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+100% of interactions with phones are miserable and infuriating. And I don't mean other people on social media, I mean smartphones themselves.
+Let me share with you my UX design manifesto.
+ready? Are you all prepared to take notes?
+[from the diaphragm, project]
+**Get out of the user's fucking way.**
+Thank you for attending my ted talk, video over.
+
+...no alright, I'll elaborate. There is, or could be, technology that exists to be a means to an end. Instead, software in CurrentYear is entirely an exercise in being an obstacle. 
+I'll break it down to some rules.
+
+[the word "experience": sardonically]
+Software is a means to an end. But app developers think they're crafting an ℯ𝓍𝓅ℯ𝓇𝒾ℯ𝓃𝒸ℯ. 
+They want to *increase* the time spent in an app. I assume this is favorable for ad revenue metrics. For those of us who actually do things, an app is a tool, and a tool is better when it *decreases* the time it takes to get shit done.
+
+take for example, Discord. They've given themselves loads of work to produce features, to justify asking you for money. Meanwhile it only exists in the first place because skype was bloated full of junk, all of the extra stuff makes the app slower. I get it; groceries and servers are expensive. nevertheless, their addiction to "progress" is harming their product.
+
+The entire world of technology is mislabeled. the definition of technology is about applying knowledge to achieve practical goals. It's far more profitable to hide the fact that your only actual goal is extracting value from the people who ostensibly should be your customers. 
+That's why the only practical goal to achieve at the moment is adversarial APIs. We don't need yet another skin on your phone's built in music player, we need the possibility for your phone to install new audio codecs and an ecosystem of it.
+
+Accursed Farms has inspiration on how to build better UIs.
+
+let's learn the lesson that clippy's project managers didn't: we already anthropomorphize our technology, we should spend less effort having it pretend to be our friend, and more effort making it useful.
+
+
+[we're going to be composing a rules list, this will be a rule - slightly slower, take slightly more effor to enunciate.]
+Do what you can, and no less.
+
+This one is a well known one from our predecessors, graybeards from before even myself - they said that The Linux Way is to do only one thing, and do it well.
+Or, as the world's favorite libertarian would say: 
+[we'll cut to ron swanson here saying to not half-ass 2 things, whole-ass 1 thing]
+example: GPS.
+you know why people put up with google's tracking? because for as much dumb bullshit as waze is laden with, for as wrong as apple is, and for as much as google maps is a thinly veiled excuse for google to catalog your gps position down to the meter and second... 
+those 3 are the only apps that 
+* offer driving directions and 
+* understand the concept of a road.
+again, what is the function of a GPS app? To tell you where you are and how to get somewhere. So the concept of a street map and navigation app that doesn't understand the concept of a street and therefore is effectively unable to navigate it is absurd.
+
+[another rule]
+Do what you can, and no more.
+["whole-ass" is a verb]
+again, focus on your function. whole-ass 1 thing. Confucious said, to go beyond is as wrong as to fall short. Or if you prefer, Dr Ian Malcolm said:
+[we'll cut to dr malcom in jurassic park saying "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they never asked if they should". So in the next line, that's what "should you?" refers to - it's an honest question, and asking it rejects the idea that the default is "yes".]
+so, ask. Should you?
+
+for example, keyboards on laptops.
+my laptop, much like every single other laptop I have ever seen within the last 15 years, is the least-bad design I could find. Laptop keyboards are universally moronic. 
+as a person who understands the concept of a file, I habitually save often.
+[flashbang: a verb. I'm referring to counter-strike here]
+looking at my keyboard, the place where many years of muscle memory have trained me to hit the ctrl key, there’s an "fn" key instead, and the ctrl key is moved over to where i expect the windows key. fn + s is screenshot. Cinnamon's screenshot app has a white flash effect. So I flashbang myself *often*.
+apparently, if you design a laptop keyboard, a prerequisite is some kind of brain damage that makes you think people want all kinds of bullshit instead of the keys on a keyboard. Fortunately, mine was able to be set once to let the keys do what they’re supposed to. However, on my black keyboard illuminated by my mostly black screen with a couple of points of extremely bright LEDs, I can see the unnecessary functions' white labels, and the actual f key labels have a dark blue one. 
+
+[another rule]
+no one wants to chat with your "AI".
+
+the current state of the art of quote-unquote AI manages to both not do what it should, and do so much more stuff rather than what it should. But it's *such* a problem it deserves to be ranted about for a million-and-first time.
+
+[can you believe they just *bought* a nuclear power plant? I'm still surprised. they can just buy one! like it's just a retail item!]
+Microsoft, being so large that they have so much money that they taught us you're allowed to just *buy* a nuclear power plant, of course is sinking all of their money (and none of their brainpower) into the current thing everyone hates.
