I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it's amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.
Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.
This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.
We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively "dual running" that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!
They are pursuing "realism" but the pursuit of realism also means that you must sacrifice strong artistic style, because style is - by very definition - deviation from realism.
Personally I'm not vegan and I do drink dairy milk, but I also love oat milk and often order my coffee that way. It adds a kind of nutty taste which I really like. Would recommend trying it sometime.
My system is that after I unpack the shopping at home, I leave the bag beside the front door. Then next time I go outside I see it like "Oh yeah, the bag!" and put it in the car.
When I am interviewing people, I always appreciate when the candidate is honest about their experience - or lack of experience.
If I ask about something and they openly say they never did that, that's a green flag. I want to see people are honest about where they don't have experience, because being honest about gaps is an important trait for when they are actually on the job.
On the other hand, if the candidate has something literally written on their CV/resume as a "strong skill" but then when I ask about it they struggle and try to bullshit their way through it, that's the opposite. If someone is happy to lie to get the job, they'll probably lie when they're on the job too.
I can write a basic regex independently, but as soon as capture groups or positive/negative lookahead or lookbehind start popping up I'm back to the docs every time.
I guess Patreon figure it will make them as a platform more money, because people tend to forget about subscriptions and just let them keep going.
But it's awful for creators who release less frequently, because people will start to feel cheated when months go by and they don't get anything. And I'm sure the creators won't enjoy that pressure either.
It's like Patreon are cracking the whip, telling creators "Work faster, you have to justify your monthly subscription now!"
This is happening because all platforms are optimising for the one single metric that matters most to them - engagement.
When you consider all users as a whole, the way to get engagement is not to have a good UX that lets you tailor what you see, and search for the specific things you are interested in. The way to get it is to shove a constantly changing and brightly coloured stream of "content" right in people's faces where they don't have to do any thinking or make any decisions, they just mindlessly click what is offered and consume.
From Netflix's perspective, they want someone to go from opening the app to watching a video in 10 seconds, and if they don't achieve that, it's a failure which they will optimise away.
The platforms have over the years systematically stripped back every control lever you have over what you see, because control means time spent thinking, and time thinking is not time engaging.
I remember reading a story a while back about someone who owned a legit CS version with a proper serial and activation.
They had to change computer, and in doing so had to reactivate Photoshop, but it wasn't working. They contacted Adobe support and explained the situation but support basically told him nope, not a chance, we aren't helping you. You need to subscribe to new Photoshop.
So Adobe accepted that yes, he bought a perpetual licence for Photoshop and that yes, the reason it isn't working is the online activation, but they still refused to help.
It's currently running macos, but I very much hope Asahi development continues, because that's very much my desire for the final destination of the machine.
For a long time I was happy with Apple's commitment to being a mainstream OS that was privacy-centric but recent shenanigans have me starting to doubt.
It's both. Linux mostly just works, but when it breaks, it breaks in a way which is sometimes difficult for the average person to recover from.
I've had a couple of times in the past where something has gone horribly, outrageously wrong, and I decided to just reinstall and start again from fresh, because that was way less time investment than fixing what broke.
Nowadays I'm using Timeshift backups, and I think that's a positive move.
I'm a software dev and also a Linux user, but that doesn't mean I want to spend my precious time messing around with the OS trying to solve problems.
I see the operating system as a tool I use to accomplish the things I actually want to do, which is writing my code for my projects, just the same as I see a car as a tool to get me from point A to point B.
If Linux was complicated to set up, or always broken, or requiring constant work then I wouldn't use it, no more than I'd tolerate a car which is broken down and in the shop every other week. But fortunately, Linux is none of those things.
Modern Linux mostly "just works", and it's really counterproductive to talk about Linux like it's hard or you need to be a deeply invested techie to use it.
I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it's amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.
Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.
This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.
We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively "dual running" that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!
It's a mess.