Do they mean "pseudonymous" telemetry meaning "non-identifying telemetry", or do they mean "pseudoanonymous" telemetry meaning telemetry is that not really anonymous?

Those two words have almost exactly opposite meanings, and as stated, they are literally saying they are collecting identifiable data.

The page only uses the term “pseudonymous”. “Pseudoanonymous” seems to be an invention of the HN submitter.

it means they can see all the telemetry from a single machine, but the identity of the machine is not tied to any human identity or github account. each machine appears to get its own UUID and that's how they "identify" machines.

Companies like IBM and Microsoft did a lot of HCI research back in the 80s, and made a lot of progress with usability and common idioms that all software followed. Then when displays with 256 or more colors became common, all that went out the window.

All those Windows Media Player skins were awful because they used so much screen real estate on dead space. Whereas the plethora of Winamp skins kept the economy of screen real estate while still providing unique and imaginative visuals.

The whole skeuomorphic trend starting in the mid-90s was similarly awful for the same reason. First, it was often hard to tell what was a control and what was just decoration. Second, it often took trial and error to figure out what was what. And, as I mentioned above, these designs almost inevitably wasted huge chunks of screen space on decoration that provided no functionality.

Of course, we have the opposite problem now. All windows look the same. Title bars are mostly gone. And since companies like Microsoft replaced all their HCI experts with art-school dropouts who think the "flat" look with low contrast is cool, not only can you not tell what app you're looking at. Half the time you can't even tell where one window stops and another starts.

The only good UI thing that's come out of the last decade or two is a near universal support for "dark mode". Otherwise, I would greatly prefer the Windows 2000 "classic" look, or something similar.

> The whole skeuomorphic trend starting in the mid-90s was similarly awful for the same reason. First, it was often hard to tell what was a control and what was just decoration. Second, it often took trial and error to figure out what was what.

I strongly disagree - do you often find it hard to figure out where the light switch is when you enter a room? Terrible applications are terrible regardless of whether they are modern or old, whether skeuomorphic or purely functional. But well written applications tend to have more affordance when skeuomorphic because people already know a lot about real world controls and their function.

I agree with your sentiments, but not your timeline. The mid-'90s was the high point for GUIs, with Windows 95 nailing it pretty much across the board.

And as you note, "flat" design is NO design. It's total dereliction of the design task. Fortunately we're seeing some steps back toward legitimate GUI, where controls are occasionally demarcated as controls.

A great example of Windows's pathetic regression is "dark mode." Since the early '90s (and I mean '91 or '92), you could set up a system-wide color scheme. Inverse color schemes were an unfortunate vestige of the late '80s, early '90s... the advent of the Mac, "desktop publishing," and the effort to make the screen an analog for a piece of paper. That analogy fails.

The result was millions of people reading black text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, every day. The first thing I did was set up a charcoal theme in Windows, pretty much exactly what all the "dark" schemes are today. And all properly written applications inherited it and all was good.

So... just in time for people to realize that this was the way, Microsoft REMOVED the color-scheme editor from windows. Only to have to hastily slap a hard-coded "dark mode" back onto the OS. So damned stupid.

Yeah, having to look up the "basic boilerplate" stuff is not worse for me after starting to use AI than it was beforehand.

By the time Bezos bought the Post, most of that goodwill had evaporated, and since then, almost all of it has.

I feel the opposite. I'm 61 and I feel like I understand ideas more quickly than I ever did before, so much so that I'm surprised at how shallowly I thought about some things in the past.

While there is definitely something to the plasticity of young brains, for example in language acquisition, or the fact that the Fields Medal eligibility ages out at 40, I believe it's not a linear thing and not a one-way thing.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the statement in the book (IIRC) that it takes 8 legs to be stable in 5 dimensions. I'd assumed it would be 6, but this is a layman's intuition. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong.

Awesome book regardless.

win32 dates back to 1993. OP doesn't know Windows history. Maintaining backwards compatibility was always a huge priority for Microsoft, even if it couldn't be perfect.

If a program didn't work on a newer version of Windows, there's a good chance it was doing something unsupported.

That's a bit of a trick question, because if you'd booted into Windows, it would have eventually broken the dual-boot.

I have to be honest. The idea that Microsoft is even admitting that their products are less than perfect is a step in the right direction.

A step on a thousand-mile journey, perhaps, but it's a step.

One major thing is the mandatory MS account. And it's (or more precisely its laxing / removal) not listed in the improvement list. Optional online account is fine and I might even use it. But mandatory online account is a big NO. This is disrespectful and an invasion of my privacy and control over my computer. I bought a PC / laptop and I want to use it the way I want, without any permission from some fucking server.

"XOR AXAX" was my license plate in the 90s.

I had "PUSH EAX" and "BX LR" :)