ElemenoPicuares

I think there’s a (fixable, if difficult) reason the FOSS world contributes such a small percentage of heavily-used end-user facing tools to our software landscape. We’ve got the commercial provided spanked on a lot of things, like web servers. Competitors almost stopped trying.

Marketing is a way smaller reason than many people imagine—it’s mostly usability. See the nearly immediate mastodon mass-exodus after getting millions of people to give it a shot. Yet most people that use signal probably don’t even know what open source means. Try to find a full-time professional photographer or designer that’s never tried Gimp, but immediately abandoned it. (The project is making a serious concerted effort to turn it around though! <3) But see how many professionals used Inkscape in their regular workflow. Even Blender, which is dramatically more complex than gimp, but after years of concerted effort, is a very useable application. Even with Autodesk doing their best to completely own 3D modeling, Blender is still an absolute juggernaut.

I think a lot of it comes down to who makes product decisions.

For open protocols, engineers with experience deploying things in real-world situations should obviously call the shots. We don’t need bean counters unilaterally deciding about things like Pocket integration, or shoving chatbot features into every crevice so they can look cool on LinkedIn.

But the people steering end-user-facing tool projects should be product people who are primarily interested in solving tangible real-world problems. Technical people often prioritize technical consistency or ease of implementation over usability, and incorrectly assume that nontechnical end users will be fine with it — they just need to RTFM Amiright? Technical people also tend to overestimate their ability to reason about design problems the same way that some designer might vibe code a few things, read a book about Python, think they’re basically a web developer, and then start saying confidently incorrect things about technical topics.

Alas, product managers and designers are not an easy fit into regular FOSS workflows. I’m sure someone with good organizational management skills could totally devise a FOSS project structure that would do the trick.

Well, if the edges are the Japanese life expectancy of 84 and 0, then 80 does fall somewhere in the middle. So there should be some four-year-olds in this deck, too.

It’s kind of hilarious that anybody considers this “democratizing” creating media. How many people that need a video clip are going to be capable of running an open version of this themselves? The wonky “open” models aren’t even close. How much do you think these services are going to cost once the introductory period financed by race-to-the-bottom money stops? OpenAI already charges $200/mo if you want to be guaranteed more than 30-60 minutes of Advanced Voice. The introductory period exists solely to get people engaged enough to push through blatantly stealing millions of artists creative output so they can have a beautiful tool they sell to Hollywood for a whole lot of money that’s still less than traditional vfx, and to m everyone gets to dink around in the useless free models or too-expensive-for-most prosumer tools and people with expensive video card arrays or the functional equivalent will still be niche tinkering hobbyists with inferior tooling and models and the skilled commercial artists still employed are being paid shit because of market forces. Great job SV. Making the world a better place.

Maybe? No idea. I'm based in the US, and I know Telus Communications, the parent company is based in Canada. I have no idea if this is even something that would violate a regulation, let alone who to report it to, or how that would change with a foreign employer.

Telus International! Not exactly a sketchy fly-by-night entity, and their job postings for these gigs are all over the place. I guess that after all these years we find out that Telus is really short for Teluseverything. I completed the survey but there's no way in hell I'm going to take any position they offer, ever. Though I'm sure answering no to that question means my application got round-filed immediately.

... but the register can be used as evidence in court.

I'm so happy seeing this technology flourish! Some call it hype, but this much increased worker productivity is sure to spike executive compensation. I'm so glad we're not going to let China win by beating us to the punch tanking hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people's income without bothering to see if there's a sane way to avoid it. What good are people, anyway if there isn't incredible tech to enhance them with?

In the real world, evil is a morally lazy concept for people unwilling to consider that some abhorrent behavior that adults must be held accountable for also has root causes that we might have some culpability in. Pretending bad behavior happens in a vacuum shirks out duty as stewards for our society, pushing all responsibility of it onto the people who have to deal with the worst of it. Personal responsibility is the start, not the end of addressing the bad things that people do.

Got a lot of use out of his site over the years. What's nice about it is that he's so friendly. I get mixed vibes from various bike communities though.

I always enjoy the folks in bike shops in the cities I live in. I'm definitely not in their 'scene,' but they're super passionate about bikes and cycling as a primary mode of transportation and really want to get as many people on board as possible. I've heard people accuse them of being elitist or whatever, but even in the most notoriously hipster spots, I've always found them just as happy to fix up some kid's beat up used Walmart Schwinn as they are troubleshooting some alignment problem on someone's custom fixie.

That's feels very different to me than the parts of the more "serious" long-distance/touring/sports cyclist crowd I've been exposed to. The folks I've known in person that don lycra and speed down pretty country roads didn't seem unusual, but in groups, they seem like one of the most gatekeep-y, Mean Girls crowds I've encountered. Better have the 'approved' goals, gear, practices and perspectives if you want to sit with them at lunch. Practical transportation cyclists should keep walking, unless they're doing it in full racing gear with clips, wrap-around shades and a helmet that looks like a heavier duty version of what they wore in tron. If you're not cycling hard enough to need a shower once you get to work, you're not really cycling.

