I don't know what Google is going to do with it, but Bing is absolutely ruining their search engine with AI. You search for something, AI starts typing out an answer in a typewriter effect. Since AI, I can't trust anymore that the snippets shown at the top are verbatim quotes from a human-written article or something the AI came up with (not considering they could be quoting an AI-generated article!). At the bottom of the search page, where the "next page" would normally be the rightmost button, it's now the "chat" GPT button. I misclick it every time I want to see the next page. I bet that is driving up some metrics and making some engineers really confused about why people keep clicking the chat button and then not chatting.
Overall this all feels so unimaginative. With all the resources these companies have the only solution they can come up with for the search problem is "just throw AI at it." I could come up with that. It's not clever.
Unlike Google, I can click the second tab every time and it goes to image search. Wait, actually they put "copilot" there and image search is the third tab now. Either way point stands: no shuffling of tabs.
Image search is actually better than Google. I can search for exact image sizes. Google used to offer this! I can just type my screen width and height and find the perfect wallpaper. Wait, it says "at least" here, not "exactly," so I guess it just stores the total amount of pixels of an image and then multiplies the width and height you inputted...
Can you believe this? It's 2024 and I can't even find an image by size on the Internet. I can't even trust the second tab is going to be the images tab. And some people think AI is going to fix software. It's ridiculous. It's just laughable. And so depressing.
Ignoring all the other bad stuff with Windows 11, one thing that made me switch to Linux was the ugly "modern" design. iirc, someone on HN said that Windows designers don't even use Windows, they use Mac.
But then I switched to Linux and a lot of apps, specially gnome and gnome-inspired apps, have such terrible design as well. I'm going to spare you the details because I could rant about it for hours.
IMHO The pinacle of the Windows desktop was Windows 2000. Windows XP was ok except for the default bubble gum theme. We don't talk about Windows Vista and Windows 8. Windows 7 was sort-of ok. Windows 10 is was trying to salvage some of the Windows 8 mess with little success. Can't comment on Windows 11 because I'll stick with Windows 10 as long as possible ;)
I agree with this more when you include how the then current versions of MS Office felt to use.
Ribbons might have a place at the absolute entry level of usability, but they'll never replace a well designed menu system that includes keyboard shortcut documentation in the UI within a super information dense presentation.
I hate the way menu bar is detached from the window/app that it applies to in macOS, but over time I've learned to grudgingly appreciate one thing about this design: it forces the apps to have a menu bar, because if you don't, it is such a visual sore point. So even when designers go nuts with UX layout, which seems to be so common these days, they still have to provide access to various things in the menu bar in a way that is mostly consistent across apps, and in any case is easier to find things in (esp. thanks to menu bar search as standard feature).
Who are you targeting as the main user of this software? Most users do not depend on keyboard shortcuts but rather repeatable actions they can use the mouse for. The ribbon only annoys power users which is a number much much smaller than 50% of all users. Plus keyboard shortcuts still exist with the ribbon system.
As someone who has spent a lot of time with “regular users”, no body is complaining about the ribbon…
> Plus keyboard shortcuts still exist with the ribbon system.
So this objection is completely manufactured?
> The ribbon only annoys power users which is a number much much smaller than 50% of all users.
It's 0% of the users who are new to the software, and 90% of the users who have used the software for some time. The UI shouldn't be optimized for people who are only going to use the software a few times unless the software is only meant to be used a few times.
But in the case of office software, what you want is affordances that can be eliminated at the user's own pace while they get to know the software over years or decades. Things like indicating the keyboard shortcut next to the menu entry, which is standard for most UI toolkits. Or things like allowing the "ribbon" to be disabled, which I would be really surprised if you could come up with a reasonable opposition to.
It also annoys infrequent users, because you need to remember into which ribbon they stuffed what you want to do and what icon it uses. With a classical menu bar, the organization tends to be more intuitive (in my experience, at least) and you can skim the different menu items to find what you need.
That seems to depend on the specific version of Office, if the screenshots I looked at are to be believed. Office 2016, for example, doesn't seem to have it.
Edit: Maybe this depends on settings rather than versions? Upon further investigation, I've found some screenshots of Word/PowerPoint 2016 that have a search bar and some that don't.
This almost makes me want to try a Mac. Everyone is copying them, they must be pretty good, right?
I just miss it when my apps had main menus, and dialog windows instead of transitions, and it didn't feel like every window was a browser even when they weren't electron apps... and I miss the window borders, and the colored icons, and when themes weren't just light or dark and...
You'll be disappointed. Even Apple isn't adhering to its own Human Interface Guidelines anymore. It might be the least bad option of the current desktop environments, but that doesn't mean much.
As sibling comment says, you'll be disappointed - and worse, unlike on Windows or Linux there will be no way to change things you don't like. With Apple, it's their way or the highway. For example, they just don't do themes at all, and have slowly deprecated or removed even the basic customization features they used to do well (like changing the icon for a folder).
>do away with the default of using the scroll wheel on the desktop to switch virtual desktops
I've seen so many apps implement this. It's so odd. If I can bring my cursor to the widget I can probably click on the right item instead of scrolling. The only case I imagine this would be useful would be for accessibility.
>Wayland as default
I have plasma installed here and one weird thing I noticed is that if I use the wayland version sometimes text isn't rendered on windows or entire panels flash black rectangles, while if I use the X11 version my mouse speed becomes slower. I wonder if the update addresses these issues. Anyway after trying out several DEs I ended up using Xfce because my mouse feels faster in it.
