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I wish this would be the solution. What I would like specifically for Linux are alternative desktop environments like the resurrected CDE. Themes don’t update well and are in my experience, sluggish.

Try this

- XFCE

- Bluecurve theme for GTK, cursors, XFWM4: https://github.com/neeeeow/Bluecurve (scale the xpm files from the XFWM4 theme 2x: mogrify -resize 200% *.xpm)

- Default Bluecurve theme font: Luxi Sans Regular

- Tiled wallpaper from KDE 1: https://github.com/KDE/kde1-kdebase/blob/master/pics/wallpap... (scale it 2x using a external tool, and use it tiled)

- Icons: https://www.pling.com/p/1012233/

Once you are done you can listen to this to have a more immersive retro experience: https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=3...


Thanks!

That is actually a feature. An UI should never be, under any circumstances, in line with a trend, fresh or different for the sake of being different.

It should, however, be as invisible as possible. Being only functional is a compliment.


Huge disagreement here. Maybe true for something critical like the control board on some heavy machinery.

But for something like a phone or messaging app, I want to see the return of fun, creative, and unique. We had such a great era of design around 2006-2013 and then it all rapidly went incredibly dull since then.

I want to see creative menus back, I want to see whacky UIs like windows media player skins back. Ultimately for basic stuff of low importance like your phone, the most absolutely optimal UI doesn’t matter, much like I don’t care for the most absolutely optimal furniture. Its visual appeal matters.


My phone is the control board of my life. It is critical infrastructure and serious.

No one is getting mangled in machinery if I take 100ms longer to send a text message. There’s time to spare to actually enjoy the design.

911/112 calls are still made via phones, and I have to say that even making a simple phone call has, at times, become highly problematic on these new and very complex smart-phones.

With that said, my pants' pocket still manages to somehow initiate the "emergency call" procedure every couple of months or so, I have no idea how that happens (I don't even know how I'd do that with the phone placed in front of me).


> Pant's pockets

Yep. I keep making accidental emergency calls too. Another interesting incident which happened only once:

I accidentally opened instagram, a group chat, and changed the background to bubbles or something like that, all with my phone in my pocket. I guess I put my phone into my pocket unlocked by accident because I can't imagine accidentally typing my PIN.


But what if animated and "playful" do not make the UI enjoyable?

>We had such a great era of design around 2006-2013 and then it all rapidly went incredibly dull since then.

I agree with the huge disagreement. That 2006-2013 era was, in my opinion, horrendous and takes the second spot as an offender just after “peak flat”.

However, I never denied that visual appeal matters. But design is how it holistically works, not how it looks.

Maybe, at some point, some team will get back to Dieter Rams 10 principles and hammer it into an UX experience. We were so close in the 90’s.

Maybe we can agree on: make the os maximally unobtrusive by default but include options to customise to taste?


> Just call them properties with unknown provenance.

They would if it would be the correct designation, however, it is not.

Emergence does not equal non-understanding or some spooky-hooky force coming from the unknown.Reductionism does not lead to an explaining-away of emergence.


Interesting. Is there a quantitative threshold to emergence anyone could point at with these smaller models? Tracing the thoughts of a large language model is probably the only way to be sure, or is it?


Disregarding the downvotes, I mean this as a serious question.

From the liked article: “We don’t know an “algorithm” for this, and we can’t even begin to guess the required parameter budget or the training data needed.”

Why not, at least the external ones? The computational resources and the size of the training dataset is quantifiable from an input point of view. What gets used is not, but the input size should.


Not at all. Here is an analogy: A car is a system which brings you from point A to B. No part of the car can bring you from point A to B. Not the seats, the wheels, not the frame, not even the motor. If you put the motor on a table, it won’t move one bit. The car, as a system, however does. The emergent property of a car, seen as a system, is that it brings you from one location to another.

A system is the product of the interaction of its parts. It is not the sum of the behaviour of its parts. If a system does not exhibit some form of emergent behaviour, it is not a system, but something else. Maybe an assembly.


That sounds like semantics.

If putting together a bunch of X's in a jar always makes the jar go Y, then is Y an emergent property?

Or we need to better understand why a bunch of X's in a jar do that, and then the property isn't emergent anymore, but rather the natural outcome of well-understood X's in a well-understood jar.


Ah. Not semantics, that is cybernetics and systems theory.

As in your example: If a bunch of x in a jar leads to the jar tipping over, it is not emergent. That’s just cause and effect. Problem to start with is that the jar containing x is not even a system in the first place, emergence as a concept is not applicable here.

There may be a misunderstanding on your side of the term emergence. Emergence does not equal non-understanding or some spooky-hooky force coming from the unknown. We understand the functions of the elements of a car quite well. The emergent behaviour of a car was intentionally brought about by massive engineering.

Reductionism does not lead to an explaining-away of emergence.



haha cool!

turned the car into a motorcycle.

here's an article with a photo for anyone who's interested: https://archive.is/y96xb


You approaching this the wrong way. What you are listing as disadvantages is, for the most part, the USP.

For example, if you are in the target group, you buy it exactly because it does not uses AR glasses; If you are proficient, you are sleepwalking the damage/distance/all other calculations within seconds in your head, you don’t even have to take a single look at any rule book. The biggest selling point, however is: there are others sitting in front of you, it can be very competitive, you can see the reaction, like in chess.


Regarding missing features: Is anyone around here who has found an alternative to the original “quick launch toolbar”?

I mean the ‘real’ one which was introduced in Windows 95 - up to Windows 8 (IIRC), which could be separated from the Taskbar and be docked at any side of the desktop, horizontally or vertically, and could also be stacked in both directions.


Honestly I'm surprised MS hasn't done more with the great dockable interface UI tech they built for for Visual Studio a few decades ago, and also gradually adopted by Adobe Photoshop and every other productivity application. I don't know if MS invented it but they definitely mastered it well in oldschool VS.

Let me dock/add-to-tabbed-pane/split-dock-into-multiple-panes and have the autohide/pin toggle for any window attached to any any edge of the screen, and make the Taskbar and the Quicklaunch and the Start Button just another set of Pane Windows, just with enforcement that (where appropriate) they cannot be closed or otherwise removed from the active screens, with a redundant always-accessible explorer rclick-context entry just in case you've somehow completely lost them.

Then make "maximize" mean "join the central pane as a new tab".


>not to waste our lives talking about politics.

In case you are an U.S. citizen, I wish you good luck living your life if everything around erodes. And before you ask, no, there is not a single bit of irony in this post, sadly.


This is a gold mine, too:

https://www.unoptimal.com/automated-ragequit

Love it! Now needed more than ever.


Interesting that you think to have the authority to tell others what “the real world” actually is. That doesn’t seem to work.

Maybe you should try to get out of the technofacist mindset?


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