A disturbing wrinkle on the internet view from 2013:
Speculation about a Linux back door (note that Torvalds didn't actually answer the question).
Time to buy some envelopes and sealing wax.
Update: Torvalds swears it was a joke but again, please see (scary but unfortunately a bit light on sourcing).
Was trying to think of when you might want to watch a cursor moving through a sound file.
For any reason besides "we at Soundcloud needed a gimmick to keep your attention while you listen to music here."
Perhaps if the wave had an interesting shape and the sound was somewhat intriguing and there was some obvious, necessary correlation between the two.
So I made this [Vimeo] as an experiment. [Embedded version]
Had been wanting to post that bit of electronic music but it needed something more. This might be it.
The drift of current design is to rub out all traces of human agency in computer and web use ("here, let the machine do that for you") while at the same time dispensing endless hype encouraging people to express their individuality by sharing.
Olia Lialina thinks "user" is not a bad word, and posits a resourceful, skeptical (ideal) individual somewhere between the programmer/designer/hacker who sneers at "average" consumers and the imagined helpless n00b most "apps" are designed for. Joking on the "general purpose computer" and the "Turing test" for artificial intelligence, she posits the General Purpose User or Turing Complete User.
Fleshing out this conception further, this person:
Dislikes being infantilized by his internet service provider ("uh oh, you're not logged in")
Scorns URL shorteners that anonymize incoming links.
Offers cigars to people who quit Facebook (on Twitter but nobody's perfect).
Questions whether top level domains are the future of the internet.
Uses Raspberry Pi to block ads at the WiFi router level.
Asks why use "HTML5" when a GIF would work. (Prompting one genius to comment "Paddy, you really need to stop listening to Moody. He knows next to nothing about the web. Esp. its technologies.")
Thanks to Olia Lialina for giving a name to what we're always preaching around here: General Purpose User or Turing Complete User. Let's call this person a TCU. (Not Texas Christian University.)
This is a person somewhere between the programmer/designer/hacker sneering at naive users and the inept clod most "apps" are designed for.
To give some examples from my own blogging experience:
Being a TCU means you can find my email address on the site, even though I don't have a large button that hooks into your email program.
A TCU who wants to link to a post here figures out that clicking on each post title puts a permalink in your address bar (assuming your browser hasn't disabled that), which can be copied and used as a hyperlink in a post, email, or sharing site.
A TCU who wants to "follow me" finds a feed link and adds that to an RSS reader.
A TCU has an RSS reader.
A TCU finds a way to get me a message -- a non-TCU goes on Twitter and demands I turn on blog comments.
In the scenario where Firefox takes away the checkbox to disable Javascript, the programmer sneers at the ordinary user who will get into trouble turning off Javascript, the inept clod is the person who checks and unchecks boxes without knowing what they do, and the TCU either employs the box (if it's there) or goes into about:config (if the box has been removed) but ultimately has a reason to turn off Javascript - say to visit a suspicious page or troubleshoot a web app.
If a TCU is having problems searching old tweets, he makes a Twitter archive using an open-source web-page-making program (and takes the time to save the tweets, a few dozen at a time, as he goes). Obviously this isn't worth doing if most of your tweets are just "hey dude."
Lialina mentions regularly visiting Twitter pages without following people as a TCU example -- what a concept.
The TCU complains about login attacks on his self-managed site and miraculously gets a suggestion from a generous TCU of a plugin to use (it's working).
The TCU turns off Google's "display results as you type" feature. Have a little patience, jeez.
The TCU is wary of "dark patterns" in web design -- the down side of being treated like a clod by programmers is that they can manipulate you.
The old-new academic word for TCU is bricoleur, one who cobbles together experience from available bits and pieces. Lialina is correct to put the focus back on the USER, where the drift of current design is to rub out all traces of human agency while at the same time encouraging people to express their individuality by sharing.
Will try to think of other attributes of this marvelous being without being too egotistical.
