wharvle

Oh, no, lots of them aren’t great. A few are (The Wire…) and some more are at least pretty good.

[edit] also I think there are a lot of different definitions of “good” in this thread. The average HBO show probably does have better writing than 99% of narrative-presenting video games.

Like an average HBO series, then. Open with a bunch of sex, maybe tell a good story after (with, occasionally, more sex, sometimes with plot mixed into it).

Piling on the H:ZD love. Sequel ain’t awful, either.

Kentucky Route Zero is maybe the most literary game I’ve played, if that makes sense. Damn good.

They don't need to ask at all for those.

I haven’t really had problems with it not working. Not more than other chat programs.

My main gripe is the “teams” chats having aggressively terrible UI in ways that make my work-life worse. Most of my complaints would go away if they let me make a teams chat that was a normal chat room.

Use a much-less-intrusive notification, and just use “necessary” cookies unless the user engages with the notification to say “yes, track me”.

Or drop the unnecessary ones.

The term was originally about stocks of similar profile, not which employers one should aspire to have. Jim Cramer coined it, and modified it a couple times (eventually adding Microsoft).

All the layers and interrelated systems means that any given change of note requires a lot more input and communication than at a small company. Some of this is necessary, but usually a lot of it’s because most organizations are terrible at communication and making relevant information accessible.

This means one of two things:

1) You will work with similar independence to a developer at a smaller company—but spent 10-20% as much time directly working on code and related things, with the rest going to tracking down people and systems to get what you need to start/proceed/complete a feature.

2) Or, someone else will do all that for you, you’ll have far less independence, and will basically just be killing detailed Jira ticket exactly as assigned. But you’ll write a lot more code and such.

Heh—that, for fuckin' sure. The fiction there runs the opposite direction, where China pretends (and encourages others to pretend) that Taiwan's less independent than it is, meanwhile just about everyone acts like Taiwan's in fact very much distinct and independent from China, even if they say otherwise.

> Styling is not handled by HTML. It's a separate concern assigned to CSS. For convenience HTML offered default styling.

It in-fact was, and to some degree still is. I assure you we achieved a hell of a lot of styling before css existed, and for some time after it did but before most of us were using it (much), using features of HTML, some of which were explicitly there to support styling.

The notion that Gaza's more than some variety of closely-held protectorate is either aspirational or a convenient fiction, depending on who's stating it. They aren't even close to having a level of control over their own territory and affairs to be considered a sovereign state. Hell, the West Bank also can't credibly be called a sovereign state, taking into account only facts on the ground and observed behavior, and not what officials say. In some respects US tribal nations have more actual sovereignty, in ways that matter, even though they definitely aren't sovereign states, from an international relations perspective, and functionally nobody treats their tribal territory as meaningfully distinct from that of the US as a whole, in these contexts.

However, situations like this, in which rhetoric and de jure policy conflict with de facto reality, open one up to others taking the fiction at face value. And what do you do then? Can't deny it without causing other problems. So now this may be regarded as an international matter because Gaza "isn't part of Israel".

Folks outside the company often join calls and video meetings. Some orgs may have their shit together-enough to exempt only those, perfectly, so they never violate recording laws, but I’d expect most would just notify on all calls/meetings if they started doing this.

Recording laws get in the way of this. You’ll start seeing/hearing a warning every time you start a call if they begin doing this.

The live-captions tool in Teams is already better at understanding some of my colleagues than I am. The tech’s there, and probably already was good-enough before LLMs.

True in theory.

In practice, I’ve never seen a “more-correct” system actually replace the value of long-lived chat channels and a culture of discussing things out in the open on those channels.

Long-lived chats don’t replace documentation and project management, but I’ve yet to see those replace the value of long-lived chats.

Now, it probably could be replaced by companies putting project management in a non-hellish tool that’s close to the code and has a pleasant chatting-about-issues experience and low structure so you don’t feel like you’re knocking over some PM’s sand castle if you mess with it (so NOT jira, asana, et c) but I’ve never experienced a company that does that. Communicating in the PM tools is always terrible.

> - Drag & drop works in a very weird fashion. When I drop something, a popup menu appears asking me if I want to copy, move or link the dragged item. There's no way to configure KDE to just move. I need to press shift before I start dragging and that conflicts with multiple selection... no way to move multiple files without the shitty menu.

Years and years of Windows and Linux taught me to avoid drag & drop, mostly, except for dragging files around in file managers (and even then, some of the Linux ones…). I learned that it would, too often to be relied upon, do something I didn’t want, cause a program crash (Linux is especially bad about this), put the program in some weird broken state that falls short of crashing, or simply not work.

It took years to un-learn this avoidance of that interaction, after switching to Mac.

Now when I occasionally poke my head into Linux-land again, I don’t have that instinctive avoidance of d&d, and so I try it a lot more. Bugs and bad behavior abound. Anyone wants to see Linux desktop be bad at some things, go hard on drag & drop for a couple days, you’ll see it.

I never understood why those use front-brakes instead of rear-brakes like the roller blades I had as a kid. The latter I could comfortably use almost instantly, the former, I never got comfortable with.

Mars' famous dust storms aren't so good at causing damage, because the air's really, really thin, so they can't pick up heavy particles even with high wind speeds. A serious problem if you need to keep grit out of fine machinery or electronics, not so much if you're worried about erosion (I mean, yeah, eventually it'd be a problem, but it's slow-motion compared to the erosion of something exposed to sand storms on Earth)

I guess it could eventually get buried, but I'd expect that to also be a slow process on most parts of the planet, for similar reasons. The only forces seriously driving weathering on the planet are radiation and wind—the radiation's pretty bad but not a problem for metal + some rocks that were already on the surface, at least over a span of a couple decades, and the wind just can't deliver much force because the atmosphere's so very thin (that's also why it's fairly difficult to fly on Mars).

