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The End of OS X 6 years ago

Meh, I just load up manjaro with XFCE and call it a day. Not much fiddling involved, very little about the user experience that I don't like.

Only thing I ever really tweaked was running a more up-to-date kernel for an old soundcard I used to use. Which took a couple of clicks.

Sorry for your colleague who had trouble with wifi, but. /shrug

Is PHP still a preferred platform for any sort of complex web development?

It's "preferred" as in tons of people get a lot of good work done with it quickly, but wouldn't go out and proselytize how "great" it is or isn't.

PHP is just a tool. A fairly old one at this point. But it still holds up to most of today's standards and is a constantly evolving language.

It's not the hipster language of choice though.

GIMP, Blender

Both of which are known to have notoriously unintuitive UI's, especially when compared to their commercial competitors.

Libre Office

Literally just copy & paste M$ Office UI, and honestly still manages to screw that up putting things in different places.

Forget better frame, chassis, and body panel design to protect pedestrians! We won't need them if AI never hits anyone.

Most car manufacturers have had this figured out for a long time with crumple zones and the like.

Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatically

Assisted braking technology is already implemented in some cars. Hell, Tesla implements basically exactly what you're asking for...

Forget seat belt enhancements since that'll just inhibit nap time in my self driving car.

Teslas don't let you sleep in your car, you have to move the steering wheel periodically to prove you're still paying attention or it'll pull over and shut down.

Also, I'm not quite sure what you're expecting seat belt enhancements to be.

Far be it for me to defend the AI hype, but your "things we should be focusing on instead" don't make much sense when we ARE focusing on them.

I find undo-tree to be super useful in rare occasions, thanks to undo-tree-visualizer-toggle-diff bound on d.

The quick diffs can be pretty darn helpful with complex changes.

I would feel more sympathetic to your argument if the companies wouldn't argue both cases at the same time.

I don't really care about sympathy, so much as I care about reality. The companies will do as all companies do. Try to make money by garnering confidence in their product & abilities. Even if they have to lie through their teeth.

Reality is, there isn't a good system (currently) to really curate massive amounts of user submitted video content, in an environment where anyone anywhere can submit said video content.

The problem's scale is always going to lead towards either a compromise of being an open video platform, or a compromise in relation to curation.

To be fair, they're the largest non-pornographic video platform. Making them an endless target for any and all abuse possible to grow channels quickly and earn ad revenue.

It's inevitable that in such an environment the system they come up with ends up making less and less sense over time. It's death by a thousand cuts, and I don't think there's a good way to really avoid it.

Any language that compiles to JavaScript.

What if I compile javascript... to javascript. So that I can have actually functioning javascript across the majority of fairly modern browsers, while using modern features.

All I'm saying is, honestly. I don't blame people for not writing straight javascript, when even if you do, you still need a build system in between if you want to support all browsers.

What do you see as the problem: Scrum itself, or the cargo cult of folks who do it badly?

Scrum itself. Sorry, but when you create a list of ScrumButs and indirectly deride everyone for not being able to take "Full Advantage of Scrum" so that your purists can go out and attack it at full force, yeah, that might be the problem.

The idea that different organizations might actually benefit from not adopting a methodology wholesale isn't that farfetched.

You could argue that's part of the cargo cult, I'd agree to some extent. But it becomes difficult to separate the 2 when you're literally derided for not following it to the religious T.

I'm far from an agile-ista, but.

The alternative to Agile is Software Engineering, where you do important things like assess your requirements and capabilities, identify how to validate those requirements are functioning properly and support your business requirements, promote testing and QA to a first-class citizen. Most importantly to always have functioning software that is reasonably demonstrated to be correct. That way you release with confidence, people take pride in their work, and the product, team, and schedule all become quite pleasant.

That just sounds like Agile...

Like, legit just sounds like the Agile Manifesto.

Honestly, if anything is likely to be the issue. It's Scrum. Scrum has the cargo cult. Agile just seems to get drug through the mud by everyone that implements some authoritarian variant of Scrum.

But again, not exactly a proponent of Agile here anyway.

What am I missing?

Touching your mouse less.

Might sound weird, but that's honestly my main reason for learning modal editing and emacs with evil.

Less flip flopping between mouse and keyboard might not be "more productive", but it's more comfortable.

And beneath that you start to find better fuzzy project searching with tools like ripgrep, an easier time navigating your project, powerful in-file movement commands, etc.

I'm mostly an emacs evil user, so I also have workspaces, projectile, magit, and a whole host of other extremely powerful tools.

And I don't really lose out on much wrt code completion, or other functionalities you normally get from an IDE. Since I can use the same language servers you would use in vscode.

That's not to say there aren't things that suck though. Emacs in particular isn't for someone that's unwilling to make changes to their config.

I just used (and still use) org-mode to track todos & projects, as well as keep time that was spent on each task.

I tried not to over complicate my task keeping, because I've always been more worried about getting the tasks done, than trying to track progress.

Anything that was in planning/needs more info state got a WAIT instead of TODO, with a note on what was needed. And I'd review my list every morning before deciding on what I needed to work on, or if I needed to start pushing for information on other tasks.

I still do all this btw, I'm just not solo anymore.

Feature minimalism is a good thing to strive for usually.

Wrote my own dirt simple lazy loader & slider libraries, because I didn't need many of the features other libs had.

On the flip side, if I need a reasonably complex component that would take quite a while for me to implement, like say. A date picker. I just grab the lightest weight, good looking one that I can find. (That also doesn't appear to be abandoned)

Minimalism in everything, even minimalism.

