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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • 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?


  • 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.



  • 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.









  • There’s isn’t enough physical space for three sensors on a smaller phone especially if it’s the size of the iPhone mini

    I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that “more cameras” is the complaints being made here. Sure, telephotos make sense as things that take up more space. But most people are using them for like 1 in 50 shots or something. I have an extremely hard time believing that someone would genuinely notice the difference unless they’re an extreme case or they’ve been told the other ones are better. Within reasonable effective focal lengths, these are pretty negligible in the sizes we’re talking about.

    If Apple couldn’t make a smaller phone sell particularly well, I doubt anyone else could.

    I hard disagree with this. Apple is literally the worst company to try to make this shit work. Apple’s core selling point is the status symbol of it all. People trying to show off having the flashiest phone are not going to buy a product being touted as a half baked smaller and cheaper version of something else. Their entire marketing was about it being mini. Apple customers are not the core audience for something like this, and Apple marketed it as exactly what people disliked about small phones.

    around or less than 5% of total iPhone 12 and 13 sales

    I find it more surprising that this was below expectations than I do that only 5% of people bought a smaller phone. I doubt much more than 1 in 20 people really is after a smaller phone. I’m sure they exist, but based on the people I know and the number of people I’ve heard interested in smaller phones, I’d estimate it more like 1 in 20 to 1 in 40. It’s not for most people by any means. But 1 in 20 is still a decent number of people.


  • They have to understand that the cameras on the biggest flagships occupy a lot of space and it isn’t feasible to bring it to a smaller form factor.

    Not… Really… Sure it makes some difference, but the much more constraining factor is the money. Cameras arent that big, but they’re one of the priciest pieces of hardware in the device.

    The problem is more that they keep trying to sell small phones at cheaper price points. So they end up with much worse screens, socs, and cameras so they perform like shit. People don’t want a small phone because they don’t care about their phone. People want small phones because the standard size is fucking huge. They need to make a high-ish tier small phone instead of low tier small phone that performs like the 50 Walmart shit.




  • I can understand that Valve doesn’t want to give false impressions that a game runs perfectly when there are imperfections as mentioned

    Idk, I disagree with this. It means that games are being labeled as “not verified” because of things that don’t really hamper what people would care about - the keyboard popping up for naming your character or seeing “A” in a green circle isn’t going to make people be like “oh no, this doesn’t work well on my steamdeck, I’m not playing it”. Does it look unprofessional? Sure. But that’s not what people care about when looking at the ratings for compatibility. They just want to know if it’s going to run well.

    These systems are all about trust and evaluating the right metrics. Having the right button icons matters to Valve but not the player. Once players play games that aren’t verified and they run fine, and they play games that are verified but still have performance hitches in some places, etc, the rating system loses its credibility and then it’s meaningless.

    On top of this, developers are already shunning the verification and just not bothering. Some of the things they ask for don’t directly affect the playability of their game. It’s an extra hoop for the developer to jump through, and if people don’t trust the badge, there’s no point in chasing it. Valve is literally undermining their own system from both sides by doing this.

    There’s already people in this thread touting protonDB being a better evaluation. It’s exactly this that will happen and will continue to happen and continue undermining their rating system until Valve aligns their verification system with what users actually care about.


  • I’d actually bet it’s something different…

    It’s less that you game on a steam deck because it’s portable, and more that because it’s portable you can game. There are people here and there that are like “yeah, I have a steam deck so I use that instead” but the sentiment I see more often is “I wouldn’t be able to game at all if it wasn’t portable - I can’t sit down for that long, I only have time on the train, I need to be near my kids” etc.

    And this changes the dynamic. It’s less that these people have “desktop gaming” and “portable gaming” and are choosing to play the AAA games while portable. They only have portable gaming. And they choose to play the same good games everyone else is playing. The only gaming they do is on their deck. And they’re not going to be like “oh, why play a good game like BG3 if I can play a shitty portable game like xyz”.

    These are just people’s primary gaming devices now. And if they can, they will choose to play the same good games everyone else is choosing to play. It doesn’t matter if it only runs OK, playing a good game with OK graphics is still better than playing a shitty game.