Good! I hope they do "kill it off" so that someone who isn't totally incompetent can fork it and take it over.
370 karma · joined January 17, 2013
I'm also a big fan. He's awesome in a bunch of things, but my favourite is Cain in Robocop 2. Such a great performance.
"Jesus had days like this. Hounded and attacked like a criminal. But like him, I don't blame you. They program you, and you do it"
"Frank. The Benzedrine's got my teeth wiggling. Cut it... Scopalomine, five mills per"
> and we're back to "Is your point that because you can name one person who was banned from using a computer before the invention of the smart phone, a receptionist working at a hospital would therefore consider that a reasonable and common reason for someone to not possess a smart phone?"
It's always good to ensure you read what you're replying to, just so everyone is on the same page.
In the future, you could have just replied "ok so my comment was hyperbolic" to my initial post and saved us all some time. Instead you derailed the discussion by trying to shift goalposts and change the subject to something you thought you could "win", for some reason.
There's other things in your long-winded posts which I could respond to, but given that you've repeatedly failed to respond at all to points I've made, for example where I asked why you seem to think there's no middle ground between "common" and "outlandish lie", but why would I bother? It's not like you'd respond to any points showing how your logic is flawed. So I guess we'll just leave this discussion at that because i don't believe there is much to add to that.
To summarise this for you in clear language, since I think you perhaps need to hear this:
* There are multiple already-cited precedents for exactly the type of thing you're calling an "outlandish and obvious lie". If you'd like more examples, I'd suggest a search engine, where you'll find lots of them.
* It's possible for things to be uncommon edge-cases without being "outlandish" or "obvious lies"
* Hospital receptionists deal with these uncommon edge cases all the time, and are trained to do so. They also regularly deal with crazy people too, and are vanishingly unlikely to even bat an eye at the claim you're calling out. It's unlikely to be the craziest thing they've heard today. And it might even be true.
* There's no compelling, widely-accepted evidence of extraterrestrial visitations to earth, or of their interest in smartphones. Which makes the claim "i don't have a phone because aliens took it" orders of magnitude less likely to be true than the claim that one doesn't have a phone because a court decided that they are a threat to national security - something that, while uncommon, has definitely happened.
* Simply assuming that something is a lie because you haven't personally heard of it before is an excellent way to be incorrect.
* It's actually not a personal attack when someone points out that your logic is flawed and that you're lacking relevant information. And so you probably shouldn't take such things personally and get all upset because your obvious, incorrect hyperbole was called out for what it was.
> I also said[1]: IIRC, agreeing to receive marketing emails was one of the terms of installing the app which was required to use the tickets.
Oh noes! They might cancel your subscription to their shitty app that you have explicitly stated you don't want! Maybe they'll call the police! I mean, you have your tickets and have been to the game already and have said that you don't plan on going to another one, and there's no way they could detect that you'd blocked their mail, so the net effect on you for violating their T&C is vanishingly unlikely to ever be anything other than zero, but sure, whatever, keep receiving that ridiculous volume of spam because you theoretically agreed to it, I guess?
Not sure why you made up a scenario involving a hospital receptionist, or why you chose to echo my point that they deal with all kinds of crazy shit.
I challenged your assertion that it was an 'outlandish and obvious lie' for one to state that they don't have a smartphone due to a court determining they're a threat to national security, and that 'He might as well say "i don't have a phone because aliens took it"'.
You chose to repeatedly fail, despite being prompted, to address even a single point I raised to counter your claims, instead shifting goalposts and making up invalid scenarios to try to prove some kind of point unrelated to your initial premise. It seems like you're the one taking things weirdly personally.
Regular aliases are fine, but they're more difficult to set up. And don't work everywhere.
I do host my own email. But not everybody has the knowledge/inclination to do so. Which is fine if that's their choice. Plus aliases work for those people too.
> are you bragging? trying to impress me?
I noticed that in your simulated internal monologue you didn't actually mention not believing that it was true at any point. It's certainly far more plausible than your "i don't have a phone because aliens took it".
I also noticed that you still haven't given any rationale as to why said receptionist would need to consider it common for it to be valid. Maybe you forgot.
I think that in reality, your internal monologue is incorrect. I think your average hospital receptionist would effectively stop listening/caring after "I don't have a smartphone", and just get on with her work without thinking about it much at all, because she's too busy to bother with it and doesn't actually care very much at all why you don't have a smartphone. Hospital receptionists are busy people and they deal with all kinds of crazy shit.
I happened to name Mitnick because of the "national security" example.
I noticed that you haven't given any reasoning as to why a receptionist working at a hospital would not consider "I'm banned from using smartphones by court order" reasonable, or why said receptionist would need to consider it common for it to be valid? Hospital receptionists deal with all kinds of edge cases all the time.
They can argue that all they like, but they'll stop pretty quickly when I ask why they can't just print out the same barcode as the smartphone user would use, and have the same person scan that using the same equipment so that they can enjoy the same anti-scalping protections (i.e if that barcode has already been scanned, you don't let them in).
