eyerony

True story: my dad is confused by basically all technology and all modern user interfaces. The one site he finds usable without assistance? Craigslist.

I never thought trendy modern GUI design would get so bad that looking at screenshots of programs running on Windows 98 would feel instantly and overwhelmingly relaxing, like settling into a warm bath, as if parts of my brain being taxed for no reason could finally just chill. Yet, here we are.

The appeal is that they need something on-trend to put in their portfolios for career advancement. It's their version of résumé-driven development. Project managers have similar incentives (screenshots are very powerful, in many settings) so at least don't stop them, if not actually encouraging them.

Oh is that what it is? I was trying to figure out why it looked so bad when not zoomed uncomfortably far "in", when I didn't recall that ever being a problem before. I think that's it.

Ugh now I can't un-see how much farther it is to mouse from the repo "body" to menu items (including those associated with the repo, which are now, confusingly, disconnected from it visually) now. Thanks for that.

My hypothesis is the point is to compete with Jira.

When they start making everything drag & droppable at a huge cost to UI latency and bundle size (plus, for some reason, idle resource use), we'll know for sure that's what they're doing.

Oh man, they've made it way harder to quickly evaluate the state of a repo, which has always (for me) been about 90% of the appeal of Github. Moving releases out of the tab list hurts, too.

Does it also feel "heavier"/slower to anyone else? Like there's more JS running or something? That'd already gotten a little worse but I hope it's not trending even farther into feeling "webappy". Ew.

How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?"

Raises hand my home server (running Debian) is currently in a weird state where a whole bunch of packages won't install or update because some library's stuck on a version they don't like. The version they want isn't available. I'm pretty sure I haven't even added any nonstandard repos to it (all it really runs is docker, so anything odd comes in as a docker container rather than a system package—this in part because I don't trust Linux package managers not to break my system when installing non-critical software due to long experience of same happening over and over, go figure). I'm not sure what I did to cause it and it's still running Docker fine so my incentive to spend an hour tracking down and fixing whatever-it-is has been zero—I'm just glad it's not a system I depend on for anything serious or need to really do anything with.

I spent a few years running Gentoo as my main machine in the 00s. On a laptop. Got suspend-to-disk working, even. I had to manually install Grub on this same Debian home server when I built it last yer, in a chroot to my newly-installed system, because the installer kept failing to do it (my process to fix it was very ordinary and encountered no problems, AFAIK, so I still don't know why the Debian installer couldn't do it, I've never seen it fail quite that way before, but it did so repeatedly so I had to give up and open up the engine, as it were). So I'm not entirely clueless.

Nonetheless I don't really feel confident using a Linux desktop I can't snapshot for emergency rollbacks or rebuild in a few minutes from a script, because damned if weird problems don't crop up when you upgrade. Or don't upgrade. Or reboot, forgetting you'd installed (through the blessed package manager!) a new kernel and now it can't read your encrypted root anymore so is unbootable and now you get to spend some time figuring that out. And so on.

I feel no such anxiety on macOS. Not that that it never breaks, but it's rare enough I don't worry about it. FWIW I'm back on desktop Linux now due to Macs' insane prices, but I suspect I made a mistake and the time I've already lost would have made spending an extra $500 on a significantly worse-spec'd machine well worth it. It's a little here, a little there, but it adds up.

Strongly agreed, I haven't even kinda liked Windows since Win7. Still, it's not as bad as the constant oops-rebooted-there-goes-your-work fest I recall from early Win10. I forget it's there most of the time, until I suspend my work VM and fire up Steam for some games.

I don't really trust a ZFS root on Linux not to, you know, suddenly break in ways that keep it from booting up, so absent that the snapshotting you can do for your whole OS when it's running in a VM is very handy, too. Though of course you could do that with any OS playing host—Windows is just convenient as the best driver shim available on generic x86 hardware, really. Takes a bunch of the headaches out. "I want to upgrade this, will my Linux installation become way less stable if I do?"—who cares, it sees what VBox shows it.

Hahaha, yeah, same smallish town's cops love to hassle people with late or early shifts playing "20 questions" fishing for drunks or I-don't-even-know-what ("5:30's awfully early to be going to work" look, asshole, take it up with the hour-fifteen of highway I have to cover, how many drunks are you nabbing at this hour on a Tuesday anyway?), usually just obviously fabricating some reason that they stopped you in the first place, without even trying to hide that it's BS (good luck questioning it, though). That's white folks, too, I can't imagine how bad it is there if you've got too much melanin in your skin. Incredibly annoying. Often it just seems like they're super bored and looking for anything at all to do.

