That lowers P(doom), because it gives AI a chance to do enough damage to make people take the threat seriously before anybody gets recursive self-improvement working.
The thing is we are basically guaranteeing this to happen. We might kill off all the models that seem like they are going to threaten the power structure of the planet through these sorts of things. That will work for a while. But just like most things in life, by sheer dumb random chance, there will be once case that manages to have some way to evade detection, proliferate, then dominate. We are basically giving it selective pressure to favor this outcome.
Either you're engaged in some large-scale testing operation and your automation already handles it, or something has gone terribly wrong and the inconvenience of the sandboxing UI is the least of your concerns.
No, the point is that the amount of friction you can add to new app installs is much higher if you don’t optimize it for the unlikely case that your user is an app reviewer.
No, the point is that every time your computer isn't doing something you want it to do, you should be able to download a software package to make it do that.
I don't care about animations wasting CPU time. Any modern CPU has plenty of cycles to spare for animations. I care about wasting my own time. If I minimize a window, it should minimize immediately. I don't want to wait for some useless animation to play first.
That animation in particular (window minimization) is 200-300ms long in most DEs, and is located on the slow/discoverable UI path that is tolerable to such delays. If you want faster speeds, you likely use the keyboard and your muscle memory and aren't likely to find yourself in a scenario where you want to minimize or maximize a window at all, since you're using the hot/low latency path through the UI (e.g. Alt-TAB or a myriad other ways). If you use a pointer, it's a rather negligible delay compared to moving it, and of course you can make it faster in the settings. UI design is about thinking such details through and measuring them, not adding useless animations to annoy power users.
Anyway, it's not the point. You're always free to disable animations if you think they're making you slow. I think too many people in the discussions about UIs are confusing quirks of particular interfaces with first principles, and are extrapolating specific experiences to the whole field.
>it's a rather negligible delay compared to moving it
That's an irrelevant comparison. If you booked a long flight, would you accept somebody pointlessly delaying it for an hour just because that's short compared to the duration? The correct amount of avoidable latency is zero, regardless of how much unavoidable latency there is.
It's also false; I have a good mouse, good mouse skills, and my taskbar sits against the edge of the screen giving it effectively infinite height (see Fitt's law). I can hit taskbar targets in around 300ms.
You're assuming this is a sequential workflow, which it isn't. Animation is already done by the time you hit a target. I also am fast with the mouse, I used to play and design competitive FPSes for a living, that's precisely why without measurement and considering actual scenarios I have a really hard time believing that this specific thing actually slows anything down for real use cases and isn't just your personal preference/imagination. I disable it too but it's just my preference, as I find it distracting and breaking the focus.
I click the taskbar to minimize/restore the windows, so the animation starts only after I click them. And it's still sequential even if I use the title bar icons, because I have to wait for the animation to finish before I can use the space where the window once was.
> You're always free to disable animations if you think they're making you slow.
Sadly less and less true nowadays. I always try to turn off any animations. On Android the settings is not respected, not even by Google owns app. On KDE itseld, it respects it pretty well, but applications don't always do, and not consistently. Firefox has its own animation settind on Android, linux, and windows (never tried on mac), and firefox doesn't even respect it in some case when scrolling even though i turned off everything.
I hate animations. I want everything instant, my time is precious, my ability to suffer shit moving all over the place is limited.
I have animations minimized (whatever the setting is called) on my iphone, and there is still a maddening delay when doing many actions. Either the app has hard-coded some amount of time between presses or the program is so inept that it really takes fractions of a second to do basic activities.
My phone conveniently integrates the functionality of an emergency communication device with the old calculator watch I used to have. That's about the limit of what the hardware form factor can do without it being an absolutely miserable experience. I don't do real computing on a touch screen.
I believe most objections to GUIs come from people who've never experienced good mouse control. If you're not using a high-end gaming mouse and a high refresh rate monitor, with sensitivity/acceleration curve selected with careful thought, on a mouse pad that suits your settings, you probably have bad mouse control.
Watch some videos of top-ranking aim trainer players so see how high the human skill ceiling is for mouse control, and look at the hardware they're using.
You and OP are both conflating GUIs with mouse control. GUIs are great, sure, but aren't necessarily mouse-driven. I'm not using the mouse most of the time in my GUIs.
(also are you suggesting becoming a e-sports tier performer to be... fast in executing actions on your computer? Think about how absurd it sounds. Mouse clicking on UI elements requires visual feedback and a lot more conscious effort where keyboard is just muscle memory and is vastly simpler for most discrete actions, except for a few scenarios, while being blazingly fast. Yes I'm more than aware what aim trainers are, and high-end mice are not more special than high-end keyboards. Aim trainers have completely different constraints and requirements than UIs.)
