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iOS 15 Humane

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Re: iOS 15 Humane

#261

Post by latch »

bengale wrote: post #258
eloisius wrote: post #254

If I could ask Apple for one thing it would be to require approval of every push notification that an app developer wants to deliver. That an app gets either cart blanche to send me notifications or nothing at all drives me crazy. I don't want to miss a notification that my delivery food arrived, but I don't want to be bombarded with daily advertising messages from foodpanda trying to get me to change my behavior. Re…

Something really should be done about this. The food delivery apps are worst for this, they seem to know you can't turn alerts off without losing a key feature, but then use it to advertise. They should be made to split this out so you can turn one off without the other. I'd love to customise the alert level for news apps. I would leave on actually important breaking news, but I have to turn it all off because they b…

> The food delivery apps are worst for this

My bank, which is otherwise great, does this. Critically important push notifications and a pretty steady stream of meaningless advertisement.

Re: iOS 15 Humane

#262

Post by squiggleblaz »

mosselman wrote: post #134
tpm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the kid will be given the iPhone and not the breadboard.

Where are the parents? Who is giving kids phone instead of something else? Also, why should kids tinker with computers if they can explore art by painting or music by learning an instrument or literature by reading? What makes it important for them to use Unix rather than something that works fine the way it is while maintaining some standard of UX? If kids show an interest in computers, they can just install unix on…

> What makes it important for them to use Unix rather than something that works fine the way it is while maintaining some standard of UX?

The concern is whether the device is a piece of paper or a television. A television can show much more complex images under the control of the average child, but it is purely for consumption. A piece of paper lets you display anything you can draw or you can turn it into a paper plane or do origami, but the realism of the resulting products is going to be much less, and they will be relatively static.

An iPhone is, by design, a television. Unix systems are pieces of paper.

Last time I used MacOS, it was a functional piece of paper and it worked as a television too, so there isn't really any dichotomy here. Any television could be built on top of a piece of paper and give you access to the base level too.

The concern is that the television is winning out: even though Android and iOS are built from pieces of paper, their maintainers only bless television-like interfaces. Frankly, I believe a major part of this is because they're built on top of Unix like interfaces, which is based certain assumptions that they don't want to maintain. So I certainly wouldn't say Unix-like is the solution.

Re: iOS 15 Humane

#263

Post by andai »

grishka wrote: post #259
eloisius wrote: post #254

If I could ask Apple for one thing it would be to require approval of every push notification that an app developer wants to deliver. That an app gets either cart blanche to send me notifications or nothing at all drives me crazy. I don't want to miss a notification that my delivery food arrived, but I don't want to be bombarded with daily advertising messages from foodpanda trying to get me to change my behavior. Re…

It's more interesting in Android. There's no notification permission , as every app is able to send notifications by default. But, there are notification categories. You can turn them off individually. Yes, the app developer is supposed to specify them themselves. And most actually do. Those who don't drive me nuts tho. I'm very careful with what I receive notifications about. Apple could definitely copy that. Right…

>notifications disappear by themselves when you unlock the phone

I get a bunch of messages from my friend on Steam, so I tap to read them, but if I tap the wrong way it opens the app instead, makes all the messages disappear, and I have to wait until I get to a place with internet again before I can see what he said.

Re: iOS 15 Humane

#264

Post by GordonS »

stef25 wrote: post #184

For me the only situation I consider "ok" for mindless browsing is while keeping and eye on the kids. Reading a book or anything else that requires concentration is impossible because you have to look up / intervene every x minutes. The whole mobile online experience has become so bad, it's soul destroying. I don't go near social media anymore and prefer to just read interesting things. While not signed in to Google…

> While not signed in to Google (because fck that), every search I do is met with a Google disclaimer I have to tap 3x to reach the bottom and tap once more to "agree" (no idea what I'm agreeing to)

Oh, this drives me nuts - it's every.single.time I open google in a private tab! I mean, they know* that nobody is reading this before hitting "I agree".

Re: iOS 15 Humane

#265

Post by andai »

latch wrote: post #261
bengale wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something really should be done about this. The food delivery apps are worst for this, they seem to know you can't turn alerts off without losing a key feature, but then use it to advertise. They should be made to split this out so you can turn one off without the other. I'd love to customise the alert level for news apps. I would leave on actually important breaking news, but I have to turn it all off because they b…

> The food delivery apps are worst for this My bank, which is otherwise great, does this. Critically important push notifications and a pretty steady stream of meaningless advertisement.

What kind of important notifications does your bank send? I don't think I've gotten a single notification from my bank about anything. They do still send paper mail though.

