FdbkHb's comments

> This is already included in the "almost anything" expression and you are the 4th person deliberately (or accidentally?) not noticing it.

I genuinely think that :

1/ this field is dominated by a disproportionate amount of people with autistic traits

2/ their ability to reason only functions in the narrowest sense and their grasp of language (takes everything in the most literal sense, thinks in extremes, prone to putting things in boxes, have a very, very strong attachment to their routine and are unable to ever leave the comfort zone they constructed) makes any attempt at communication beyond painful.

I have come to not even bother replying to people who are unable to understand human words such as when they interpret "most" as meaning "all" or "rarely" as "never" as it's one of the telltale signs that it is going to be extremely unproductive.

This phenomenon is the cause of most pains and drama. Once you start to see how this pattern develops you understand the true cause of the endless bikeshedding, of why even the idea of having a code of conduct can raise endless anger and storms and so on. You're touching a comfort zone so the temper tantrums are thrown. The routine has been built and it must continue until the end of times.

If there's any field in this world that is in need of more neurotypical, emotionally stable adults, this is it.

GIMP.

But it doesn't take many later versions of Photoshop to start becoming more productive than using GIMP because of functionality it has that GIMP does not:

Adjustment layers were introduced in 4.0 (1996, GIMP didn't even exist yet)

Layer styles were introduced in 6.0 (2000)

Smart Filters were introduced in CS3 (2007)

They're all invaluable tools that provide a non-destructive workflow where you can go and edit a change you made without having to undo everything you did after that change and redoing things again.

If I had to use an ancient version of a program and have nothing but that program until the end of times, I would pick Photoshop CS3.

This entire class of functionality still does not exist in GIMP.

A lot of modern tools can be added to GIMP through the G'MIC plugins (like the healing tool), but the core editing loop functionality, what is in my opinion the most important thing, is extremely primitive and outdated. All of the competition provides non destructive editing. Including other open source software like Krita (which focuses more on painting tools rather than photo editing, leaving a hole in the open source ecosystem).

Debian maintainers are experts at touching things they shouldn't and creating a mess in the process. The worst case, by far, was when they broke the RNG of SSH key generation:

https://jblevins.org/log/ssh-vulnkey#:~:text=In%20May%202008....

Those guys are out of control and constantly having conflicts with upstream, I'm astounded to see the amount of support I see for debian in this thread.

Or Topologilinux:

https://topologi-linux.sourceforge.net/

> * Seamless internationalization. If you're a native English speaker you probably never experienced the "fun" of dealing with French and Russian in the same text document. Pre-Unicode supported English + one other language, if that other language wasn't too weird.

For some programs, that hasn't changed. I use OneNote heavily to write some sort of personal info database I always look up when I forget something or need to reproduce a command verbatim quickly. The act of writing it and organizing the data also heavily reinforces my ability to memorize thing in my mind in and of itself too. So I'm quite fond of that little program.

When I tried to use it while learning Chinese I ended up having to turn off the spelling/grammar correction. It just can't function with two languages in the same notebook. All the Chinese text had the red squiggly lines warning you of a mistake and I found no way to enable the support for more than one language. You must select /one/ language for the spell checker in that program.

Or disable the spellchecker, which is what I did in the end.

>If your device is associated with the "Find my Mac" "Find my iPhone"

I said "if your device".

**IF**

Is it difficult to understand?

If it isn't associated (with "find my" turned on) there's no issue. If it is, and you lose your apple ID, you are SOL. Turning on "find my" with an associated apple ID is the same as making Apple the only entity that can truly control and own your computer. You can no longer reinstall macOS without your apple ID if there's an issue.

If your device is associated with the "Find my Mac" "Find my iPhone" stuff, losing your Apple ID is the same as possibly (only possibly because you can still have user accounts with separate passwords and use the OS, but there will be limitations) bricking your device.

You can't even wipe the hard drive and reinstall macOS without access to the associated Apple ID. This is a good measure to dissuade thieves from wanting to steal Apple devices, but it is a terrible measure from the point of view of a user who has lost their ID.

> With barely any setup, Google/Microsoft/Apple will keep a backup copy, in case you lose your phone.

Not Microsoft. Their implementation has no synchronisation feature and provides no way to back it up or transfer to another device either. You lose the computer you lose the passkey.

Their implementation is very daft and goes counter to the point of passkeys since you will need a less secure way of authentication to remain enabled on the accounts you use a Windows Hello passkey for, for the sake of being able to recover those accounts.

Remember, the best security schemes are only as secure as the least secure scheme that is available to access the account. If you're still on an account that can be recovered by sending a 2fa code to email or SMS/texting then you have achieved nothing.

