juliendorra

Suing is very costly, takes year and is mentally draining. And in the end they wouldn’t probably not get much if any money, and may even loose or be dropped. So in this case I understand why they wouldn’t want to do it.

Zelle seems more complex in terms of access, slower, and less universal (inside the covered zone) than IBAN based instant bank transfers. Users need to enroll using their phone number and / or an email, when IBAN instant transfer is available by default. They say that transfers "often" happen in minutes, when instant transfer via IBAN happen in a few seconds, always. The FAQ also covers issues enrolling, which means that users are not guaranteed to be enrolled. It’s an out of band process with it seems email or phone number as the ID. It seems the recipient has to enroll beforehand which is another complication (IBAN being the bank number you have the guarantee that your recipient exists and can receive the funds instantly) Zelle feels more like a system added on top, IBAN instant transfer is an extension of the existing bank transfer system, used and found at the same place UI-wise.

To give a little historical perspective (as you are young at 23) dads have been ignoring their kids for some times in our society: before it was magazines or maybe books. Or TV at home. The cliché "don’t disturb your dad while he is reading his newspaper" is sadly anchored in a real asymmetry in terms of child care (fathers tend to care for kids on their own terms, mothers for all the rest) Said otherwise: me time for dads is usually sanctuarized

It’s very bad PR for all US AI companies, not just Anthropic.

Agents should have the same permissions as the user prompting them, nothing else.

In user support work, it won’t make them very useful. User support is the fallback when self-serve tools and public documentation, the one you have permission to read and use directly, are not allowing a solution.

By definition useful user support allows operations that are beyond the user’s permissions

"Our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal" It might be a recency bias, because the 19th and 20th were extremely polarized, politically… from entire nations split up on one issue, up to political assassination, civil wars… slavery, women’s vote, antisemitism, prohibition, civil rights, asylum, universal marriage, and much more.

Yes, it was obvious maybe even in the 60s for a few, and it has been fantasized by many, but you wrote it as a cohesive, nearly deterministic, and fluid story. Your deep understanding of some fundamental issues (like latency) that you turned into consequences instead of brushing them off is what made it so perfect as a very tangible and possible future. One read and it never left me

This is a really close equivalent to keep learning sketch and clay modeling in design school

ADHD and other mental issues are under-diagnosed in dysfunctional or toxic families, and of course exist in very stable caring families, so I would be very curious in which data link the very different symptoms you cite directly to trauma. It feels like going back to the era of shaming mothers for autism.

They are the basis of the prototype that Bas Ording used to design all the interactions we know today on touch: inertial scrolling with rubber band effect, row of icons for apps, pinch to zoom, etc. It was a fingerwork trackpad with his Director (in 2004!) interactions projected on! It was designed for a Mac tablet, but then the focus shifted to a phone.

I use an Air M2 8GB, and memory becomes an issues when I have Chrome with hundreds of tabs, a docker runner, an IDE, and several other apps like keynote all open. Add Claude and the machine is suffering! My guess is that 8GB should be fine for most users, but design students for example may stumble upon issues if they use a lot of big apps concurrently.

Nice write up! Even if I think that turn taking is a very simplified model of conversation! There’s collaborative overlapping, while the other continue, there is all the confirmations that the other agree, there’s the phatic messages maintaining the "listening channel open", and there’s even completion (filling a word or a name) that are not turn taking and should not be taken as such, yet that the model should be able to produce and accept. They are probably not modeled well or at all by a turn taking process

In the first years, I remember no other search engine was close to Google quality. We all ditched AltaVista because Google was incredibly better. It would have been awful to switch back to any other options. We can already switch between the 3 big proprietary models without feeling too much differences, so it’s quite a different landscape.

Consoles are not a big market enough to move a company like Intel. Consoles are a niche in computing. Gaming computing is niche compared to business computing (both in value and in number of users)

Wider range in bigger cities, I think it’s quite common everywhere? Small town restaurants need pauses

I think it’s a myth that people consumed less information just a few decades ago. Remember that newspapers used to have at least two daily editions (morning and afternoon). And of course radio has had continuous news flashes for a century.

This is similar to the myth that people communicated less before the messaging apps: they were glued to their phone for hours, sent telegrams and even sent very short letters (delivered same day!) to just say "thanks for the lunch that was very nice" (I found some in my grand-parents’s papers)

Our (social) communication appetite has always been quite insatiable.

Yes, there has been nice geniuses (ie. people with extreme talent), Mozart was for example a good person. Da Vinci (if a little sycophantic when young) was not unhinged at all nor abusive and was appreciated.

But since romantism we have built this image of the genius as necessarily abusive.

