warriorstar @warriorstar@elysian.city

I'm not just singling out Microsoft for this. Apple used to care about this level of interference with people's basic ability to focus on their devices. No longer. An absolutely grievous offence occurs in Settings.app on recent iOS releases: "Finish Setting up iPhone", a call-to-action that displays a red notification badge on the app icon. And what does this do? It puts the user into a flow to set up the following services: Apple ID, Apple Pay, Siri, and iMessage.

This is an anti-pattern designed to take advantage of our very real desire to not have shit constantly reminding us about calls to action we don't care to take, or to see notification badges on the icons of apps when there's nothing worth notifying us about. Interface designers are being incentivized to get us to look at their app, think, "okay, what do I need to click through to get rid of that icon badge", and move on with their life.

You can no longer trust what your OS says is important or not. In one fell swoop, this defeats the purpose and efficacy of *all of them*. And there are a lot of them. Not just from your OS, but from all your favorite apps, all those terrible fucking third party pieces of software you have to install to use your scanner or whatever.

Here you can see that the big ⚠️ icons are all for actions that have ZERO TO DO WITH SECURITY and 100% across the board to do with signing into a Microsoft service, signing up for a Microsoft service, or increasing the telemetry you send to Microsoft.

The first one has a ⚠️ icon. The call-to-action is "Set up OneDrive for file recovery options in case of a ransomware attack". The second one, "Account protection", has the same icon, and the message "Sign in with Microsoft for enhanced security and other benefits". No details on what either of those things might entail. The third one, "App & browser control", claims that "The setting to block potentially unwanted apps is turned off. Your device may be vulnerable."

At some point, UX designers around the world decided that all calls to action, regardless of severity, required ⚠️⚠️ GIANT WARNING SIGNS ⚠️⚠️. So this is a screenshot of the “Windows Security” control panel in Windows 10. It purports to share with you "security at a glance". It is comprised of seven categories represented by large icons. These icons may have notification badges on them. The germane ones are "Virus & Threat protection", "Account protection", and "App & browser control".

no matter what browser you have selected in windows 10, invoking a web search from the start menu opens edge

i’ve basically about fucking had it with software that refuses to listen to me

still fucking in awe, that the way i found out i haven’t made any backups of my gaming rig, is my NAS telling me i was running out of space on a volume that was—for no obvious reason—one sixth my array total capacity

i think past me wanted to see how quickly it would fill up, and to test the alert system, and then i just forgot about it and presumed it was humming along

“how to create a windows 10 backup to a network drive

first, open up the windows 7 backup control panel”

software’s neat

i’m never calling them capsules

sorry

at some point in the past ten years nearly every hardware and peripheral company that i used and recommended started churning out cheap plastic garbage

logitech fell the farthest in my estimation but i’m looking for peripherals now (in particular a sufficiently powerful USB-C hub) and it’s all just shit that looks like it would fly away in a light breeze

harvest moon for the SNES is one of my favorite games

here are two large (7680x7360) uncompressed images containing the mountain forest that i stitched together

there is a fall version and a winter version and i believe they are pixel-accurate

share and enjoy

i accidentally opened the directory on my drive containing the Sandman series

already like 5 chapters in

turns out the turing test was the wrong question to be asking

instead of having to worry about whether or not a human being could tell the difference between a person and a computer, the real problem is getting a computer to tell the difference between a computer and a person

my NAS which has two 9TB disks in it, was complaining about running out of space; i checked the thing and the volume I had created for each OS backup was only like 4TB large

i don’t remember if I was doing that to prove a point or something, or to force me to look at it, but hey, i looked at it, and seems like all my shit is still safe

the problem with any music composition in the hitman series after blood money was jesper kyd had already used your franchise to write one of best albums in video game soundtrack history

there’s just no topping that

jesus i wrote this toot with “absolution” earlier, which is not the game i was describing

o mores, usque adeone scire tuum nihil est nisi te scire hoc sciat alter?

it won’t be long until i’m in the autumn of my existence

i hope to everliving fuck i have the strength to face it

i can’t wait to just even go to a fucking restaurant, man

i want my fucking city back