While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working
twitter.com
twitter.com
I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong. Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them unlock my account...
Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password very carefully, letter by letter, watching each letter come up on screen as I went. When I went to type the letter p, nothing happened. I hit p repeatedly, nothing.
I figured the switch for the p key on my keyboard had died or something, so I went to IT and got a new keyboard. Unplugged the old, plugged in the new. Still no p. OK, this is getting ridiculous. Clicked on accessibility tools and tried to use the on-screen keyboard to type in my password. _Still couldn't type the letter p, even with the on-screen keyboard._
Ended up having to hard reset the machine, and then everything was fine and dandy. Still have no idea what could have happened. It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and I've never looked back.
You can only play this game once with a particular group, but it's a good laugh.
- "I can't get a p, no matter what I do there's no p at all!"
- "No p?"
- "Nope!"
- "Well if it's a no-op of course there's no p!"
- "It's not a no-op, I'm telling you there's no p!"
When I first started doing caps-lock-to-control, I mapped my physical control key to caps lock. Eventually, I stopped bothering and kept it as control.
I had just upgraded to iPadOS 15 and the caps-lock-as-control setting reverted to the default. I went into settings and changed it back, but I did so with caps lock accidentially enabled.
This left the folio keyboard stuck in caps lock. I had to go back into settings, set caps lock back to caps lock, press the caps lock key to disable, then I could make it a control key. But trickily, the setting change didn't seem to take effect until I swiped out of the screen where you change that setting.
ANYWAY, I'M JUST GLAD I FIGURED IT OUT.
BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?
Dunno, but in my country we use a QWERTZ layout where you can't write the letters Ě, Š, Č, Ř, Ž, Ý Á, Í, É without caps lock, because with Shift those keys produce 2, 3, 4, ..., 0
So that's why I need it. :)
It was useful on some old machines that tended to prefer uppercase input. On typewriters, the shift lock key (which is slightly different) tended to be used when people wanted to add emphasis to a word or phrase.
As for modern computers, it is less useful. When one of the keyswitches on my keyboard failed, I replaced it with the keyswitch from the capslock since I figured it was the one key I was guaranteed to never use.
Auto doesn't make total sense to me, but it seems originally the Romans had only the letters we know as capitals, and none of the extra characters like semicolon.
IIRC sometime in the middle ages lower case letters were added, but it's not clear to me why and how it ended up getting a bunch of different rules (eg German capitalises nouns but in English it's only proper nouns).
https://www.termsfeed.com/blog/all-caps-legal-agreements/
There are also theories out there about why our names appear in all-caps on government documents, relating to the concept of treating an individual as a 'corporation'.
Never had the problem when using SharpKeys to rewrite the registry.
In later versions it's pretty common to see such windows that don't actually have focus. Clicking again on the title bar usually fixes the problem but I find it very annoying. There's a race condition in the system somewhere that Apple doesn't recognize as a bug.
Alt+Tab (switch between open programs) - might help change the focus
Windows 10 has an advanced version of ^ as I understand, which uses the key combo: Win + Tab. The cycle of these commands can be reversed by adding "shift" to the mix (in case of many open programs / windows and you dont want to cycle through all of them)
Win+x has different, but equally useful menus for win 8 / win 10 - I was overjoyed when i first discovered this, as it retired many many other shortcuts I used over the years. (to get to device manager / control panel / event viewer)
and if all else fails: Alt+F4 - closes active (focused) program / window. If no programs or windows are in focus, then it will bring up the "shut down" dialog box, which allows for reboot / signout / shutdown / Switch user / sleep and hibernation if its enabled.
Nothing sucks like mouse without borders. Nothing. Except for Synergy which is worse. But nothing sucks like synergy. Well except Multiplicity.
(thinking your CTRL key was stuck and activating the print shortcut, but unplugging the keyboard rules that out)
But what about the on-screen keyboard? Do on-screen key presses get routed through the keyboard device driver too?
One day, one machine just ... stopped having a bunch of those IP addresses. They were just gone.
We didn't understand, troubleshot as much as we could, and eventually just gave up and went "forget it, just try restarting the machine."
It worked.
