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"I am not very observant where pictures are concerned"

Like... is that a satirical choice or what?

Can we stop dismissively projecting pet peeve interpretations onto posts that aren't worthy of them?

I didn't say "you are depressed". I said "have you considered that you might be...". When did that become diagnosis?

FWIW I said "clinically depressed" to draw the specific distinction between colloquial use of the word "depressed" meaning "down", and the medical notion of depression that covers this sort of stuff -- long term loss of direction, low self-esteem negativity etc.

It's just a suggestion to consider the whole picture and maybe seek advice.

This is partly a matter of confidence and psychology, I think.

Lots of us have ideas that we simply never entertain because we are too good at quickly shooting them down when we spot small difficulties, before we've even let the idea out of our heads.

People who are good at ideas are also good at getting them out there, in an imperfect state, and letting other people assess whether those difficulties are dealbreakers, or whether in fact they could help mitigate them.

For example a lot of startup ideas are discarded because of fear of process/legal/regulatory stuff, when actually what you need is to know someone who can help with that. Getting your ideas out there in an open, deliberately naïve way can help.

> Am I just hard-wired to be mediocre?

Have you considered the possibility that you're actually clinically depressed? Working on the assumption you are male, I think a lot of guys don't realise that low-grade depression looks like this for a lot of us. Especially getting towards mid-life.

One thing I would suggest is to embrace boredom. Cover up your television, delete your streaming video apps, cut back on social media as much as is possible, stop gaming if you game. Stop avoiding boredom with low-energy solutions.

Get really, really bored. Then see what your brain wants you to do. Boredom is a precursor to a creative state.

Another thought: consider if your "worthwhile" is actually helping other people do theirs? If you can learn new tools and languages easily, could you help others? Could you teach?

I need this change in my life too, and this is the direction I hope my life is heading in.

Right -- I would include that in "transform" in my example above.

I've seen too many forum developers spend far too much time after the fact dealing with their decision to "just use TinyMCE" ==> Oh hey, you're a server-side HTML parsing expert now anyway; wasn't that what you were trying to avoid?

Ehhh!? I don't get this at all. You obviously do both.

1) you get your input data into the form that is meaningful in the database by validating, sanitising and transforming it. Because you know what form that data should be in, and that's the only form that belongs in your database. Data isn't just output, sometimes it is processed, queried, joined upon.

2) you correctly format/transform it for output formats. Now you know what the normalised form is in the database, you likely have a simpler job to transform it for output.

It's not just lazy to suggest there's a choice here, it's wrong.

Yeah... I have a similar problem I want to work on in the coming months that I think people traditionally often used to solve with the help of Fischertechnik and the like, so this might be helpful there.

I miss really small phones.

My favourite two small iPhones were the small-by-contemporary-standards iPhone 5S and SE.

My favourite phone ever, small or large, was the Sony Xperia Mini Pro (the second of the Xperia Mini devices, with the slide out keyboard). An absolutely amazingly useful, chunky little device with a super keyboard, an unusually good camera for the time, and an actual shutter button for it.

I'd have used that phone for a couple of years longer had the ambient light sensor not failed. Hard to use a phone that doesn't turn off the touchscreen when it's pressed against your ear.

It's not myself I am defending.

That the developer has been paid low is a fact.

The accusation is that they were paid low because they were exploitable due to their low self-esteem.

This is projected onto this fact without evidence. Perhaps from bitter personal experience, but projected nevertheless.

I know what words mean, but you're imagining words that don't exist.

> This is very mean and unfair because you're taking advantage of your friend’s feelings and hard work without giving them what they really deserve.

The motivation for the friend's altruism is, in fact, not in evidence. Nor is there evidence that they didn't know they were being underpaid, or didn't know the situation was unclear.

There are many reasons why it might be rational for a developer with full knowledge of the situation to accept low pay to make sure something happens, when it otherwise might not happen for no pay.

And there are situations where something has a truly unexpected upside.

The nasty accusations are that:

1) this is, specifically, "preying on low self-esteem". Where is this in evidence?

