Rakhim's Blog

If global large-scale human communication continues to be concentrated within large social media platforms and content providers like YouTube, human languages may become sort of...

Rakhim's Blog · 1mo

I know, I know, this sounds controversial. But hear me out. A few years ago a new trend in UI design emerged where related elements would appear more and more detached and...

Windows 11 after two decades of macOS: okay, but also awful

Rakhim's Blog · 1mo

Recently my partner's trusty old 5K iMac died after 8.5 years of service (Radeon gpu is fried). At first I thought it was finally time to get one of those cool little M4 Mac...

Modern UI is clean and invisible? Ha, I wish!

Rakhim's Blog · 2mo

This is an excellent video about modern UI/UX: "The Hidden Cost of 'Clean' Design." I highly recommend watching it and checking out Ilia's other work. I agree with nearly...

Alarm is sacred, must not fail, but iOS 26 is wicked

Rakhim's Blog · 5mo

There are two smartphone features that I consider sacred and believe they must never fail: phone calling and the alarm. There is an unspoken contract between users and vendors....

Examples are the best documentation

Rakhim's Blog · 7mo

When I'm searching for docs, 95% of the time a single example would suffice. Yet, 95% of the time I can't find one in any official source. It seems that by default formal...

Benjamin Button Reviews macOS

Rakhim's Blog · 7mo

Apple's first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable...

AI is not another abstraction because god plays dice

Rakhim's Blog · 7mo

Some folks have gone all-in on AI-assisted coding. I've seen some tweets (not sure if sarcastic or real, to be honest) expressing disgust about the prospects of ever writing...

Finland is a high-context society that loves defaults

Rakhim's Blog · 8mo

In anthropology there is a notion of high-context and low-context cultures. A high-context culture is a culture or society that communicates dominantly through the use of...

AI is impressive because we’ve failed at semantic web and personal computing

Rakhim's Blog · 8mo

Unless someone wrote an article about that exact thing, a plain full-text search engine cannot answer a question like this: What animal is featured on a flag of a country where...

Thank you Google for breaking my YouTube addiction

Rakhim's Blog · 11mo

Over the past few years, Google has done a surprisingly great job of making YouTube less interesting and engaging — and in turn, less addictive. Maybe they've got some ethical...

But what if I really want a faster horse?

Rakhim's Blog · 12mo

People in tech business circles love this quote by Henry Ford: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The idea is to think outside the box...

How to play Half Life 1 and 2 on M-chip Macs

Rakhim's Blog · 12mo

Half Life and Half Life 2 are my favorite games. I've played them through multiple times. I played Half Life 1 for the first time in 1999 or 2000, can't remember. My computer at...

Knight Ride: a game about rogue (chess) knight

Rakhim's Blog · 13mo

I made a little puzzle game called Knight Ride. You can play it here: knightride.rakhim.org. A few months ago, I started learning game development with Godot and began building...

Don't make it "like Google"

Rakhim's Blog · 13mo

Google is usually criticized for its relentless collection of personal data. It's an important and widely discussed topic, but I’m surprised there isn’t another common...

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