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• Post #4312453

  Life hack: just leave your phone on “do not disturb” all the time. Check it every two or three hours if needs must. Also set up the auto reply that tells people you’re driving and will get back to them eventually. It’s wonderful.

• Post #4312452

  Buy reference books for stuff you would pick up your phone to look up.

• Post #4312451

  How common was it to set pages of running copy with a Ludow Typograph? Is this just something the people at Ludlow did to show off that they could make a text face for a machine that was mostly uses for headlines?

• Post #4312450

  I miss the days when social media was Usenet, EFnet, and AIM. #warezart before the crackdown!

• Post #4312449

  Apple laid the groundwork for screen addiction in 2001 when its designers created an operating system that looked and behaved like casino gambling machines. The Cult of Mac became a legion eager to sit in front of a Mac and enjoy the bright colorful buttons and cute animations.

• Post #4312448

  I changed the color mode on my phone to grayscale and the results are amazing. The urge to use it turns into a letdown when color is gone. My brain is rapidly deciding that it isn’t worth the bother and the desire for phone induced dopamine is fading fast.

• Post #4312447

  For years I thought that the iOS system settings app was just a disorganized train wreck. But I've realized that it is well designed. To be hard to use. Because Apple does not want users to make their phones look like phones. Apple wants iPhones to look like casino gambling machines.

• Post #4312446

  I’ve spent more time today trying to understand one passing sentence in a book by watching a long academic lecture about it than I have actually reading the book. And I still don’t get it. Tomorrow I’m going to make Claude build me a reading list so I can put even more work into figuring out this one line. This book is really fun!

• Post #4312445

  This one’s a fuckin banger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHObGLeYpTI

• Post #4312444

  Whoever did the design for Tony Iommi’s new album did an incredible job. https://www.iommi.com/from-the-dark-album-announced/

• Post #4312443

  What’s better than a superhero knocking out a winged elephant? A mechanical lotus airship! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNaSdnz2I8g

• Post #3012656

  Stop giving pedestrian companies and their apps stupid names that are hard to remember with meaningless abstract icons. You don’t need to be creative about everything

• Post #3012655

  What’s the state of typesetting Nastaliq on Mac? Is it just a lost cause until the InPage plugin for Indesign is released?

• Post #3012654

  After using an iPhone for over a year I am still regularly amazed at how profoundly bad iOS is.

• Post #3012653

  It’s hard to be motivated to design something when I know that I will never design anything as attractive as a Gibson ES-335 in British Racing Green. (The color of my grandfather’s ’68 Mustang)

• Post #3012652

  Every time I sit down to read a big book she sits next to me and begs me to put her in my lap so she can take a nap.

• Post #3012651

  “I’m sorry Dad, I lost your nice copy of The Great Gatsby.” “Oh that wasn’t the nice copy. I gave you the one set in Times New Roman. Let me show you the Folio Society edition.”

• Post #3012650

  I bought a book printed and bound in India but it smells like a book printed and bound in Belgium and that confused the hell out of me.

• Post #3012649

  Here’s my trick for not procrastinating with YouTube: Use Firefox. Every time you see a video you want to watch open it in a new tab. Just keep doing that. At some point you’ll have to close Firefox for an OS update, or let it restart itself after it updates, or some insane Javascript will crash it. There’s always a chance that Firefox will reopen and not be able to load all those old tabs. Now you’ll never watch all those videos instead of doing something important.

• Post #3012648

  Here’s a killer idea for a startup: email hosting that uses AI to detect and block fund-raising emails from American politicians.

• Post #3012647

  Hey UX/UI designers: you know that dark pattern of tiny buttons you implement to make it hard to actually tap the button? You aren’t supposed to implement it with buttons that people are supposed to tap. Especially on big tablets and touchscreen laptops. You won’t ruin anybody’s day by making the play/pause button bigger than a toddler’s fingertip.

• Post #3012646

  It’s amazing that companies will spend large sums of money on AI tokens to summarize overly long and inane emails rather than teach employees how to communicate efficiently. Back in the 1990s office workers became obsessed with sending Powerpoint decks and Visio charts. So companies just told people to stop making so many presentations and charts. Problem solved.

• Post #3012645

  I need furniture help. Who sells good desk lamps? I want something that will work, last, and not start a fire. But 99% of what I see is low cost knockoff junk.

• Post #3012644

  There’s a non-zero chance that Lemmy was doing all that speed so he could stay thin enough to wear those tapered jeans that tucked into his custom boots.

• Post #3012643

  “China is just six months behind on AI!” is the new “Iran is six months out from a nuke!”

• Post #2018879

  “What does freedom even mean, anyway?” And then I had to explain the concepts of positive and negative liberty to an eighth grader.

• Post #2018878

  There should be some kind of Nobel Prize for the UX designer that realized we could just use our email addresses as user names.

• Post #2018877

  Progress in Chinese package design: American brands just stick socks in a cheap plastic bag. This Chinese brand rolls and wraps each pair and puts them in a decent box. I’m seeing more and more good Chinese packaging. By 2030 there will be Chinese package design on par with Japanese design.

• Post #2018876

  The lady at my favorite desi food truck refused to sell me my usual order and made me eat the chole masala instead. Indian food culture is the best.

• Post #2018875

  Is there an email hosting service that can reliably block all political fund-raising emails?