2) the developer has "impostor syndrome". Again, where is that in evidence?

You can use your big words if you like. But you are making an accusation that is supported only by your projection (perhaps of your own bad experiences?) onto it.

(I've done this kind of work. Once or twice when younger I would suggest impostor syndrome may have played a part, for sure. But in recent years I have done great work for low pay simply because one specific outcome was a social good I wanted to see happen, and I couldn't have done the work without some compensation. Had that work produced an additional financial windfall or escaped the MVP stage, I would have been there to profit from it. It didn't, for reasons I have learned from. But the social good exists nonetheless.)

Sorry you don't have crayons; they are an underrated device for the development of your evidently-pre-adult brain, and they are just plain fun! Put them on your wish list for Father Christmas.

> The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO.

This is an underappreciated aspect of psychopathic corporate life and "Human resource" thinking, I think. It's hard to avoid the feeling that companies -- particularly big tech -- feel empowered to hire lots of people quickly precisely because firing people has become so easy.

Such that when one big company has a round of layoffs, competitors genuinely feel some pressure to follow suit almost arbitrarily, because it's an expected part of a cycle; a numbers game, a way to appear "lean", etc.

Actually it is me who should apologise; I'm in an awful mood today and on other days would not have been so pompous, I hope :-)

And yes -- I think to some extent my determination to push myself not to accept guilt for things that aren't my fault comes from realising that guilt for imagined misdeeds is the most potent fuel for OCD, which has wrecked the pattern of my life; it is a thief of joy.

When I explained one of my OCD obsessions/compulsions to a friend, they said "I can understand why that affected you but you understand it is literally absurd to have guilt from that?", and it was one of the most empowering things I've ever heard.

Guilt is a burden that good people willingly shoulder and bad people willingly shirk (if they are capable of it at all).

Internalising that there are more productive negative emotions to feel than unearned, secondhand guilt is a life's work for me.

Yes, that's the line you quoted earlier. It's still not evidence of your accusation and it won't become that through repetition.

This is a nasty accusation made without evidence.

Not sure I should answer a post with a "how exactly" in it, to be honest, because it's rude. But:

I don't, but that negative emotion shouldn't necessarily be guilt.

First off, we don't know the obligation can't be fulfilled in this case. No reason to feel guilty if it can be. Things change.

Second, if there is genuinely nothing you can do to fulfil a moral obligation because of systemic issues, there is no value in guilt; it's literally not your fault. There might be negative emotions but it's better to consider them sadness or helplessness, and push away guilt.

Negative emotions happen. But taking on guilt for things you did not do and cannot fix for reasons outside your control is significantly emotionally damaging.

My internal definition of guilt is screwed up because I have OCD. This is why I am so keen on defining guilt carefully.

What I am describing above is just discomfort. Unless the parent poster deliberately sought to underpay the person, they should have no guilt merely from that scenario. Discomfort is real enough.

Guilt might attach if they do not or choose not to act on that discomfort, or if the person is materially disadvantaged by not doing the ongoing work, or if a promise of better pay/longer employment was attached to asking for that work to be done at a low pay.

You can't change the reasons for which you need a new person, and you've materially benefited from the person working for low pay. But it's not guilt, it's your morality and ethics identifying a gain you made that you feel you shouldn't be comfortable with.

One suggestion, perhaps the most obvious: identify the likely pay/compensation of the person who will replace them, and then pay them the difference (or as much of it as you can) in severance over and above what you're required to offer.

Second suggestion: help find this person a new job at the kind of pay they should actually have been earning for the quality of work they were doing.

But don't feel guilt: it's more like a moral obligation. It's a good thing, not a negative emotion. It means you're thinking like a complete person in a world where it is common to pretend that isn't necessary.

Only after the fact though.

Affinity are saying they won't switch everyone to subscriptions, that perpetual licensing will always be an option, and they don't yet have a subscription model.

I would have thought that was obvious from my comment.

I'm with Jeff on this one.

LLMs are an obviously terrible solution for any problem that actually has a complex but invariant solution.

