Everyone has 4K is a dumb argument. Most have 1080p. The sensible upgrade path for PCs is 2K. Legal streaming services only support a few devices, so a 4K device may be stuck in 720p. HiDPI is also, somehow, still an unsolved problem in this day and age? Same thing with HDR, especially since many self-proclaimed HDR TVs aren't even good enough to achieve what any layman would expect from a HDR TV. So HDR certifications became a thing, amazing. But 1080p SDR remains the king for now.
Afaik the problem with HiDPI is that fractional scaling sucks, so you have to jump from 1x to 2x to have good quality. For 1080p, that means 4k. So you should end up with the same screen size as you have now, except with four times the pixels, and four times the electricity bill because your hardware needs to render all those extra pixels, and this for some marginal semblance of an improvement in image quality when you look closer at your monitor than you're recommended to if you want to keep your eyesight.
It's crazy to me that so many software companies dumped millions and perhaps even billions of dollars in R&D collectively to learn how to do UI&UX effectively in the 80s, 90s, 00s, etc., and every new generation just ignores the previous one completely because it looks dated.
Gen Z, or Gen Alpha, or whatever you call teenagers these days, aren't born knowing how to use a desktop computer. They're born knowing how to use smartphone apps. From what I hear, many of them are terribly ill-equipped to be actually productive with desktop.
They're no different from just an office guy who never used a computer in the 90s or from a kid or got a PC from his parents in the 00s.
Why would the GUI have to adapt to modern users when a new user now is no wiser in practice than a new user back then?
>every new generation just ignores the previous one
One of the easiest first steps when creating your own identity as the new generation is to refuse your predecessors wholesale. This goes triple for something that is about fashion, which GUIs to some extent are a fashion statement.
Because most of the time you didn't have to implement this. The UI toolkit implemented this. When you have to do everything from scratch, most people don't.
Take a simple link navbar with a menu of links on a webpage. This has existed since forever. It should be that you can open the menu with your keyboard and use up/down to navigate it. But that means writing JS code. So devs who did it from scratch didn't do it, and only those who used an UI library with that already programmed in by someone else got it.
But "waaaahhhh native apps are soooo hard" they cry.
IDK man, every project from a single developer who uses Win32 widgets is infinitely better, more predictable, more usable, and more professional looking than any shitty electron app.
In theory, if you have a folder with every files that have every two-letter combination at the start, there will be 650 files with distinct letters and only 26 files that have the same first letter and same second letter.
In practice, the amount of actual words that have the same first letter as the second letter is minuscule. Even words that have the same letter appearing twice in sequence.
It's just optimized for the most convenient scenario.
> "In practice, the amount of actual words that have the same first letter as the second letter is minuscule."
In the enable1.txt wordlist of 172,823 English words, there are 126 starting with a double letter, and those are largely the variations of oohs, aahs, oomphs, oozes, aardvarks, eels, eerinesses, and oodles of oocytes, oolites, oophytes and oologists near oomiaks.
I expect it to work that way. That's the way I grew up with. It's faster than pressing a letter then pressing down. It's a skip-to-item function to not a search function ARE YOU HEARING ME NAUTILUS
This is what the future looks like, but without dragging and dropping.
It's just a bunch of blocks stacked in grids, columns, and rows. This is what GUI and UX has become. Just black text on white rectangles, because it needs to adapt to every form factor, be accessible, be internationizable, be blahblahblabhlabblahblahblah. It has to be generic.
GenUI is the next step in a very depressing trend of sucking out all the color from websites and applications, and just the thought of it happening makes me very sad.
I'd have a much better "user experience" if I found a website that turned my cursor into a sword.
Personally, I think the problem is that people abuse Google for things it's really not designed to do, and they don't even realize that.
Google is great at finding official webpages by their exact title. If you type the title of a news headline from the 90s, Google will give you the link to it. I think that is amazing. Basically anything that has a canonical URL, Google is good at finding.
But when you search for "how to do X" for example, there will be several results that are perfectly valid and they will still need to be ranked in a list. Because it's not a "list" of results, it's ranking of relevancy. So to avoid showing spam, Google will push to the top websites it finds trustworthy. And now every top result comes from the same website. If you need an explanation for the Xz incident, for example, there is no canonical URL for it. There will be several news websites, youtube channels, etc. that have talked about it, competing to be the top result.
Google still has to rank them even though the algorithm can't tell fact apart from parody, so no matter what Google does, Google will be the one judging which content most people will read when they want to know about a certain topic.
To borrow my fellow robot's words, people are finding knowledge through an algorithmically curated aperture: Google's SERP.
If they're evil, they have the power to control everyone on Earth. If they're good, they must be going insane with what to do with their users' crippling dependency on them as a source of truth.
I find Google isn't so good anymore for finding things by title; rather than being a search engine they are slowly becoming more like a politician answering reporters' questions, in that instead of returning results based on the terms I asked for, they insist on returning results for the terms they believe I should have asked for.
Can you give me examples? Personally, I don't think I've ever had a problem finding things by their name or title on Google. If I type python, I get python's website, if I type hacker news, I get this website. I can type the name of an old program and get their webpage on sourceforge for example. I've also tested that it works with finding the official websites of celebrities, e.g. if you type eminem, you get his official website.
It does seem to have biases toward recency and product pages, but finding things by their title isn't a thing Google is bad at.
I often search for titles containing very specific acronyms or abbreviations (which I would expect to be high precision low recall); Google's first response lately is usually a search based on a "correction" of these to a more common search, presumably because they are biasing to low precision high recall. (eg band names, even at hamming distance, will shadow maths structures)
Clicking again on my original query, or liberal use of quotation marks, then does the trick, but it's annoying af. Maybe there's a setting somewhere for "show me the results of my query first, not the 'did you mean' first"?
EDIT: upon reflection, the problem is that I use Google in an early XXI manner: if I've been someplace before I use the URL bar, and it's for places I haven't been, that aren't common knowledge, that I want a search engine. There was a time when Google was optimised for this use case, and although that time is long past (in particular, no one buys ads for my queries), the annoyance is recent because now they actively pessimise.
It's also gotten very poor at exact text matches. I often make a bet to myself before searching for certain things as to whether or not Google will show something irrelevant. Most recently I was searching for a specific memory address error crashing ASIO. I was using the exact text from the error popup, and Google was giving me results for... Skyrim Script Extender refusing to start. The only shared text was "Page fault" between the two. I've also noticed this when looking for specific part numbers where instead it will give me magazines by matching the ISSN. Forcing quotes is a dice roll, as sometimes that will just return zero results, or Google will do the exact opposite and broaden the search terms.
