Last time I was using a windows computer I was turning it off to re image it and I didn’t want to wait for it to shut down so I just held the power button since it didn’t matter if it got messed up and windows popped up this message on screen that was like “Please stop holding the power button we just need a few minutes”. Like what are you doing you aren’t supposed to tell the user what to do, that isn’t the job of a computer
I wish, the new dell optiplexes are terrible, not only do they not have an actual psu switch, it takes like 20 seconds of holding the power button before they turn off and then you have to wait like 10 seconds before you can turn it on again, during which time it does a really good job of pretending to be on and flashing disk activity lights and things but it’s actually just self testing and you have to wait for it to turn back off before you can actually turn it on again. Dell used to make such good quality computers but they are genuinely awful now
The moment my computer refuses to obey my commands sent from the physical layer, is the moment it will cease to exist on this physical plane
all computers should be like the one in star trek TNG, for simple feedback it just beeps and bloops in ways that are intuitive, and if it actually needs to use speech to relay detailed information it does so in a short and efficient message delivered in a clearly roboticly neutral yet pleasant voice.
speech to relay detailed information it does so in a short and efficient message
So the antithesis of modern capitalist mindset of cheap devices that are designed solely to advertise?
Yeah, IDK if that’s ever going to happen unless we achieve Star Trek levels of societal restructuring.
you can run linux as a completely fine desktop OS right now, and there are several open source assistant projects, then there’s stuff like mozilla’s deep voice for recognizing voice input and you can totally train a voice synthesizing model on people who willingly donate their voices.
It’s not really that far out, it just needs a handfull of people who want to see it done and have some spare time they’re willing to occupy with development.
I fucking hate notifications. I either disable them entirely or delete the app. No in betweens. Remind me to use your app?..deleted.
I too take any unwanted notification as a potential threat: the only answer is immediate annihilation of said app. Basically the dark forest hypothesis but it’s my phone.
Seriously, I wish I could just set up some kind of regex filter in iOS Shortcuts or something that would let me specify what notifications to show or block.
Doesn’t help that corporate social media apps will give you controls over every single notification type except for the ones they ram down your throat daily.
I have a very specific notification in mind: I’ve opened Instagram organically maybe eight times in the past decade, but I’ll open my messages if someone send me a message there. I can’t open their shitty platform on a browser as they hate VPNs on desktop. With all due respect to the meme posters on Lemmy, the fresh brainrot my friends send me on there is much easier humor to digest than whatever mix of Everett True, Star Trek, and den Döner-Mann nicht fragen warum er nur Bargeld nimmt the Lemmy All page has for me on most days. So I keep that malware on my phone. I want a notification when they send me a message. I want a notification when someone I meet wants to follow me. I’m squarely in the lower quantile of ages on Lemmy and a lot of people I want in my life will use that platform as their primary messenger, and while it’s not ideal, I do want those notifications. You know what notification I don’t want?
See some of today’s most watched reels!
Their stupid app sent me this notification, like clockwork, about once every 23 hours.
Check out some of today’s most watched reels!
I’ve never watched a reel in my fucking life. I still call them Stories and I haven’t watched them even when they were called that. They put the button for Reels right at the bottom where all the important stuff should be, so I’ll fat finger my way into the Reels section once every three years, and it’ll still be at the tutorial screen where it tells you to swipe and tap and whatever. You can’t seek through the videos of course - not interested.
They know I’ve left it on the tutorial screen for longer than 20% of their userbase has been alive. And yet —
Check out some of today’s most watched reels!
(This is mostly an exaggeration, it was like once a week, and I left notifications off until recently because I met a group of people who use it more than my usual crowd. I have not been bombarded by unfiltered notification sewage for a decade lol)
And they didn’t have a toggle for that notification either until pretty recently. Or maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Wish everyone would stop using these apps and try hacking together a terrible HTML website like the good old days. Computers are wasted on us all. Hosting video is expensive, it must be rapaciously profitable to be trying to get everyone hooked on it.
postscript
This being Lemmy, I’m going to politely ask people to leave me be with my locked down phone OS and corporate malware. Yes yes I know, the only phone really worth using has a bare metal OS, you gotta ask your relatives to resend the family photos as ascii art so you can see your niblings in the CLI, you gotta laser out your phone’s processor’s clock and replace it with a mechanical switch that you flick back and forth so you can be 100% sure the phone isn’t running when you don’t want it to. I get it, I hear you, I’m just generally content with this phone and I’ll probably get its overpriced underwhelming successor in 5 years when I need a new one. It’s fine. It’s not a PC. The only thing missing is a headphone jack really.
Ex-app developer here. We do it because reminder notifications boost our re-engagement by over 10%.
When an average user downloads an app, there’s like a 70% chance they’ll use it day 1, a 10% chance they’ll use it day 7, and 1% chance they’ll still be using it by day 30. A simple reminder notification after day 3 or 15 can drastically boost those numbers.
Why do we care about the numbers? Because Google and Apple care. They see higher numbers, assume it’s a good app, and make it show up in the search results more frequently. This gives us more downloads.
If you’re putting the time in to craft a quality app, you probably need money, which comes from ads and subscriptions, which is funneled by the number of downloads. If you don’t like that as a user, stick to FDroid.
So then the answer is to uninstall apps that give you reminders - to negate the correlation that nagging users leads to positive outcomes.
OsrsNeedsF2P
I just wish they’d just give the ability to selfhost a server because oh my god 95% of the iron on the map is filled with bots
My recommendation is Neo Store because even though it’s slow there’s still more apps available.
I’m pretty sure they run on the same backend, though Neo Store has more repos set up already.
(I’m going to be honest, Neo apps look better than the standard Material You)
My experience working support for a phone manufacturer has informed me that once an average user installs an app it tends to stay installed indefinitely, but they may or may not be aware it’s even installed. A gentle nudge notification of “hey look at me” every once in a while might very well be amazing for engagement
Or maybe, and I know this sounds utterly insane but hear me out:
Instead of reminding people to use it with notifications you could use the memory of previous engagements to make the user actually initiate subsequent utilization of the app. It’s kind of like the user notificating itself.
It sounds crazy but it might work!
If an app gives me more than a couple of unwanted notifications that I can’t easily disable, it’s uninstalled. Fuck that shit.
The CD-Keys website changes the tab title to “We miss you” when the tab loses focus. Pisses me off enough to close it every time.
For some reason that’s a very common thing among websites where I shop for 3d printing and electronics supplies. It’s infuriating because it forces me to cycle through all the tabs to find a specific one instead of just reading it off the god damn tab title. A gross misuse of valuable screen real estate that’s normally expected to display useful information. Fuck you.