Maybe it's a tiny vocal minority? Maybe they're people that are "online only" enthusiasts trying to be cool? I dunno... but it just seems very punitively conformist.

I quickly rose to the a top contributor role of a non-programming stack exchange site. I had more technical subject matter expertise (including formal training) than seemingly anyone else there, was friendly, thorough, empathic, upbeat, technically competent, and prolific. Not too long after getting involved, I just got too sick of unhelpful, pedantic, self-important moderators nitpicking at my posts and making passive-aggressive edits, so I just left. That was years ago and I still regularly collect points in upvotes and get positive comments from people.

Many people in those roles claim they're uptight because they want to maintain the quality of the posts. Well, I assure you that particular SE, at least, is much worse off for it.

In the US, many people I know have been periodically inundated with scam robocalls... in Mandarin! They spoof a number very close to your own which is a dead giveaway in a larger metropolitan area but probably pretty effective in rural areas with fewer local numbers. The novelty wore off after like the 10th "Nĭhǎo..."

I wonder what sort of person is aware enough of DDoS attacks to want to buy one, savvy enough to find where to buy one, yet dumb enough to pay with PayPal. Or accept PayPal if you ran such a service. Given, it says the people running it were 16-24 and adolescent hubris knows no bounds... Maybe the customers were the same general age as the owners?

For example: "This makes a lot of sense to me. Because order and variety is what we experience in nature. For example, trees and mountains follow recognizable patterns, they have shapes that allow us to categorize them. Yet each tree and mountain is different and unique. The human body, as well, has forms common to all, it has symmetry and proportion, yet each individual is different.

What makes these monster buildings so unsettling is that instead of a delicate balance of order and variety, they have too much of both. The moster building has too much order - it's a box with long rows of windows. But the façade also has way too much variety because of the AC units and the mishmash of colours and window frames."

(a bunch of declarative statements about hotels based on visual analysis)

"But I think this kind of visual trick could find application in high-rise residential buildings to make façades look nicer and gentler."

They are making technical design analyses of buildings, criticising architects based on that, and making recommendations to architects for future work. Professional design critique also includes matters of artistic opinion mixed in.

Developers and their ilk spend all day thinking up solutions to novel and difficult problems in ways that really matter, and that's awesome. Irreplaceable. At times it seems like the only thing between us and an incredible shining future in so many domains is just having enough dev time to do the research and solve the problems! The other people in the process just sort of fall to the wayside while developers do the real work.

Many developers forget that their knowledge is domain-specific, and no matter how broad the applications are for their skills, it doesn't increase the value of their perspective beyond code. Every designer I've met who's worked in tech, and many others such as communications people, managers, support people, etc have been frustrated by this exact attitude. Confidently weilding criticism and dismissing ideas in realms far outside of their expertise.

If people publicly criticize the work of professionals without the requisite knowledge, they shouldn't be taken aback when someone tells them they're taking out of their tuba.

See my answers to the above comments.

s1ck b3rn m8

You can write whatever you want. If someone who knows more pointing out that you're off-base is that much of a deterrent, you're probably right to avoid it. As I said above, I'm far beyond the point in life where I feel the need to hold my tongue when I recognize someone speaking with authority well outside of their expertise, especially if they're getting attention by doing so.

I think Dezeen is a great place to start to keep up with things. When you get a little deeper, you'll have a better idea of where to look for more in-depth books, etc. that are more specific to your areas of interest.

That's because I wasn't talking about design: I was talking about expertise.

My professional discipline shares some baseline knowledge with architects and I enjoy architecture, but I am not an architect. I know enough about it to realize that you're better off listening to an architect talk about architecture than me, and way better than someone with no design background at all.

Aside from my design discipline, I was also a classically trained chef, and also spent quite some time as a software developer. The number of times a person from an engineering-type background haughtily "explained" my areas of expertise to me is gob smacking. I'm far beyond the point in life where I feel the need to hold my tongue when I recognize someone speaking with authority well outside of their expertise, especially if they're getting attention by doing so.

I like Dezeen, Arch Daily, and The City Fix for more urban design type stuff.

This topic is vastly more complex that the author realizes. This window placement technique is one of many design facets that create the intended visual impact of these buildings and isn't close to their most significant difference to those large functional midcentury apartment blocks. Not only do architects need a 3 year graduate degree and board certification to start their careers, brand new architects are not the ones designing large public buildings. The author assuming that their musings about window placement on Vegas hotels could in any way inform seasoned and well-educated architects' design approach is pure hubris. Ridiculous.

