Blog/2025-09-24/Feed Proliferation

Some random insufferable nonsense

Well, at least you asked

At some point of time, Chrome started updating to include some kind of content feed into its new tab page. I'm one of those people who has poor impulse control when I see something and I click it. Before I know it, the Doorway Effect has me and I no longer remember what I was going to do. I almost always regret it when I've entered this zone, but I almost always click it. I suspect a lot of people must suffer from this Akrasia and the engagement metrics probably go up and to the right as a consequence.

So I've switched to Brave browser for a bit. At first I was horrified to discover that they also have a News Feed but it's opt-in so I opted out. There's an annoying notification-like icon in the bottom right so I don't know how long I'll be using this browser. That's the sort of thing that tends to bother me a lot.

MacOS Tahoe

Speaking of the doorway effect, the new Launchpad replacement in MacOS Tahoe gets rid of it. I forgot I asked MacOS to upgrade last night so I was greeted this morning by a completely new wallpaper. The new UI looks a lot like the Compiz-style UI I used to have back in the day on Ubuntu, sans workspaces-on-a-rotating-cube. One interesting thing was that they've replaced Launchpad on the all-fingers-in gesture with Spotlight opened to the Applications search. I'd heard of this somewhere and it bothered me because Spotlight is the slowest search tool I've ever used. But it's been pretty snappy.

The most annoying thing about the new way they do things is that the UI element renders with a slow animation (I don't mind these) but the text input doesn't accept text until after the text element has rendered. This is wrong! You should accept text as soon as the application has launched. What happens then is that the first few letters I type actually go nowhere. I get the beeps for when you're typing in a place you can't and then the next few letters show up. Jobs Would Never Stand For This.