Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th November 2024 - eviltoast

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • nightsky@awful.systems
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    2 days ago

    The ongoing trend of ā€œflat UIā€ is largely not due to processing power though. Even inexpensive computers have CPUs and GPUs that could push very fancy graphics without problems, see what the same machines can do in game graphics (and I donā€™t mean high-end gaming, I mean the kind of simple gaming that can run on a low-end laptop these days). Some of the early GUIs in the 1980s had ā€œflat designā€ due to performance limitations, but that went away in the 1990s. Today it could still be a reason in some embedded system scenarios with simple microcontrollers, but not in a desktop or laptop computer, and also not in smartphones or tablets.

    The reason we have the bland flat design is the same why we still have things like ā€œall surfaces are ugly glossy black plasticā€ (luckily this one is on its way out) or ā€œwar on physical buttonsā€ aka ā€œtouchscreens everywhereā€ā€¦ itā€™s simply a design trend.

    • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
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      2 days ago

      @nightsky ā€œtouchscreens everywhereā€ isnā€™t an aesthetic choice, itā€™s a cost-of-goods choice: which adds more to the cost of a physical product, a bunch of bespoke embossed buttons/keys for specific tasks, or a single mass-produced touchscreen?

      Itā€™s the same reason modern electronics uses embedded microcontrollers rather than actual properly designed task-specific gate arrays.

    • Steve@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      I hear you, but I didnā€™t say flat ui is due to processing power. My line of thought is that a sudden bump in available processing power might prompt designers to feel that elaborate uis are fine now because despite flat ui not being an efficiency thing, it is definitely perceived as one by the average designer who doesnā€™t know how much of the css used to render it is generated client-side via js