User Interfaces
I am taking a Human Computer Interaction course this semester which I am really looking forward to! We were assigned a whole bunch of reading but one article that I really enjoyed was Jef Raskins comments on User Interfaces. It is an older article but many of the things that he pointed out really resonate with the issues that we still face today. In the article, one line really stands out for me which is “the union of two wrong systems does not make for a single, unified, correct one”. This reminds me of the idiom “two wrongs don’t make a right”, but is interesting to think about from a UI perspective. UI’s are changing all around us. Every major GUI OS is implementing some sort of convergence between the traditional desktop metaphor and touch screen capability with endless screens of icons and interesting gestures in lieu of menu driven interfaces. This is a very interesting time to be thinking about HCI as more and more devices in our world are becoming computerized.
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Check out some more stuff to read down below.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- A eulogy for Vim from Drew DeVault's blog
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
- Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
- Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- On Alliances from Smashing Frames
- Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
- Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast
I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines. It's available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Here …
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 2, 2026Flood Fill vs the Magic Circle
Musings from Robin Sloan: Most olive oil production at medium-or-greater scale depends on machines of this kind [over-the-row olive harvester]; they trundle over trees planted in long rows, almost like continuous hedges, and collect the fruit with vibratin…
via Information Overload April 2, 2026The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity
Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog April 2, 2026Generated by openring