dfyx @ dfyx @lemmy.helios42.de

Posts

6

Comments

433

Joined

2 yr. ago

May I ask what you do professionally?

Are you intentionally misreading my posts or is this just a superiority complex? It's not about how long something takes to learn or how often I have to look it up. It's about how long it takes to do on a daily basis.

And to clarify, I'm not talking about "Why is this function in a different menu than what I'm used to" but "Why does GPlates require me to export my continent coordinates into a text file, copy a line in that file by hand, give that copy a new ID, make sure I made no syntax errors, re-import the text file and then edit the shape of both copies just to split a continent in two halves?" I know how to do that, it's not too hard to learn. But if there was a knife tool or at least working copy and paste, I could reduce that task from minutes to seconds.

The best manual in the world doesn't help me if the things I need every two minutes in my workflow take three times as many steps as in the software that I'm used to. Sure I can learn how to do it but it's still annoying - knowing that there's a better way to do it - and over the course of a month of using the tool, my productivity loss is probably enough to just pay for a proprietary tool.

OpenSCAD has pretty nice UX (though massively outdated UI look & feel) but of course describing your part in code is a very different use case from most other CAD tools.

Software for a medical device. Everything needs to be done exactly right and documented in three different places or else the regulatory agencies from at least three countries get really angry at you and worst case pull your device from circulation. Less cowardice and more cover your ass. Still annoying though.

You would think so, right? But that doesn't have a requirement ID so apparently it can't be referenced in the incident report.

I mean, technically, there are pretty good frontends for gdb, for example in VS Code and CLion but I guess if you use them, you're a corporate shill or something because they are backed by companies and contain code that isn't licensed under (A)GPLv3.

On the other hand, we got an absolutely precious scene where the one party member who wasn’t magic-affine and didn’t want to be involved with any supernatural stuff had to ride an unnaturally fast six-legged half-demon horse in order to catch up with the bad guys.

Ardo still thinks that we should just leave this whole mess to the sun god's holy inquisition and get the fuck out of town, thank you very much.

Their argument was along the lines of "The requirements and design don't specify what should happen if you move and delete at the same time so it can't be a bug. Behavior that doesn't violate the design but also doesn't lead to the result the user wanted is a user error". My argument was that we can't always specify the interaction between arbitrary features other than "If the user does two things at once, at least one of them should be executed, ideally both" and "the program shouldn't crash just because the user did something unexpected". Otherwise our design document would be ten times as long.

Well, they could have the resources to do it if they didn't scare away every new user (and potential contributor) with "Trust me, it gets good once you dedicate your entire life to it".

The funeral industry would probably pivot to making fire-proof caskets and putting people in right before they expire.

Wind and solar energy is no longer used because it's cheaper to just work poor people to death and then use their burning corpses to run a generator.

The orphan crushing machine is now a power plant.

I recently had a case at work where you could move an object by holding the left mouse button and delete it with the right mouse button. If you deleted it while moving, you got an error message and the program would crash. It was an easy fix but afterwards I had a one hour discussion with our usability engineers if what I had fixed was a bug (my opinion) or a user error (theirs).

There were a few things that it eventually got but lacked for way too long like support for UNIX line endings.

Oh, TIL that the small part by the Caspian Sea is far enough west to be considered Europe. Thanks for the correction.

Not quite correct. Kazakhstan is in central Asia, not Europe, even by a loose definition. Instead, Belgium (Brussels vs. Antwerp) and - by some definitions of Europe - Turkey (Ankara vs. Istanbul) should be on your list.

Wikipedia has a complete list.

Edit: Germany used to be a case that did this intentionally until 1990. While it was split into West and East Germany, West Germany chose Bonn as its capital as Berlin was surrounded by East Germany. They could have chosen a large city like Hamburg, Munich, Cologne or Frankfurt but went with the much smaller Bonn to symbolize that it was only a temporary solution.

To add some more, here's a list of stuff that I would love to do at some point but haven't found the time yet:

• A tool that directly translates PCB designs into a format that my resin 3D printer can read so I can abuse its display as a UV etching machine
• An alternative to GPlates that's a bit easier to use for fantasy worldbuilding. GPlates is great but it's mostly meant for serious scientific work so its UI is a bit complicated.
• A minimalistic blogging platform that interfaces with ActivityPub
• Many, many games.

Instead of a long-winded post, here's a quick list of stuff that I've worked on in my free time over the last few months:

• Some scripts to automatically set some metadata on my photo library
• A tool that grabs a video stream from an HDMI input (from the OS's point of view that looks just like any webcam), finds text in it and overlays a translation. I use that to play Japanese visual novels on my Switch
• A simple Bubble Shooter game because my gf was frustrated with some bugs in the one she had found online
• A simple 2D game engine and editor inspired by RPG Maker XP
• Updates to the registration website for a community event that I host twice a year
• Updates to a discord bot that automates some dice rolls for my online TTRPG sessions
• A browser extension that helps me scrape some data from a specific website
• Helped a friend port an old website from PHP5 to PHP8

Overall, it's mostly stuff that is useful for my hobbies for which I can't find an existing solution that fits my use case.

All of the Discworld books of course. Or at least your favorites.