Fr0styMatt88

Oh wow I just had such a flashback....

The first time I ever saw JPEG images was from an Amiga magazine (Amiga Format maybe?) coverdisk. If I recall correctly my A2000 would actually take time to display the whole image - it wasn't instant.

Good times!

For criticisms of things like code (or art), I think of that as "criticize the thing and not the person".

Bad: "You don't know what you're doing. This is poorly-written code that will perform badly on bigger datasets. "

Good: "The runtime of this code is prone to grow exponentially. A different algorithm will get around this. "

As much as possible I try and criticize from the viewpoint of wanting to make the work better instead of from wanting to bring down the person that did it.

Edit: To add - I will very possibly be _wrong_ about the definition of better, which is something else I try and keep in mind.

Stardock actually has software for Windows that does something like that:

https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/

Since I have a vision impairment, I'm sure the effect is amplified very much for me, but using the mouse is such a massive break in flow:

- First you have to lift one hand up off the keyboard and put it down on the mouse. This may or may not mean taking your eyes off the screen.

- Then you need to find the mouse pointer on the screen

- Then you need to aim for what is usually a relatively small target and move the pointer there.

- If you're right-clicking, the right-click menu usually presents more small targets you need to aim for.

- If you need to use the keyboard, again you have to move your hand over to the keyboard from the mouse.

For finding the pointer, I developed this unconscious habit of slamming the mouse pointer to the very top-left of the screen. It's difficult though when on someone else's machine, where your brain isn't used to the pointer velocity or where multi-monitor means that slamming the mouse to the top-left actually puts the pointer on another monitor.

People look at me in awe when I'm using a two-pane file manager but honestly not having to take your hands off the keyboard and not having to move your eyes off the screen gives so much better flow. It's also why I like the UI of Blender - one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse at most times.

Can you give any tips on where to start? Any particular books or anything you found helpful in giving you practical ways to exercise your willpower?

Do you think there was anything in particular that biased the N64 emulator scene to be more drama-filled than some of the others? I never followed it that closely; I just remember that Project64 seemed to go for a really long time without official updates, IIRC.

OT but this does take me back - who remembers the drama with Sparcade?

I often say that I think the greatest stroke of genius that Facebook had was calling it 'Friending' and 'Unfriending' instead of 'Add to your contacts' and 'Remove from your contacts'.

I remember being delighted at how 'spacious' walking around Vegas felt the first time I went. Malls were wide and walking through shopping areas never felt cramped like it often does here in Australia. I was really surprised; it didn't feel at all like I was expecting it to.

I've mentioned this in other Powershell HN threads but you might want to try these two commands to make discoverability much better IMHO:

Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key Tab -Function MenuComplete

Set-PSReadLineOption -ShowToolTips

Also note that you can get in-console help on most commands without having to go out to a web browser. On the ones I've tried, examples are also included which help output too.

Help will also list available commands; eg:

help json

Shows me the three commands available from my shell: ConvertFrom-Json, ConvertTo-Json and Test-Json.

There is also Get-Command, which you can filter for command discovery, ie:

Get-Command | where Name -Like "Json"

The advantage to PowerShell being object-based here is that if you press <TAB> after typing where, the list of completions you get will include the properties that are in the object returned as the result of Get-Command.

I also use Cmder for a much nicer console than cmd.exe. I haven't tried the latest version of the new Windows Terminal but I hear it's also nice.

I've been very low-vision since birth and having glaucoma (since birth) meant that I lived with the very real possibility of going blind. I knew this from the time I was a child and preparations were made. Thankfully my glaucoma has been under control for many years at this point, though I'm still extremely low-vision. So what follows is just some random points, as I don't really know how to keep this post reasonably short, nor what should go in what order. So hopefully this doesn't devolve into rambling :) Anyway, some observations and lessons:

- Others have mentioned touch typing. I was taught touch typing from an early age with the help of an educational support teacher. I can say that it's one of the most valuable skills I have and I'm really, really thankful to the special teachers that put in the effort with me over those years.

