https://gizmodo.com/the-surpri...
and
https://tatham.blog/2008/10/13...
go into how people with astigmatism - a rather large % of the population - are less likely to love light text on dark backgrounds.

There doesn't have to be one true color arrangement for everyone (though, as with many accessibility features, there's a tension between letting designers have complete control and letting users adjust things that make their lives easier

For my usage, having to jam a finger hard slows me down just as much as the tap-and-hold... but with more "did it work? did it work?"

I don't think sensors for 3D touch (measuring how much the screen was flexing because of the finger jammed into it) would have much to do with reading a fingerprint anywhere on the screen.

Yeah, gestures are so easy to trigger accidentally, it really can violate the dao of programming that a program should do that which startles the user the least :-D

Analog controls in a binary world are often a bit off- I mean, do you really want to jam your finger harder into a pane of glass? Between that and the idea that as a generally optional feature, it usually activated secondary / non-critical modes, you're left with the "press harder for a less important thing" - bad UX all around.

Facebook still offers a formula that might be unique on the Internet; a hard to replicate (if only because of the Metcalfe's law / fax machine effect) blend of using real-word identities and relationships to get and give attention, with a lot of work put into making a UI that is friendly enough for non-techies but still pretty feature rich (thinking of how easy it to throw up a photo gallery - and also get an audience for it)

I don't see people abandoning it en masse, and as long as they can find some way of monetizing the people who are there, they will remain a predominant player.

I wish it was all the old, independent web and blogsphere where anyone could hang up their shingle, but that paradigm has died out to the "wall"/stream amalgamated views of tumblr, twitter, instagram etc - and Facebook is the only of those really nailing the "real life" aspect.

even though "TodoMVC" shows that a todo app is kind of a cliche, it's interesting how many of the same (incorrect) assumptions so many things make. (Also, many people make idiosyncratic lists of their own requirements, see below ;-)

Table stakes is having good "repeat" events, and some choices for stuff like "Final Friday of Month" or whatever- as well as a crisp "this repeats when task is marked complete vs this repeats when task was dude" I've found some apps that do this pretty well (Appigo Todo - but it hasn't been updated in years) but too many either don't support it or bury it in the UI.

Of course even Appigo makes very-engineery (vs. human-factorsy) presumptions like "everything with a date is more urgent than anything without a due date" and "the more overdue something is, the more urgent it must be" while the opposite is most likely true.

One other thing I haven't seen in an app (at least not one less than $20) - I want categories for my todo items, but I don't want to have to navigate back and forth to view the various categories... way too many apps treat these as separate lists for some unfathomable reasons, so trying to skim both urgent and less urgent stuff (less ugent might be stuff that needs to be done in a certain place, like at home or a store) requires clickng back and forth. I just want a big old list with subcategories inline

I'd also like tracking and charting of how many things I have pending vs get done, so I can do a little self-gamification if i want - but that's not as important as a categorized-but-browsable-as-single-list

" The music is slower, melodically simpler, louder, more repetitive, more "I" (first-person) focused, and more angry with anti-social sentiments."
None of these mean "worse" per se. While I admire this kind of analysis, I reject the idea that it permits broad scale subjective value judgements with the scent of "objective truth".

I think the phones have gotten slim enough that you can kind of think of the case as an optional part OF the phone.

(Going without a case is kind of like how the Rebels always take off the back panels of their Y-Wing Fighters)

And relative to other parts of the phone, pretty damn customizable! So it seems like a win.

Yeah, fuck them. All of the up-side to being an academic disappeared more than a decade ago. If they think salary is the *only* thing theyâ(TM)re not winning at, theyâ(TM)ve got their collective heads up their asses.

I read Carol Dweck's "MindSet"... in all the books I've reading during a self-help kick, I think its identification of Fixed Mindsets vs Growth Mindsets is the most useful concept, both for my own growth as a former-semi-precocious child, and how I deal with kids these days

Precocious kids are prone to developed a Fixed Mindset, feeling that their intelligence and abilities are intrinsic, critical to why they are special, maybe even why they are loved. So the result of praising intelligence as "oh you're so smart" - The tendency could grow to seek only those activities that will validate their self-image, and also to lash out with anger at the external "causes" of their failures...

Describing and cultivating the core of the Growth Mindset is trickier.-- it's a more nuanced belief. It holds that the value of life is in the process, that abilities and intelligence are plastic and that constant growth and striving are the hallmarks doing well. You want kids to get a good Growth Mindset and maybe they will reject things that are too easy as unworthy of their time and attention; it's much better to get a good challenge that can teach, even if the "good" results are less assured.

THanks :-D

Confusingly I grabbed both the regular and misspelled version. SoYour and SoYoure - I think the person helping with LetsEncrypt got tripped up

Cool, thanks for the pointers.

I know Robert O. Doyle's son, Robert has written some survey stuff looking over the problem of free will, like what does that mean in a universe that's seemingly pretty damn deterministic...

Ah, glad I didn't come out swinging.

I admit I'm a little pessimistic about finding definite answers. Trust those who seek the truth, doubt those who claim to have found it.

Not sure exactly what question you're asking but....

Like I mentioned, The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul is a great "sampler" if you enjoy asking the questions.

Also, Hofstadter's "I Am A Strange Loop" has one model, and presented in a particularly emotionally moving way

Finally, "On Intelligence" by Jeff "I also made the PalmPilot" Hawkins has some very specific possible answers about some of the neuroscience of (tl;dr: it's mostly all "predict and test")

Yeah, why? I thought it was a pretty fair article, so thanks for that.

And I think Dennett's more right than not. Consciousness isn't what it intuitively seems to be on the surface, it takes more introspection to get a feel for it.

At least try "The Mind's I", a book of essays by lots of folks he co-edited with Hofstadter.

Rereading Daniel Dennett's "Conscious Explained" now... really opened my eyes to what consciousness is and isn't.

(I reference it in my own comic on dealing with mortality, as plugged in my sig)