It's amazing what weird states a computer can get into that "did you try turning it off and on again?" is a very real and legitimate and helpful piece of advice.
- Isolate any other sources of ionising radiation.
- Check to see if prevalence increases or decreases with increased or decreased cosmic ray exposure (atitude, shielding, detected cosmic ray storms).
- Are the characteristics those of single-bit flips? (E.g., power-of-two changes to values, or similar.)
- Are the errors nott repeated for the same hardware component. (E.g., under increased cosmic-ray influence, bits flip at an increased rate, as predicted, but which bits flip is random and has no detectable pattern, as predicted.)
You end up with very strong circumstantial evidence of altered bits due to cosmic ray influence.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bit-f...
> It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and I've never looked back.
On Ubuntu, that would be:
$ Q=$($(echo /usr/bin/*rintf) \\x70)
$ echo hel$Q
help
$ echo hel$'\x70'
helpThe only things we could guess were something related to the Windows Search, Cortana, or telemetry services. Unfortunately, it's been since the early days of Win10 since that happened so I don't remember any other details. We also had to physically restart the system to fix the problem.
Eventually we figured out the 'p' (or maybe it was 'n'? Can't remember for sure.) in the password was getting skipped, but it was hard to tell with the password masking. Tried a USB keyboard, onscreen keyboard, same thing. I think we might have given up and let her use one of our computers at that point. It was (and still is) very confusing.
Example: https://www.folioeast.com/
I never realized how often I use the esc key until I started getting routed to Squarespace logins all over the place.
Wish I could remember what led me to that decision.
Couldn't agree more. Everything is just so awful I can't even imagine the staff turning it into some boring Twitter like dumpster fire all about sucking up to celebrities. They have chronological post order by default, that makes it instantly better than nearly all other social networks.
It's unsalvageable and due to that, an accidental refuge from the current mess of the Internet.
It were some actions that one wouldn't usually use together. I, as a bad gamer just didn't at all, but some people were able to put more commands per second there...
It might lead to a dystopia where typing o-r-a-n-g-e somehow yields "a bright spectrum at dusk" but that's an issue for a separate discussion.
And forget about the technical aspects, the cultural aspects of suggesting to use a foreign alphabet to write in one's native language is insulting. This is a technique often used by conquerors, just ask any southern ex-Soviet state. Even if the Japanese have accepted it due to technical limitations.
> what do I need this overaly for anyway?
The overlay allows you to access a number of functions in games, much like the Xbox overlay. You can turn it off entirely if you don't need it, but otherwise the global hotkey is an integral part of it, because it's the only way to invoke it.
Contrast that with Catalyst Control Center which was a regular windowed application that you usually opened when performing first-time setup and then never needed to fiddle with those settings again. And it had a global hotkey AND a context menu shell extension, which took a couple seconds to load every time you right-clicked the desktop. It was insane. Loosely quoting Raymond Chen - noone ever got promoted for _stopping_ a feature from shipping.
They also didn’t tell Microsoft. Outlook, MS Teams, and Jetbrains IDEs are my main offenders (using the EURKey layout).
Recently tried a HN-recommended todo app. It actually registered some Ctrl+Alt combination as a global hotkey.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/10/22323716/youtube-search-b...
Rather than insert a space in the search term, it scrolls the document.
The backspace key fails to work in Pocket when editing tags. Instead it's necessary to either use the <delete> key (if available), or to highlight and overwrite text to be replaced.
So this excellent set of tweets does not surprise me in the least.
But if you could stomach working with the code the catered lunches from Dos Toros and Luke’s Lobster were epic.
and 2012's "PHP: a fractal of bad design": https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
That's a wonderful definition.
A clock losing a random number of seconds per day is actually correct more often than a stopped one.
Typing in the various text input fields has ~1s of lag. It's a TEXT FIELD for fuck's sake!
The problem is that the front-end ecosystem encourages pulling in megabytes of third-party crap for every little thing (including poorly reinventing existing browser functionality) and the result is that some interaction between all that mess causes an entire page redraw upon every keystroke or similar.
If you have free time, I'd pop open Chrome Dev Tools, run a performance monitor on both and try to diff out what each of those products do that cause the additional input lag (if there's no code obfuscation).
