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points by mattkevan 4 days ago | 0 comments
It’s like UI outsider art. The Shaggs [1] of interface design. Can’t decide whether it’s hideous or wonderful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs

[–] bardan 4 days ago
> It’s like UI outsider art.

Presenting... MultiPSK!

https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/MPSK-Fig1...

[–] brabel 4 days ago
I like it. I bet a designer would put lots of space around each box and hide stuff under menus and tabs, thus making the full range of options much harder to get at a glance. Like breaking up your giant function into hundreds of tiny functions. Some people prefer to just see everything at once and I think it’s a valid way to do it.
[–] latexr 3 days ago
> I bet a designer would put lots of space around each box and hide stuff under menus and tabs

A designer might indeed add more space but not necessarily hide stuff. Design works within constraints, and if the constraint is everything should be visible, then it needs to work like that.

That interface would benefit from more space in areas. Note for example how the descenders of letters (look for “g” or “y”) bleed into the bottom shadow (the “side”) of the buttons. It’s definitely tight. It gets worse with the bold areas. On the top right you seem to have buttons, labels, and a text field, all using the exact same font at the exact same size, all in bold and with no spacing between them. It makes it harder to focus on information, and everything is so close together that you’ll either have misclicks or be slower as you put the cursor in just the right place.

Sure, have that interface for the hardcore users, including those who are going to use the keyboard to interact with every part of that, but it’s not a failing to add more space, and menus aren’t always wrong.

People love making fun of designers, but it’s the toupée fallacy, you notice it when it’s bad. There’s a reason “good design is invisible” is a maxim. Like on every field, there are good designers and bad designers.

[–] mattkevan 4 days ago
Wow, that’s incredible. Reminds me of this

https://arngren.net/

[–] jodrellblank 4 days ago
“hate scrolling”, he mumbled

- https://www.aplwiki.com/wiki/Whitney_C

[–] trvz 3 days ago
Slightly disappointing: he had to put 264 lines of code across 5 files.

I, right now in 2026 and at least one decade later, get at most 59 lines of code at once in my primary editor (Panic's Nova) on a 27" monitor.

That is almost the same ratio.

[–] jodrellblank 3 days ago
I don't know if you know the reference, but his screenful of code looked like this: https://www.jsoftware.com/ioj/iojATW.htm

(with a post explaining it here: https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... )

It's stylistically denser than a typical 59 lines of code, then macro-densified and 'golfed' further.

[–] brettermeier 4 days ago
What a band! Thanks for the input.