Sometimes, tooltips appear at the wrong position. Let's say, you hover

Sometimes, tooltips appear at the wrong position. Let's say, you hover
over a URL in your browser and then the content of the "title"
attribute shows up. Those kinds of things.

I only see this in browsers, but as I don't use that many GUI
applications, others might be affected. I just don't know.

All the time, I thought this was the fault of my window manager[1]
because I wrote it myself, so there might be bugs.

But a few days ago, I saw a Mac user with exactly the same problem.
That's nice. Kind of.

____________________

Some random guy on the internet explained why I feel so old. I can't
quote him/her, but it basically goes like this.

I was a kid when phones with rotary dials were still a normal thing.
Let's say I was five or six years old. I can clearly remember phoning
people with that thing. Every other kid I knew had a phone like this.
It was normal.

When I first got in touch with computers, it was normal that they ran
at 8 MHz or faster machines had 33 MHz. They ran DOS and you only
started Windows 3.0 sometimes. Or maybe only DOS Shell. When you
entered "dir", line after line appeared on the screen. Yes, you could
actually see that. Oh and the monitor was monochrome, of course. No
color. Just an amber screen.

We didn't have access to the internet. There were only mailboxes (or
"BBS systems" as they are called in non-germany, I guess). Dial-up
stuff. You had to use a special terminal program which we ran in DOS.
Later on, there were terminal programs for OS/2. Dialing into one of
these boxes was very, very expensive and we could only do it, like,
once per week, for 20 minutes tops.

I read about computers only in printed magazines or books.

Okay, fine.

About five years later, I had a computer with 133 MHz. You know what
that thing could do? It could play videos. Little movies. Holy mother
of shit. This was absolutely astonishing.

We got access to the internet.

A few years later, my computer had 500 MHz. We got flat rate access to
the internet. A few years after that, my computer had 1.3 GHz. Add
another few years and I got a dual core machine. Today, my machine has
four cores (plus hyperthreading) and 32 GB of RAM. I don't buy PC
magazines anymore and I rarely buy books about computers.

All of this happened over the course of ten or fifteen years. It was a
massive revolution. It happened *so* fast -- but to me, it didn't feel
fast. Why? Because I was very young, a kid, a teenager. When you're
young, the perception of time is different. One month as a kid felt
like a year feels to me today.

Both these things -- me being young and technology changing
dramatically -- created the illusion that I'm old. I'm not that old,
I'm just over 30. But it feels like I have lived through a lot more
time because technology changed so quickly and so profoundly. I feel
like a 60 year old professor with grey hair when I talk to our
students about my first computing experiences. Funny thing is, they're
18-20 years old. Not that much of a difference. They only missed
those crucial years with the massive technology boom.

So there's that.

On top of that, I feel that in the last five or ten years, not much
has happened. Our computers have been "fast enough" for a long time.
Computer *usage* hasn't changed that much. You have a GUI ... and
that's it. There are no such things as holograms or holodecks or
whatever. Yes, computers are still getting faster. But it's not a
fundamental change like the one I described above. The difference
between Windows 95 and macOS Sierra is relatively small -- but the
difference between a simple DOS command line and a Windows 95 GUI that
can play videos is enormous.

____________________

1. https://github.com/vain/katriawm