And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

Kill and intimidate people. This a serious question?

Yeah, in an all out war it's not likely to work. But an all out war against your armed citizenry also isn't likely to happen.

Politicians are still people. They too, can fear being at the wrong end of a barrel.

Which no, isn't some kind of veiled threat. But more an important point that politicians, just like everyone, also tend to want to live & sleep peacefully at night. It's not in their self-interests to make such a move.

What's far more likely to happen is what's already happening/happened. The erosion of various rights, and the militarization of the police force.

This is the thing I don't get.

Who precisely is this concept even marketable to? People with high speed internet, that also can't afford a gaming console?

But can afford a device capable of handling all of the inputs & playback of the video.

So lets low ball and say a $140 chromebook.

+ the cost of the games.

How many people is this? Genuinely.

Even as an emacs user, the answer is generally "No, I don't really use the function keys".

I mean, you're right that I use them to change brightness or change volume. But the touch bar can still do that, so... Meh.

It would probably be awkward to use for about a week, and then I'd get used to it. So it's kind of a whatever.

I do agree it's a dumb gimmick though, and is unlikely to offer anything more than the meme of running Doom on the touchbar.

The Google Squeeze 7 years ago

I append words like "wiki" or "reddit" to get results that aren't SEO'd

I'm not sure what you expect. I mean, yeah. I have to put OSRS in any search for "murder mystery" to get the result I wanted. But that's not a huge deal.

Who searches for generic "computer" that isn't a 70 year old lady probably looking for a new computer. Google in that scenario is just serving up what they're most likely looking for.

And heck, it's not like the wikipedia link was that far down. It was under a couple of store links and then bam. Wiki for computers.

I think it genuinely depends on what your users are nostalgic over.

You can look cutting edge while taking advantage of nostalgia.

To be entirely honest, the "flat design" doesn't look "cutting-edge". It looks basic, which is because, well. It is. Intentionally so. If users don't care what your buttons look like, why spend tons of time making them look a specific style. That's just more time spent.

I'd argue that the reason it's become so prevalent, is exactly that. Less time spent designing, more time spent on features.

I personally doubt users would prefer Skeuomorphic buttons.

I personally doubt users would know the word Skeuomorphic, let alone care what the button looks like.

and I honestly do not want any of my products to perpetuate this emotion.

Why would you not want nostalgia? There are entire product brands built on taking advantage of nostalgia.

And nostalgia doesn't even imply "Hah, this is old and inferior".

Plenty of people still use Emacs.

I picked it up several months ago after using Jetbrains IDE's for quite a long time, and honestly haven't felt the need for any of what Jetbrains brought to the table.

Mostly thanks to LSP.

If you're not a Java developer, Emacs is perfectly fine as a configurable extensible editor. With the additional caveat that its lack of multithreading can get in the way sometimes.

just like PulseAudio does.

I think part of it actually stems from people that had problems early on with PulseAudio, and have developed a vendetta against Poettering. Whether that vendetta is justified or not, I don't know.

Personally systemd hasn't been a pain point. It's been far less of a headache than everyone at the office thought it would be.

Again, just more insane elitism.

You keep going to the "OH MY GOD, PEOPLE WOULD DIE" examples to try and make a fairly weak point.

No one is going to die, because some noob made a crappy little site out of the millions of crappy little sites, and it's not performing like a demi-god.

VMs and high level languages aren't "training wheels". Especially not VMs, that's just complete and utter non-sense. Unless you think literally every website on the web should have a 100% dedicated server box.

VMs are good for a great many of things, both noob-friendly and not.

As for high level languages, they were meant for one particular thing. To get a task done quickly. Which is largely the real reason why so much software out in the wild performs like crap.

Anyone can sit down and spend years making a highly performant piece of software. But when things have to move fast, corners get cut & there's not enough time dedicated to researching to get said product to be as highly performant.

So how, precisely, is anyone supposed to get experience if it's unacceptable to hire them fresh out of "boot camp".

Even if you go "INTERNSHIP". Well what, is everyone supposed to stick the unpaid intern on toy apps that don't give them any actual real world experience writing actual production software?

Cause then the next argument will just be "Do you also go to a doctor that came out of an internship? Is you house built by a constructor that came out of an internship?".

Elitism at its finest.

I concur. Manjaro solves a lot of the problems of the Linux desktop, and brings with it the great Arch community.

And for keybindings, you're probably better off figuring out how xmodmap works.

It's not pretty. But honestly, if you want pretty when it comes to keybinding, nothing beats a good keyboard. Like the UHKB, Ergo Dox, anything supported by QMK basically.

I think it's emcumbent on approach 2 to try and understand why people act like approach 1.

Recidivism.

As members of the public, it's highly likely that we've both seen others be burned by trying to take approach 2. And have ourselves been burned by trying to take approach 2. After all, many crimes have very high rates of recidivism.

These experiences tend to model how we approach other people in the future.

And to be honest, it's not really a 'wrong" approach that "only makes everything worse". At some point, the question of approach 3 "removing a person from society" is a valid question when it comes to reducing harm.

This article has sold me on not buying that book.

I mean, what is this. Not even a point on how Expert Software Designers get bored and browse hacker news for 5 hours?

Terrible.

Programming Idioms 7 years ago

But it's not at all unreasonable to think some newbie may come along, copy & paste that solution, and then call Shuffle from multiple threads.

Thread safety is something that needs to be touched on constantly, and it's smart to write your code such that it would be thread safe. Because otherwise, it just looks like a normal function call. And it could take someone ages to figure out why everything is breaking if they were to actually use that example.