Notices by Hisham (hisham_hm@mastodon.social)

🇫🇷 3ème semaine - où vais-je? ✈️

#monanneeenfrancais

🇩🇪 3. Woche - wohin gehe ich? ✈️
#meinjahraufdeutsch

🇫🇷 2ème semaine - c'est pas facile d'alterner entre les langues !

#monanneeenfrancais

🇩🇪 2. Woche - ich habe vielen Thema gedenkt, und ich habe alles vergisst 😆

#meinjahraufdeutsch

🇫🇷 1ère semaine - 🎶 dur dur de parler le français ! 🤣

#monanneeenfrancais

🇩🇪 1. Woche - Achtung: es ist sehr, sehr schlecht... aber es kann nur bessern 😆

#meinjahraufdeutsch

Happy new year! I'm going to start something fun and somewhat ridiculous.

I've been doing Duolingo for German 🇩🇪 and French 🇫🇷 over the past week (I had some contact with both many years ago but never really got them to a usable conversational level), and I'm going to start posting one video a week here to document my progress, just trying to freestyle a bit for a minute or so.

Let's see how far I can take this! I'd love to do it consistently for the whole year, and hopefully see the progress!

I wonder if non-developer end-users feel the difference, or if the end result is just the same: "this doesn't work".

I've seen people not realizing they were being manipulated by slick ill-intentioned software.

I've seen people dismissing awkward well-intentioned software outright with "this is broken".

If users were looking at a person performing a task in front of them (say, an office clerk) rather than a piece of code, everyone would be able to tell the difference instantly.

(cont.)

Well-intentioned awkward free software still beats slick ill-intentioned proprietary software any day of the week. Both cause frustration, but the nature of the frustration is so, so different.

The latter pretends it Just Works, and the frustration is injected for nefarious reasons.

The frustration in the former is an accidental emergent behavior. I feel empathy to that, but it's no less frustrating.

(cont.)

I recognize it as a user myself when using software by others, and unfortunately I recognize it in my users when they fail to use my software. I know the answer in both cases is "well, the workflow is awkward because reasons". There's always reasons, they're always complicated.

I wonder if I would know that were I not a developer myself.

(cont.)

https://hisham.hm/2025/01/14/frustrating-software/

There's software that Just Works, and then there's Frustrating Software.

htop Just Works. LuaRocks is Frustrating Software. I wrote them both.

As a user and an author of Frustrating Software, there's a very particular brand of frustration caused by its awkward workflows.

(cont.)

@anna The reading that this is a need to conform does not preclude the perception of their political agenda. He needs to conform _because_ of his agenda, which is in equal parts political and economical.

IMO Zuckerberg seems more worried about maintaining his market/economic position than pushing a specific ideological course. Musk is doing the latter (as a means to amass further power) and he now has the upper hand. The timing and tone of Zuckerberg were a white flag to the incoming regime.

@a1ba
tired: slow scripting language
wired: Japanese slow scripting language
inspired: Brazilian fast scripting language

@gmgall seja meu duoamigo: hisham.hm

Pascal and Ada have bunk beds at my office #caturday #CatsOfMastodon

When a project has a modern-looking website, sometimes I can't tell on the spot if its a FOSS project or a SaaS company.

And then sometimes it's both!?... https://typst.app/

I guess my brain is used to the 2000s look for FOSS sites, and I ended up associating slick sites with huge fonts and marketing-speak with startups.

The design I made for https://gobolinux.org/ back in 2016ish tried to stay somewhere "in-between".

https://ghostty.org/ has an interesting approach!

#webdesign

Oh, the amount of times I've typed 2>&1 (and the amount of times I mistyped 2&>1 and produced a file called "1") due to not remembering to use |&

An angle I hadn't thought of before:

Big Tech would love for this to be true: "LLMs provide better value than doing a quick web search and finding out yourself"

What if the way they're primarily tipping this balance is not by making LLMs better, but by actively making web search worse?

(It sounds far-fetched at first, but "let's make product X worse to promote product Y instead" is in fact a common trope in the industry.)

There was _one_ social network where I "lived in" where outrage was not the most popular thing: Orkut.

Because it was very focused on communities (each with their customs, kind of like subreddits -- some could get heated, but I only hung out in the wholesome ones), and on 1-to-1 friend relationships (via the Scrapbook and Testimonial features, which were positive by design).

Experience design matters, and maybe copying Twitter isn't the best place to be in the design space.

@cstanhope @KasTasMykolas oh, I didn't know either syntax!

That did work, thank you. I guess my original toot still stands since I wouldn't file that under "easy" (it wasn't obvious for me, I'm sure it wouldn't be obvious for non techies).

I did try searching for `word hisham_hm` and that only showed other people's replies to me with that word, but not my own posts!