It reads like a non-developer reading a bunch of articles about tech buzzword du jour like blockchain or microservices and then ham-fistedly using that to "explain" the architectural shortcomings of a bunch of complex systems that they couldn't hope to understand designed by heavily educated and experienced professionals. An actual developer would roll their eyes but if the author's readers aren't developers, it not only sounds as credible, it sounds more credible because someone is finally explaining that complex thing in a way that makes sense to people who reason about problems the same way they do.

If you want to learn about some knowledge domain like architecture, you're a whole lot better off reading architectural blogs than a technical person's musings about it. Misconceptions born from a similar perspective to yours are going to seem undeservedly credible and be a lot more difficult to parse and filter out.

Completely separating styling from content seems dogmatic in this context. It certainly makes sense when working with long documents with standardized style, or ones that need to be processed with code, but I don't think that really applies. From what I understand, even ATS resume processing is a blunt instrument that assumes the content will be commonly formatted word docs or PDFs, and sending it better quality data will not yield better quality results. I think defining styles in an OO.org document would suit the task much better. Different strokes for different folks and all that, but this seems like a hammer thinking everything looks like a nail.

Maybe a good step would be figuring out a way to not immediately commodify all human activity and then smugly tell the affected to learn how to do something new when their life's work is rendered obsolete by technology.

We just need to give the AI memories from real people and give them a life span short enough that they won't realize it... and then if they go bananas and start causing harm, make another AI to terminate them... I swear I have heard this strategy used elsewhere.

Beyond smoking rates plummeting in recent years, indoor smoking rates were plummeting for years before that, and that's when you normally saw ash trays. I was a smoker for a couple of decades and never once had a dwelling I smoked in, and that was true for many other smokers I knew. That became socially frowned-upon long before smoking lost its momentum. I have noticed that even the dubiously effective large smokeless self-extinguishing public ash trays that were ubiquitous outside of bars/clubs/etc in the 2010s are becoming less common.

Smoking on US flights was banned in 1988.

Why do these articles always attract glib and judgemental comments from people who have no personal experience with type 2 diabetes and whose study of the issue amounts to "a few things I read about this a while ago."

I agree that getting rid of federation is not the answer. However, it will be little more than a source of neato developer projects as long as new projects try to get users to think about it, let alone understand it, nevermind actually needing to understand it to use a product to its full potential.

People who don't care about federation, conceptually, will never care about federation, even if it yields tangible benefits they care about otherwise. They will prioritize user experience, interface, branding appeal, reliability and speed of operations like finding people in-app, and all of that other stuff that FOSS social media, and many other types of FOSS projects, de-prioritize. That is why FOSS alternatives are still alternatives despite being free, and largely technically superior.

The disconnect is rooted in differing perspectives. Developers, naturally, use more sophisticated means of evaluating software than end users, much the way nutritionists evaluate food. We consider interfaces and user experiences to be means of interacting with software, and consider the software on a whole, yielding only so much weight to usability. Since software plays such a huge part of our lives, spending a little time wrangling it doesn't seem onerous.

To nearly all end users, the interface/experience is the software. Even people who do care about federation conceptually may not even be willing to deal with admin > 0 for their social media accounts. It's not ideal, but it's reality. Currently, federation hardly matters more to people than HTTP/2 does. Trying to use it as a selling point for general audience software is a failing strategy. So who cares? Social media is a hell of a lot more useful with a critical mass of users... other users are what make it "social," rather than merely "media."

If developers are nutritionists, designers are chefs. Calculating proper nutrition to keep us alive and functioning is arguably more important to making food delicious and enriching our sensual lives. But if you take a large group of people and offer them their choice of food either constructed by nutritionists or constructed by chefs, the chefs will win every time. Many of the nutritionists will be mystified by people's lack of ability to prioritize critical body functioning over beautiful sensual experiences.

(When I was in culinary school, a fellow student was a career-changing nutritionist saying she was becoming a chef because she was tired of "being the bad guy taking away all the things people loved.)

The key is actively enfranchising people who specialize in knowing what users want. Spending an afternoon in Gimp making a punny logo is not branding. Customizable color themes are not UX. Deeply considering, and probably researching users needs and expectations and then trying to meet them is the only way forward for FOSS social media. People are willing to give up some flavor benefits for food that's significantly more nutritious, but we need chefs to help us make it as tasty an appealing as possible, and then spin the hell out of the benefits. It's the only way forward.

Sure, if a trailing space in copied/paste functionality or precise :after placement is important then you'd need to modify the ending tag placement... but prioritizing that use case seems like a premature optimization. I don't think that makes a drastic difference. Compared to markdown, you've still got a heck of a lot more formatting flexibility without changing the rendered product.

Compared to markdown I think HTML works a lot better as a general purpose format.