It can take upwards of one full minute for text to start appearing when typing tags.
I love their write ups, I know whenever I see their posts on here to cozy up with a coffee because it's about to get fun.
JIRA's Search is far worse than the regular JIRA hotkeys. The Enter key will incorrectly tab-complete JQL just before executing the search. Meanwhile, the Tab key doesn't tab-complete and instead focuses the Search button (which lets you execute the uncorrupted JQL). You have to actively train yourself out of how everything else works just to avoid going insane. Well, that or use the mouse just to click Search (eww).
Every ticket tracking system sucks. Trello was the closest thing to joy.
Its curse, is its developed by Atlassian. A company that was capable of buying Stash, and, somehow, somewhat, turned that codebase into what we now know as bitbucket.
When BitBucket was acquired they were cloud only, and when Stash launched it was on-prem only. We used Stash and BitBucket Cloud around that time at the place I was working and I can definitely tell you that on-prem Stash was definitely not a reskinned on-prem BitBucket Cloud; for one I’m pretty sure BitBucket Cloud was written in Python (Django) and Stash was a typical Atlassian Java product.
The best part of Jira is because it is so flexible, no matter how your process slightly deviates from a basic trello-like board, you should be able to make one or two adjustments in JIRA and have it reflect that.
That's not true of literally any other workflow piece of software I've used, and I've used a ton.
That said, because all the other types of workflow management software I've used are significantly more opinionated and limited, they also limit how bad of a process a bad project administrator can create in them as well.
Absolutely this. I grew up working on an FRC team that used Trello, and I think we got more done as high-schoolers than most modern Agile teams could.
The search/filter box on the MR and Issues list has the appearance of accepting free input, but what you need to do is use some ridiculous no-code query UI to click your way to a valid query.
I can't type 'author: xxx' into the field, because that will tell me that searching that way is unsupported (so why let me do it?). Instead, I have to start typing, select the word 'author', then another box will appear and I have to select '=' in it, and then a third box will materialise where I can search for a username. At this stage, it's basically a coin toss as to whether you get the desired input or the whole form breaks and you have to start again. Someone, somewhere, thought this was more intuitive than parsing a string or offering some predefined filters.
My only question is: why?
Aside from auto-complete searchbars, I think UI functionality peeked in the mid to late 1990s.
Ever since then designers have decided that looking cool is better than being easy to use and it’s been shit.
Naturally tumblr isn't one of them.
Most commands anyway. I'm looking at you, netcat
Either way, even an extremely imperfectly honoured convention is better than no convention at all.
Not really though. Some command in the distant past once told me that I need to type /? to use the correct parameters. And then another one told me that /? is invalid, I need to type --help for help. And thus, I was aware. Contrast this with youtube, which I use for 10+ years now, where I have 500+ videos sorted into playlists, and I even know some shortcuts - discovered mostly by accident - and never once saw the "?" help page, until I read this hacker news thread.
Anecdote, I know.
They have rather more docs than you'd expect, the big problem seems to be that nobody expects them to have useful documentation so it often doesn't occur to us to look - hence why I figured it was worth posting it for people who didn't know about it yet.
Like I say, the big problem here is 'realising that googling "$site keyboard shortcuts" actually has a point in the first place' - hence why I tell people about '?' any time I think it might be useful :D
Also a lot of web-based code editors override the standard Ctrl/Cmd-L shortcut ("go to URL bar") to mean "go to line". It's nice having IDE-like affordances, I guess, but not when it interferes with the basic functionality of the browser.
I get why the hotkey scourge came about, because folks are trying to build apps on a platform that isn't actually a platform. Browsers provide some but not all of the facilities of a real operating system (I'm using "operating system" here in the larger sense of "an integrated software platform that includes a complete toolbox a la Windows, macOS, etc."), so everyone's forced to reinvent square wheels. But understanding it doesn't make the experience as a user any less painful. And although I very much prefer to be able to work from the keyboard whenever possible, hotkeys as they exist on the web today ain't it. They're inconsistent, undiscoverable, and aren't integrated with fundamental UX principles like "don't destroy the user's work" and "let the user recover from mistakes."
PLEASE STOP making the web terrible.
