that’s awesome, I’m sure she was really grateful to have you there helping her so much!

wacom is a company that produces drawing tablets. you know, hardware tools for artists. it is their job to market specifically to artists.

idk, at least yours probably doesn’t ever make you pass out because you went from sitting to standing too fast

they are not optimizing for your enjoyment, they’'re optimizing for your engagement. they don’t give a fuck if you hate what you’re watching as long as you watch it for longer.

the question is what series of horrible life events led to you needing the linkedin app on your phone in order for this to be an issue?

personally i’m left handed so school-taught cursive was much harder for me to write and t never got faster than block-letters (not sure what to call it, to me handwriting means non cursive and i would specify cursive but i know in other parts of the world that’s different so in this message i’ll use “block letters” to specific non-cursive) assuming i ever needed to read stuff again.

but i think the main reason people hate it because a lot of people have terrible cursive handwriting. if it took the writer 25% less time to write but it takes the reader 2x as long to read… that’s fuckin annoying lol. i’m all for people using it for their personal notes but there’s a LOT of people who shouldn’t be using cursive for anything anyone else has to read.

I used to do data entry for the post office and the number of people who addressed their letters with terrible cursive was way too high. the OCR could interpret most block-letter handwritten addresses but it couldn’t handle as many of the cursive ones because the characters are more ambiguous. often to read people’s cursive you need to use more context (ex. disambiguating through the words around it) which just isn’t possible for an address.

for people using “block letters” the OCR would only fail on like, cards for grandma addressed by little kids and times when the scan cropped out the edge of the writing. but we got tons of shitty cursive handwriting.

i later delivered mail for the post office and the distribution of block-letter vs cursive style handwriting was very different - more block-letter than cursive. making the overrepresentation of cursive amongst illegible addresses during my data entry time even more significant. it’s not a perfect sample data set but i keyed thousands of letters per day during the data entry job and when i did delivery i’d say dozens of the letters i sorted were addressed by hand most days so it was enough enough to give me strong opinions.

in high school i saw this xkcd and didn’t understand the joke. next thing you know i’m trying to dual boot ubuntu, writing down error messages so i can look them up on the library computers and download alternative gpu drivers onto a flash drive (we didn’t have internet at home back then and i couldnt drive yet… so debuggging issues usually took multiple days). weirdly, i enjoyed that experience and here i am ~16 years later. i use linux at home and at work :)