I will not be migrating from Mojave to Catalina, and will use my current generation of Macs until they are obsolete, while finally making the transition to Linux

I've recently been doing this, after some time (ahem, a decade) away from "serious" desktop Linux. Some observations/pointers:

- Running ultralight window managers with minimal services still feels the most "right" and predictable/stable way to have a Linux GUI. So that hasn't changed. Unfortunately this means manually screwing around with scaling and size problems on 4K displays now. Like, really weird stuff like various windows being drawn at different scales or part-scaled-part-not and drawing your cursor a different size when you mouseover. It's no fun sorting all that out. Boo.

- Wayland is less horrible than I expected but does give the impression of being a lovely new way for any ordinary application to crash your entire windowing system. As if Linux didn't have enough of those already.

- It's still easier and more predictable to just run the damn thing in a Virtualbox VM under Windows, if you've got the horsepower for it, letting Windows handle the drivers for the actual-real-hardware. This may not be true on stuff like System76 or oldish Lenovo machines or something, but probably is if you've got, say, a dedicated recent-vintage graphics card, unusual USB devices, anything like that. It's just way less crashy in a VM, on the same hardware, unless you're damn lucky and probably running fairly old kit. Was true in 2010. Still is, it seems.

- Gnome3 has gotten so incredibly resource-hungry and unstable that it's finally driven me to KDE (see above about handling scaling issues in the lighter WMs being a PITA for why I'm not in Awesome or XFCE or something), which is a DE I've never liked since I first tried it two decades ago. It is a little better now, admittedly, and doesn't make me feel ashamed or like I'm Doing It Wrong for not running exclusively K* applications like it used to. The settings panels are still some kind of bad joke, organizationally. It's not that there are too many options, it's that they're trollishly organized. Friggin' gnome-shell. What an absolute garbage fire. Which is a shame because aside from being even harder to customize meaningfully than macOS (!) Gnome3 looks fairly pretty. It's seriously, no joke, awful though. I wish I could use it but it's simply broken, at present.

- All the new packaging stuff I've tried sucks. AppImage is closest to being good but it's exactly as good as having a bare exe file on Windows or downloading a static binary on Linux, so... it's fine, but does nothing for you like adding console launch commands ("code ." for example) or configuring your environment, as far as I can tell. None are as good as Homebrew and Homebrew-Cask (yes it's on Linux but there are way fewer eyeballs on it so fewer packages and they're often broken) for managing user-, not system-level packages. Snap's complete crap, like, they should just give up, it seems irredeemable at this point. Flatpack is significantly better but still not great. Usable for some unimportant things if you don't mind them doing weird, broken stuff sometimes or just not working when you need them to (see again: unimportant things)

Incidentally, I've settled (back) on Debian after trying Fedora 32 due to tons of recommendations on Reddit (I... did not enjoy the experience) and already knowing I didn't care for Ubuntu (anymore—it was great in the late 00s) as I'd tried that in VMs a few times during my Linux hiatus and not liked it. I also toyed with Void Linux on a crappy little machine for a while and damn is it nice for low-end hardware. I tried Manjaro but I-forget-what serious thing was broken about it on my rig and was going to be a pain to fix. Great installer, though. 10/10 on that.

The fluidity is about keeping activity on the screen tightly in sync with motion on the trackpad and having zero or no unexpected behavior or jank when e.g. reversing a motion partway through to undo it (say, starting to slide three fingers up to expose all your windows, stopping to peak at something, then sliding them back down to put everything back where it was—you can even stop in the middle of it to make the windows do a little dance and nothing goes badly wrong or far out of sync). It nails that stuff even on my aging low-specs-even-at-the-time 2013 MBP. It's not so much about raw UI speed which, yes, light Linux/BSD window managers still hold the crown for (outside dead or niche operating systems like BeOS and QNX or maybe even old versions of Windows, which actually hold the crown)

Once saw a police car in a smallish town whip a u-turn for no clear reason, no lights, nothing, nearly hit a car that was pulling out of a bank parking lot and the driver of which had clearly already looked that way and seen no-one coming, then the cop freaked out, u-turned again (lights this time) and pulled over the car they nearly hit. Guess whatever they were breaking traffic laws and driving very dangerously to get to wasn't so important after all. What a shitty day for that person. At least it was probably just a totally unjustified ticket and an unpleasant lies-filled conversation with an upset and fragile-ego'd cop, and not death or injury, I suppose.

