generated

script artifacts/script-altVO.txt

@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ But then the great mistake was made, which was: well if people react to computer
 "i don't provide the weather, only help with the documentation"
 It's time to stop!
 won't somebody please think of the shareholders!
-something to the effect of "i just work on my config"
+"it's for *your* security. We're trying to protect you! It's not for our profit, of course..."
 coming back to this now that windows 11 is out...  imagine being able to move the taskbar.  we had no idea how good we had it back then.
 we're trying to make great products for people!
 the quote is very long

script artifacts/script-primaryVO.txt

@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
 
+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?
 **Get out of the user's fucking way.**
@@ -9,16 +10,14 @@ Thank you for attending my ted talk, video over.
 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 other than real time chat, to justify asking you for money. Meanwhile it only exists in the first place because skype was bloated full of junk, and it only persists because their userbase refuses to use Matrix.
-
-Notice how every search company realizes that every website is overladen with trash, so they offer an "ai summary". If the accuracy ever gets good (it won't), that would be a great way to pull information out of a website without being told to sign in with google so that I can waive my privacy protections for their absolutely unnecessary cookies to then decline to sign up for their newsletter and then tell their chatbot to go find somewhere else to be useless.
+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, computers don't need to pretend to be human. how would we change our bad assistant into a good one?
+let's learn the lesson that clippy's project managers didn't: we already anthropomorphize our technology, computers should aim to be less like a person and more like a useful tool.
 
 
 
@@ -32,8 +31,7 @@ you know why people put up with google's tracking? because for as much dumb bull
 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 virtually unable to navigate it is absurd.
-yet again, 100% of interactions with phones are miserable and infuriating. And I don't mean other people on social media, I mean smartphones themselves.
+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.
 
 
 Do what you can, and no more.
@@ -46,8 +44,8 @@ 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.
-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 cute white flash effect. That's why 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. I get the impression including the real labels of what the keys are supposed to do was a begrudging concession. 
+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 fun white flash effect. That's why 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. 
 
 
 no one wants to chat with your "AI".
@@ -62,19 +60,19 @@ So some cufflink-wearing motherfucker said "great, people will emotionally conne
 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. The arms race between users trying to disable cortana and microsoft "accidentally" reenabling her could be its own video.
-years pass, the most glorified markov chain in the world, chatGPT, conqueres society.
+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. 
 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? 
 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 that happens again.
+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 that happens again.
 
 
 indulge me one last tangent to complain about AI.
 openweathermap.org has a chatbot. 
 FUCKING... WHY? 
-so that I can look past the weather forecast to ask it to tell me?
+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!
 ...let's try it.
 THE PERFUNCTORY CHATBOT ON THE WEATHER SITE DOESN'T EVEN TELL YOU THE GOD. DAMNED. WEATHER!!!
 
@@ -89,7 +87,7 @@ 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 blessing through 3rd party app stores,
+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.
 
 
@@ -99,16 +97,9 @@ So in the extremely rare event that a person actually googles something, and the
 imagine the *audacity* it takes to *stop them from reading* to ask them to sign up for a newsletter. You know, in case they like this experience so much they want to come back for more of it. Your function is to be read, putting junk in the way of the text is the opposite of that.
 
 
-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 pinnacle of getting in the way. 
-the Floating. Action. Button.
-it's a software screen notch.
-
-
 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 because first and foremost it's about the shareholders, people don't get the same. 
-However, 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.
+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.
@@ -123,24 +114,20 @@ 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.
 
 
-Clearly something is wrong with my DAVx. What, though? fuck knows.
 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 completely fucked, 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.
 
-Surprisingly, there's an example of this getting better: vehicles!
-for years, a "check engine" light meant "take it into the dealer and just pay whatever they demand". But nowadays, you can buy a decoder for that signal relatively affordably, and actually see what the error code is - possibly even fix the problem yourself!
+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, quote-unquote security is the excuse for user-hostility - 
-"it's for *your* security. We're trying to protect you! It's not for our profit, of course..."
+Security theater has a lot of overlap with other problems. Most often, lying about security is the excuse for user-hostility - 
 
 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, for all the effort they put into telling you that the petty ritual of dominance they're enact on you is for your protection, they miss 70% of test weapons.
+Meanwhile in the US, for all the effort they put into telling you that the petty ritual of dominance they're enacting on you is for your protection, they miss 70% of test weapons.
 ..hey, remember in 2008 when the TSA felt they weren't getting the respect the entitled themselves to, so they switched their uniforms to look exactly like police officers?
 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.
-Here's some ideologues, who theoretically *want* to propagate their ideas into as many minds, maybe even neural networks, as possible? Mysterious connection timeout.
+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.
 
 
 conform to known paradigms.
@@ -160,17 +147,23 @@ There's a wise comment on that accursed farms video:
 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. But the whole premise that customization is unimportant is bad. 
+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. Just ask the air force.
 
 
 
 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.
-no one wants to chat with your chatbot - if anyone wants to have a conversation, it's with a person, because your technology doesn't work. Get the notification out of the way.
 scrolling is not an ℯ𝓍𝓅ℯ𝓇𝒾ℯ𝓃𝒸ℯ, every vehicle website ever.
 If you want to "customize my experience" before I'm allowed to have one, the answer to all of your questions is "whatever gets you to go fuck yourself".
 
+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. 
+