You forgot people summoning demons through Dungeons&Dragons.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/Occult_dnd.pn...

> Google "expulsion of the Jews from"

Hatred of a people based solely on religion while despicable has a different nature from racial hatred.

If you had googled "expulsion of jews from" you would notice there were many times they were allowed to stay if they converted (at least, give the appearance of). The Marrano during the times of the Spanish Inquisition is a notable example.

But if you are a jew in the era of antisemitism, there is nothing you can adopt to not be a jew. In the eyes of racists, you will always be a jew and the object of their hatred.

So, yes, 19th century antisemitism has a markedly specific nature that doesn't compare to the past.

It's google, so probably not. Their claims should always be taken with a grain of salt. They went with their own stuff route for the SOC on their Google Pixel phone lines and those SOC are always much worse than the competition and are the main reason why those phones have such terrible battery life compared to Qualcomm powered phones.

Stackoverflow's architecture, while more than just one server, is very much in the spirit of this and I'd say they're a highly successful high traffic website.

https://stackexchange.com/performance

9 IIS web servers, 1 SQL server (plus one hot standby SQL) with 1.5 TB of ram and 2 redis serving 1.3 billion views a month. And if anything they've been scaling down their architeture over the years as hardware gets better and their software improves: in 2016 they ran 11 web servers for example. Notice how little CPU usage they've got, even in peak usage, it's really about I/O ie lots of RAM and fast storage.

So it depends on the use cases, but I do not think "I need the cloud" is the automatic answer to "I am making something for the web". In fact the vast majority of people will never even get close to the level of traffic SO has.

Of course, even with low traffic, some type of software would highly benefit from a distributed cloud architecture. Can't really make a search engine that indexes the whole internet on so little. But are you making the next google?

Their stack is certainly a lot, lot, lot cheaper to run in the long term than going with Amazon's blood sucking costs.

Brutalism is about the expression of form follows function. A brutalist building is grey not because people love grey but because that's the color of naked concrete and painting over would be considered adding needless form.

Now, a color must be picked when you make a website, and it doesn't have to look grey, as pixels do not have an inherent color, unlike real world materials, such as concrete, wood or metals. But if you add useless animations (that glitchy thing at the top is obnoxious) that exist solely for the purpose of looking cool and not aid with understanding the UI, you are doing the absolute opposite of brutalism: form over function. This HN 'app' is several times worse to actually use over plain HN. It's not more legible, it's distracting, it breaks the back button etc.

I wouldn't call this "appropriation of brutalism" but "misunderstanding of brutalism".

It is definitely not ""antiquated"" to care about usability and removing distractions.

>So what's the point?

The point is if it breaks after an update you have to get into windows safe mode to unbreak your system if ExplorerPatcher causes an explorer crash loop (which it did in the past after windows updates ran). Even not-too-average Joe might get stumped by this and not immediately know what to do. The process of getting into safe mode is very cumbersome in itself if you need to do it from a system that boots into the desktop without any issue (windows doesn't consider the explorer crashing infinitely to be an issue): you need to forcefully shut down your computer three times /during the boot process of windows/ so that windows thinks "there's an issue" and gets you into the Recovery mode.

It's not like during Windows 7 and older releases where you only needed to press the F8 key to get a menu for safe mode boot. Anything that forces you to attempt to get into safe mode to fix is thoroughly undesirable and unfun to experience.

The opus issue is truly unforgivable. The only way to reasonably browse folders that contain opus files for me has been to change the view to a list type, without any metadata detail, then go to the options in explorer to apply that view to all folders of the same type (explorer will automatically pick a set of configurations that changes depending on file type contained in a folder. In this case, it's the "music" type if it detects a majority of audio files).

The issue is caused by the metadata parser and since it doesn't get prompted if you don't use a detailed column view you don't hit the issue that way. Of course, this represents a loss in functionality since you won't be able to sort things by metadata columns like artists/composer/album title etc.

> Maybe I'm too old, but since when is simply using another software as opposed to built-ins considered modding? Most of these seem like replacements to me.

ExplorerPatcher /is/ modding. It's not killing explorer.exe and launching another UI that is independent from the os like, say, what blackbox for windows or litestep did. It's patching running executables in memory in a way that could break whenever any data structure gets changed in a Windows update, which is a big deal because Windows is a rolling release OS that constantly adds and remove features. Users of explorer patcher found themselves having to boot in windows safe mode to disable it in the past after windows update ran. It's literally breaking your machine in a way that computer users that aren't very savvy might not understand how to fix. It's very bad publicity for MS who might get blamed by some: "my computer isn't starting anymore after a windows update, I hate MS" so it makes perfect sense to prevent this program from launching in a new major update.