[EDIT] this and other dangerous-driving observations lead me to treat cop cars on the road like someone I've seen through the window drinking a 40 while talking on the phone. They're far and away the most likely category of vehicle to do something batshit crazy with no warning.

Hey, it's me a couple months ago! With a side dose of "we may or may not fire you, we dunno yet" for several weeks (they did, abruptly, the day after once again saying they maybe wouldn't, and I guess I'll never know exactly why). Confusing as hell and unlike anything I'd experienced in my not-short career. I guess some managers/teams are straight-up incompetent at onboarding and blind to how hostile-to-new-hires their codebase(s) and docs are. Oh and useless, god-awful justify-your-existence-to-your-manager (then tune out because nothing anyone else says matters) standups every day adding to the stress. And no planning process to speak of. It's the second time in my life I've felt actually-mentally-ill and the other involved a sick newborn, so. That's impressive for them to have achieved, I guess.

Save money if you can and look for cheap/free credit lines, is my advice. If you can get a few months' worth of bills in the bank or available on super-cheap credit then the worst-case (shit, best-case, for me—I felt so much better after) scenario won't really be that bad. Hit up your network if you can and see if anyone needs some contract work, if things don't work out. It's pretty easy to scare up a few hours here and there, maybe enough to at least cover bills.

Factoring is the point at which a lot of people start truly hating math. As in going from having a weakly negative or even somewhat positive opinion of the field to hating it. I'd avoid the name.

email client

I hear a lot of "my email", as in "I opened up my email" or "where's my email?" Sure they could mean their email inbox, but they also mean the email client with that phrase, and don't differentiate the two at all. Much like how a web browser is still, to many (most?) people, "the Internet" (or "my Internet", as in "I clicked on my Internet").

Is everyone insane or is there something I'm missing.

Difference in taste based on class-related norms & values, mostly, is what I'd say you're missing. Can make a thing really impressive/desirable to one group of people, and simultaneously gauche/disgusting to another.

Yeah, I dunno why it is, but that could well be. I suspect it has something to do with whatever's resulting in women attending and completing college at a higher rate than men, but that's just a hunch.

[EDIT] jesus it's so hard to write anything about this without walking on eggshells—to be clear I'm not complaining about any of this, including the college thing.

Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall.

I secretly (well not in this moment but ordinarily secret) consider women in software development smarter than men, on average, due precisely to this observed tendency to spot where the social and monetary rewards are (management, other social roles "above" developers) almost immediately and start aiming for that ASAP.

[EDIT] this is in general bigcos and "startupy" places, anyway—I dunno if that trend holds in e.g. FAANG or finance or the other places where devs actually do make really, really good money rather than just good-for-not-a-manager like everywhere else.

Yeah, you're on to something. I'd guess it's intense and precise coaching paired with people who don't do this sort of thing very often. It seemed to get a lot worse soon after they started trying to get a bunch more presenters involved, some years back. My guess is they didn't think the first couple of those were polished enough, so cranked up the prep, which, when applied to people who haven't developed outstanding presenter-talent, gives you a really fake and awkward effect. I think the somewhat rougher early ones were nicer, personally.

To their credit, I guess, most other events I've seen like this since everyone started trying to ape Apple's announcement style have the same problem, and usually worse.

They've been trending that way even at the live events. Last few years the obviousness of all the coaching and rehearsal has been extremely distracting. I mean it was there before but not quite so intensely. They all come off as robotic or like someone's holding a gun on them.

Ages 0-22: zero times, basically never sick, never had strep or a sinus infection even once. Maybe, maybe had very mild cases of the flu once or twice when very young but then never got it again in that age range, despite never bothering with the vaccine or taking any precautions whatsoever. I'd get my "annual sniffles" when I felt slightly off and had a slightly runny nose for about 36 hours. That's as sick as I got.

After that, once a year in a good year, twice in a bad one, and I get the flu every other year or so, even with the vaccine. If I get the flu it also gives me a sinus infection more often than not. Nose slightly stuffy 100% of the time, now. Almost all my strep and sinus infections trend toward landing me in the ER, on saline, if I don't get antibiotics—rarely do they just go away. Haven't made it quite that far yet but I've been damn close.