Groovy is god-awful though.

Jenkins is... fine, basically, if you can get away with almost never having to touch Groovy.

1) As a "technical" user who started using Firefox when it was called Phoenix (then Firebird, then Firefox)—this is of zero value to me. Might be to (frankly, a very few) others, but I will see no personal benefit from this. I have zero need for more browser engines on my phone & tablet.

2) The main market effect is probably gonna be that Google is able to cross-promote and "whoopsie" bugs its way into having even more market share for its engine. Don't love that, but it won't personally harm me unless Safari market share gets low enough that dev shops drop from "test on Chrome and Safari" to "test on Chrome... and that's it".

3) Where this might really, really suck is if they have to permit non-browsers to bundle Web and/or JS engines. I very much do not want that and it's likely to make my experience noticeably worse, if that happens. Dunno if that's required by the changes, though.

A comically large proportion of “AJAX”-type use of JavaScript could just be frames and probably perform better, if frames had evolved a bit rather than remaining stagnant.

Fix that and give us HTML tables with basic features built-in and datasource-backed tables + list views back in the mid ‘00s and mind-boggling amounts of time and money could have been saved.

Instead, none of that happened, and it still hasn’t.

Don’t even get me started on how much money could have been saved if the Web had adopted payment standards so that the browser itself could handle payment input.

It might be the very-long takes without cuts (it’s nuts, he does the jacket-to-cardigan and oxfords-to-loafers getting-home routine and launches straight into his first segment all as one shot in at least most episodes, the craft and skill on display is really impressive) plus lots of looking straight at the camera, which are intended to avoid confusion (people aren’t born understanding the “language” of film editing) and make kids feel like he’s addressing them personally. Some folks find that kind of direct attention uncomfortable, and the avoidance of film/tv editing artifice might make it feel even more so.

Anyone start singing/reciting the song “Daisy Bell” at you?

> Another piece of reality is that sometimes people don't know how/what to look for in search engines, or they're so overwhelmed with work they don't have the time/patience to look for it, and they need the solution to be placed in front of them.

A lot of these are failures of workplaces/managers/whatever, in my opinion. Hell, a bunch of them are specifically that we've decided everybody has to be their own secretary, because computers, but nobody gives much thought to empowering workers with better tools and training that really focus on their needs for that specific role we've decided they must fulfill in addition to their actual job.

A whole lot of the ones I've heard could be rephrased as "I wish my company had a secretary for every five or ten of us, to do these couple of tasks that we all hate, find distracting, and are kinda bad at since it's only a small part of our jobs, all of which leads to actual problems X, Y and Z, wasting time & materials and pissing me off besides, all of which would go away if we had a secretary who could focus on this stuff".

> Those scenarios you mention could be venting off in their free time when they have the time to ruminate and think about their pains.

Oh, I hope I didn't give the impression I get, like, mad when this happens. I mostly just think it's funny, and illustrative of how very much one must take that kind of input with a large grain of salt. It is sometimes kinda sad, mostly for the reasons above.

They usually seem really serious about it. I dunno. I definitely don't go out of my way to bring what I do into a conversation or to focus on it if it comes up, because most folks find computers incredibly boring, and nothing I do with them is particularly interesting. I do tend to encourage people to talk about what they do, mostly out of habit from product "discovery" work. It's often, like, plumbers or whoever, not other software-adjacent folks, who light up and tell me about this great idea that'd love to have available, if they find out what I do... and it's almost always something that already exists, and not even in a "you could just do that with Excel and email" sort of way, but purpose-built apps for what they want.

Not that you shouldn't ever enter an existing market, it's just that I always get a little kick out of how they claim this app would be super-useful and I should build it, but they've been a couple taps away from having what they want for, potentially, years. It demonstrates the gap between "you should build this, I would use it, it would be very helpful!" and how potential customers actually behave.

OK, the glass may or may not be smaller on the windshield and rear (I haven't measured, and yeah, a greater slant could be the mechanism, not less glass) but the viewable area is smaller.

Side windows are 100% for-sure smaller, because all the structures around them have gotten much thicker.

They're separate, but one owns and controls the other. I'm not seeing how pointing out that they're separate (a point on which I don't believe anyone here was confused in the first place) adds anything material to this exchange. "Boeing decided something", in a business strategy context, is just shorthand for "the people who control Boeing decided something", because Boeing doesn't ever decide anything. It can't.

Windows and front/back windshields are way smaller now, too. It's like we're all driving around looking out of tank-viewport-slits. (I'm sure there are exceptions in some models—I drove a buddy's Jeep-truck the other day and the unusually-good-by-modern-standards visibility nearly turned me into a Jeep guy on the spot—but that's the trend)

> “When was the last time you googled for a way to roll back your iOS app?”

> “Did you try the answers online?”

A very high percentage of the time when people give me "great app ideas" when they find out I'm in software, always assuring me everyone in their field/interest-area would use this novel app they say I should make, it turns out that 1) it already exists. From several vendors. Literally the exact thing they want, on the platform they use, and 2) they've evidently never even bothered to check, because this information surprises them.

Paris seems to do pretty OK on all of density, vibrancy, and aesthetics, while segregating all their somewhat-tall buildings to La Defense. I'm skeptical that moving all those into the city proper, let alone aiming for top-X-buildings slots, would improve the city in any way.

Planned cities always seem to get obsessed with far more "green space" than is needed, huge, useless plazas, and very-wide streets, which create miserable, too-spread-out spaces that never stop feeling sterile and wrong. There may be some exceptions, but that's the usual outcome.