I was in the mood for self-harm, so I decided to watch this. Ooh boy. "I'm from the former proprietary design ecosystem, and I'm here to help!"
"Local models remove the ethics problem!" is certainly a take about AI, in the implied context of the assumption that the desktop ecosystem should integrate AI as an inevitable future.
Before I bitch about everything in a liveblogging way, I should say that I am not against experiments in UI. A lot of what I want to do with Mercury is experimental UI, so that people can graphically assemble tiny components into bigger, highly personal applications without thinking they need (or are using) computer wizard skills, even on a tablet form factor. That is a giant bag of unanswered questions that should be expected to need trial and error.
The KDE desktop, on the other hand, does not need to play identity crisis. It's stable, comfortable, productive, and continues to be incrementally refined. Yes to experiments, but maybe not in the one full-featured reliable POSIX desktop that isn't fucking GNOME.
"The reason we have so many window managers and terminal emulators and file managers is that it's a sublimated desire for a better desktop paradigm." Okay Freud, you wanna cigar with that? CHRIST, BOY
I need you to know that, other than cropping roughly to the border of the video by hand, I have not doctored this still. It's at 26:06 apparently.
I was going to say "This is literally just people fucking with working things because they're bored and need clout" but I got psychologically T-boned as the video proceeded to the most alarming description of an experimental filesystem I have ever heard, and I'm including the joking description of GEFS as "the file shredder of the future" and every Harder Drive joke by Tom7.
"WinFS wouldn't just store your data, it remembered where you downloaded it from, who has worked on it... you know, that kind of thing... so you could actually have a history of what this file has been through." Yeah, I'm sure Microsoft was big into that, and to some degree revived this in spirit with the Copilot desktop "record your desktop at all times" lead balloon of a feature. I bet North Korea's big into that, too.
"You see things like WinFS and Nepomuk crash and burn, but live on in smaller ways in things like Spotlight and Baloo. It's easy to see this as proof the ideas were wrong, but they were just ahead of their time, before we had the hardware we have today."
BROSKI. WHO HAS RAM? In es economia? People still fucking hate Baloo and kill it when it uses a bunch of background resources. These ideas have been implemented to the exact limit that the public will tolerate them.
This is closely related to something I let slip without comment earlier about him talking shit about the size of the screen of the original Macintosh. Admittedly I am steeped like a teabag in permacomputing internet culture, my opinions may be more correct than average, but a dismissal of low-end hardware is a terrifying thing to hear from the guy who's volunteered himself to show up to your open source project on a "coffee is for closers" mission of fucking mercy. Alright? That's some horror movie kinda bad signs. Run. Run like you just got out of the shower in your new home to find the words "you're next" scrawled by a finger in your fogged mirror.
@MaddieM4 they’re just happy they’re not next, which is why they climbed up
Sharing this without context. Maybe that makes me the Grinch. Let the Fediverse rebuke me if I am, I can take it.
Oh god he's trotting out the Knuth quote. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
I'm not going to ask a field of internet strangers to watch a two hour history lesson by Casey Muratori that ends in a fucking Ginger Bill interview, but that quote did have a context. A complex, nuanced context, where the least damaging summary I can give is "this was based on studying a bunch of really tiny programs that were each basically just a main loop and some setup/teardown." Really closer to things we'd think of as function-scale today. The statistics from that study do not generalize to post-1980 software very well.
But you don't need me to tell you that, to know that the parade of charlatans who have borrowed this quote over my lifetime are the kind of people to blame for the Windows 12 task bar being a React application.
Okay, so the warping-sides demo is cool, if a bit funny to see using OS X as the starting point. This could easily be an optional KDE effect plugin that people with wide monitors would enjoy turning on, and find useful. I'm even chill with the idea that virtual desktops are a bit opaque for people outside the technorati.
I do find it a tell that the exact phrase he uses is "most consumers."
In a software context, I think part of the Star Trek utopia we should be striving for (and a sign we've achieved it) is putting a wooden stake through the heart of the word "consumer."
Windows reconfiguring into widgets is probably not going to be a viable KDE plugin. I do have to admit it's kinda cool, but less critically useful, and less likely to see application adoption.
The shake gesture, though, that can work with existing technology.