+[we'll have emperor palpatine on screen, in that scene where he asks anakin "have you heard the tale of darth plageus" - can you match that tone? don't do a full on, saturday morning cartoon villain voice, but a partial impression]
+have you heard the tale of Clippy?
+
+Way back, some cutting-edge psychological research was done that demonstrated people anthropomorphize their computers, and hate them like they would hate a person.
+["cufflink-wearing motherfucker" is an insult, for his quote can you do it slightly wacky. in the past i've done the alternating caps to describe this, but the quote is longer so it shouldn't be as intense]
+So some cufflink-wearing motherfucker said "great, people will emotionally connect with their computer more favorably if we anthropomorphize it." 
+Now you start up your word processor and it jumps in the way to say hi and chat about how it can interfere.
+Fortunately, clippy was killed off pretty quickly. As long as people are projecting a personality onto their computer, we hated clippy as intensely as we'd hate any other pest. And of course there are some people who felt the opposite. I'll leave a link in the show notes to an erotic fan fiction starring clippy that you can actually buy.
+
+Microsoft eventually came to their senses and euthanized clippy. Then a few years later, they bought Halo. Once that story concluded, some idiot at microsoft figured they could try again to make clippy happen, as Cortana. 
+years pass, the most glorified markov chain in the world conqueres society.
+Cortana is dead. 
+[have the next line sound sinister]
+Now, microsoft will make you love Copilot. 
+Remember how they tripped over their own dick right out of the gate by starting at step 1 with a feature that automatically screenshots your credit card details and passwords? 
+[it is not actually good times, aim for a tone of gallows humor.. laughing to not be depressed]
+hah, good times.
+Recently they're preparing to roll it out again, this time assuring us it's opt-in-only. Given their track record of "accidentally" forgetting that a user didn't opt in, I don't think anyone's going to be surprised when they forget again.
+
+
+indulge me one last tangent to complain about AI.
+[slower so that the insanity of the statement comes through]
+openweathermap.org has a chatbot. 
+[annoyed. Push more air from the diaphragm, a bit louder, but not shouting quite yet]
+FUCKING... WHY? 
+[again at the more annoyed tone, volume back down]
+so that I can look past the weather forecast to ask it to tell me? If anyone wants to have a conversation, it's with a person. And the reason to talk to a person rather than use your technology is that your technology doesn't work; the answer to that problem is not more, newer, less working technology!
+[reset tone. Open minded, as if with a shrug]
+...let's try it.
+[full-throated, ideally on the other side of the room. I may add in background noise of stuff being thrown around]
+THE PERFUNCTORY CHATBOT ON THE WEATHER SITE DOESN'T EVEN TELL YOU THE GOD. DAMNED. WEATHER!!!
+
+[another rule]
+Work *with* the user
+
+...as opposed to *against* the user. Honestly it's amazing how much is out there working *against* the user, but still has users.
+The dominant social networks are all infamous for messing with your timeline. The timeline is their whole function. 
+but I've already complained about that.
+
+
+question: how do you automate your phone? if you try and do some research online, both sides of the walled gardens have a *plethora* of stupid ways to decrease your productivity of automating *other* stuff *from* your phone. But since your phone is the nexus of your security and identity, you aren't allowed to let anything go poking around in it.
+So there is almost *no* concept of "automating a phone".
+And therefore you'll have to pull up DAVx and hit refresh, manually.
+You're begrudgingly allowed to install apps without google's or apple's blessing through 3rd party app stores,
+but you **may. not.** automatically update them.
+
+
+because no one likes ads, if you're a professional Marketer, you market *yourself* on the grounds that you can make a stronger impression. Which means making your ads more intrusive.
+Everyone hates ads. Everyone hates pop-up ads **much** more, because they pop-up.
+I would have thought this was obvious both experientially and tautologically, and yet...
+So in the extremely rare event that a person the wider internet for something to buy, and the even more rare event that they find a good result, they might read the web page.
+imagine the *audacity* it takes to *stop someone from trying to give you money* to ask them to participate in some extraneous junk. 
+
+
+The digital markets act of 2022 in the EU granted advertising corporations the right to view the data they've generated, the right to take their data to other platforms. In other words, big tech gatekeepers don't get to lay claim to advertisers and treat them like property. It demonstrates we all know interoperability is great and enclosure is bad, 
+but only shareholders, people don't get the same. 
+When making a useful tool, interoperability is the most important thing. Before praising AI, before praising the iPhone, society loved that the internet connected everyone together. We had a futurist optimism that ideas and communication could flow, making the world a better place and building Great Things.
+That didn't happen, though. 
+Now when you try to get two technologies to work together, they do what they can to inhibit you.
