CIRCLE WITH A DOT

"Feelings are just fleeting, on the surface, but emotions, they're very deep, primal. They linger."

- Jeff Bridges, "The Giver", 2014

@thomasfuchs People need to move from GitHub (and Microsoft) to other services. I moved some of my repos to Codeberg, and the other ones I host internally on a mix of subversion and git.

Not sure why nor how we got into this position where folks incorrectly think "github" is the only professional solution.

In the 1980s, at one of the first software jobs I had, I was seated for a summer next to the office line printer.

A dot matrix printer would print maybe 9 vertical dots at a time, move the print head slightly, print the next set of dots, etc. A single character was composed of a matrix of 9 dots, thus the name.

A line printer was used in office settings. It would print an entire line at once instead of printing characters one tiny slice at a time. No print head to move on a line printer. But when the entire line prints, it sounded like a gun going off.

So when printing a page, it was like multiple guns going off per second, one loud bang per line. At at this office, people would regularly print documents with hundreds of pages.

Spent that summer wearing headphones listening to my Walkman.

UI bugs listed in no particular order:

- sub-atomic sized text fonts
- 0.0001 pixel wide scroll bars
- mouse cursor that doesn't change to indicate you're over the border when trying to modify the size of a window

All of these things were known since the start of GUI interfaces. There is no reason why these should be a problem in 2026.