- I naturally gravitated to computers. I don't know what it was, but after seeing them in school, I had to have one! I never got into blind sports as a kid and couldn't play most regular sports at school, so my parents saw the opportunity of computers as something I could get into. Something else I'm really really grateful for (I've been incredibly, incredibly lucky). The rest is history.

- I'll stress again - if you love software engineering and computers, there is no reason at all that it can't be your profession.

- Tech-wise, I use a magnifier on my Android phone and I use the magnifier on OSX. On Windows, it's easier to sit close to the screen. If you're at the stage where you need screen magnification, I can say that I've found the OSX built-in magnifier along with the trackpad a stellar combination.

- I find it difficult to locate the mouse pointer, so I use an extension called Saka Keys in my browser, which allows me to follow links on pages without having to use the mouse. I primarily use the command line for things if I can, especially if I might be on another machine that I can't get as close to as I need (eg- helping a friend quickly). You get to a point with touch-typing where you can feel when you've made a typing mistake. You also get really good at memorizing stuff, as others have said.

- At work, don't be afraid to speak up about what you need. This is tough. For many years I was embarrassed about needing help. It's illogical, I know, but it happens. You want to be independent and prove that you can be 'just as capable' as everyone else. That's a double-edged sword though. People WILL forget you are vision-impaired. I had a friend that I've known for years ask me why I sit so close to the webcam a few days ago when we were video chatting. My webcam is on top of my monitor.

- Believe it or not, people WILL forget you are vision impaired or even blind. I have plenty of experience with the former. If you're fiercely independent, people won't think to offer you help. You need to get comfortable with asking for help when you need it. It's a long, long process and something I'm still not 100% on myself; it's difficult.

- A case in point: At work, for the longest time if somebody wanted to show me code or talk me through code, I'd feel too self-conscious and awkward to say anything as we sat there and they started talking through their code. You get really good at memorizing stuff and going off what they say along with the broad 'shape' of the code. It would only be when I needed something specific, like they were pointing to a value or something, where I would lean in and say "what was that value again?". Nowadays I'm much more comfortable in my own skin and I simply ask them to either enable the magnifier on their machine, show me code through a remote desktop connection or I go to my machine and I have them talk through the code while I'm sitting as close to the screen as I need to.

- On a more philosophical note about other people; you're going to come across some strange, but well-intentioned behaviour. I've had new co-workers ask me why I sit so close to the screen; people assume if you're wearing glasses that your vision must be fine. You'll get really annoyed at the "sitting close to screens ruins your eyes" crowd; yes, I've been told (with good intentions) that sitting so close might damage my eyes.

- The way I think of this is that people are generally good and I'm happy to answer questions from anyone, as long as they're made in good faith. Often I think that people are just uncomfortable with talking about disability. Being a kind of a taboo, they think it's better to 'not say anything', or they're afraid of being rude. I'd rather people ask and I've also become a lot better at being forthcoming about what I need.

- I'm still learning not to shy away from being a 'vision impaired' person. There are some YouTubers that I recommend which I find really inspiring and helpful in this regard:

- The Blind Life is a YouTuber (who if I recall correctly has RP) who focuses on assistive technology and gadgets.

- Molly Burke does some great stuff. She is also blind, RP I think.

- For disability more generally, I cannot recommend 'Special Books By Special Kids' highly enough. It will literally change the way that you react to people. It is utterly incredible.

I know it's very different when you haven't grown up with a disability and suddenly you have to deal with it vs it being "the way it's always been", but I hope some of this might help and I wish you all the best.

That’s an awesome summary, thanks for writing it.

Second Life is funny - I commented to a friend the other day that the place seemed to get overrun by genitals (not my exact wording.... ROFL) and casinos. I actually worked for a company that got a bit into Second Life back in the day (we made an official port of Tringo to a TV set-top-box games service).

I got the sense that Second Life couldn’t outgrow prims. They were great when bandwidth was low, but game graphics just overtook Second Life and kept going. Content creation was really fun though, especially the collaborative aspect.