The only downsides are that sometimes it doesn't work if their shitty form verification insists that the plus character isn't valid in an email address. In those cases I tend to set up an actual mail alias (yourcompany@mydomain.com), but that's an annoying extra step - pluis aliasing is simple, requires no configuration, and works everywhere. But this is pretty rare. And if you're using it to sign in to things, you'll want a password manager so that you can remember what plus alias you used for each site.
Don't misunderstand me - I'm not defending the behaviour you're posting about - it's reprehensible and I wouldn't have bought tickets at all under such a system. What I'm offering is a way to make it more manageable for people who don't want to go without things that you can only buy under these user-hostile models.
Kevin Mitnick was banned from using any computer for quite a while. This absolutely would have included smartphones if they'd been a thing at the time. People are banned from using computers and the Internet all the time.
If you're going to claim that the "national security risk" bit is outlandish, you might be interested to know that when Mitnick was in prison he was held in solitary because officials claimed he could dial NORAD, whistle modem noises into a phone, and start a nuclear war.
> are those *really* the rhetorical questions you'd fling at your Aunt Tillie panicking on the phone, because she can't email anybody or renew her important drug
But I'm not actually really talking about regular people losing their personal email where they happen to keep a few sort-of important things that are relatively-easily replaced/transferred into a safer system. Those people I can sort-of understand, and don't really need to ask my questions - the answer is simple: "I never thought about it until now".
But aunt Tillie doesn't call herself an "entrepreneur" and doesn't rely on the existence of her gmail account for the survival of a business, and she especially doesn't have a blog where she whinges about the fact she did that.
I'm talking about people who should know better, who should be smart and considering things like "what are the existential threats to this business I'm trying to run?", who use gmail for vital business functions like payroll, and who tie their auth for everything else to their google (or whatever other shitty cloud service) accounts.
> the deficiencies we're discussing don't really get publicized
And another thing: my questions are not rhetorical. I am genuinely curious about the thought process that leads to these decisions. See, I didn't actually have to see this article even once - what I did was I gave it about 10 seconds thought, and came to the conclusion that relying on unaccountable third parties for mission-critical business infrastructure is an existential risk. This all seems very obvious and straightforward to me. Perhaps I'm some kind of super genius? I'm doubtful about that.
> These service-outcomes are the outliers in need of repair, not the consumers.
But if you're not giving any thought to who controls your vital data and you lose it as a result of that, that's at least 50% your fault.
"I'm sure it's very sad that you've lost all your [email|calendar|photos|whatever]... but, were you, a person who has chosen to rely on a service provided by a cloud provider with a track record which goes back well over 15 years of locking people out of their accounts with no recourse for the user, not aware that said provider has a track record of doing so, in some cases without even giving an explanation why?
Were you not aware that the service you were relying on them for was critically important to you? Or were you unaware that the provider of this service has the capability to completely disable the service you're relying on with the simple flip of a switch?
I'm fascinated by this decision you've made - could you please explain the thought process by which you chose to use this service which you have no control over for critical things?"
Pity it's not playable in even mildly current versions of love because being backwards compatible takes some slight effort on behalf of framework maintainers.
(the term you were looking for is "oblique", btw)
Suggestion: I'd like to have an option to exclude fonts without ligatures from the game. And it seems there are others who don't like ligatures who would probably like to be able to exclude fonts with ligatures. You could also do this for other features like serifs.
This seems bizarre to me, I do not understand the rationale behind it. Can someone enlighten me?
> I wish music had not move to stream
> I don't see why
Regardless of which distro you use or how into free software you are, there's a very simple truth: the more Linux users there are, the more people will develop software for Linux. More software supporting Linux == better.
This applies both to proprietary software that people might want (e.g I'd kill for a Linux-native version of FL studio, the only thing I use wine for these days), and also for FLOSS software (more Linux users -> more exposure to FLOSS ideals -> more converts -> more FLOSS software).
Having the ecosystem grow is a good thing.
It would seem I didn't read your post properly, I think I must have just been tired or something. I took "who is forced to use it" as a statement (i.e "I'm a user who is forced to use it") rather than a question. Reading it again now when I'm awake it makes a lot more sense!
> 10 years ago, whenever I saw something like that I would've said that person has zero actual experience working as a programmer
It's also really easy to tell yourself "but this time I'll get it right!". I'm still guilty of believing it sometimes.
> But these people have experience. They're just optimistic and full of wishful thinking maybe?
I feel like it's probably easy in a project like this to lose sight of what regular users want, or to feel like you know better and so should be able to dictate to them what they should want. And because you've had your head buried in the project for a decade, dealing only with team members who share all the same opinions, you're shocked when people don't find "but if you ever get a HDR monitor it might be marginally better" to be a compelling reason to have to re-write all the scripts they've been building and relying on for 20 years.
> I disagree. I've talked with many of those people both online and in real life who don't understand that for most people time has value. They really just don't get it. They're not stupid; they just don't really think about it that way and don't have much to do in their lives aside from this one specific hobby.