All I can figure is HGH is a hell of a drug. I was also super-fit (looking, plus solidly healthy-range BP) until about the end of that age range, despite eating ~2x my on-paper "maintenance" calories of pure garbage food every day. Go figure. I eat much less and much better now, am fatter, and get sick sometimes rather than never getting sick. Getting old sucks.

By the time I get them for those things I'm usually sitting at about 4 hours of sleep over the last 48-72(!) hours and unable to eat or (sometimes) even keep water down, so yeah, I need 'em. I wait that long so my body has a change to fight it off without resorting to antibiotics, which sometimes does work. Though also to avoid spending two and a half hours being sick and miserable in the car, at the doctor's office, in the car again, at the pharmacy, then in the car again, rather than at home resting, until I just cannot avoid it.

If I could get antibiotics for strep or sinus infections without going to them, I'd pretty much never go. Those visits are really dumb because I already know what's wrong, and just need them to say "yep, it's the thing you already knew it was, here's a prescription and a bill for doing nothing useful"

... actually on reflection already knowing what's wrong and just needing a doctor to say it so treatment can proceed is the norm for interaction with doctors generally among friends and family. Including having to gently walk the doctor to the correct diagnosis so they don't waste a bunch of time and get you in for more visits and tests than you need.

IMHO Perfect Dark is one of the oldest shooters that holds up (play the version on the Xbox 360, maybe also the XBone, not sure). Yeah yeah it's a console shooter, but it's outstanding and hi-res + dual-stick controls make it feel modern-enough. Do note that it has two two-player campaign modes in addition to regular single player: co-op, and... versus. Yes, versus. Also be aware the difficulty modes change the objectives significantly, and sometimes also your starting position, so if it seems weirdly short bump up the difficulty.

I think some of the original frantic shooters hold up alright, for what they are. Quake, stuff like that. They're kinda niche genre now, though. Not sure about the early Dooms, hard to judge those as easily. I like them, still, but...

The Half Life remake in the HL2 engine (Black Mesa) is very true to the spirit of the original and smoothes its rough edges off very elegantly, but the original's probably still fairly playable, too.

First mass effect, oof. It suffers from a lot of "which of the three buildings they made will this quest take place in?". Also having enemies walk right past your AI teammates, who are busy doing nothing, to shoot you in the back over. And over. And over. Gets really frustrating after a while. Two is so much better. You're in for a treat.

[EDIT] on reflection the one mechanic that probably feels off to a modern player in Perfect Dark, and indeed in many older shooters, is having thrown weapons treated like ordinary weapons, rather than a secondary attack with a separate set of items to cycle through. That is, you have to switch away from your gun to arm a thrown weapon, then throw it, then switch back. That's a little clunky. IIRC throwing-is-separate model wasn't popularized until the first Modern Warfare (I've played the first Call of Duty recently and I don't think it was in that, yet—man, talk about one that doesn't seem nearly as good on re-visiting)

At launch the boss fights were much worse. They updated it to provide alternative solutions to most or all of them, at some point.

Wait, is HR part of “the originals” now?

I think it wasn’t until my sixth or seventh play through that I finally felt like I’d found everything in that game. There’s just so much in it, and it’s content to let you miss most of it if you want. IIRC there are a three or so main routes through that first level (in the front, through the tunnel, climb the side), plus a couple optional side-areas.

Types are for compilers, not people, and personally I think there's more disadvantages than advantages re: time.

Hard disagree. Types are for people. They're for people to tell compilers what to tell people. Which is incredibly useful. They are first and foremost a communication and code-navigation/wayfinding tool—for people.

As for all this extra time some folks keep complaining about, we must be using TypeScript entirely differently, somehow. I don't get it at all. Its overhead is less than the time it saves me in typo-spotting alone, let alone all the other benefits. Takes 5%, gives back 20-30%. It's not even close. Maybe it's a problem for really, really slow typists? I'm not even some kind of editor wizard and it hardly slows me down. It can't be thinking up the type definitions since you need to do that anyway—right? I hope? And at that point you may as well write them down.

poor documentation

Static types are documentation. Better yet they're documentation that can't go stale without a computer yelling at you that it's wrong.

A thousand rows wasn't impressive in 2000. I think people've forgotten (or weren't around for, so don't realize) how big a step back we took on picture quality and pixel density for monitors, for many years, with the switch to LCD.