If global large-scale human communication continues to be concentrated within large social media platforms and content providers like YouTube, human languages may become sort of irrelevant in that space. Sometimes I Google for something and see a Reddit result in Finnish. I live in Finland, so it makes sense when...

I know, I know, this sounds controversial. But hear me out. A few years ago a new trend in UI design emerged where related elements would appear more and more detached and unrelated to the things they are meant to point to. Here's a screenshot of Google Chrome circa 2010: Remember those tabs? (I love them.) They...

Recently my partner's trusty old 5K iMac died after 8.5 years of service (Radeon gpu is fried). At first I thought it was finally time to get one of those cool little M4 Mac Minis, but then decided to conduct an experiment. I gave up my Mac Studio M2 Max (64 Gb unified memory and 1 Tb storage) and tried to use my...

This is an excellent video about modern UI/UX: "The Hidden Cost of 'Clean' Design." I highly recommend watching it and checking out Ilia's other work. I agree with nearly everything in the video, including this standout quote: If you want to understand a generation, don't listen to what its witnesses say. Look at...

There are two smartphone features that I consider sacred and believe they must never fail: phone calling and the alarm. There is an unspoken contract between users and vendors. Sure, innovate away, change the UX at will, whatever. But you can't fail at making phone calls and sounding the alarm. I missed the alarm...

When I'm searching for docs, 95% of the time a single example would suffice. Yet, 95% of the time I can't find one in any official source. It seems that by default formal technical documentation is targeted towards someone who's deeply immersed in the ecosystem. But many developers have to juggle a lot of "worlds"...

Apple's first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface — was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple's first OS...

Some folks have gone all-in on AI-assisted coding. I've seen some tweets (not sure if sarcastic or real, to be honest) expressing disgust about the prospects of ever writing code by hand anymore. The common argument I hear is that this is just another step in the long history of programming breakthroughs. We moved...

In anthropology there is a notion of high-context and low-context cultures. A high-context culture is a culture or society that communicates dominantly through the use of contextual elements, such as specific forms of body language, the status of an individual, and the tone of voice employed during speech. Rules are...

Unless someone wrote an article about that exact thing, a plain full-text search engine cannot answer a question like this: What animal is featured on a flag of a country where the first small British colony was established in the same year that Sweden's King Gustav IV Adolf declared war on France? But ChatGPT got...

Over the past few years, Google has done a surprisingly great job of making YouTube less interesting and engaging — and in turn, less addictive. Maybe they've got some ethical guidelines in the top management now? If so, well done, Google. Back in the day, when YouTube was mostly about your subscriptions, it was...

People in tech business circles love this quote by Henry Ford: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in existing ones. Like Apple creating the iPhone (sure, smartphones existed...