Hardly anybody wakes up and says “oh boy I can’t wait to Operate Photoshop today! I love Using the Browser!”
The greatest improvement you can make to my user experience is to disappear into my subconscious. you fetch and render pages and allow me to manipulate them. You are not what gives me joy. You are the tool I chose to find it.
Make a tool worth choosing.
Oct 26, 2026, 12:11 PM@davidgerard @Seirdy "[it] wants to be your friend"
Fifield. From "Prometheus". He does not want to be your friend. He wants to make money. As a geologist.
(I wonder which is more honest, given he turns into a monster later in the film anyway, having been exposed to the Black Goo.)
@Seirdy Long ago I read about a study comparing people’s styles of using computers: “hard” vs “soft” mastery, which came to either swearing at the computer or begging it to please work right. I thought at the time that this isn’t mastery, mastery begins precisely when the computer vanishes, and you’re just using your mind enhanced by reliable tools which you know well enough how to use that you don’t need to think about them anymore to solve the problem.
@Seirdy most people except weirdos like us don't even like to Use The Computer
@aburka but even we mostly enjoy using software that we shape, rather than software that’s handed to us in a “take it or leave it” state.
text editors, configurable desktop environments, shells, weird offline music playback setups, software we help develop, etc. experiences we create, not experiences we consume. the experience is building something and appreciating it, not mere operation of a tool.
most products shipped by software companies do not fall into these categories.
@Seirdy @aburka But then some dingus software developer decides Everything Must Be Trivially Customizable and we wind up with nightmare applucations where one misclick or accidental keystroke upends the whole UI with no way to recover and no way to lock down the UI to protect against accidental mangling.
I want someone who understands the purpose of their tool to build it so that its primary workflow is sensible and coherent and doesn't put the burden of UI design on me. I use a tool, it works in a reasonable way for what I'm doing; if it doesn't, I uee a tool that does and ideally I never waste time configuring it. I actively don't want to be customizing my tools - that's the toolmaker's job, not mine. I resent having unwanted flexibility, genericity, and abstraction forced on me when all I want it a well thought out tool that dependably works as expected. YMMV.
Oct 26, 2026, 9:20 AM@Seirdy all business have forgotten this, it does not matter the industry. They are too heavily relying on marketing people instead of utilising marketing to GET THEIR GOOD PRODUCT IN FRONT OF PEOPLE.
Because they have forgotten that the good product is the thing they should be trying to expose people to.
Instead, it seems like everyone thinks that marketing is the finish line.
Oct 27, 2026, 11:37 AM
@Seirdy It seems telling how popular markdown has become, when it's simplified basic HTML. People want to use something they can comprehend.