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A very smart application of AI. Google could add it to the debugger. When my program crashes deep in jQuery code, with no stack crawl, it could suggest what the problem might be without me have to try to describe it for ChatGPT. The Google AI debugger would be able to look everywhere any anywhere in the virtual machine. Much faster than I can. As a programmer I hope they're working on this. Or maybe it's already out in testing form?#

A couple of days ago I saw a post from Evan Prodromou asking if I had seen a product announcement, and was wondering what I thought of the name. The name of the product was Really Simple Something. I said it was the first I heard of it. I did a little digging using ChatGPT and found they can do this, it’s not illegal or unethical. But it’s also true that you could invent a new format and call it HTML even if it isn’t what we think of as HTML today . The W3C would have no recourse. If you wanted to make a new CSS to compete with the existing CSS, no one can stop you, and you can call it CSS. Not a good way to run the internet imho. But that appears that's how it works. So as much as I didn't like what they did, esp the fact that the first I heard of it was a public announcement, and had no time to prepare or maybe even help them do something better, I guess we have to accept it. RSS has been through this before and came out okay. I just wish it would stop at some point. It's a useful thing, deserves love and support, not just from me, but from everyone, esp people who run companies that depend on it. You benefit as much as I do. End of sermon.#

Last night's email didn't go out. I found and fixed the bug, and the mails went out about 10.5 hours late. #

As the article details, researchers landed on the term “gender detachment” to describe a phenomenon wherein subjects “were essentially articulating […] a lack of gender identity”. My aborted pronoun hack in essence was me thinking aloud about the fact that I simply don’t think a lot about myself in terms of gender, although my homepage dutifully designates me as a cisgender, straight, and male, which I imagine is certainly true.

In this particular research, most of those identified as “gender detached” also happened to be asexual. I am not, although I am celibate (and what I’ve termed “sexually agnostic”) and aromantic, the latter of which especially I wish I’d known a long time ago as it would have saved me a lot of headaches.

At any rate, over the decades since the early days of the new millennium, I’ve mostly realized that my natural state tends toward just not caring one way or the other whether or not I had access to sex, and that what access I’d had tended to be because it was quite evidently there before me, and (cue that background radiation of conformity I’ve discussed so often in other contexts) so at such times I simply did what and as other people did.

Anyway, this is about gender, not about sex, so let’s return to the issue at hand.

Mostly, while I somewhat identify with this idea of just not thinking about gender all that much, I think it’s worth questioning how much of that would qualify as so-called “gender detachment” and how much would be the fact that people like me, who presumptively represent one or more of the various identities considered to be normative defaults, simply don’t have to think about these things, because for them they are just a societal given.

(For instance, I also don’t have any particular allegiance to the race identity of “white”, but in the normative social constructs of race and racial privilege, I certainly am precisely that. The fact that I don’t think about it doesn’t mean it isn’t true, and certainly implicates this idea that whomever society deems to be of its default identities simply doesn’t need to think about their identities.)

In the end, I neither have any particular impetus to challenge or question the normative defaults I’ve lived within for just shy of fifty-six years and which my homepage designates as being true, nor really any particular sense of identity surrounding the idea of being “male”.

It’s all something for which I don’t especially have a particular answer, although I did once in passing suggest my gender was “potato”.

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It’s strange because as an annoying book person I believe in words! I want more and more words. I want fancy words and long-winded words and difficult words. I demand complexity! I want to think and ponder and struggle with a sentence that is trying to drag me along with it on a rip-roaring ride that I can barely comprehend. This, to me, is the textbook definition of fun.

But here’s what modern UI design looks like: There’s always a confusing title; it doesn’t quickly tell me what to do or what it wants me to understand; beneath that there’s a subtitle, explaining the title again; beneath that there’s several sentences that restates the title and subtitle but simply jumbles all the words around to make it justify its existence; then the button—there is always a button—and it asks me to “Confirm” or “Apply” but as to what I’m confirming or applying I have absolutely no idea unless I go back to the text and fight my way through it all again.

Folks will spend so much time adding fancy illustrations and making sure the icons aren’t blurry but when it comes to words and actions in interfaces they seem to gloss right over them. We have learned to scan UIs like robots because the folks who designed them don’t care for the words as much as they cared for the fonts or the colors.

But words in an interface have a different job than they do in a book and behave in a different way. Every word in a UI needs to act like a hammer, with each successive word the interface should become clearer, more easily understood. If you put a word like Explore in an interface it might make sense but now add another navigation item like Discover beneath it and now both words make no sense. The UI has collapsed into meaninglessness and folks are forced to click and think and furrow their brows to understand the difference between the two. This is because words in interfaces have relationships: they all work together to build comprehension. If one button or title or navigation item is confusing then it makes everything else more confusing, too.

The cynic in me worries that the folks who made this interface don’t want me to read the popup or modal or alert or web page or list of settings or whatever and they really just want me to click a button. The words are designed to be longwinded and confusing. They just want the click. The more hopeful designer in me worries that these folks just didn’t spend the time necessary to understand what they want from me. Either way, it sucks.

So this is feedback I give to myself as I’m working on an interface today: Remove that subtitle! Make that title as brief as possible! Kill that second sentence! Make it impossible for users not to read this! Disambiguate! Separate these concepts! Hide the fluff! Say one thing! Ditch those words!

Since she only uses it for browsing, it doesn’t really matter if she’s logged in or not. I tried explaining that, but she still felt uneasy with that red dot staring back at her.

So I said: “Look at it this way, if it gets stolen, you don’t have to worry about anyone getting access to everything.”

It worked. Just like that, the problem turned into an advantage. Now she’s in love with that little red dot.

Sometimes everything can change even when nothing has changed.

Update: Great follow-up by Scott: Getting the most out of a bad situation

Photo with thanks to the older child.

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