I haven’t checked it out in a few years actually. Impressive to hear it’s still going, though it’s a shame they couldn’t really jump into VR when the Oculus Rift came out. I vaguely remember something about a VR client, but can’t even recall if it was officially supported. I always remember wondering where they were and why they didn’t seem more prominent. It seemed like VR was what something like Second Life was waiting for, yet they never came to the party. I got Linden’s other experimental thing on Steam (Patterns) and then it disappeared before I got around to really trying it.

I’d add AltspaceVR, Bigscreen, VRChat and Rec Room to your list of what’s currently happening in ‘metaverse-like’ things. As a user I find AltspaceVR frustrating as I’m never quite sure when events are on in my local time-zone. Stuff ends up being on at odd hours and I never seem to catch it. Or something seems promising but then you realise most of the people there are kids and it’s off-putting. As for Bigscreen, it’s great for hanging out with friends occasionally. Never really got into VRChat much, but it seems very much ‘Second Life’ in a lot of ways. I haven’t tried ‘Rec Room’ myself but have heard complaints that it’s been overrun by kids.

The hardest thing though is finding friends that have VR headsets and that are willing to install any of these apps and go to the trouble of setting up accounts. In this sense I think Facebook Horizon will have an advantage over the others when it does finally become available (it’s not the only one that lets you use an existing account; I remember being able to use my Oculus account for one of the others but can’t remember which one off the top of my head).

I also still find that I feel an inertia to entering VR, despite owning an Oculus Quest and being really enthusiastic about it. It’s just easier to pick up my phone and play something on a whim. VR still requires more effort and I think it’s just the isolation from everything that makes it feel like that. Especially when you’re in a place with other people. It feels weird isolating yourself around everyone else, at least for me.

I remember what setting the time on a VCR was like and it's interesting to think of all the assumed knowledge you actually need in order to have it seem intuitive.

Two things off the top of my head that I can think of: 1) knowing that a blinking number is indicating some kind of selection and more generally 2) seeing the UI as a glimpse into a larger abstract space that can be navigated. Or in other words, having used computers for many years, what my parents sawzl as just a blinking word, I would see as a menu where up/down/left/right had meaning.

There's also some more abstract thinking involved there - for me it's very spatial so I think of it as being able to keep track of your place in this 'abstract map'. You had to learn some non-obvious things like "if the down button stops working, it probably means I'm at the 'bottom' of my available choices" or "if I start seeing the same choices again, it means I have 'wrapped around' and in a logical sense I'm back to where I've been before".

I actually remember thinking something like this as a child when we got a VCR. I think I remember that realization that "this is a menu I can explore". The exploratory skills you pick up when you have to figure out how to use something technical generalize really well to other technical things.

TL;DR: I think VCRs were hard to program because the limited UI of buttons and a tiny screen meant that you actually needed a fairly built-up mental model of the process to keep track of what you were doing.

I still remember the first time my young niece sat at my traditional desktop computer a few years ago. She must have been about five or six years old. She immediately started using her hands to try and interact with the screen and was utterly confused as to why nothing was happening.

For me, the use of the Snapdragon 835 in the Oculus Quest seems like a really good example of this philosophy as well. Definitely 'withered' by the time the Oculus Quest was released. Yet it's doing things to a quality that I've never seen it do in any Snapdragon 835-based phone.

Similar experience here. Two redundancies so far in my career and one job I voluntarily left to do more study. The first redundancy was really difficult but taught me similar lessons. The second one was nowhere near as traumatic as the first.

Similarly, in both cases it took me a few months to find a new job. Reading HN you can get the impression that there’s something wrong with you because it seems like a software engineer shouldn’t be able to even cross the street without being offered a job. I think that really depends on where you live and how much of a network you’ve built. That can be difficult if you’re the introverted type.

The orchestration overhead must be huge, but it sounds like they have focused on automating the pain of that away as much as possible.

