I dunno, a lot of the people in my life that aren’t tech savvy are inconvenienced. The ads pop up and block stuff. But they don’t know how to do anything about it.
I guess it’s easier to just do nothing and suffer than learn what adblock is. It’s easier to use the shitty defaults.
Well that’s fascinating. I’m not sure what to do with this information. Maybe read the study more carefully when I have more time
Many people have a sort of learned helplessness. They don’t really know computer fundamentals, they get scared and stressed so they stop thinking, and then they don’t want to deal with it.
People aren’t rational. They’re emotional.
I think most people are kind of bad with money, and I think that scales with income.
I think a lot about some old coworkers (six figure salary). We all wanted to go out for a party after work. A bunch of then paid like $80 for a car. I paid $3 for a subway ride. Got there at the same time.
Maybe that’s not so much “bad at money” exactly as have incomprehensible to me values.
I feel like every retro I’ve attended has been a farce.
“What went bad? We said doing it this way would be harder and more risk prone. Management insisted we do it that way, and it took longer than and caused a site outage.”
"What should we do differently?’
“Listen to the team next time”
“That won’t happen”
There’s definitely a lot of cargo cult* thinking in software. People don’t understand the why of things but they want the results. That’s why most “agile” I’ve seen is a waste of time.
*Is there a less problematic phrase for this?
I’ve wasted entire days with people like that because they couldn’t be fucking arsed reading error messages and figuring things out by themselves.
I’ve had a couple interview tasks that are like “clone this repo and run it. Try to do [action]. Tell us any errors you find and how to fix them”
One of them was some sort of redux app, and the problem was a state mutation. Another one, the CSS had some weird so stuff rendered crazy. Both were pretty easy to track down and fix. You could probably also do something that’s like an error thrown, but people would probably just feed that into an AI now.
One of the guys I worked with said be prefers the chatbot because stack overflow always made him feel stupid when he’d ask for help. The emotional dimension is big for some people.
I just recommend checking things from the live boot environment. I found out once that some things didn’t work (HDMI , Ethernet, Wi-Fi) only after installing, and it was a hassle. Ended up switching to a different distro that did work out of the box.
The worst is when people don’t know how the system works, and then won’t listen to answers
Like I was at a job and product was going on about “our system has no concept of project owner. We have all these projects but there’s nothing unifying them under a single owner. We need to build this!”
I was like “… what? That’s just not true. There’s a “company” object that does that. It’s got a foreign key with project in the database. I guess it’s a weird name but it’s there”
It took several back and forths over multiple meetings. They eventually got on the same page and I saved us doing a whole useless project, but they did insist I rename it to “account” in the database and code. I would’ve rather left it because that could’ve been dicey, but alas. (The rename did go out fine, but I had to go looking for every reference.)
For the code, open source is probably the way to go. People should be able to build from source. Otherwise, how do they know you’re not doing something shady. Open source is generally a net improvement on security, assuming people actually look at it.
For screenshots, first fix it so the screenshots render nicely on narrow displays.
Would probably need to be open source to be trustworthy. Running a random executable from the Internet seems dicey.
Needs more screenshots. The two that are on the site don’t render great on mobile. Can only see a small portion.
I’m unclear how you find another user and verify who they are.
Website should have a clearer feature list. The user manual wants to download a text file instead of showing it in the browser.
The advantage of Mac is it’s more widely used and thus more widely supported (for things that are supported at all). You can just buy an apple computer from a trusted source and it’ll work. Linux doesn’t quite have that yet. If more people move to Linux , you’ll find better drivers and stuff.
Fixed Agatha Christie: Evil Under the Sun not being playable in French.
What an oddly specific fix
Most of the code at my current job doesn’t even have the optional type annotations. You just see like def something(config). What’s config? A dict? A list? A string? Who the fuck knows.
Unfortunately most of the developers seem to have a very pre-modern take on programming and aren’t interested in changing anything.
Get a code formatter. Ruff is popular. So is black. Never think about it again.
I’ve seen at a very large company a workflow that involved manually updating an excel workbook and (I think) saving it on confluence, so a python script could download it and parse it later. It wasn’t even doing formulas. It was just like less than a hundred lines of text in a half dozen sheets.
As someone who works in software, I’ve been using macs at work for more than a decade. One job had Linux machines. One place had windows for developers and it was a shit show.
Apple isn’t amazing but at least the terminal is sensible.
For work, a Mac and vscode. I don’t love vscode but it’s what everyone uses.
Well, some of them develop on windows with like notepad++ and it’s kind of a nightmare. There’s no ci/cd, linting, or testing, so whenever I check out someone else’s branch it’s full of red squiggles.
My personal is pop!_os Linux where I’m also using vscode because I’m too cheap to pay for pycharm.
Yeah, I can follow the train of thought. They don’t know that like an hour of reading now will save them decades of pain, I guess.
Like, there’s degrees. Learning how to compile Firefox from source with custom changes is way more work than “search: how do I get rid of ads? Search: best adblocker. Click install on ublock.”
Which brings me back to what I was trying to say earlier. People imagine dealing with these problems is way harder than it actually is, so they don’t even look.
Something like this is coming up at work. They’re like “oh it’s going to be like weeks of work to get a linter for our code” and I’m like “it’s fifteen minutes please just let me help you”.