User Interfaces
I am taking a Human Computer Interaction course this semester which I am really looking forward to! We were assigned a whole bunch of reading but one article that I really enjoyed was Jef Raskins comments on User Interfaces. It is an older article but many of the things that he pointed out really resonate with the issues that we still face today. In the article, one line really stands out for me which is “the union of two wrong systems does not make for a single, unified, correct one”. This reminds me of the idiom “two wrongs don’t make a right”, but is interesting to think about from a UI perspective. UI’s are changing all around us. Every major GUI OS is implementing some sort of convergence between the traditional desktop metaphor and touch screen capability with endless screens of icons and interesting gestures in lieu of menu driven interfaces. This is a very interesting time to be thinking about HCI as more and more devices in our world are becoming computerized.
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Check out some more stuff to read down below.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Joining Cursor from Fatih Arslan
- Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making from Ludicity
- No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass from Fernando Borretti
- Is it ethical to use AI? from charity.wtf
- The logical destination of LLMs from Andy Bell
- Revised rules of engineering leadership. from Irrational Exuberance
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its prede...
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries August 16, 2026“I think there’s a lot of value in these.”
Speaking of user interface guidelines, developer Matt Sephton and others compiled many of Apple’s human interface guidelines, starting from 1980, all the way to 2014, including some goodies like early drafts, NeXT, Newton, and so on. Elsewhere, designer Ge...
via Unsung August 16, 2026Birding photos from Dutch Gap on Aug 15, 2026
Birding photos from Dutch Gap on Aug 15, 2026 My best bird photo from this morning is a dragonfly (Eastern Pondhawk, I think). Least Sandpiper Green Heron Red-headed Woodpecker. It's a juvenile, so its head is not actually red yet.
via O'DonnellWeb August 16, 2026Generated by openring