To me it looks like an Alan Kay style of OOP design. From that standpoint, replace 'microservice' with 'class' (or 'actor') and 1600 of them isn't that ridiculous.

It'd be an interesting system to browse. I'm actually curious if they've built any tooling around making the codebase easier to navigate and edit. Smalltalk handles a huge amount of tiny classes by having good browsing tools. What would you use for a Go codebase of this size?

In a similar vein, a friend of mine released a really simple finger labyrinth app awhile back:

https://www.labyrinthjourney.app/

Sorry dang; my intent was to express how urgent it felt in my own internal dialogue, not to express aggravation to anyone else here. I'll edit.

I've been finding myself really aggravated at people who continue to downplay it, especially when they're engineers who should know what exponential growth means. There also seems to be this weird narrative going around (or at least it was, I'm not sure if it still is now) that this is all being overplayed by the media. My manager told me over the phone yesterday that it was 'just a bad flu' and that the reaction everyone was having was out of proportion. She's an engineering type that I'd have expected to know better. I'm currently working from home unless it's absolutely necessary to go into the office.

At the same time, I'm having to grapple with the honest truth (found after some introspection) that my extreme need to make people understand this is just as much about my own fear as some people's need to pretend everything is okay and downplay it is to them.

While reading yesterday's thread about "I'm not sure there's an acceptable solution to this", something in me started raising some alarm bells. Reading that thread, it was like the world had already ended. I can totally understand this, but I know there's only a certain amount you can be drawn into that before it goes from being responsibly aware to being uselessly hopeless.

So I'm trying to practice empathy and remind myself not to jump down my friend's throats in chat everytime something coronavirus comes up. At the end of the day, we're all in this together and nobody has definitive answers.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, remind yourself to be nice to people. Everyone needs this more than ever right now.

Edit: Not intended to be directed at anyone in particular here. Just a bit of my rambling thoughts. I'm also not saying we shouldn't spread good information. I've just been finding myself getting really angry at really close friends and trying to keep on top of why that is for me and how I can be a bit nicer to them.

That’s a good point I hadn’t considered. Only time will tell, I guess. These are now really scary times to be in.

Not really. The delivery riders, Uber drivers, couriers and postal workers that bring you all that stuff you can order online like food and goods. The people that work maintaining the cables for your ISP (and the technicians in their data centers) that let you work from home in the first place. The people that clean your streets. Ambulance drivers. Taxi drivers. Cooks. The people that collect your garbage. The people that maintain your cities. These are all just off the top of my head.

Really think hard about it; it's pretty easy to take a whole bunch of stuff for granted especially when you work in high-tech areas. I'm extremely fortunate that I can work from home, but what if my fridge breaks down or I just run out of milk and my Internet happens to be down?

That was an awesome article! The kind of rabbit hole I’d gladly go down :)

SD cards and USB sticks are just.... weird. I haven’t delved too deeply but maybe someone here knows.... why is this? At this point I almost think of them as ‘not disks’. The particular weirdness I’m thinking of is I’ve seen more than one drive just seem to die, just because you try and repartition them in Windows. Not even filling the drives up.

Is it the case that USB drive and SD card firmware is just crap? Like it makes assumptions about the device other than ‘this is just a set of blocks on flash memory’ and actually needs things on the disk at a file system level to be a certain way for it to work properly? I’m really curious.

Yeah, keep in mind that the output is a fully-fledged object, it is not the text you see. The text is generated by the PowerShell host if the returned object makes it back there and the host is set up to present that object to the user that way.

Take the following in PowerShell:

ls | sort DateTime -d

ls returns an array of objects, sort then sorts the array by each object’s DateTime field (and here I’m asking it to sort in descending order with -d). The point is that sort isn’t depending on any text output, so it works with any array of objects regardless of the command that returned them.

The other cool thing this enables is auto-complete awareness in the shell. If I typed:

ls | sort <Tab>

then the shell knows what makes sense in auto-completion here as ls has an actual return type and in this case it will give me a list of available fields that I can sort on.