Re: iOS 15 Humane

#266

Post by foobarbecue »

indigochill wrote: post #249
spython wrote: post #149

The article wants Apple to save us from mindless browsing, but I see mindless browsing as unavoidable. Not because of some technical or legal thing, but because mindless browsing is a good thing. We need it. Mindless browsing is like a walk through the woods, just looking for what is happening, navigating a huge amount of information that is hardly important at the moment – oh, the cherry tree is blooming – but could…

This is why I enjoy hanging out in the tildeverse ( https://tildeverse.org/ ). It's just a loose group of public boxes you can SSH into and chat on (some of them share mailing lists, but others don't). Some people make websites or games or tools or whatever. But none of it is organized. It's just people hanging out online.

Thanks, tildeverse looks fun! Just found the first clear, simple explanation of Makefiles I've read on there.

Re: iOS 15 Humane

#267

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

threatofrain wrote: post #239
toomanyducks wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's well past midnight, I've been interacting with apps designed to maximize 'user engagement' since 8 PM. I don't have coherent thoughts, I'm opening irrelevant tabs habitually. This is not healthy. I have a problem. That problem is mindless browsing, and it feels engineered. Not saying you're wrong, just that your ideas don't work for me.

FB may try to maximize whatever appeal they have, but does persuasive design really stack up against persuasive friends? What is the fundamental ammo behind FB's ability to manipulate FOMO? Isn't it friendship and social delight?

Except that many FB friends aren't really friends. We don't have a word for "People we don't talk to about anything important but who also enjoy cat videos."

If we did, that's where FB would live. It's a kind of friendship surrogacy - noisy and occasionally entertaining, but facile and shallow.

And that's the definitive effect of ad tech. It makes everything facile and shallow.

Politics becomes polarised and infantile and hostile to nuance. Social interactions become gamified ("Follow me and I'll follow you back to help both of us reach 1,000/10,000/100,000/millions!") Clicking Like becomes a displacement activity which avoids real political change. Relationships become performative. Businesses become all about engagement and persuasion - using the same old template of techniques and page designs - and not about social value.

I think it's naive to expect Apple to push against this, because Apple are part of the problem. Apple World is a shiny place which includes exactly the correct number of minorities and age demographics all living the officially approved clean, smiling, sunny, fit, healthy, efficiently organised, and brightly decorated middle class consumer lifestyle that Apple products try to personify.

This isn't even about technology. FAANG (and Microsoft) have created a shockingly undiverse collection of overlapping online worlds which define too many elements of work time and personal space - and all with a 1950s tone of optimised conformist consumption, mandated self-improvement, and transactional time trading.

Re: iOS 15 Humane

#268

Post by user-the-name »

megous wrote: post #237
user-the-name wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS alone has far, far more tools for creativity than Linux has ever had. "Creativity" doesn't mean "tinkering with kernel settings".

I doubt it. Every single time I have to do something more complicated on one of these GUI only devices, I get to appreciate how GNU/Linux ecosystem allows me to actually combine the power of multiple tools to achieve what I want quickly and my way. Combining simple apps together like lego building blocks to build something, is where it shines.

That is not creativity, that is just wanting to do things your specific way, which is a way most people do not really prefer.

Re: iOS 15 Humane

#269

Post by [deleted] »

bipson wrote: post #253
spython wrote: post #149

The article wants Apple to save us from mindless browsing, but I see mindless browsing as unavoidable. Not because of some technical or legal thing, but because mindless browsing is a good thing. We need it. Mindless browsing is like a walk through the woods, just looking for what is happening, navigating a huge amount of information that is hardly important at the moment – oh, the cherry tree is blooming – but could…

I disagree wholeheartedly. Mindless browsing will occupy my attention, keeps me distracted and on the edge, draining my energy and mental capacity, makes me jittery - even if this realization took me quite some time. A walk in the woods is refreshing and my mind is focused, wandering maybe aimlessly, but well-paced, on its own time, makes me relaxed and open-minded. We like distraction, our mind craves it, often we d…

[deleted]

Re: iOS 15 Humane

#270

Post by spython »

andrepd wrote: post #195
spython wrote: post #149

The article wants Apple to save us from mindless browsing, but I see mindless browsing as unavoidable. Not because of some technical or legal thing, but because mindless browsing is a good thing. We need it. Mindless browsing is like a walk through the woods, just looking for what is happening, navigating a huge amount of information that is hardly important at the moment – oh, the cherry tree is blooming – but could…

A walk through the woods is not engineered by Las Vegas casino designers backed by petabytes of user data to be as addictive as possible. There's taking an aimless stroll and there's compulsively opening reddit or facebook at 3am.

Yes, of course it has a lot to do with information hygiene. We need to be more particular about what we let into our minds, we just don't have the tradition for it yet.

Browsing facebook is more like taking a walk in a dystopian junkyard than a forest, and a sign by Apple saying "you might be browsing a junkyard" would just add to this dystopia. This is why the proposal is to design better spaces for mindless browsing, since we apparently need it.

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