161–170 of 262 posts
You know what's cyberpunk to me? Cyberpunk isn't about having robotic body parts and netrunning in cyberspace through your brain implants in a chrome-and-neon-encrusted arcology. Cyberpunk is owning a Taiwanese bargain-basement PC and booting Linux on it in 1995. Because like real punk rock, Linux was DIY and it showed -- it was messy. When you booted it up, there was no sugarcoating -- no warm and friendly bootup sound, no happy Mac smiling back at you. The various bits and bobs that made up a working Linux system started chattering to you -- all at once: first the drivers and kernel subsystems, then the init scripts, then some of the user-space daemons, all telling you unbidden how their day is going. Every component of the system told you what was going on with it, for good or ill. It would've been quite alarming to a normie; 1995 was far from the year of the Linux desktop. But I appreciated it.
And I resent error messages that try to mollycoddle me as a user. Apologies, "Something went wrong :(", and so forth. Just tell me, in the most rigid machine-like way, what happened. A stack trace would be helpful if the failed bit is open source.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This went viral a couple years ago: https://twitter.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594 Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34812857
From the discussion "This seems to be part of a broader, ongoing software infantilization process. Colors can't be sober either, everything has to be colorful, cheerful." What kind of shallow charicature of a tough guy do you have to be that seeing colours makes you feel like a baby and that cheerful is a bad thing , something to be stopped? > " Besides the obvious inappropriateness " Obvious?? All tools should be mo…
Is it so surprising that people expect tools they use for business to look and act professionally?
I don't even like "We" in UI messages. "We couldn't find that site." "We're just updating your computer." Perhaps I'm just an old fogey, but passive voice feels like the only right choice: "The site could not be found." "Your computer is being updated." The insertion of "We" feels like an imposition; the company who wrote the code reaching in and enacting their will with your equipment, using your screen as their soa…
“We” is a Microsoft-ism they started with Windows 10. Yes, it is horrible, because it puts the user into a minority position against an anonymous “we” that apparently controls the system. It has a belittling and patronizing tone that emphasizes the user being powerless and non-autonomous, who instead has to be taken care of by, and is at the mercy of, the anonymous “we”.
We should insult the user. “Your edits did not persist due to an unknown network error. Fuck you!”
"APPLICATION ERROR. SAVE YOUR WORK AND QUIT. YOU LOST EVERYTHING. WAY TO GO, GENIUS."
I don't even like "We" in UI messages. "We couldn't find that site." "We're just updating your computer." Perhaps I'm just an old fogey, but passive voice feels like the only right choice: "The site could not be found." "Your computer is being updated." The insertion of "We" feels like an imposition; the company who wrote the code reaching in and enacting their will with your equipment, using your screen as their soa…
I blame Google for popularizing that. Honestly it was fine enough for a YouTube error, "we couldn't find that video." But then everyone started copying it, including Microsoft who, in Windows 8, updated the blue screen of death to have a "whoopsie poopsie! Your computer has a widdle boo boo!" type message, accented with a :( sad face emoticon. Which I can guarantee was presented to countless people who lost real work…
I don't even like "We" in UI messages. "We couldn't find that site." "We're just updating your computer." Perhaps I'm just an old fogey, but passive voice feels like the only right choice: "The site could not be found." "Your computer is being updated." The insertion of "We" feels like an imposition; the company who wrote the code reaching in and enacting their will with your equipment, using your screen as their soa…
What about passive voice for the software error, then apologize with we in the name of whoever developed that software?
I don't even like "We" in UI messages. "We couldn't find that site." "We're just updating your computer." Perhaps I'm just an old fogey, but passive voice feels like the only right choice: "The site could not be found." "Your computer is being updated." The insertion of "We" feels like an imposition; the company who wrote the code reaching in and enacting their will with your equipment, using your screen as their soa…
I still use "we" whenever I'm emailing clients, except now it's to sound like there is more than just me in this dept.