This would make a lot of careers obsolete though (and even entire companies - I'm sure there are "newsletter popup as a service" startups). It's hard to make someone understand something when their paycheck depends on not understanding it.
I had this bug trying to implement a text editor using Draft.js but not sure it was for the same reason.
I guess tumblr devs tried to implement a text editor and at the same time have some vim like shortcuts(jkl).
This makes you appreciate how less can be more.
I had written a comment with multiple paragraphs (which I guess they don't expect people to do, or test for) and I wanted to add something to the next-to-last paragraph, and when I tried to type "matters" it would keep locking me in autocomplete tagging for friends name "Matthew", and as soon as I dismissed the cursor would leap to the end of the comment. If I tried to click back, the cursor kept jumping to the end!
For example, earlier today I was editing a small internal app in Retool. I typed something, instinctively went for Cmd-Z, and it reverts a bunch of changes I made in the query I had open 5 minutes ago. Of course, by the time I spot it and hit Shift-Cmd-Z, the internal state has updated so now it redoes some other unrelated undo operation and I have two broken things to fix.
And then of course there's Notion, the champion of "you've hit a keyboard shortcut and it's applied it to something halfway across the screen from the selection, or possibly just given up trying to do anything useful and deleted a few paragraphs of text at random". Perhaps they were pining for the outrageously janky experience that was attempting to make even the most innocuous of formatting changes in earlier versions of Word For Windows.
If I accidentally fat-fingered e.g. the \ key at the end of a message ("Got it!\"), I want to
1. press the up key
2. press backspace
3. press enter
to delete the last character in the last sent message.
But unless you actually wait at least a second after step 1, the UI is so sluggish in starting the edit of your last message that you instead get "please type a message to continue" because you pressed enter while the New Message text box still had focus.
Things are much worse if you want to do anything more complex. Say, capitalize the first letter of the last sent message (up, home, delete, type capital letter, enter). Usually results in complete gibberish, like appending the capital letter to the message, or sending it in a new message (depending on how fast you are).
How does VSCode handle this? Because I’ve never had an issue typing on it, I’ll definitively have a look to the repo, but does someone know?
on'tD do this.
I did try copy/pasting from another program, but formatting bugs made that unreliable.
>They fixed this by completely changing how anonymous blocking worked, so that it worked by IP address instead of by username, but for a while that information was exposed to the user
>which meant if someone sent you an anonymous question you could block them and then find out their IP address
lmao! What a dumpster fire. I'm glad I never used it for anything remotely serious and exclusively consumed content second-site by people who actually went to tumblr.com.
Edit: Currently I am here:
"and my favorite part of this is that every time tumblr has fucked up and created some weird bug, the user base almost immediately weaponizes it."
(1) https://twitter.com/foone/status/1310432709273989120?lang=en
Here's their most recent thread (in response to this post) on why: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440703149585563652
How is this a problem unless you do UTF-8 validation when parsing the XML, in which case stop doing that for data you don't control.
0xxxxxxx
110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
if (c & 0b10000000) continue;It was only after it sold that Yahoo realised how many of them were using it for porn, which in retrospect should have been obvious: it's an image hosting site.
During Tumblr's peak heyday (~9 months before the sale iirc), Tumblr's daily posting volume was around 1/5th the size of Twitter's at the time. Keeping in mind that Tumblr had no character limit and much greater multimedia support, the amount of content being posted on Tumblr was quite significant.
It was a widely-used general-purpose social network / social publishing platform. Most major brands had a presence on Tumblr, and for a while it was extremely common to see a Tumblr icon on their sites right next to Facebook and Twitter icons.
From my POV as an early engineer there, what went wrong was poor execution in response to many simultaneous existential threats:
* Instagram succeeded at peeling off all the "just want to post photos on mobile" users, and also became the hit new thing with the teenage users
* Pinterest succeeded at peeling off all the "just want to digital scrapbook" users
* Although the porn percentage was relatively low at the time, it still scared advertisers
* Difficulty fundraising / running low on money at particularly bad timing. Facebook's stock performed poorly for its first 15 months post-IPO, and this temporarily made fundraising difficult for existing social platforms... especially when growth was relatively flat (due to the first two bullets) and revenue was disappointing (due to third bullet).
