The only scripts I’ve seen still leave a giant empty box at the top… Are there any that fix this too?

where it won’t obscure passwords. But, surprise, it will obscure DRM content

Yeah, we all know where the priorities really are.

How have our consumer protections gone so fucking far.

it includes logging things you do in apps, tracking communications in live meetings, remembering all websites you’ve visited for research, and more.

Yeah, uh, no thank you.

Is Microsoft this out of touch? Or are we doomed to be constantly monitored by our corporate overlords?

Seems we’re just still charging directly into 1984.

I never claimed they were all trend chasers - my point was that it had a good place and then trend chasers over did it, and those areas are problematic. There is a place for it where I think it deserves to stay, but people have used it in the wrong places and overdone it in others to the point where the overuse had started showing issues.

I’d agree with everything you say about designers choosing to use flat designs without understanding the point. It’s definitely overdone and this becomes a problem.

But your argument for skeuomorphism is a huge stretch. We had ten years of skeuomorphism also showing it just straight doesn’t work in a lot of places. It becomes overloaded and hard to read.

But you’re comparing it to absolute off the deep end applications of the opposite. Why not somewhere in the middle? The entire argument you make for it is just that “well people understood what was click able etc” which is literally just basic design principles and nothing to do with skeuomorphism uniquely.

Why can’t we just expect UX people to do their jobs correctly? Why throw the baby out with the bath water in order to get a different baby we know has other issues?

And what change in outcome did refusing a straw cause?

This doesn’t have anything to do with flat design. It’s the fact that people take hammers and look at everything as a nail and go pounding things. Everything like this is a “contagion”, people just latch onto hot button ideas and go crazy. Flat design in itself is fine, and extremely beneficial for what it was designed for, it’s just overused because people chase trends.

Before flat it was skeumorphism and that was even worse. You had everything in tech trying to look like real things which made things way too busy and hard to read. And then people tried to make it work on tiny phones with low res displays and it was difficult to use.

Hence, flat design was born as a solution. It made icons easy to read on tiny devices. And it did a good job at that. It solved a problem and did it well and everything was well and good.

The problem was the next step where people decided they needed “consistent branding” so they did it on their website too. And then their marketing materials. And then their products. Then you had a problem.

Flat design works well for what it was made for: iconography. And for legibility of small UI. But it’s not for everything. But people can’t think for themselves and solve different problems in different ways. And Google made it easily available everywhere. And people picked that up and use it everywhere. And THAT is the problem.

At least that makes sense and has a logical reason

Not that I’ve seen, but I know some people who somehow missed the video, and he doesn’t link to it on the website so:

https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE

Glad I’m not the only one… The hell is it doing after epic?

I bet if such a law existed in less than a month all those AI developers would very quickly abandon the “oh no you see it’s impossible to completely avoid hallucinations for you see the math is just too complex tee hee” and would actually fix this.

Nah, this problem is actually too hard to solve with LLMs. They don’t have any structure or understanding of what they’re saying so there’s no way to write better guardrails… Unless you build some other system that tries to make sense of what the LLM says, but that approaches the difficulty of just building an intelligent agent in the first place.

So no, if this law came into effect, people would just stop using AI. It’s too cavalier. And imo, they probably should stop for cases like this unless it has direct human oversight of everything coming out of it. Which also, probably just wouldn’t happen.

My experience is dated, but figured I’d share it in case no one else has any input.

I owned a few Motorola Android phones before and after the Google involvement. I think my most recent purchase was 2015.

At that time, they were extremely “pure android” with very few additions beyond the stock experience. The things they added were way ahead of their time - I still think those devices had the best “always on” display implementation to this day, and they did it way before it became a norm.

Their software and update support was rivaling Google at the time, and most other manufacturers were still in the days of 2 years of updates if you’re lucky.

They just stopped making phones it seemed like. I ended up moving towards Pixels over the years, but Moto is the one company that would tempt me to switch back. That or maybe HTC but they’re dead.

Hope you get a more recent answer - I didn’t even realize they were still making phones to be honest.

Yes, because when you run systems like that, you use the AI, and you have the people as a fallback for when the AI fails.

It was primarily watched by people in India because the AI was failing the vast majority of the time.

So yeah, the state of the art AI is… Failing at its job 70% of the time. Instead of the hoped goal of 5%.

That’s more “device” pairing than “parts” pairing. The thermostat to HVAC communication is a standard. Sure, if someone started forcing that, that’d be bad. But that’s more akin to Apple’s “iOS only works with MacBooks” type shit with Airdrop and such than it is to their “you can’t replace the camera in your phone unless it’s from us”. They’re both problems, but the one you’re describing is both not happening and a different issue. I’m not saying it won’t happen but it’s a different topic.

What… The… Fuck?

If your thermostat could cause a fire or gas leak, your HVAC system is flawed. This is entirely a fabricated concern. If anything, I’d chalk it up as reasons why maybe right to repair the HVAC isn’t a great idea. A properly setup HVAC wont let anything tell it to do that.

Firstly, I said this one was iffy to me.

Second, the subtopic was HVAC and thermostats are like, the electronics that control the HVAC which I wouldn’t even really necessarily bucket into HVAC. It’s like HVAC adjacent.

Third, this whole topic is about right to repair, not right to replace. So the on topic argument is “you want to be able to repair the same thermostat with off brand parts”, to which I say, yes? Probably? I don’t see how that’s a problem.

And fourth, who the fuck would buy an Amazon thermostat, lmao.

Yes. But only if you don’t pronounce GIF like a heathen.

so do some folks use opp as “opponent”? Sure, that’s believable. But I feel fairly confident…

Bro, it doesn’t even have the right number of P’s for your reasoning to make any sense.

It comes from “opponent,” that’s why there are two P’s. It comes from video games/chess/card games/etc where you refer to the person or persons you’re playing against as the “opponent”. It’s been happening for many years but has made it’s way into gen z slang.

That’s because it is. People who don’t understand just make shit up. That’s why the number of P’s doesn’t even line up.

Yeah that’s totally valid. Agreed.

But I also wouldn’t really trust third party parts for the appliance itself. I think once you do, that immediately becomes a possible problem. If it was in my house, I’d only buy from the manufacturer for something like that.

But on the other hand, Idk that it’s necessarily wrong to legislate forcing these companies to allow it. I generally believe consumers should have the option on their own, but some things are too dangerous. I’d pretty much be against medical devices but HVAC is a little more uncertain to me.