The document-associated clipboard stuff isn't ba-oh he's talking about AI in that now. Okay. Eating around the mold here. The idea isn't awful. But it's not a clipboard. It doesn't do the things a clipboard exists to facilitate. That is a different feature. Removing the clipboard in favor of this, which requires the concept of a document and associated document clipboard file, would be a criminal offense.
> ...a wooden stake through the heart of the word "consumer"
Same for the word "user", IMO. Very similar connotations to it: it's been too often used to mean someone incapable, lacking autonomy, needing a benefactor to make a decision for them. Which they do need, because we've been designing hostile and complex interfaces that strip them of said autonomy.
Compare that to the word "operator": evokes an image of someone operating a CNC machine, maybe piloting a helicopter...
@nobody I hadn't considered that, and I do have some TRON nostalgia for "user", but hot damn do you make a good point, and "operator" does slap. Imma let that marinate in my brain for the next couple days.
🙈 'fraid I'm not sure which "TRON" you're referring to, I'm a bit uncultured
But I doubt it's anything inherent about the word, I guess we must've tainted it over the past 3-4 decades? It's kind of likea miniature of the situation with, say, "negro" or "black": it's arguably not by-construction deragatory, but is made so through centuries of deragatory or dehumanizing usage.
@MaddieM4 ...tainted by the joint effort of the corporate and the sysadmin cultures
@nobody @MaddieM4 "Which TRON"?
There is only one TRON. The sequels are ... not worth considering.
I also have big nostalgia for TRON and "I fight for the users" -- and that was before I'd ever touched a computer.
Operator is a good word. I don't know if I want to replace "user" with it, but it's a good word choice.
Edited 11h ago
There is only one TRON
Yup!
(We are talking about the Japanese operating system, right?)
"So I could say 'map these', and then drag that map into my document."
I'll take "features I would never use, that would lurk rotting in the window manager/application code until I accidentally activate them and have to figure out what the fuck is going on and how to make it go away" for 100, Alex.
Not that I was doubting, but I do think this man has just proven his credentials as a former Apple designer.
"There's a lot of data we could collect, that makes me nervous, so I try to think about how to do telemetry in a more privacy-preserving way."
Yeah that's called turning off telemetry. I get money now please for be smart designer woman?
"So I looked for attention signals, and then plotted this web history, taking 50 nodes and converting them into 7, it's a very opinionated view..." Yes, and they're the opinions of an old white guy who has been doing UX for proprietary browsers for 30 years, and it shows. I'm racking my brain to see if I have any friends who would want this. This is peak solutions seeking problems on the missed connections section of Craigslist.
Oh, this isn't for users. Apparently. It was apparently research for the history/storytelling about data that people also will not use and will find invasive. Good shit, good shit. Love it up. Keep it up in Q4, we have to keep momentum up for acquisition.
In the Q&A, a member of the audience asks about the security implications of storing this much data, and compares it directly to Windows Recall. The presenter, Scott, says a few right-sounding things, already having some language for this problem: that you make the world's greatest honeypot, that this is why he focused on collecting attention metrics instead of content, and that Microsoft implemented the feature very stupidly (and that WE can do it better). That last part in particular plays well to the ego of the audience.
But Windows Recall wasn't just badly implemented. It was badly conceived. It was data collection that nobody wanted, all risk, no reward. Not seeing that, makes it seem even more likely than it already did that Scott would fall into the same concept-level failures. His point about people storing their bank credentials on computers doesn't invalidate this point, it makes it more harrowing. Linux desktop security is not okay (which is why misguided people reach to containers for salvation).
I do not care about memory, or storytelling, or having a pile of notes attached to every document, or some secretly-collected web of my activity, in my desktop. It's a productivity machine. Most of those are pointless and some are upsetting. I just want to use my tools without them trying to use or outsmart me.
Maybe it's not enough to say this is solutions in search of problems, because it's that but more so and in a specific way. The desktop has largely stopped evolving because it got good enough at a very wide variety of productivity and fun tasks, and then we ran out of legitimate room to sell new features. As someone who now sees the value of finished software, that's fucking fantastic, exactly what you want to see. It is literally only a problem, instead of a miracle, if you need to sell new features every quarter. It's contrived. And the only reason to contrive it is persuading people to spend money on the new version of a proprietary OS.
Hard pass, pal-o-mine.