* Ever-growing tech debt. The early team was extremely solid, but very small relative to the amount of traffic, so we often had to creatively cut some corners. Later on, management didn't want to allocate staffing to fix existing things, and a lot of time was wasted on unrealistic big-bang rewrites that were abandoned. Meanwhile the hiring bar kept being lowered over time once the company was no longer a rocket ship.
I left just before the Yahoo sale, as working at Tumblr had gone from my dream job to a stagnant grind during my tenure there. I later returned for another year in the late-stage Yahoo into early Verizon days, with idealistic hopes of helping to prevent a Vine-like fate, but let's just say that was a poor personal decision and leave it at that :)
The comment section would be thousands of lines long, but every line was something like:
User blahblah reblogged this!
User whatever likes this post.
User someone reblogged this!
There was also the meme of the "shitty Tumblr gif" thanks to their fairly low image size limits.
The user experience was generally better in the dashboard (activity stream / feed for logged-in users). The dashboard was the vast majority of traffic; blog UI didn't get much staff/engineering attention as a result.
The "notes" feature on Tumblr was absolutely never intended to be a "comment section", btw. There intentionally was no comment section at all originally. This notion was part of the conceptual difference between tumblelogging and traditional long-form blogging.
Contextually, this mechanism came about at a time when comments (on blog posts, YouTube, etc) were complete cesspools of negativity from anonymous jerks. The Tumblr idea was that to respond to something, you would have to reblog it in order to add commentary. This way, if someone wants to spew nasty comments, their blog would be terrible and no one would choose to follow their blog.
The reblog system was a way for Tumblr users to publicly respond to things, and allow that response to be visible to the responder's followers. The original poster would also get a notification, and they could reblog the responder's reblog to add more if they wish.
The dashboard made this slightly easier to read. Again, if you only ever experienced Tumblr on blog views and without an account, you literally never saw the core functionality that made Tumblr popular.
Also, most Tumblr posts weren't long-form text to begin with. That wasn't the point of the platform.
that explains quite a lot
It also has a number of nice features added compared to tumblr, like changing which blog of yours is the “main blog”, having a separate dashboard and following list for each blog in an account, a system to detect uncredited art-re-uploading, etc.
It's really bizarre and I think has to do with some sort of logging/spyware they run on the site.
They switched the default from one to the other one day, so that mid day your replies started being top posted. And so you got that wonderful mix of top and bottom posting. Then they fixed it, and so you could have a thread that had just top posting in the middle. Neato. Thanks Tumblr.
Appreciate the description “fractally broken“. oh dear :)
Has a similar predicament[1] (though completely different cause); felt very uncivilised copy and pasting the character I wanted from the internet…
Still wondering what the most elegant way I could have gotten that character, especially if I didn’t have internet access.
Scroll through random files?
Perhaps I might’ve known a little about ASCII and tried converting a few numbers to characters till I found the character I wanted.
At the time I did not, and was thankful the internet provided the character I needed.
Still feel like I got away with something and would have been stumped without that… :)
On Safari/macOS, you can't refocus on a Tweet by clicking anymore (if not signed-in already), as this inevitably brings up a sign-in dialog, which resets the view selection in the same instant. As this is not the case with other browsers, I guess, it's not the intended behavior. However, as it has been so for a while now, Twitter seems to be happy with this.
What's scarier is that at some point Clarion got support to publish software as websites... Maybe Tumblr is written in clarion.
Just move somewhere else.
Because it's not all bad? Because the problems they experience are relatively minor and fixable, and that by complaining about this bug it might get fixed?
> so I think I should make it clear that when I say "I love tumblr" I mean I love the userbase, at least most of it (obviously not the cyberbullying people with death threats part), and not the staff. the staff have no idea what they're doing and are only making the site worse
He/she loves Tumblr :)
Ha ha ha.
Tumblr is the place where you get followed (sometimes even messaged) by porn spam accounts regularly.
This problem is so infamous that even some ARG creators literally used the "spam bot aesthetic" (but with weirder messages) to pull people in: https://youtu.be/ZaYioM_bsb0