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> My father called me in exasperation last night after trying and failing to book a plane ticket

I've been going through really infuriating experiences with airlines' software too. Web apps, totems for luggage dispatching, everything. I know it's hard to pinpoint a single cause, but I believe that the current trend of overemphasizing aesthetics plays a major role on the current deplorable state of affairs: applications get too hard to design and build and at the end of the day there's simply not enough time to properly test things and fix its bugs.


That's an interesting insight. I didn't notice that Charlie's trajectory also works as an allegory for the regular mental decline of the average person


> the regular mental decline of the average person

of every person


I don't think that's true at all. Most people die before they fall to the level of intelligence the character does near the end of the novel. Even many 90-year olds are still fairly lucid.


The key word is 'allegory'


...if they live long enough.

(Pedantically, that decline may take less than 15 seconds.)


Charlie's trajectory may be your trajectory, not as an allegory. You may be that average person.


It wouldn't be allegory if it didn't apply to the majority of the bell curve. I'm not sure why you say "not an allegory." If Flowers for Algernon wasn't a story with something to teach us about our own lives, then I don't think so many of us would find it interesting.

The only reason some people escape this fate is that they die too young.


s/allegory/analogy/

It may just be a side effect of my dyslexia coping, but I read it as ‘analogy’ until reading your comment. Even then, I’m am pretty sure everyone knew they meant ‘analogy’ and just moved on. It’s okay to point out mistakes, but please be civil when doing so.


Hi, but I meant allegory indeed.

According to Wiktionary:

- (rhetoric) A narrative in which a character, place, or event is used to deliver a broader message about real-world issues and occurrences.

- A picture, book, or other form of communication using such representation.

- A symbolic representation which can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, usually a moral or political one.

He might have been triggered by my use of "average". I realize it now that it may not have been adequate, sorry for that, English is not my first language.


My bad, my dyslexia and reacting to less-than polite comment got best of me :)


Did you read the book? (Spoiler Alert) Basically the only thing remaining with Charlie after his regression was the memory of his friend Algernon. A "mere" laboratory rat, like himself. That's a message about what things really matter in the long run.


I like to think that Esperanto is easier, not necessarily easy. It definitely helps if you know e.g. a romance language, but it still is way more accessible than any other "regular" language (and, even for a romance language speaker, it requires effort to learn properly).

In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.


You can look at the whole rest of the page I linked to for ways in which Esperanto is irregular and parochial.

For example:

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/v.html

There's a whole word class (words ending in AŬ) which is essentially a "Wastebasket Taxon" for his vocabulary: There is no regularity to what ended up there, merely arbitrary choice. That's acceptable in a natural language, but Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular As Oat Bran, right?

> In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.

Really? Do you have any evidence for this? I follow a blog which frequently discusses such things (language use in China) and it's never been mentioned:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/


I think it's technically true that someone in China at one point used Esperanto to introduce Western languages to a few other people, because around 1900 it was part of a package of futuristic Western ideas like overthrowing the Emperor and Communism.

But the claim omits how utterly unsuccessful Chinese Esperantists were at their goal compared to the revolutionary Communists. (Even though they were sometimes the same people, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yuzhi )

For comparison, a few years after Zamenhof started Esperanto, Paul von Möllendorf (a German aristocrat working as a customs official in Shanghai) suggested in his Manchu grammar https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Manchu_Grammar that Westerners should study Manchu as an easier introduction to the Chinese classics, the Chinese Emperor at the time being ethnically Manchu. Then the Emperor got deposed and by now the last native Manchu speakers have probably all died of old age. Learning Manchu in order to learn Chinese would be a collosal waste of time.

Chinese Esperantists that I know don't really seem to make fewer or different mistakes when using Esperanto than when using English. The marking of tenses with -is, -as, -os may be perfectly regular, but that doesn't help much when grammatical tense itself is a foreign concept to you. Someone who usually uses present tense in English when talking about the past will tend to also use present tense in Esperanto when talking about the past.


On the other hand, Esperanto is one of the languages featured by Radio China International (https://esperanto.cri.cn), and there's also an official support for the El Cxinia Popolo magazine, and maybe others I'm not aware of. I'm not sure one can generalize 1) the antagonism between the communist government and Esperanto and 2) the lack of skills of the Chinese Esperanto speakers.