I’m sure abusive genius are very visible (by definition?) and that abusive people tend to monopolize more ressources too. (Like these tenured professors that use their students to advance their own career)

You should be able to use Google Takeout to get all of your YouTube data, including your watch history.

This article is a nice example of someone using it:

When I downloaded all my YouTube data, I’ve noticed an interesting file included. That file was named watch-history and it contained a list of all the videos I’ve ever watched.

https://blog.viktomas.com/posts/youtube-usage/

Of course as an European it's a legal obligation for companies to give you access, but I think Google Takeout works worldwide?

Microsoft did it too with Windows and Words (supposedly after a very messy trademark dispute around excel? If I remember well?). This avoids trademark dispute on names (as you can’t trademark generic name alone) and is an effective way for very recognizable brands to extend their branding without adding too much confusion

I have been using CSS since, well, they were invented back in 1995 but not continuously (when I need them). And I can never remember how to properly center things or how to do a lot of supposedly simple things. The specs has a lot of confusing naming (the naming have some logic, but nevertheless a confusing) and of course a lot of interrelated effects.

We used to have css editors that helped.

But I’m glad LLMs can now write CSS for me, and it nearly works perfect every time (I sometimes have to dig and fix things, and to push it to use the latest specs not old obsolete tricks)

The first digital privacy laws following a personal data scandal were voted in… 1978 (France)

Tech has always been a tool for control, power and accumulation of capital.

You counterbalance it with social and civic laws (ie. Counter power)

My guess is that it’s easier to build with (WebKit is old, after all) and maybe Apple’s pace on certain features is perceived as slow? A new WebKit browser on Windows might also seem risky for a startup, they probably want a known and safe build path.

Alternatively people who say “I’m not political” are benefiting from the status quo and political direction of things (long term, not necessarily short term). They frame inaction as apolitical.

There's no up swipe in the prototype made in 2005 by Ken Kocienda (which this is a reproduction of). It's tap for center letter, and swipe for the sides.

What do you mean by "widen the margins"?

In any case, Ken Kocienda validated this reproduction's behavior as very close to his original blob keyboard (see bluesky posts between him and me)

The goal is not to make it better than the original prototype! But to the contrary, to give you the same experience that pushed Kocienda to explore further and design the right user experience.

The blob keyboard was never publicly shown (at least not until Kocienda's book in 2018) and was quickly morphed into something else internally.

So Swype probably reinvented the idea independently (as others did too I think)

Apple did patent some swipe behaviors for keyboards at the time of the first iPhone: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8059101B2/en

Sometimes the best ideal solution is not the one that can win in practice!

The web was and still is a very bad hypertext system (no bidirectional links, no versioning, no integrated index, no transclusion, etc.) and we are still paying this debt! But this was also the an incredible hypertext system, permission-less, decentralized, and that made it a success.

I feel that the iPhone keyboard was the same, it had to appears (including in screenshots) innocuous and "without quality" to win over users.

As I remember it, all these mobile browsers for Windows Mobile were not exactly the same code and rendering engine / javascript engine that on desktop. They were ports

As the iPhone OS was Mac OS at its core, Safari was exactly the same engines, and that was a quite novel and enticing promise: the real web in your pocket (minus proprietary plugins like Flash)

Yea, and Ken Kocienda would end up using a huge dictionary (bigger than any phone or the Newton which had one in 93 and a bigger one in 96) at the word level too. But only after this prototype, because the design goal here was to validate that there was any way at all to type the letter you wanted. Design is not a linear thing, and that’s what I wanted to make people feel by recreating this early prototype! Note that everyone in the team (15 developers) was busy creating their own weird keyboard too! Everything was halted because of the basic 1-to-1 keyboard failure to work

Yes, the book explains how everything started from the capacitive touchscreen. The initial idea (2004-2005) was to build a Mac tablet computer based on touch screens. Bas Ording designed all the interactions we know, rubber band and inertial scrolling, the home screen… for a mac tablet!

So really the capacitive screen drove the interactions. Input first, just like the mouse on Macintosh or the stylus on Newton, everything then flows from there.

On the web browser, I disagree with you (sorry!), the killer app of the iPhone was that Safari was the same Safari, with the same capacity and rendering, than on desktop.

It was completely new. Yes, you had to double tap on complex, non responsive websites, but every single (non-flash) site would render the same.

My 640x480 HTC Universal with a plastic keyboard felt antiquated compared to the 320x480 iPhone, especially starting with the 3GS

Thanks! Yes, the blob keyboard opened the way to the idea of decoupling what the user see and what the software keyboard takes into account.

Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn! I'd be happy to chat