wharvle

A whole lot of us will be mentally impaired sooner or later.

Our experience with software when that happens is sad for everyone but bad UI designers. For them, it’s justice.

… lack of empathy? Where?

Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume.

If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for a panel of users from a nursing home, a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c.

I expect the outcome would be a hell of a lot less twee “on brand” UI elements and a lot more leaning on proven design systems and frameworks, including fucking crucially for appearance. And also a lot less popping shit up on the screen without user interaction (omg those damn “look what’s new!” sorts of pop ups or focused tabs—congrats, some of your users are now totally lost)

Same. “Oh, it’s just… the obvious thing.”

You’ve just made a map of rich and poor areas with extra steps.

Which is effective. If you’re a parent trying to decide which schools you want your kids in, maps of where the money is and maps of school rankings are damn near interchangeable (mostly not for funding-related reasons, though). You could use either and come to similar conclusions.

Yeah, sixth film credit… but the second one for which her character had a name.

And that other film appears to have had a box office under $1.4m, with a collection of basically nobody notable attached, including the director.

Shrug Google’s router thinks I have it. And it’s on by default.

People’d find it outrageous if beanie baby collectors were sacrificing 2% of US food production on altars to their beanie babies, because doing so made the beanie babies more valuable to other collectors. Even if some of the collectors were growing their own food for the purpose, et c, et c—it’d still bother a lot of people. Maybe most people.

The typical behavior is that DNS returns an IPv6 address, then whatever-it-is sits there until a timeout, because it’s simply not being routed. I’ve not investigated further because turning off IPv6 fixes the problem and breaks nothing (that I care about). Anything that only returns an IPv4 address from DNS works either way.

My cellular connection supports IPv6, but testing sites report it’s misconfigured in a bunch of ways. I don’t see problems in practice, though. But on my home network, it’s turned off.

the next ouch-hot-coffee-in-paper-cup wacko

Nitpick, but this specific example, despite its place in pop culture, wasn't a case of a lawsuit-happy wacko. McDonalds screwed up, after being warned they were screwing up and failing to correct, and someone got badly hurt.

Yeah, IPv6 is shut off on my Google Fiber router. Stuff on the Internet breaks when it’s on (last tested three or so months back when they sent me a new router).

When we first got Fiber, years ago, Amazon’s store was one of the things that broke until I turned off IPv6. Wouldn’t load at all, on any device on our network.

Works fine for VPNs and such, but I don’t talk to the Internet with it, because my experience has been it’s terribly unreliable.

The point is to get people in who'll spend money. Governments don't usually create visa programs to be nice—they do it for some benefit.

The big question for us to be able to figure anything out based on this: what did that chart look like in other years?

Healthcare and government are enormous slices of the economy. I'd expect them to be at or near the top of hiring much of the time. IDK about hospitality.

For one thing, they sounded like absolute shit even compared to digital landlines.

1) Kids? You mean only high schoolers, right? I lived that time period and can't imagine any kid who didn't drive having a cell phone, then.

2) I graduated in the early '00s and I think maybe 5% of the kids in my graduating class, at most, had a cell phone by graduation. Mostly some shitty Nokia with a phone-only or low-texting plan (texting was still crazy-expensive), mainly for contacting parents about after school activity stuff.

Middle-class-spectrum car-dependent exurb. Maybe it was different for, like, kids growing up in Brooklyn or something? Or rich kids, perhaps.

A more-common perk for children of free-spending parents, in my town, was still a second POTS line, though I do think that was starting to tip the other way just at the end.

I’ve only recently encountered airflow for the first time, and have been surprised at how half-baked it is for being damn near the industry standard (as far as open source, anyway). And it was a lot worse until recently!

Dynamic task dispatch being a relatively recent feature. The fundamental design imposing lots of structure (well, kind of—you can skip lots of it, but it takes time to figure that out) to practically no benefit (and god, is the terminology dumb, made all the more so because half the stuff it names is nearly useless). “Oh yeah the scheduler just crashes or locks up while still health-checking all the time, standard practice to so restart it frequently” posted on a hundred different issues dating from yesterday to years ago (many fixed! And yet…). It’s pretty bad at passing data between tasks (see again: lots of structure, little benefit)

Hard concur. When something might look wrong or misleading to a future reader is exactly the time to comment.

Pictures of naked kids aren’t necessarily illegal, or we’d be sending nearly every parent to prison (to take one example).

Besides, if it worked like that, training on anything under copyright would have a similar effect. These models have a bigger problem if they get “tainted” by a tainted training source. (Fingers crossed they do! But I doubt it)

If the volume of novel images shot up 10x right after these tools started becoming accessible, that’d let you make a good guess that most of it’s not real.