There is no antagonism between the government and Esperanto that I'm aware of, more like disinterest. As I mentioned, there was originally a lot of overlap between people supporting either cause, but Esperanto simply never got as popular as Communism.

As for China Radio International, the inclusion of Esperanto among the forty-odd languages they translate content into is transparently intended to propagandize to foreign Esperantists more so than promoting the language.


> Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular

I don't know. There are irregularities indeed, but they are so few that it's easy to simply memorize them.

> Really? Do you have any evidence for this?

Unfortunately I have no URL to share here. This has been discussed a few times in some of the meetings I attended in the local Esperanto club -- and it makes sense, given the language's propedeutic properties. The geopolitical context has probably played a role (even here, in Brazil, part of our youth refused to learn English for some decades after the US sponsored a coup and a dictatorship in the country, and Esperanto was presented as an alternative pursued by a few of us).

Also, the Chinese government supports Esperanto. There's esperanto.cri.cn and maybe others, although I'm not informed about the nature of the contracts involved.


I can relate. I thought it was due distractions, but I usually get more distracted at the phone than I do at the computer and, yet, I get worse results out of my readings at the latter. An e-paper based ebook reader didn't improve the situation either.


There's also Cobol on Wheelchair[0], although they didn't follow the good name abbreviation practice.

[0] https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair


A 96-sheet notebook + a Pentel needle-point pen. I've been feeling some strong headaches lately and the doctor's requested me to stay away from screens as much as possible. I've been using the notebook and this cheap yet nice pen to write down ideas and whatever. It's been a month now and the changes in terms of creativity and mental clarity are quite noticeable.


> aesthetics/artistic sense of UX designers is absoutely trumping usability in very many modern applications

Indeed. And I get totally stupefied by how much freedom and authority they are given in relation to the other people supposed to provide inputs for the project.

My stock broker did that. They had a web app that didn't just work -- it was acknowledged as very good. Fully customizable, you could open many sub-windows and monitor an arbitrary number of quotes depending on your strategy. The screen could turn into a mess, but it was your mess, and that's ok as long as it made sense to you, the user. I used their web app for more than a decade.

Last year they replaced it by something they have the guts to call "the enhanced experience". That fuming pile of sh*t enforces a certain geometry for the screen that makes it absolutely clear that the kids who designed that garbage never traded stocks in their lives.

But what scares me most is: what the hell the managers who approved that crap had in their minds?


The spectrum is a limited resource. Rate limits restrict the amount of spectrum one occupies, leaving more of it for use by other operators.

There are other restrictions like this. For instance, in my country, only clubs are allowed to transmit analog TV continously. Individuals can only make short transmissions.

Some people argue that increasing the bandwidth would incentivize digital modes. I can understand the point, but I would rather experiment with low-bandwidth modes than to take larger portions of the spectrum with faster, potentially wasteful modes.


> This is how internet services should look like.

Yes, definitely.

I've called UX designers out a couple times on the aesthetical complexity of their designs: if you award GOV.UK's quality a prize [0], why don't you mimic them instead of Google?

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/govuk-wins-design-of-the-...


The GOVUK deliberately bare branding serves a purpose similar to the old Tesco Value branding: to make it look austere. If it looked luxurious people would be more likely to complain about taxpayer's money being wasted.


Not really. They publish a lot of blogs explaining design decisions. It almost always comes down to making the services as accessible as possible.

Part of that involves really simple layouts, very high contrast text, legible fonts, compatibility across many devices, simple language etc.

It's certainly an added benefit that it gives an appearance of austerity, but that's more a byproduct of simplicity.


Companies need branding because they're trying to stand out from the crowd. To be distinctive and memorable, so you think of them and trust them when making buying decisions.

Governments generally don't have that requirement. So GDS doesn't need fancy branding and other concerns can take priority. It's remarkably refreshing.

It would have been so easy to just cargo-cult whatever is fashionable in the private sector. It's kinda miraculous they didn't. A mark of thoughtful, self-confident professionals. Bravo!


There was actually a lot of pushback against the austere aesthetic by government ministers - they wanted fancy looking photo banners and pretty things. This was pushed back on in the name of making something functional the prioritizes users.


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