They should’ve hired tea industry execs. If the tea industry can come up with grades like “Special Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe”, they can come up with something beyond Ultra High Definition.

Maybe like this:

• High Definition (HD)
• Full High Definition (FHD)
• Ultra High Definition (UHD)
• Very Ultra High Definition (VUHD)
• Special Very Ultra High Definition (SVUHD)
• Full Special Very Ultra High Definition (FSVUHD or SVUHD1, both are acceptable)

Not that these grades would only apply to displays that don’t support picture-in-picture or split screen. Displays with those features (“broken” displays) would use the following equivalent grades instead:

• High Broken Definition (HBD)
• Full High Broken Definition (FHBD)
• Ultra High Broken Definition (UHBD)
• Golden Ultra High Broken Definition (GUHBD)
• Special Golden Ultra High Broken Definition (SGUHBD)
• Full Special Golden Ultra High Broken Definition 1 (FSGUHBD1)

Because your company makes you use Azure Virtual Desktop to connect to a VM and AVD’s clipboard handling is as unreliable as anything else from Microsoft?

Problem is, if your slang is too new it looks like gibberish. Of course you could try something else that stands out. Like badly translated idioms.

But it’s probably jacket like pants. Even if you tear your ass open to make your writing look less 08/15 that doesn’t mean everything’s in butter. It’s probably only a matter of time until LLMs will copper off that style as well and your clever plan turns into a zero number. And that’s where the hare lies in the pepper: Your clarity goes over the Jordan and it ain’t itching the LLMs’ bean. It’ll get trained on your stuff anyway and the cat bites its own tail.

Maybe bad translations aren’t the solution either.

The same happens to people who write a lot and pay attention to their style, such as this gentleman. The way LLMs generate text is strongly influenced by what used to be considered a high-effort eloquent style. Varied sentence lengths, triplets, typographically correct punctuation, yada yada yada. Until recently, that stuff used to be the hallmark of professional writers (and Kenyans, apparently).

What were LLMs trained on? Professional writing, first and foremost. Books, scientific papers, op-eds, blog posts. So by default they take a polite, professional tone with all the flourishes and best practices that previously used to be de rigueur for authors and the like. So now what happens when someone used to “proper” writing writes something?

Everyone thinks it’s AI slop because that’s how LLMs talk. High effort now looks like low effort. And because tech bros immediately went on to develop “humanizing” tech, any other style will soon also look like low effort. And the same is true for art: Being able to produce highly detailed pictures with spectacular colors and shadows went from something impressive to evidence that you’re just a random jackass with a ChatGPT subscription.

You can’t really win anymore. Anything short of a live performance or a feature-length movie could feasibly have been generated by a fully automated content mill. That really sucks if you want to engage in creative expression of any kind and doubly so if you once thought you could make a living off of that.

You can absolutely have fancy UI elements that provide additional functionality. Most OSes don’t have built-in 3D visualization widgets but that doesn’t mean you can’t write CAD software for them.

My point is that your custom widgets should make an effort to look and feel as much like native widgets as possible. Any skills the user has in using native widgets should carry over to your custom ones. So your custom text field should look and behave like a native one until the user types two left brackets. When they do, the menu that pops up should be a native menu or one designed to resemble one very closely.

Thanks to web-first development and lazy cross-platform UIs, standards in this regard have deteriorated to near-nothingness. Buttons don’t have to look or even behave like anything else on any platform. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect the user to relearn the UI for any application. Modern UIs spiritually follow in the footsteps of Bryce 3D rather than any Human Interface Guidelines. And that peeves me.

For all their faults, Apple got Mac users to have very high standards in this regard for quite some time, which led to a bevy of good-looking and approachable applications, at least until post-skeuomorphic macOS took care of the “attractive” part. The consistent UI across vendors was something I really liked back when I was a Mac user.

Yes. That’s literally the point. The more things look and behave as expected, the easier they are to use.

Of course these days that gets trumped by the desire to shove the corporate design everywhere.