How’d the BeOS scheduler work? Every desktop OS should just copy that. It felt like magic. Only thing I’ve seen since that even comes close is iOS, and it cheats by killing programs left and right (and has lost a little ground on that front over the years, anyway).

QNX Photon wasn’t far off but was never a realistic option for an everyday desktop (even less so than BeOS, which was at least intended as such).

Yeah, just copy BeOS.

IMO the case for something like IPFS gets worse and worse the larger proportion of clients are on battery. This makes it a really poor choice for the modern, public Web, where a whole lot of traffic comes from mobile devices.

Serving things that are mostly or nigh-exclusively used by machines connected to the power grid (and, ideally, great and consistent Internet connections) is a much better use case.

"Factory worker" is more like "farm hand". It would be weird for a farm owner to give that answer, when asked what their job is.

Looks around desk at non-Apple monitor, keyboard, mouse, USB hub, and cables

Yeah, uh, they definitely always do that. It "wouldn't be them" to ever not.

(Hell, the monitor even supports True Tone—and it didn't at first, that arrived in an OS update, from Apple)

I doubt making the windows draw is what’s taking them time to get right.

Its wireless operation seems to depend on Hand Off in some capacity. Most companies probably wouldn’t want to grant a personal device access to that on a work laptop, and I bet there are some thorny questions about what to do with incoming Hand Off data from multiple accounts.

Step 1: Make platforms liable—in civil and criminal senses—for content they elect to promote (not just host). "Elect" includes "an algorithm did it". This also includes things like "an algorithm said we should put this ad, which no human at our company has even looked at, in front of this particular person".

There is no step 2. The worst parts of social media and ad clearinghouses (Jesus, all the scams Google promotes and makes money off of) are destroyed, anything remotely defensible survives. Personalized "algo" feeds and "algo" suggestions? Untenable. Customized ads served from a system no human monitors or checks to make sure they're not serving blatant scams at a massive scale? Gone. Both the incentives and ability to try to connect strangers with one another in ways they didn't directly ask for? Greatly diminished.

Ad-supported media survives (for better or worse). People can still communicate just fine. People can still publish without trouble.

5. Excessive time on making agile work such as time on Jira story points, backlog grooming, retros, meeting minutes, agendas, scrums (designed to again, make management appear like they are doing something)

I lose so very much time to not just the ceremonies, but to wrestling-with/losing-things-in all these bafflingly complex tools like Jira or Asana or "Azure Devops" and such.

Most places I've been use Github or Gitlab. The issue trackers there are fine. They're close to the code, and in a site I'm already using. They're easy to have conversations in. They work well with built-in review processes, and with pull/merge requests. They don't permit enough strict structure that one worries about smashing some PM's carefully-constructed sandcastle by just trying to use them, but have enough filters and tagging and such that you can apply every bit as much logical structure as I've ever seen in Jira and friends, if you want to, it just won't also make it horrible to use when you do.

I wonder sometimes what % of productivity companies are losing by letting PMs pick where tickets & communication about tickets live. Plus the extra cost of the tools themselves.

I always feel like there's a whole rule-book of "how to Do Life" that I didn't get, for this easing-into-the-upper-middle-class and/or doing-serious-business-stuff shit, that other people just know, because of who their families are and who they grew up hanging out with.

I gather the version of that I did get was the middle-class version—which some others didn't get and have a similar "wait, that's just normal?" reaction as I do to the upper-middle stuff. Like 90% of that's basically credit-related—how credit cards work and how to use them, how to build credit, how to buy a house (generally with a mortgage, so, still basically a credit-related thing), that kind of stuff.

I've noticed similar things when it comes to paying others to do stuff for me. Having a house cleaner come in for the first time was fucking weird. Still is, really. I can't relax, feel like I ought to be helping. Or paying someone to do work on my house that I could do—tiling, drywalling, some light electrical, plumbing, most general home-improvement stuff. It feels gross—I don't think it does for those who grew up with that stuff being normal. I suspect it's a barrier to advancing in business, because those attitudes carry over. Delegation is weird to me. Being someone's boss is horribly uncomfortable. The notion of starting a business and hiring employees to take over stuff I've been doing feels icky and wrong, and no amount of one part of my brain telling another part to knock it off makes that go away.

Yeah, that styling reads like something out of an exceptionally unconvincing scammer email.

Mass, height, and the mechanics of momentum (as when, say, tripping) all make a difference. Some of the terms involved have exponents applied. Adults definitely feel a lot more force from mistakes made while moving their bodies than kids do.