Modal interfaces are genuinely cool. For the uninitiated, a “modal” interface is one where the same input does different things depending on the state (or mode) the system is in. Think of your smartphone keyboard popping up only when you need to type, or a gas pedal driving the car forward or backward depending on the gear. I love the concept enough to dedicate a whole chapter of Mastering Vim to it.

But there’s a time and a place for everything, and a car’s center console is neither the time nor the place for a flat sheet of glass.

I was traveling this week and rented a Kia EV6 - a perfectly serviceable electric car. I was greeted by a sleek touch panel that toggles control between the air conditioning and the audio system.

Dear car manufacturers: please, I am begging you, stop.

When I’m driving down the highway at 75 miles per hour, the absolute last thing I should be doing is taking my eyes off the road to visually verify which mode my AC knobs are in so I can turn down the volume. I can’t feel my way around the controls because gently grazing the surface of the screen registers as a button press. It’s not just annoying - it’s unsafe.

Modality works fine when you have physical feedback. My old Pebble Time Round (may it rest in peace) had a tactile modal interface. It had four buttons that did different things depending on the context. But because they were physical, clicky buttons, I could operate the watch without ever looking at it. I could skip a track or dismiss a notification while riding my bike, purely by feel.

Compare that to modern smart watches, or, worse, earbuds. Don’t even get me started on touch controls on earbuds. I’m out here riding my bike through rough terrain - I do not have the fine motor control required to perform a delicate gesture on a wet piece of plastic lodged in my ear.

I miss the click. I miss the resistance. I miss knowing I’ve pressed a button without needing confirmation from the software. We’ve optimized for screens that can be anything in so many areas of our lives, but these screens aren’t particularly good at controlling stuff when we’re living said lives.

Yeah, I miss analog buttons.

I spend a lot of time in front of a computer or a phone, even now that I have a kid. Hey - she needs to sleep, and I have some time to kill. Many of my hobbies revolve around a screen too - like playing video games, tinkering with stuff, or writing.

It’s unsurprising that I’ve been wanting to take a step away from the screen and find a way to engage with physical media more. I used to read a lot of books - I don’t anymore. I listen to audiobooks sometimes, but it’s been a good year or two since I last sat down and read a book cover to cover. That’s fine - life ebbs and flows, and even though sitting down and reading books used to be a huge part of my life - they aren’t today, and that’s okay.

But it’s nice to put down devices and just hold something in your hand.

I worked around this limitation though and decided to get more into magazines. Yeah, print media is still alive and kicking. We have two physical publication in our household this year - The New Yorker, and PC Gamer. Two very different magazines, and you can probably tell which subscription appealed to my wife - and which one to me.

I’ve been reading both, although I’ll admit that PC Gamer has received more of my attention. Hey - unlike The New Yorker, which oppressively sends you a new issue each week, PC Gamer has been sending me issues monthly. And I don’t need to tell you that The New Yorker is a great publication - it’s got hell of a reputation, and for a good reason. It’s quality journalism, and peak writing, or so I’m told, but it certainly reads that way despite my limited knowledge on the subject.

But I do know a thing or two about video games, and one thing I know is that gaming journalism from major publications - PC Gamer included has been steadily declining in quality over the past decade. Between corporate relationships, out of touch and burnt out reviewers, and sanitized, often generic pieces - I have been avoiding mainstream gaming media. There are lots of small independent reviewers who do a wonderful job covering the titles I care about, and I trust those a lot more.

I’ve read somewhere that the print edition of PC Gamer is somewhat different. You still have the same people working on the issue, but the time pressure’s different, articles can’t be updated once they go live, and there’s much more fun and creative writing. I’m sure all of that’s available offline too, but I don’t think I would’ve read any of that if the magazine wasn’t already in my hands.

Reading editions of PC Gamer feels like stepping a time capsule, in big part due to fairly substantial retro game coverage - you can’t exactly publish breaking news in a monthly print, so the focus is much more on having interesting things to say. Chronicles of Oblivion in-character playthroughs, developer interviews, quirky reviews - there’s lots to love.

I’ve heard Edge Magazine is well known for high quality writing and timeless game critique. I think I’ll check that out too - here, I just subscribed.

Like many of my contemporaries, I’ve been experimenting with AI, and one of the bigger challenges I’ve run into isn’t around output quality, hallucinations, or other issues. No, the biggest issue for me has been the overconfidence AI tends to instill in the user.

Now that I think of it, South Park had an episode on the topic, called “Sickofancy”. In it, an AI assistant was overly encouraging to Randy’s obviously terrible ideas. Another source, winther’s essay on the pitfalls of AI-assisted writing briefly touched the topic, too.

More than once I tried to use AI for brainstorming, and AI convinced me of terrible ideas instead of offering a human’s healthy scepticism. I tried using various models for help with writing, and each time AI convinced me the output is wonderful, and each time I showed the output to my wife she said something to the tune of “This doesn’t sound like you at all, it reads more like a timeshare advertisement”. And she’s right every single time, because I’ve really struggled with getting meaningful critique from today’s chat bots.

