"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"

NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability.

It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".

The window handles, on the other hand .. this was correct in Windows 3.0 and there's basically no good reason to have changed it. There should be a title bar. Active window should have visibly contrasting title bar. There should be sufficient grab space all round a window to get hold of it.

Bonus points: move your mouse pointer very slowly around a bottom curved corner window handle on Windows 11. Ask yourself: how well does "place I am pointing at" line up with "where the curve is"?

Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.

I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.

Speak for yourself. Tabs in file explorer and notepad are my favorite windows feature in decades. I can't believe it took them this long.

Also, I'm pretty sure the tabs were WinUI/XAML based, not WebView2 based. There are some "Electron" (i.e. web tech stack) components in File Explorer these days but I don't think most of the things you're complaining about are part of that.

my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place.

also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it.

sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.

If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.

But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.

Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.

At least, more room than if not.

I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.

Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them.

Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.

So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.

Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.

Some spend is just in case. Some spend is for prestige (we are on TV!). Some is for vague reasons that cannot be measured.

> The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year.

>P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.

Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.

By default, people give a lot of trust and benefit of the doubt. Everyone's account in life starts out a little positive when it comes to trust, welcome, empathy, and believe.

But the flip side of that is that people have a very good memory for past transgressions. When someone has extended you a little trust, or given you some time to learn your product, they will absolutely remember if you turn around and harm them.

It takes only a match to burn a bridge, but a year to rebuild it.

In Bordeaux, winemakers consider themselves geniuses manipulating a many variety blend. In Alsace, winemakers view their role as not screwing up God's work.

I've seen this pattern a bunch:

1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.

2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.

3. They post the content

4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up

5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.

6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.

There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.

(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)

I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term.

Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.

But yes, a lot of the tech industry these days resembles people looking at a rainforest and thinking how much value could be derived from clear-cutting it. Massive one-time extraction of value, long term destruction of an ecosystem, resulting in harms distributed all over the world in ways that aren't obviously linked.

- Eschew the "For You", Read tweets only from people you have chosen to follow.

- Only follow people who have a bona fide livelihood outside social media, avoid anyone for whom income is largely driven by "engagement".

... You don't actually advise them to post on LinkedIn, do you? You know all the engagement on LinkedIn is fake, right?

"Designed as the foundation of every great music system, our Power Plant AC regenerators embody an uncompromising commitment to excellence. By rebuilding power from the ground up with state-of-the-art engineering and meticulous precision, they deliver the stable, pure energy essential for revealing music in its truest form."

The product image for this "Power Plant" that no doubt costs tens of thousands has what appears to be a poorly Photoshopped "Improvement" factor meter on the front that goes from 1x to 1000x lol.

https://www.psaudio.com/cdn/shop/products/P20-Black-front.pn...

Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?