gargs (u/gargs) - Readit News

gargs commented on Apple needs a Snow Sequoia reviews.ofb.biz/safari/ar... · Posted by u/trbutler

gargs · 9 months ago

When I started using OS X, one of the biggest draws for me was first-class native keyboard shortcuts support that was consistently followed and applied by all apps (first party and otherwise). So you could be sure that a shortcut for search across all contexts (global) would work just as well as the shortcut for a contextual search within any app. No one writes great third-party native apps anymore and even Apple's own apps completely disregard this part of their heritage. Just try searching across the AppStore, Apple Music, and the legacy Finder.

For newer Apple apps, sometimes the keyboard shortcuts simply don't exist. I believe part of the problem here is the deprecation of AppleScript, which means there's no incentive to spend time on consistency, and the other part has to do with organizational indifference towards all the wonderful UX innovations from the past.

What Apple has successfully accomplished, in collaboration with other 'big tech' companies is drastically reducing user expectations from their software. I wouldn't completely blame the AppStore's forced race to the bottom for this alone. There is still a huge market for tasteful apps that cost more (even sometimes with obnoxious subscriptions), but if even Apple isn't leading by example, why waste time on it if you could just build another simple note-taking app.

gargs commented on I Quit Spotify newyorker.com/culture/inf... · Posted by u/yarapavan

marginalia_nu · a year ago

I quit Spotify a few years ago as well.

They kept changing stuff, breaking my work flow, with every change it felt like there was more friction to listen to the music and podcasts I wanted, and less friction to listen to algorithmically selected slop I didn't want to listen to. Eventually I just said fuck it. I don't need this source of stress and frustration in my life. I've never looked back.

I'm on youtube music now. In many ways it's a worse product, but it at least stays the same and doesn't keep trying to make me change my listening behavior.

I suspect Spotify's problem is that they have (or had) too many developers, so you get this pressure to look busy "improving" the product, with endless lateral change as a result instead.

gargs · a year ago

If their problem was 'too many developers', I reckon they'd be building totally useless yet amazingly engineered SDKs and data/analytics tools or apps to improve the quality and satisfaction of your music consumption. Instead, they focus on all the things that just reek of an overabundance of marketers and Product People™.

gargs commented on Apple found in breach of EU competition rules theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/malermeister

gargs · a year ago

Surely, Apple will respond by artificially hampering one or more of their products in the EU and hence take away even the slightest reason to upgrade hardware in the name of Apple Intelligence.

Customers need a company that acts and reasons like an adult.

gargs commented on ICQ will stop working from June 26 icq.com/desktop/en#window... · Posted by u/Uncle_Sam

aeyes · 2 years ago

I don't remember file transfer being very reliable, it used direct connections between clients so if you had a router it wouldn't work.

gargs · 2 years ago

We only had dial-up connections with a real IPv4 address back when I used ICQ.

gargs commented on ICQ will stop working from June 26 icq.com/desktop/en#window... · Posted by u/Uncle_Sam

gargs · 2 years ago

It was way ahead of its time even in the 90s. I remember being swooned by the real-time typing windows, amazing sound effects, Just Works™ file transfer, and the wonderful contact list with people decorating their names with ASCII art. I made some wonderful friends in real life.

gargs commented on As clicks dry up for news sites, could Apple's news app be a lifeline? semafor.com/article/05/19... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

gargs · 2 years ago

Maybe, but Apple has proven to be exceptionally bad at rolling out their services globally if they fail to obtain some arbitrary scale.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/118205

gargs commented on The Lost Worlds of Telnet (2019) thenewstack.io/the-lost-w... · Posted by u/wannacboatmovie

vouaobrasil · 2 years ago

My public library system used to have their catalogue on telnet. I liked it a lot because it was a simple, direct interface where you could look stuff up. Now decades later, I bring up the site and see it loads 120kb of fonts, or more than the entire data sent and received by a typical telnet session.

Ah...I wish websites were made to be more efficient. Sad.

gargs · 2 years ago

This was my immediate thought upon seeing the title! I used to love the library telnet server, which worked for searching, placing a hold, renewing, and even inter-library loans. There was also rudimentary full-text search of engineering journals. Today, it's a 'modern' website with tons of whitespace, non-customizable fonts, and links out to events and what not. Simplicity is such a wonderful feature and yet it's somehow completely orthogonal to modern engineering.

gargs commented on Why tech job interviews became such a nightmare wired.com/story/why-tech-... · Posted by u/namanyayg

hprotagonist · 2 years ago

My perspective has long been -- since well before the free money printer stopped going brr -- that the reason tech interviews are insane has little to do with rising interest rates or monetary factors per se.

It's because tech dev / coding jobs are one of the few white collar fields that, historically, have not de-facto required a pile of advanced degrees. Maybe i'm getting old, but "you don't need a degree if you're hot shit" has long been part of the atmosphere: from old school hackers to the long history of founders who drop out of school to work on their startup, etc.

This directly leads to interviews being the gate: if we can't know what you are by what degrees you have / what papers you published / what lab you did your dissertation in / what bar exam you passed / what hospital you did your residency in / who you clerked for / etc. ... then we're going to have to do all 4-8 years of post-undergrad pain and suffering all at once, during the interview, so grab a whiteboard and buckle up!

It's ... less than ideal.

edit: what's less than ideal is the perverse incentive force that creates bad interviews. The recognition that a degree doesn't guarantee job fit is not a bad one, though; you really can be more successful in software dev if you're self-taught / uncredentialed than you can in many other disciplines.

gargs · 2 years ago

...and after passing that hurdle, you're suddenly exposed to a large body of work in the organization that has no processes to ensure continuity and modernization other than some rudimetary coding styles and PR/code review flows. The only way to stick around is to make your output so incomprehensible that the only way to maintain it is to keep the lead around.

For all the talk about hiring the best, once they're in the goal becomes to stop hands-on development as quickly as possible and to add friction to improving the knowledge repository as much as possible.

gargs commented on Why tech job interviews became such a nightmare wired.com/story/why-tech-... · Posted by u/namanyayg

gargs · 2 years ago

Gatekeeping also has something to do with this.