Matt Campbell / is on Nostr

Software developer, formerly at Microsoft, now leader of the AccessKit open-source project (https://accesskit.dev/) and cofounder of Pneuma Solutions (https://pneumasolutions.com/). My current favorite programming language is Rust, but I don't want to make that part of my identity.

Music lover. Karaoke singer. Science fiction fan. Visually impaired (legally blind). Secular humanist

Last Notes

2024-03-10 14:02:37

It's easy to get discouraged at the state of computing, especially consumer software and the web. A recent case in point is this post by @npub164k…c25x: https://mastodon.nz/@gtw/112058063633743100 To be clear, I'm not criticizing that post; it resonates with me.
So, I think it would be good to have some posts pointing out useful and interesting applications that make the most of those 10+ billion transistors. No generative AI though. I don't deny that generative AI is sometimes useful, but it's such a hot topic already.

2023-11-17 01:17:17

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@npub1d76…897u I guess the crux of the disagreement is summed up in this from part 4: "The “traditional desktop” is dead, and it’s not coming back" People like the author of the original article might respond that it's only dead because specific project teams decided to kill it, that the decision to kill it didn't have enough benefit to outweigh the cost of change, and therefore, GNOME didn't have to do that.

2023-11-16 19:03:05

Came across this article on the decline of usability which, among other things, puts GNOME 3 in the same category as the notorious Windows 8. https://datagubbe.se/usab2/
I know that classic Mac/Windows conventions like menu bars and title bars aren't sacred forever. But this article does make a convincing case that the industry at large, including GNOME, has gone backward. And, at least for me, that's uncomfortable to contemplate.

2023-09-21 19:14:36

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@npub1sg4…xslc
> Also event loops are good, use them
Pretty much all GUIs use event loops already, right? If you're saying to rely more on non-blocking I/O as opposed to threads, I don't think I agree. The only practical thing I can take away from the "Virtual Memory" section of the article is to do more stuff away from the main event-loop thread, since you never know what might cause a page fault.

2023-07-11 00:41:30

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@npub1qz2…nlrg No, I'm referring to a different section of the page, right after the IRC conversation, that starts with the phrase "Those women are soft". According to archive.org (it only belatedly occurred to me to check there), that's not in the original post, so I'm guessing his site was compromised.