+GMail does not like when you try to use a different mail client - perhaps one with a working spam filter.
+Cars used to be forced to use a standard headlight - but naturally that was lobbied to death.
+
+[another rule]
+Be Transparent.
+
+They say knowledge is power, which explains why businesses obfuscate as much as possible from their users. Ask any doctor how much anything costs, they don't know. Ask any mechanic how much something would cost, they don't know. Yet they expect you to agree to be on the hook to pay an amount they'll decide later. 
+
+Hidden information is bad. 
+Software should have observability for itself during development, and you might as well provide that same observability to your users while you're at it.
+
+
+Apple says phones "just work", so the world keeps the faith. When something doesn't work, if there are logs, good luck finding them. On a real computer, if the whole thing is fubar, you can reformat and start from scratch. If your emacs configuration is out of control, you can do the same - "declare emacs bankruptcy". 
+But if your phone appears to be haunted?
+Shrug, throw it in the trash and buy a new one.
+
+let's not retread what apple hath wrought against the right to repair.
+
+
+Security theater has a lot of overlap with other problems. Most often, lying about security is the excuse for user-hostility - 
+
+[the next section was almost half the length of the script. so I'm going to have a sort of glitch-effect to cut each sentence. so, please read these a bit faster, slightly agitated]
+Surely I don't have to remind you that flying is a nightmare, almost entirely for 1 reason: the TSA, which is undeniably, *purely* security theater
+-Meanwhile in the US, where the shoe bomber was headed, for all the effort they put into telling you that their petty rituals of dominance are for your protection, they miss 70% of test weapons -
+-in 2008 when the TSA felt they weren't getting the respect the entitled themselves to, they switched their uniforms to look exactly like police officers-
+[a good time to take a deep breath. reset tone to normal]
+ok, TSA tangent over, back to nerd shit.
+Websites are afraid of DDoS attacks. A web server is a fallible thing that can only deliver so much. But that isn't why a disgusting number of websites block VPNs - as evidenced by the fact that they give you a professionally styled frontend webpage saying they'll let you read if you sign in.
+
+[a new rule]
+conform to known paradigms.
+
+You know how a save icon is a floppy disk? A type of storage media so old, I bet if you're listening to this you physically can't use it. But the association has stuck.
+You know how on mobile, the menu of all your options is probably 3 parallel, horizontal lines, a.k.a. the hamburger menu? another association that everyone just went with.
+IRL, this extends much further. Red light means stop, green light means go. 
+So when you have an action that could be destructive, you color-code it red, and when something is constructive, you color-code it green.
+["arbitrary" is a neutral description here]
+These associations are arbitrary. But since they're there, we keep them.
+Can you touch type? imagine I presented you with a blank keyboard. You'd still be able to type, due to a lifetime of training.
+Prime example: recent episode of LTT had them forcing android on some iPhone users. To summarize, there's a circle with a symbol in it, and surprise! it doesn't respond to being tapped like every other button, it wants you to drag sideways.
+
+[another rule]
+Allow customization.
+
+There's a wise comment on that accursed farms video:
+[we'll cut to a read of that comment]
+Why can't you move the taskbar in windows 11? so that it can look like OSX. What is the only rationalization that apple investors have been giving for apple's success? That apple has good taste in interface design. Apple insists that their UX is good because of the decisions they've made for it.
+When apple speaks, the rest of the world obeys. so customization options are viewed as less and less important.
+not to mention, if you're stopped from customization, for example modding in some armor for your horse... now it's something that can be sold to you instead.
+Companies love to dumb everything down, and in response to criticism, blame it on a hypothetical group of lowest-common-denominator people. This way you're not presented with the ability to customize, it's moved behind a paywall. But the whole premise that customization is inessential is wrong.
+Normal is not a valid target. The air force learned this in the 40's.
+
+
+
+and finally, a short list of features that you know goddamn well no one wants.
+no one wants to sign up for your newsletter - you aren't interesting enough to fill one out. Just get the stupid notification out of the way.
+scrolling is not an ℯ𝓍𝓅ℯ𝓇𝒾ℯ𝓃𝒸ℯ, every vehicle website ever.
+Onboarding is at best a necessary evil.
+
+[we're going to have volume increasing for o, fortuna in the background. ]
+
+The worst UX antipattern emerged a while ago.
+It picks a permitted subset of functionality, moves it away from anywhere it could interoperate with other systems, entitles itself to priority over what you're trying to look at, so it can be in front of your eyeballs. 
+It's everything people hate about popup ads, but so commonly done that it gets enshrined in UI libraries. 
+the Floating. Action. Button.
+it's a software screen notch.
+The pinnacle of getting in the way. 
+
+So, again:
+Get out of the user's way.
+
+