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I know that your comment can be read as unfairly hijacking a news item without adding much, and I'm also somewhat annoyed with it. But I know the place it's co

by sho_hn 3y ago

I know that your comment can be read as unfairly hijacking a news item without adding much, and I'm also somewhat annoyed with it. But I know the place it's coming from. After having been in tech for 20 years and having had the chance to write some code that runs on billions of devices now and so on, I also can't shake the growing sense that few of us work on solutions to relevant problems anymore, and the best we seem to be able to come up with - strapping screens to people's faces and forgetting the world - feels increasingly dystopic and like giving up completely. There's other stuff going on, some of it far more exciting, but my "where will this go if we build it?" critical filter is definitely a lot more primed now than it was in the early 2000s. And I think that's probably a good thing. On the news item though: I think an interesting new core UI gesture. If you remember those system-global text actions that were popularized in NeXTSTEP (and still stick around in systems like KDE's Plasma), this feels like a modern spin on it.

urbandw311er 3y ago
Hey thanks for embracing the idea of what I was trying to say, I think in all honesty it was a little bit of an early morning, pre-coffee snipe and it is a reasonably interesting UI gesture. Fortunately the ever-vigilant HN crowd put me in my place! ;-) But I can tell from the rest of your comment that you understand the main gist of where I'm coming from. Of course it's not Google's fault per-se, but as a megacorp full of big brains, many of them wasted on pointless, often-abandoned busy work, it does embody this idea that we've somehow lost our way as a species. We're on this weird treadmill of capitalism and we can't get off it, and while we're addicted to influencers peddling ridiculous sunglasses there really is some horrible stuff going down. We could do so much more if there was some magical way to re-organise the planet and its governance! Euughh, time for more coffee I think...

by sho_hn 3y ago

urbandw311er 3y ago

Hey thanks for embracing the idea of what I was trying to say, I think in all honesty it was a little bit of an early morning, pre-coffee snipe and it is a reasonably interesting UI gesture. Fortunately the ever-vigilant HN crowd put me in my place! ;-) But I can tell from the rest of your comment that you understand the main gist of where I'm coming from. Of course it's not Google's fault per-se, but as a megacorp full of big brains, many of them wasted on pointless, often-abandoned busy work, it does embody this idea that we've somehow lost our way as a species. We're on this weird treadmill of capitalism and we can't get off it, and while we're addicted to influencers peddling ridiculous sunglasses there really is some horrible stuff going down. We could do so much more if there was some magical way to re-organise the planet and its governance! Euughh, time for more coffee I think...