Sunday Reading 2021-07-18

Lee Peterson found some screenshots of iOS 4 in his archives, and they bring back a lot of memories for me. My first iPad, bought in October 2010, originally run iOS 3.2 but was updated to iOS 4 shortly afterwards. The move away from skeumorphic design with iOS 7 has never sat well with me, the older iconography had personality, damn it. While I’m not holding out hope for the pendulum swinging back any time soon, it would definitely be nice to have some actual depth back in the user interface.

Jaron Lanier Interview on What Went Wrong With the Internet — it probably won’t surprise you that Lanier finds a lot of things wrong with both social media and Silicon Valley culture. Some of his proposed solutions might surprise, though. Definitely food for thought.

Knuth versus Email — “I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.” While I doubt I could swear off of email the way Donald Knuth has, I’ve definitely rethought how I use it over the years.

(I’m going to start doing this as a weekly feature, so that I can clear out stuff that has been lingering on my reading list for a while.)