Personally I prefer rigid, automated questionnaire filtering that gets you to a real person as soon as possible.

I also thoroughly believe in a) human support chats and b) believing the people answering them to be decent human beings who deserve my clarity, preparedness, politeness and empathy, and I think more should be done on chat interfaces to make them slightly less amenable to stupid unstructured queries. You help people ask the question right.

Indeed -- though reducing seems to have other benefits.

Though as far as is practicable [0], one should not drink alcohol. No amount is safe or good enough for you to offset the other risks.

[0] life is short and not all social offers of a drink should necessarily be turned down, unless you're willing to figuratively or literally show the trappings of "one who must not" (pregnant, alcoholic, religion, training for sports, on medication, etc.)

> And it's not like customer service of the same service providers without this tech was appreciated by people before these chatbots.

This is just "but humans also".

I wish our industry's collective standards didn't allow for just replacing one subpar experience with a very similar one that has less empathy and is lots cheaper.

> My isp does not use "ai", but presents me with their decision tree

Which, paradoxically, is something that would look a lot like classic AI, from the before-times.

Now you just need a typeface with the distinctive alternate lower-case A :-)

> it doesn't optimize the hard part

This is universally true of Generative AI's impact on all art and craft.

It's a Dunning-Kruger thing. It makes the stuff that a novice thinks is hard apparently easier, but does not ever tackle the difficult stuff. So that novice is actively disadvantaged compared to how they would be if they worked with an actual artist to make what they wanted.

Precise and to the point.

> He was addressing an important point that you cannot treat everyone that opposes taking down confederate monuments as white supremacists.

But you could, correctly, characterise everyone taking part in that march as having white nationalist sympathies. Because it was a white nationalist march: that was the point.

There cannot be "good people" on the side shouting "jews! will not! replace us!", because if they were good people they wouldn't have been there at all.

Trump was trying to create a false equivalence because he knows those people are his people. And he did it again more than once. "Stand back and stand by".

Fuck him, fuck excusing this stuff and fuck bad-faith pretence that Trump was talking about some bigger picture: he was talking about the people at that rally.

I've built a fairly sophisticated web-based translation tool for an agency's client who demanded it.

I built it to their spec, for their CMS. They didn't use it, because the scheme they wanted turned out to be too much bother, and they couldn't find translation agencies who would bother with it.

The reality is that if you want to make it easy to keep translations up-to-date, you actually have to support all the (confusing, frustrating) translation infrastructure built around .PO files. Because then you have the support of translation agencies, tooling, even Crowdin etc.

Trying to short-circuit this with clever minimal bespoke JSON and ChatGPT is probably a mistake: this is a job where you will ultimately want actual people with actual multilingual ability working for you, and if you don't use the normal tooling you'll find it difficult to attract contributors even with open source.

Yes, mostly. That is, if a Photoshop plugin is well-behaved and doesn't make use of undocumented aspects, it's pretty much going to work.

https://peterthenaturephotographer.com/process/affinity-phot...

https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=page...

They have actually committed not to switch to a subscription model. Why do you think this is them doing that?

> Do we believe they'll build the infrastructure to support a SaaS, then turn it all off after this 6-month trial?

It's not a SaaS? It's a series of apps with trial keys that expire. Just like the normal 15 day trial or the pandemic-era three-month trial. Once the key expires, the trial expires.

Affinity has really sophisticated colour editing controls.

For example you can apply adjustment layers and then use a blend curve (not just blend ranges) to moderate it. So if you want warmer shadows, it's as easy as using a colour temperature adjustment to warm up your image and then adjusting the curve so that it doesn't apply where you don't want it.

And you have cross-model curves: you can apply Lab curves to RGB model images without converting.

It has a Capture-One-style HSL wheel. It supports LUTs (and LUT inference!)

I can think of some things Photoshop does that Affinity Photo does not, but I've been using it nine years now for my photography and web work (along with Designer). I think for almost every normal Photoshop user[0] there's no reason not to use Affinity Photo instead.

[0] Unless you're particularly wedded to Lightroom, for which there is no Affinity alternative.