The esthetic wasn't bad, the problem is that it was a massive reduction in functionality. For example, the fact that Metro apps included on windows could only be use in fullscreen mode and only one copy of it could be used at the same time. The new Metro settings they included to replace the ones from the control panel had only like 10% of the functionality of the old one and they actively tried to prevent you from finding the old one. The content density was significantly lower and dialogbox/dropdownmenus couldn't be resized to display more items (eg. list of keyboard layouts that can only display 3 items at the same time)
Yes especially given that XP was the most useable version of Windows ever. They just threw it all away and expected people to relearn the basics of interacting with their PC.
XP was good but I’m partial to 7. It was like a refined Vista that brought proper alpha blending support and a number of QoL improvements without setting the core experience on fire.
Then they should have waited for a decade? Literally what does that have to do with anything. No shit, design decisions are very different when teleported literally a decade later
Metro was terrific on mobile - especially for older people who had no issues reading information from tiles or navigating sharp interface. Once my mother's HTC 8S broke and she had to temporarily switch to iPhone she complained how the interface was small and barely readable.
It's the desktop where it failed - you can't just force users into a mobile interface, at the same time remove the most recognisable element of your product (start button and menu) and believe people will adapt.
What I find wild is that there were internal W8 releases with a proper start menu but they abandon it at some point to fully embrace Metro.
Blog owner here. You're welcome to unblur it: I swapped the number out in the screenshot for one of Ofcom's list of official never-to-be-assigned telephone numbers for drama (e.g. film & TV) use (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/phone-numbers/...) before I applied the blur.
That number isn't mine, and will never belong to anybody!
Blurring makes sense as a way to say "this is private". It's almost lampshading, in this case, because it's the bit I want you to look at!
But blurring doesn't make sense from a privacy perspective, because unblurring is pretty easy. So I modified the number to a known-fake, will-never-be-valid one.
But if I just did that, people would probably try to call it, or would say "but you've put it back online here", or similar. Or else would say "that number's fake anyway, why are you worried?". Blurring it as well achieved the best of all worlds: it lampshades the bit I'm talking about, and it indicates that the kind of data stored there should be considered private, and it prevents the actual extraction of the (real) private data from the image. Win, win, win.
Unless the question "why bother" was to imply that blurring was hard to do? Because it definitely wasn't. Changing the number took much more effort! The blur was just two clicks; significantly less effort than, say, explaining why I chose to do so! :-D
Often I'm lazy and just black out revealing information, like I did in my blog post about how British Gas can't understand my name (https://danq.me/it-is-only-q).
But sometimes I've done the same thing in other places and gone further, sometimes concealing "fun" messages. In my post about Halifax putting the wrong names on a letter to me (https://danq.me/halifax-dun-goofed), I changed my address to a message along the lines of "what, you think I'd put my actual address here, like it's my first day on the Internet" and then blurred that.
Incidentally, I think that one was the first times that anybody contacted me to say that they'd noticed the unblurrability of my images, but I've been using this approach for years!
Definitely readable. A stronger blur would not have helped the situation either. It is absolutely insane how well information from a blurred image can be reconstructed. For example, consider the "Data" column of the following image, which basically looks like a gray image without any content, but neural networks can recover most of the blurred characters: https://fips.fi/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/HDC_result_exampl...
Algorithms can see the difference between RGB 245, 245, 245 and RGB 246, 245, 245 (it's 1, 0, 0) but the eye can probably not, also depending on the monitor hardware. Thus the blurring effect might not be as strong as it looks like at first glance.
There are computer techniques that can be used to de-blur sensitive information, so the expert advice is not to use simple blurring effects.
But in this instance, it’s trivially easy to read the numbers even without any fancy software.
@author, if your reason for blurring was to protect your identity, then you should update that image asap because you’re not succeeding at hiding your number.
I was involved in one startup in particular where "trust" was important. They didn't understand why I was pushing to build a native Android/iOS app and have it on the app store, as opposed to a PWA.
It's because, like it or not, having an app on the app store makes you look legitimate, it makes you look like a real company.
It was a pain in the ass, a PWA would have been way easier, but I still maintain it was the right call.
Except the results will be what the algorithm has determined that people accessing from your IP address at your location using your exact version of your browser on your exact version of your operating system on a screen with your exact width and height and pixel resolution are into lol
It would be incredible to be able to feed an entire codebase into a model and say "add this feature" or "we're having a bug where X is happening, tell me why", but then you are limited by the output token length
As others have pointed out too, the more tokens you use, the less accuracy you get and the more it gets confused, I've noticed this too
We are a ways away yet from being able to input an entire codebase, and have it give you back an updated version of that codebase.
reminds me of some dystopian short story I read somewhere, where society moves to a nearly full advertising economy, and everyone has to be an influencer about all the food / things they consume for the day, streaming themselves on camera live 24/7
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