Esports training is about beating the competition, so you have to chase every last improvement possible, and there are diminishing returns. For ordinary GUI use you can compromise on 99% performance with much less effort. This is still more effort than most computer users put in, but it's hardly anything compared to what professional musicians or athletes have to do. There's nothing absurd about it.
As an example of a compromise you could make, in many games, mouse acceleration has higher skill ceiling than linear mouse control. But mouse acceleration it's harder to learn, and the possible performance improvement is only small. I disable mouse acceleration myself because I'm not aiming to win tournaments. IMO, linear mouse control should be the default.
And I do not experience any conscious effort when using a mouse. My subjective experience is I look at a target and the cursor appears there automatically. The better the hardware you're using the easier it is to achieve this.
I suspect that is a huge factor, indeed. I often see people using bad mice, with uncomfortable shape, bad buttons, bad sensitivity plus often acceleration enabled. Then on top of that, people are putting mouse in some weird locations, like a narrow slit shelf, or far away from the keyboard (because they have a bad sensitivity configured in part). Or even no mouse and just use trackpad (even the superb one like in Macbooks). Of course GUI would feel clunky that way.
Stateless desktop is a feature. Application state is something I have to mirror in my head to prevent applications from doing unwanted and surprising things.
IMO, even the clipboard metaphor is too much state. We already have the selection highlight, which has the nice benefit of being directly visible. This should be reduced to a single global selection highlight. Then copy and paste can be replaced by "duplicate highlighted selection here", eliminating the possibility of forgetting what's in the paste buffer.
Yeah I definitely understand the value of the stateless desktop.
I do think that, for example, the fact that browsers hold history is generally a useful thing, though, right? For me it's less about persisting the application state itself as it is about holding onto metadata for later inspection.
Hot Dog Stand is really illustrative of the change in attitude. Previously: "It's your computer, of course you're allowed to make it look ugly." Now: "It's our computer, that's not on brand."
IMO, "scroll here" should be the default action for clicking on a scrollbar. There are already good keyboard shortcuts for page up and page down, but there cannot be a keyboard shortcut for "scroll here". It's wasting the capability of the mouse to duplicate keyboard functionality when you could be benefiting from unique mouse-only functionality.
Oh hell no. If you think "scroll here" is a sane default, you haven't experienced the pain of jumping possibly thousands of lines in a long document with an accidental click, and no easy way to go back to where you were.
I don't think that's a serious problem. There are three possibilities I can think of:
1. You're editing text outside of Emacs. Your cursor remains where it was, so you insert a single character and the document scrolls back to the cursor. You can then delete that character.
2. You're editing text in Emacs. You like to pretend it's still the 1970s and off-screen cursors are some pie-in-the-sky fantasy. You solve the problem with some unspecified ELISP wizardry, which as a self-respecting Emacs user you are surely capable of.
3. You're reading a read-only document. You activate your full-text search, which every good document viewer has, and start typing the last sentence you read while it's still fresh in your memory.
and start typing the last sentence you read while it's still fresh in your memory
Double hell no. The majority of the time it's a log file with lots of repetitive lines, and I'm definitely NOT going to remember exactly the line, especially after the disruption of accidentally jumping somewhere unexpected.
Mouse and keyboard should be alternatives on equal footing as much as possible. The gutter for page up/down has the benefit that you don’t have to move the mouse all the way up and down to the arrow buttons when repeatedly switching between the same adjacent pages, or when you positioned the scroll button slightly off where you wanted the position to be, and adjust it a little by paging up or down — especially when the scroll range is so long that a small mouse move on the scroll bar corresponds to more than one page.
For scroll ranges that aren’t overly long, you can long-press so that the area ends up scrolling to that position. Only for long scroll ranges is it necessary to drag, use the context menu, or the Shift key, for absolute positioning.
There are certainly trade-offs, but it’s not like there aren’t justified reasons for the way it is.
The ubiquity of mouse wheels and two-finger scrolling on trackpads drastically weakens your case for prioritizing the page up and page down behaviors in the scroll gutter. The mouse already offers a low-effort way to adjust scroll position at small to medium scales, generally much easier that repositioning the cursor from above to below the scroll thumb unless you really need to scroll by precisely one page (usually not possible on the web anymore because of floating dickbars).
With regards to Qt, does that mean Qt apps on Windows or something? I use KDE so there are a lot of Qt apps and they are all click-to-scroll in the scrollbar. Of course it's KDE so it's configurable so you can change it to click-for-page-up/down and middle click to scroll, but left-click to scroll is the default.
A video game allows you to develop your skills and use your brain in a complex way (especially true of competitive multiplayer games). A slot machine is played by mindlessly pulling a lever.
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