> I've seen so many apps implement this. It's so odd. If I can bring my cursor to the widget I can probably click on the right item instead of scrolling. The only case I imagine this would be useful would be for accessibility.
For me personally, it lets me think of desktops in terms of what is left or right of them, rather than what actual number it is, i.e my Steam desktop is to the right of my browser desktop and to the left of my remote session. If I need to go to the email desktop from where I'm at, it's two scrolls away. I usually leave a little bit of the desktop visible on each virtual desktop to facilitate this.
So, not an accessibility thing for me but an actual preference. People are different. I know, it shocked me too.
I have always wondered how do these malicious actors with their bots manage to do so much. Do they ever get caught? It's like there is no deterrent.
For example, if you use bots to spam Wordpress blogs with comments that contain links to your site (black hat SEO), that is obviously a bad thing to do, but I'm not sure if it's even against a law.
Think of it this way. If Google makes 300 billions per year scrapping 1 trillion webpages, how much money should it pay for each webpage it scraped?
There's a point in bulk scraping that the logistics of giving people real money for data makes no sense. The payout out be to small to waste time thinking about. And the fees of costs of paying anyone in the world would be higher than the actual amount being paid!
I'm not saying it's morally right, I'm saying the only way to be commercially successful is to try to get away with it.
Personally, I feel it would be a much smaller problem if Tumblr had an internal AI thing going on. What users REALLY don't like is that they have confided a post with one website, and that website just shared that post with a third-party because if opens up infinite possibilities.
If Tumblr can take your post and give it to OpenAI, they can take your post and give it to anyone, and that's the problem. Because for users, what they post is "between them and Tumblr" and not anybody else.
I'll even say more. Artists don't care if you scrape their art to make AI generated art with it. Because when this happens, it's "between artists and scrapers" and not anybody else, so it's fine. What they do care about is when people post that AI generated art on the internet, or publish it professionally, or do basically anything with it.
In other words, there's a sense of privacy when there is only two parties involved, no matter what is going on, but the instant a third party gets into the system, the first party will freak out, because then you lose that sense of privacy.
I think "consent" is not the right word for this, because it's never simply "consent" it's always boundaries and expectations. Consent implies there's always one yes/no answer for a process. In practice the process is always so complicated that it would require countless yes/no questions, to the point nobody sane would want to deal with it.
Just look at cookie banners and imagine if we had a consent popup for every single thing that needs to be download to show a page: do you consent to download the HTML? Do you consent to download the CSS? Do you consent to download the Javascript? Do you consent to download the images? The user just wants the see the page. You have to make assumptions about how far that consent goes, so it's absolutely transitive, the problem is at what point it crosses the line.
Let's think about dating and imagine if we both had to consent to
every single thing that needs to happen to get it on. Do you consent
to dinner with me? Do you consent to coffee at yours? Do you consent
to us getting our clothes off? Do you consent to ... you get the
picture.
Thing is, we actually do this, but silently.
The "assumptions" you rightly speak of are the mutual trust mechanisms
that allow two adults to make clear shortcuts without explicit words.
We move at a certain speed. We check for feedback. We use clever
signals. We base our trust model on the NSA definition that "Trust is
the ability to do harm" in context where there is some symmetry. Sex
is actually risky for both parties.
And no means no.
But in the digital world we're talking about a massive power
asymmetry. When you're with a big corporation it moves from dinner to
data-rape in a few milliseconds.
No means "yeah but harder".
Consent doesn't disappear because the process got complex. Human
relations are more complex than any web page.
It's about whether we obey the rules and show mutual respect. Big-tech
corporations absolutely do neither. and that's the problem here, not
complexity.
What might level the game, is if when I visit your site with my web
browser, you risk that I could do you some serious harm.
Unfortunately, it's not a human on the other side, it's a system, whether it's a system built based on business rules or a system built based on computer algorithms, everyone gets the same inflexible system. It's not logistically feasible to create a custom experience for each user based on how far they consent to every little thing, as the use cases are infinite: you may consent to download CSS on this site, but not on that site, or on that site, but not on pages that match this regex, etc. If you tried to do that, your product would immediately flop because most users would find it too annoying and complicated to use compared to any system that makes reasonable assumptions about consent.
I agree that many modern software have no respect to humans, but that's not because the developers didn't want to implement a yes/no consent dialog or several of them, it's because they think the only boundary they can't cross is what the law says they can't, and everything else is fair game.
Sorry late to reply after work today, but you really got me thinking
AR
> everyone gets the same inflexible system. It's not logistically
feasible to create a custom experience for each user based on how
far they consent to every little thing,
Is it though? Maybe this is where AI is going to be a win - in dynmaic
protocols and bespoke interactions. What if we leave my "AI
web-browsing agent" to talk to your "AI web server" to quite literally
negotiate a whole bunch of preferences. Usual game theory applies.
If your bot tries to defect or fuck mine over, or my bot is too greedy
or defective we both get a suboptimal outcome? Maybe I am happy to
trade certain bits of data like location or budget but will withold or
lie about others, say age and gender. In response I might not get all
the info I seek. By making the value of our transactional relations
explicit some interesting things might happen. Maybe if your Wbserver
agent is is a bit too greedy mine will shop around to other sites etc.
respects.
Then the AI would be the one making assumptions about your consent. When it gets it wrong and your boundaries are violated, everyone will just shrug and say "well but the AI said it was okay."
In my opinion, algorithms can not fix this. The developer needs to know clearly what boundaries they can't cross, and the only way for that to happen is if there are obvious penalties and deterrents. If Microsoft commits egregious privacy violations but it makes them more money than it costs them, why would they stop?