This is an unsurprising finding, but I think it’s worth noting. Working with AI tooling today is like having a writing partner who’s read every book out there, but never experienced a single emotion in life and doesn’t know how to contextualize the ideas. I wonder why’s that?

Even when prompting the models to not be overly agreeable or requesting pushback - the models lack judgement. You ask them to evaluate your idea - they’ll spit out that it’s the best idea ever conceived. You ask for criticism, you’ll get told that it’s a terrible idea. Even rubber ducking - using an inanimate object as a sounding board that is - yields better results in my experience, since at least I get to utilize critical thinking.

This isn’t really an anti-AI rant or anything. The technology is here, you can’t put it back in the box, and there are real use cases out there (hey, I just saved myself a few minutes of fiddling with a spreadsheet formula by getting Gemini to do it) - but human overconfidence supported by AI is a real problem we’ll have to be mindful about.

There’s this old joke:

• Me: I’d like to buy a piano.
• Yamaha: We got you!
• Me: I’m also looking for a motorcycle, where could I get one?
• Yamaha: You’re not gonna believe this…

I just had my own Yamaha moment. I was looking for a good pepper grinder, and I just found that one of the best pepper grinders on the market is made by… Peugeot. Yup, apparently the car company produced great pepper grinders, bicycles, and cars, in that order.

Live and learn.

And yeah, the pepper mill is sturdy, feels and looks great, and the grinding mechanism comes with a lifetime warranty.

This is an entry to the IndieWeb carnival on ego hosted by bix.

In case you don’t know me - I’m Ruslan. A father, a husband, and a big nerd for video games and optimization problems. A few years ago, I would’ve started this intro differently: “Hi, I’m Ruslan and I’m an engineering manager at Google.” Oh - I’m still a manager at Google, but my priorities in life are different, and the shift is driven by the way my relationship with ego has changed over the years.

Over a decade ago, in my early twenties, I seeked recognition. I wanted to be widely known and respected. I moved to the United States from another country, pursued a career in tech - hopping between companies until landing at Google. This was huge for me, as I admired the company growing up, and working at Google felt like a peak achievement for a little computer nerd like me.

But I haven’t really savored the accomplishment. Now that I got to Google, it was all about getting to the next level, getting a promotion, bumping up my salary, expanding my span of influence, and so on. I compared myself to other early-twenty-somethings. Look, Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook at age 19, and I’m already a few years behind! Did I want to start a company? No. Did I even like Facebook? No, I didn’t. But that didn’t stop me from comparing myself to others, and it leached the joy out of life.

The generational curse of productivity certainly has something to do with it - I couldn’t just relax and savor the victories. I had to work hard for the next milestone. But a huge driver behind my early professional achievements was my ego. I wanted to be the best, and I wanted others around me to know it. I simply didn’t know a different way to live.

Throughout my early years I was really concerned with what people thought about me. I still struggle with it. And professional success felt like a way to bring authority into the conversation - “look, you can’t think poorly of me, I’m mister big pants in a serious company”. Mind you, we’re talking about an imaginary conversation in my own head.

In my mid-twenties I met my now-wife, who had a much more balanced outlook on life. She’s a hard worker too, but her achievements weren’t driven solely by the need to be seen by others as something else. No, she simply did things she was good at, and did them well. There’s lots of professional pride, yes, but it just felt… healthier? We both were ambitious, we both wanted to do our work exceptionally well, but while I wanted to be seen as the best, she just cared about her craft - regardless of who’s watching.

That was a major change from how I approached life, and her attitude rubbed off on me. I tried to decouple my own self-image from my professional successes. I began to engage in hobbies for the sake of enjoyment.

Look, I started this blog back in 2012 to bolster my professional image. I wanted to appear attractive to prospective employers, and I wanted people to see how many important thoughts I have, and how many cool things I know. This blog is very different now, because I have less people I care to impress. I don’t want a large audience.

Do I get excited when an article I write goes viral or I get a royalty check from my book in the mail? Absolutely. But do I get worked up when only a single reader gets through the entirety of what I write? Not anymore, no, because my ego as a writer needs less feeding than it used to. That’s why I removed comments and other visible indicators of popularity on this blog (eh, and I just don’t want to be tempted by the pursuit of bolstering my own ego).

In my mid-30s, I care less about impressing people. It helps me be a better listener, a better friend, or even just a better fleeting acquaintance. I have richer interactions with others when I don’t try to impress them. It ain’t perfect, and I find myself struggling - but I feel like I’m on the right track. I know I’ll win when I won’t be checking the view counts on this piece though.

If you’re curious about what other writers have to say about ego, I recommend you check out other entries on IndieWeb Carnival: On Ego.