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ThisIsSin

Derive the current state of affairs from a frictionless spherical state of nature

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joined 2022 September 06 05:37:32 UTC 

				
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ThisIsSin


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Derive the current state of affairs from a frictionless spherical state of nature

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 06 05:37:32 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But 'pick a program to run' is not one of the problems which has an intrinsic 2d representation.




I respectfully disagree; 2D ancillary menus have several significant benefits over a bare terminal, but they still need a 1D terminal in that menu.  And I get that there was a significant time period, specifically between 1986 through 2006, where this wasn't the case.




The superior way to start an application is to type the name of the binary




But when I have two programs that start with the same name, like say Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, I'd have to type out the entire name to access the second application.  (I'd also have to know the name of the binary, that doesn't necessarily match the name on the box, and sometimes it isn't even a binary, but a part of one [so now you have to memorize the launch argument, and tab-autocomplete generally won't help you with that].)  With a proper menu representation (and I admit the Windows 10 and 11 are very much not this; StartAllBack is mandatory on Windows machines), the sequence is 'vis' (or similar) + [down arrow] + Enter, speed the terminal cannot hope to match (unless you decide to manually configure an alias for it- but a general purpose solution for this is a lot more convenient, because it works everywhere, which is the same argument vi users make about learning it).


Selecting text and objects is something else that has an intrinsic 2D representation for reasons that become obvious if you don't know how long the line is (which you kind of have to for terminal-based selection), or if you need to see the document you're copying from as well as the document you're pasting to.






Menus are tolerable if there are a few options to pick, like at the ATM




Menus are preferable here because, on an ATM, they're literally just keyboard buttons that map directly to the action.  If you want to withdraw 200 dollars, you don't have to translate '1. View Balance.  2. Deposit.  3. Withdraw.' -> 'Enter amount to withdraw' into keyboard commands, you press the [equivalent of the] 'Withdraw' keyboard key, and then the '200 dollars' key.  There's no potential of anyone misreading or mistranslating the input, since the menu changes based exactly on what's relevant at the time; it's drastically more intuitive.




Yes, keyboard searching might make that more tolerable, but can only hope to approach the comfort of the command line interface.




Computer interfaces have legitimately advanced since 1970 and that's OK.  They took a huge leap forward back when the OS wars weren't yet won, then slowed down, then came back for a time when OS X became relevant again, then desktop UX took a backseat to mobile UX.  (Which made a great leap forward in 2007, then another just as large one in 2009 with webOS, and then regressed to where we are today.)


In my opinion the world is overdue for a new desktop UX paradigm, since unlike the 2010s it's now crystal clear that desktop PCs (including laptops) will never go away, and it's time we go after the things we missed the last time, like how to display text in readable locations and not to truncate the important parts (which is also something the terminals still have problems with in applications that show data in tabs).  Maybe once someone figures out how to get an LLM to spit out all the hooks and hacks you need to reliably replace explorer.exe (not that the Windows source code isn't in LLM training sets already, of course), we'll finally get someone applying the UX research the rest of the way.






But at the end of the day, most vehicles are not picked for their infotainment system




Yeah, they're clearly picked in spite of it.


Unless you're Tesla or (to a point) Rivian, but those are software companies that just happen to make cars.  Every "X drives" video I watch on YouTube has the infotainment clearly lagging by a half second or more, and with the absurd power of even 15 year old computers this is just not a thing that should happen.  Car UX was legitimately better when the engineers (or rather, the execs directing the engineers) were forced into the simplest embedded development; as soon as they got access to something more advanced than embedded C it all went to shit.


And at this point I think good car UX is dead and buried because consumers aren't even in any position to care. Hey, at least the auto lanekeep will stop you from leaving the lane after you get flashbanged by drivers who are too brain-dead to turn their fucking brights off (or you're too busy fucking with the infotainment's lack of switches to be able to stay in your lane).