.
Is there any shot we are sufficiently close in space/time to encounter such another advanced life form? Almost certainly not.
But when the sales cratered, due to an oversupply, retailers were stuck with the cartridges without the ability to return them. So they turned to the measure that killed the Atari: clearance bins. When all the games you could hope to ever play are in a bin for a buck each, no one is buying anything at 30$ anymore.
Nintendo’s never going to say it, but their practices with the NES were not quality control; they were doing price control.
My personal slant pins it on the cult of minimalism. I realized we were effed when Lufthansa went with their incredibly dull and depressing livery. Most people in the planespotting world disliked it (1), while designers were falling over themselves gushing about the elegance, clarity and simplicity of the brand (2). My UX designer even used them as an example to emulate (we disagreed on many things).
Also, designers, like most people, are inherently uncreative. A new trend will start, and people will follow. Just look at how every AI project has been trying to shoehorn "Q" into their names these past couple of weeks. Or how everything "smart" had to have a lower-case "i" in front of the brand for a long while. I'm starting to see the backlash against minimalism more frequently, hopefully it'll hit design schools soon and the next home run brand will move away from extremist minimalism
(1) https://thepointsguy.com/2018/02/lufthansa-new-livery-boring...
(2) https://www.adelahaye.com/blog/2020/2/11/feeling-blue-luftha...
1) be as boring as possible so people can make sense of it quickly and efficiently in a world where there are countless other things competing for your time and attention
2) standout as much as possible to gain your attention in the aforementioned busy world
IME this explains a lot the nature of trends that design experiences.
It's frustrating because as a grad student I was explicitly taught to avoid using local slang, informal sayings and expressions, humor, etc. in my academic writing to make it as understandable and unambiguous as possible.
I think a simple piece of advice (stolen from Tuft) is to not use colors unless you really need to. If you can find a way to present the same information in black and white - it's generally going to be better. The next step up.. If you need to highlight somethings, maybe just use one color (ex: red). Don't bring out the whole pastel bile rainbow immediately. And try to stick to consistent colors to convey meaning
For color gradients I find these incredibly useful (though the license/attribution-requirement is kinda annoying)
Funny, read your comment as my copy of Tufte's VDoQI is open to page 154:
"Color often generates graphical puzzles. Despite our experiences with the spectrum in science textbooks and rainbows, the mind's eye doe not readily give a visual ordering to colors, except possibly for red to reflect higher levels than other levels [...] Attempts to give colors an order result in those verbal decoders and the mumbling of little mental phrases [...] Because they do have a natural visual hierarchy, varying shades of gray show varying quantities better than color."
Some would say only the classical optical camera would capture faithfully our reality. But does it? The reality of the sunlight is a broad spectrum of radio emissions: UV, infrared and more. Does the optical camera capture these? No. Thus, which reality does it capture? Our perceived reality? Other would argue: at least the optical system would capture events in time faithfully. But does it? What would we see in a femto second? Certainly not the pictures we normally see. So the results of an optical system are also super imposed realities, not very much different than the results of a computational photography.
There is simply no single one reality, only our perceived realities. But if so, can we still call it reality or it’s merely a product of our sense, our perception and hallucination?
What captures an image is an imaging surface; traditionally a chemical emulsion on a piece of film, now a complex array of digital sensors.
This imaging surface is of human design, it therefore images what its designers designed it to image. But don't forget that it is a sampling of reality; by definition always partial, and biased (biased to the 400~700 nm range, for starters).