Omar Rizwan (@omar@social.omar.website)

zlib logo: the text zlib being compressed by a clamp

I was looking at this Paul Dourish book earlier which opens with this critique of computers as being optimized to save programmer time instead of human time

it's funny how 90s and early 00s commentary on computing has opposite problems to those we have today: that computers had these overcomplicated UIs designed by programmers, they had all these settings, they had terrible security, and so on

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Open thread

Omar Rizwan @omar

the impoverished computer versions/metaphors of things

> i think people forget sometimes with git that version control also means you have multiple directories open with the same repo on different branches
> like having multiple windows open

it reminds me of the problem with ebook reading as opposed to physical book reading -- they can implement a 'bookmark feature' that theoretically does the job but it doesn't have even close to the level of speed and concurrency …

Open thread

Omar Rizwan @omar

I feel like I've developed all these micro-tactics for making and finding software that meets this standard https://hachyderm.io/@dubroy/111658490778296619 like
- stuff that's written in C and uses a Makefile tends to work like this
- "single-file libraries"
- stuff that is 20+ years old and hasn't been updated but has elaborate API documentation/header comments