For those unfamiliar: ls and sort here are shortened aliases to more wordy verb-noun commands. These (as well as a large bunch of others) are given to you by default.

I don't find it ugly, just strange. It's optimized for interactive usage though from what I understand. I think of it mostly as calling .NET methods that all have named parameters:

myfunc -param1 this -param2 that

instead of:

myfunc(param1: this, param2: that);

I get the impression it's designed with the intent that you're supposed to type the dash, then hit Tab to get tab-completion in most cases. Same with the verb/noun syntax (I know I want to 'Get' something, so typing Get-<Tab> for the list of things is usually the thing to do). I do find it a bit difficult sometimes to think of an approprioate verb right off the top of my head (is it Get- or New- that I need?).

I'd also love to see the concept of proper namespaces in PowerShell; it seems really inconsistent right now (unless I've missed something). For example, type Show-Command and hit ENTER, then look at the different modules that are available. Some will express a 'namespace' by having it prepended to the noun (see for example, commands from the BitLocker module, their nouns all start with BitLocker) while others express no namespace at all (see for example commands from the 'Dism' module). For everyday use I've gone with the 'add the name to the noun' approach in my own scripts. That does mean I tend to use short namespace names though.

I've mentioned this in an older PowerShell-related thread here - MenuComplete is absolutely awesome and improves the PowerShell experience in the console. I actually think it should be the default. If you havent already, try these commands:

Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -key Tab -Function MenuComplete

Set-PSReadLineOption -ShowToolTips

PowerShell is my full-time shell in Windows now (and it will be in Linux also when I get back into it); I rarely use CMD for anything and parsing text in bash just seems antiquated.

Didn't they release a headset using their proposed technology? Or were they using something else for that?

Thanks to everyone that responded. I hadn't seen the reasons for the added concern explained as clearly/directly.

It could also be because your immune system got used to the change in environment.

I honestly don’t understand the particular level of fear around COVID-19 when compared to other flu outbreaks. Can anyone point me to a concise explanation? I mean, I get that it’s a new virus we’ve never seen before, but what distinctly sets it apart? Everything I’ve read says that it affects older people and those with a compromised immune system the worst, which is just like any flu. Is it mostly that we’re worried about what we don’t know that we don’t know? Not trying to be dismissive, I just feel like I’m missing something. I don’t remember the panic around swine flu or bird flu being like this.

Also does anyone know why people are panic-buying toilet paper in my country?

Anyone know the rationale of people that make a room freezing with air-conditioning and then wear a jumper in that room to warm up? I know a few people like this and I’ve always been curious if it’s almost like some kind of glitch in their body temperature regulation, like it might be easier for them to regulate their body warmer or colder but not the other way around or something.

It's funny though, I remember the old days before Google and they built something that was demonstrably superior for their users than what was out there at the time. They did win with a superior product.

Stadia feels like something that got designed by asking "how can we make something that's worse for our users than the other alternatives that are out there now?" and then going and building that.

Now had they come out with virtual machines better than what anyone could get at home, maybe?

Don't get me wrong though; I'm sure a lot of this is death by a thousand compromises.

As a side note: I was watching the Product Keynote from Flutter Interact '19 and when the person from the Stadia team was speaking about their app, it reminded me that despite all the negativity Stadia is getting, we should remember that there are real people building it that are enthusiastic about what they're doing and trying to make something good.

This is the thing that baffles me the most. You pay the full price for games you don't even own? At least with Steam there's the possibility of downloading your library in case Steam ever goes away for whatever reason.

The other thing is - they must, must be playing the multi-year long game here. Infrastructure around the world just isn't ready for game streaming.

Having said that, from what I hear GeForce Now is giving people a FAR better experience than Stadia.

Now that I think about it, why did they even rush Stadia out? I never got the impression anyone was dying to get their hands on it. They could have given it another year of polish at least and nobody would have complained, surely?

I'd love to hear Google's internal rationale for why they thought this pricing model was a good idea.