@cyberquixote Literally every 20 seconds I hear a new thing best answered by the Black Panther "we don't do that here" meme. It actually casts a very poor light on some stuff I didn't even think to criticize early on in the video, where the guy acts like his proprietary experience is a valuable credential for open source, and that he's "atoning" for working at the worst companies, by bringing these valuable skills as a gift to FOSS.
The problem is, a word I've come to really find useful lately, *proprietisms.* I don't want to use Audre Lorde's "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's palace" as a thought-stopping cliche, but this guy comes from a world of milking users for money, data, and emotional investment. A world of moat-building. Many of the tools that work in that domain, for those goals, are toxic and unsuitable outside the non-consensual orgy of relentless user-fucking that Apple and Google embody.
There’s a useful generalisation of Conway’s law that software architecture follows not just the org chart of the company that produced it but the economic system that the company existed in and its goals within that system.
This is why I find most F/OSS reimplementations of some proprietary thing misguided. Almost every design decision in producing the original was driven by the requirements of the proprietary business model. Proprietary software is incentivised to:
Lock users into the ecosystem and make switching to an alternative hard.
Provide a platform that other companies can extend, but only in ways that encourage lock in.
Create complex artefacts that no other entity can recreate.
And so on. You can do all of these in a program that is technically free software, but then an end user will not see any of the possible benefits of Free Software other than the cost. And you train users to favour cheap software, when you should be training users to favour software that they can modify and extend in ways that you didn’t consider and don’t necessarily want (so they get their own version that shares most of the code with yours, and that’s fine, you have different requirements).
Designing software around user modification and extension requires a very different set of engineering principles.
Sorry for the repetition if I’ve said this to you before. It’s one of my more frequent rants, so there’s a reasonable chance that I have.
@david_chisnall @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote Then I shall share my own evergreen Conway's Law corollary:
There must be software designs we have never conceived because we do not have the social forms of organization that would be able to do so.
@david_chisnall I've been pointing this out about Mastodon at every feature they've been planning for years. I wish they'd stop trying to be Twitter/X.
@happyborg @david_chisnall @cyberquixote Ughhh YES! Why do I have a character limit at all, or at least, one that isn't like 20K characters or something? It's actually more protocol traffic in every single way to force people to split non-trivial thoughts into a series of tiny episodic installments like it's the fucking Quibi of Text. I'm currently getting my notifications blown up because I had a long popular thread yesterday. An "above the fold/below the fold" line would be a welcome feature so that stuff can still render humbly in a feed context. It's insane that Tumblr got this UI right. That's like the scene from The Good Place where Jason figures out what's going on - "HE figured it out? That's a new low."
Literally the only reason to have a character count you can plausibly hit (without, say, pasting the entire Bee Movie script or something) is to emulate Twitter/X, which is such a braindead goal that it deserves public mockery.
@MaddieM4 @happyborg@fosstodon.org @cyberquixote
Literally the only reason to have a character count you can plausibly hit (without, say, pasting the entire Bee Movie script or something) is to emulate Twitter/X
And the reason Twitter had the character limit was so that you could fit a tweet in an SMS message. Does anyone even operate an SMS to ActivityPub bridge?
@datarama @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote
100%. My thinking in this space is heavily biased by work done at Xerox Park and VPRI, as well as designs for mainframes that were discarded because they didn’t work with desktop computers that were a couple of orders of magnitude less powerful than the cheapest smartphone you can buy. But I wouldn’t claim to have explored more than one tiny corner of this design space.
@datarama @david_chisnall @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote No doubt! Like Ruha Benjamin says, technology always ships the culture of its makers. And the vast majority of our technology comes from a couple of monocultures, Silicon Valley and fossbros to name two. That leaves a lot of other cultures unrepresented, unprepared for.
@bright_helpings @datarama @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote
I’m not even convinced that these are distinct monocultures. There’s a narrative that the east and west coasts had different engineering cultures, but they were both spin outs from the UNIX world. Most of the non-UNIX-derived cultures have been sidelined (even Microsoft tends to hire NT kernel engineers who have experience on some open-source kernel, which is normally a UNIX derivative).
@david_chisnall @bright_helpings @datarama @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote Am reminded of Prof. Regehr's blog post on _inversions_ in computing: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1204 . Some techniques in computing are impractical/useless or practical/useful merely due to particular pressures (e.g. parts of a system happen to be faster or slower than others).