And it's relying on the assumption that the old code paths it depends on won't disappear in the future. EP doesn't have a replica of the old windows taskbar: it's merely disabling Windows 11's new one and forcing the old one to appear, and it can do that because the code for the Windows 10 task bar is still there. You surely don't expect this to survive all future refactorings and cleanups?

ExplorerPatcher is the kind of software that would have been neat in the old world of Windows where a release of Windows gets frozen and sees no major changes past security updates except for the release of a Service Pack which you have to manually install yourself. It is a terrible idea in the current world of a rolling release state OS.

> At the time Microsoft spent a ton of money in usability research, that no free environment could afford

It was a combined effort with IBM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Note that even the obsolete parts of the CUA is still supported on modern Windows! for example, CTRL+C and CTRL+V might have won as the favored keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste, but CTRL+INSERT and SHIFT+INSERT still works! The CUA design documents had a very large impact on the approach taken at Microsoft in designing GUI software and standardizing interactions.

Of course, standardizing keyboard shortcuts are but a tiny part of the ambitions behind the CUA. It's still a very good read to this day for anyone interested in the design of user interfaces. Here's an excerpt of one of my favorite points made in the documents :

>The user interface should be forgiving. User actions should be easily

>reversed. When users are in control, they should be able to explore

>without fear of causing an irreversible mistake. Because

>learn-by-exploring environments involve trial and error, users should be

>able to back up or undo their previous action. Actions that are

>destructive (that may cause the unexpected loss of the users' information)

>require a confirmation. Users should feel more comfortable with a

>computer when their mistakes do not cause serious or irreversible results.

>To users, the unexpected loss of their information is the most frustrating

>and destructive application occurrence. When you allow users the

>opportunity to change their minds about an action that would destroy

>significant data, you provide a forgiving interface, even if you are

>unable to allow them to undo the action after it is completed.

Oh, yes, gimp, the software that is still going "we'll have non-destructive editing.. maybe.. soon.. probably" when its first elements were introduced in Photoshop in the mid 90s. The. Mid. 90s.

It's such a productivity boost that it would be a lack of self respect to one's own time to use a tool that doesn't have it.

The other parts aren't much better either. Calc is unbearably slow on large spreadsheets.

It's always been a janky and stuttery experience and the massive improvements in computer performance (CPU, SSD etc) have never managed to bring it up to par, you can see how much faster Word loads even on a simple document compared to Writer. It's been that way since before it became open source: Star Office made you look at its splash screen for a decent while back in the day.

> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.

I see you have never opened a large spreadsheet in competing software or you wouldn't call MS Office bloated. Sheets and Calc are extremely slow, inefficient software. Excel alone, if you have a use for it, makes it well worth the price of admission. It simply has no competition and neither Google nor Libreoffice can serve as drop in replacements for that.

Most of the features in the Office suite get out of the way and are only there if you need it. It's no bloat to the people who need the features. Office is where Microsoft still shows love for desktop software and it shows, they open very quickly and feel responsive in a way most other software they produce don't (opening the widget board on Windows 11 is a more stuttery experience at times than opening something in Word or Excel)

> It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening

You can't save it in the cloud "by accident". When creating a new document and clicking to save you explicitly have to pick "onedrive" or "this computer" as locations.

> It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.

It took you 5 minutes because you had no idea what the user did. It's not the fault of the software if the user clicked to save to onedrive.

You can also still create new blank documents directly in the explorer.exe (right click -> new -> word document) as you always could since Windows 95 in which case you would have set a local location for the document you're working on before writing the first line of text.

I also find it interesting you're suggesting Docs, a piece of software that is cloud driven only, as a replacement for Word because a user mistakenly "saved to the cloud"

And if giving people the option to save to onedrive is a "dark pattern" then what is a piece of software that can /only/ save to google drive, exactly?

Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions is the whole desktop suite + the online apps (which are pretty competitive with Docs if you need to access something on another computer in a pinch) + 1 terabytes of storage + up to 6 users (each with their own 1tb of storage) on the same subscription for 99 bucks a year. Google can't even begin to compete on that level of offering. Some of the apps have no real google alternatives either, OneNote is an incredible tool for personal organization of ideas and clipping online content you want to keep. It's also very snappy and responsive, again, the Office division really cares about quality of desktop software in a way that has become all too rare. The people working on Windows's desktop/UI elements would do all too well to take inspiration from them because 11 is a damn sham.