if you've ever messed up a dimension or a hole position on something you're building, don't be too hard on yourself.

at least you're not the Cisco design engineer who caused an entire product line recall by placing the mode button (which resets the switch if held) directly above an RJ45 port.

@david_chisnall @bill88t

https://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2020/10/29/improving-x/ I had a 'less neighbourly' one queued up and PoCed ever since, as there is another middle ground to be had. In the spirit of choosing both armies and battles wisely - it's not the fight to fight. "Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy"

@amy @david_chisnall I have a number of those in the bag of horrible input devices from the last round of venture capital glancing at VR. I wasted some evenings reversing and most often just some wrapping around a BNO055 making your hands drift more than those of a piss drunk salaryman in the hotel bar at 3am spotting an alluring thigh. Complete waste of time versus what is happening in the DIY space. Examples:

https://github.com/scottbez1/smartknob https://e-flesh.com/ and https://github.com/sb-ocr/diy-spacemouse

The defocus-cancel problem is exactly that and it has some overlap with the reordering problem - the devil, synchronisation. Your input is on the way somewhere; recipient synthesises a response that gets invalidated by input happening that happened in between and in the popup-swamp invalidation is typically cancellation or substitution.

Force synchronicity (grab semantics) and latency needs to be consistently low or it feels stiff and janky/laggy.

We don't really have the mechanisms to solve for that (insert soft versus hard real-time corpus here). Reordering just sours the deal by latching to sort-preference, and often not your preferences but those of an antagonist (adtech again).

A compromise is mostly-sort but don't invalidate active selection. Cat9 (which you might have missed out on if last was '22) tries to mostly follow that but without position guarantees, but it was also substantially harder to code than a synchronous-blocking shell.

This is very aggressively (perhaps too aggressively) stated, but he's absolutely right. People are all worried their ideas are gonna be "stolen", and my friends, I can assure you that won't be the problem.

TIL about Sparklink: https://digitstodollars.com/2025/03/27/sparklink-the-biggest-wireless-standard-you-have-never-heard-about

Tl;dr: Claims to be Bluetooth.next, invented by Huawei, trending in China.

#ai #meme

me: *takes several screenshots while playing a game*
me: *exits game*
gnome: SOMEBODY TOOK A SCREEN SHOT WOW
gnome: SOMEBODY TOOK A SCREEN SHOT WOW
gnome: SOMEBODY TOOK A SCREEN SHOT WOW
gnome: SOMEBODY TOOK A SCREEN SHOT WOW
gnome: SOMEBODY TOOK A SCREEN SHOT WOW
gnome: SOMEBODY TOOK A SCREEN SHOT OMG THEY'RE REALLY GOING FOR IT
gnome: SOMEBODY TOOK A SCREEN SHOT DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS
gnome: SOMEBODY TOOK A SCREEN SHOT WOW THATS A LOT OF PICTURES
gnome: SOMEBODY TOOK A SCREEN SHOT OMG

It seems after 10 years of previously serious and respected people saying the cloud is the future and that I’m a dinosaur for telling them it’ll be back on prem before the end of the next decade, I was right.

It WAS more expensive.

It WAS less performant.

It WAS less secure.

It WAS a gateway to increasingly more exploitative pricing models.

A lesson in getting carried away with the hype and not looking at the actual trends. This was always going to happen. Threats increasing, and compute, storage, and bandwidth costs reducing faster than your upgrade cycle.

@datarama that prompted me to check for replacement battery for my GPD Pocket 2 that I got for cheap (200ish eur) refurbished. Alas the battery died not that long after, otherwise it was a neat display for 'in the field' quick- shell kind of work (also hidpi and touchscreen input development/testing). Last I checked they were outrageously expensive, managed to score two for ~30 now.

The street that my mum lives in is a one-way street, but wasn't marked as such on #Google Maps. This caused many drivers to drive the wrong way. I have tried to edit it on Google Maps (there is such functionality), but to no avail. No matter how often I submitted a change (with photos of street signs!), Google said "Sorry, we could not verify it".

Solution: Edit the street on #OpenStreetMap! A few months after I did this, Google seems to have stolen the data, as it regularly does, and now the street is correct in both datasets!

Hey Germans, please come up with a word that means "the fear of typing `return` vs `shift-return` because you don't know which inserts newline and which sends the message"

@amy @david_chisnall Luring me in with flattery and tales of HCI? I'll fall for that. Something to experiment with that in ehrm, focus, is to replace or extend rodent rubbing with an eyetracker (supplier and driver situation is problematic though - there are untold stories around https://github.com/letoram/arcan-devices/blob/master/tobii_4c/drv_eyetrack.c#L216); excluding disabilities or off-label use of prescription eye drops, it is fairly hard to interact with something without also directing your gaze in that general area. Adtech parasites are intimately familiar with this -- it's not exactly guesswork behind why ads seem to be so good at capturing attention (another form of "knock, knock, we'd like to talk to you about Jesus" kind of focus stealing).

'Focus follows gaze-point' has some rather interesting feedback loops, e.g. warp cursor to gaze point and the lower precision makes you sympathise with a cat being tricked to chase a laser pointer around. The global 'restack + grab' being bad conclusion hits immediately, but also 'on-defocus-cancel' reactions. From a designer perspective I'd take a stab at "you do not ever 'deserve' the user's attention, you must earn it" as an imperative.

#VibeCoding your MFA

@piusbird @cadey given the state of dawntrail, they absolutely need ideas.

@pekkavaa my pitch is to not take that one in stride or you'll just be tiled.

@aaronsgiles isn't it funny how the body works ..

Really enjoyed David Gerard's amusing take on how programming with AI becomes like a gambling addiction for many.

"Large language models work the same way as a carnival psychic. Chatbots look smart by the Barnum Effect — which is where you read what’s actually a generic statement about people and you take it as being personally about you. The only intelligence there is yours."

"With ChatGPT, Sam Altman hit upon a way to use the Hook Model with a text generator. The unreliability and hallucinations themselves are the hook — the intermittent reward, to keep the user running prompts and hoping they’ll get a win this time."

"This is why you see previously normal techies start evangelising AI coding on LinkedIn or Hacker News like they saw a glimpse of God and they’ll keep paying for the chatbot tokens until they can just see a glimpse of Him again. And you have to as well. This is why they act like they joined a cult. Send ’em a copy of this post."

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/

@fireborn After this occurred I've taken to going to shows like this with a pocket recorder and in-ear binaural microphones. Localisations of international productions are rare to be found after the event.

@fireborn Ah sorry, no the run itself. I wanted to see it again to hunt for nuances but even though all shows were sold out they weren't allowed to continue running it.

@fireborn I saw it in theater when it was running here in Sweden a few years back and it was absolutely brilliant (in Swedish), made better by the local mormons handing out books outside.

They had a separate audio feed to jack into for accessible annotations, though barely mentioned anywhere I could find.

Tragically it was cut short by the "rights holder" withdrawing international rights grants.