Been pretty happy with Linux for the past year or two.

A few minor problems here and there. I was struggling to figure out how to adjust the screen brightness (pop!_os defaults). Found a command line tool to adjust gamma - my girlfriend was a little baffled. Then I realized I should just adjust the brightness on the display itself, on the hardware.

I’d rather have health than maybe marginally better cooking experiences

the truth is that what we did didn’t affect them as much as we expected, and most people don’t care as well :(

Most people don’t really care about anything. They won’t put up with a little inconvenience. Worse than toddlers.

I fundamentally disagree that users should not be allowed to install whatever they want from wherever they want.

You can install whatever dodgy file from wherever you want. I (and many others) don’t think that should be the default

There’s definitely a lot of cargo cult* thinking in software. People don’t understand the why of things but they want the results. That’s why most “agile” I’ve seen is a waste of time.

*Is there a less problematic phrase for this?

I’ve wasted entire days with people like that because they couldn’t be fucking arsed reading error messages and figuring things out by themselves.

I’ve had a couple interview tasks that are like “clone this repo and run it. Try to do [action]. Tell us any errors you find and how to fix them”

One of them was some sort of redux app, and the problem was a state mutation. Another one, the CSS had some weird so stuff rendered crazy. Both were pretty easy to track down and fix. You could probably also do something that’s like an error thrown, but people would probably just feed that into an AI now.

I just recommend checking things from the live boot environment. I found out once that some things didn’t work (HDMI , Ethernet, Wi-Fi) only after installing, and it was a hassle. Ended up switching to a different distro that did work out of the box.

The worst is when people don’t know how the system works, and then won’t listen to answers

Like I was at a job and product was going on about “our system has no concept of project owner. We have all these projects but there’s nothing unifying them under a single owner. We need to build this!”

I was like “… what? That’s just not true. There’s a “company” object that does that. It’s got a foreign key with project in the database. I guess it’s a weird name but it’s there”

It took several back and forths over multiple meetings. They eventually got on the same page and I saved us doing a whole useless project, but they did insist I rename it to “account” in the database and code. I would’ve rather left it because that could’ve been dicey, but alas. (The rename did go out fine, but I had to go looking for every reference.)

I know it may be hard to believe if you only browse Lemmy (like myself), but the average person actually likes these so-called “AI” tools or at least a significant amount of them do.

This is probably true but makes me sad. I tell all my friends not to use the lie machines but a bunch of people at work use them all the time.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that AI needs to be baked into the browser. They have a robust extension ecosystem for this sort of thing.

For the code, open source is probably the way to go. People should be able to build from source. Otherwise, how do they know you’re not doing something shady. Open source is generally a net improvement on security, assuming people actually look at it.

For screenshots, first fix it so the screenshots render nicely on narrow displays.

Would probably need to be open source to be trustworthy. Running a random executable from the Internet seems dicey.

Needs more screenshots. The two that are on the site don’t render great on mobile. Can only see a small portion.

I’m unclear how you find another user and verify who they are.

Website should have a clearer feature list. The user manual wants to download a text file instead of showing it in the browser.

Microsoft doesn’t have to compete very much. They’re not a monopoly, probably, but a strict definition. Apple exists. Linux exists and is better than the terminal hell the average person thinks about. But that’s not enough pressure to make microsoft actually try to appeal to customers. Most people are basically stuck.

We should break up all of these companies that are so big they can coast with shitty products for years.

• it’s free
• runs on a wider range of hardware
• is more customizable
• can run much windows software with wine or proton
• has a large ecosystem of native software
  • much of it free and open source

The advantage of Mac is it’s more widely used and thus more widely supported (for things that are supported at all). You can just buy an apple computer from a trusted source and it’ll work. Linux doesn’t quite have that yet. If more people move to Linux , you’ll find better drivers and stuff.

Fixed Agatha Christie: Evil Under the Sun not being playable in French.

What an oddly specific fix

How will it reduce demand for parking? Do you envision the car will drop someone off and then drive away until it finds a parking spot that’s farther than the person would want to walk?

That sounds like a very hard problem , and people wouldn’t be happy waiting 5-10 minutes for their car to navigate back to them. Or it would just cruise around looking for parking, causing more traffic.

Cars could tailgate like virtual train cars following each other at highway speeds with very little separation, lanes could be narrowed to fit more cars side by side in traffic, etc.

Once again reinventing buses and trains

It took like 100 years to build the car-hell we have now. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to fix it.

And people are, famously, stupid. They’ll fight like hell to avoid change, but once it’s in they’ll fight like hell to keep that change.

Plus there’s a lot of selfish idiots that need to be overridden.

So leave that problem for later. Let them keep driving themselves, and focus on improvements where people actually live.

Most people live in or close to cities.

You have to be careful at low skill/knowledge levels, because it’ll happily send you down a crazy path that looks legitimate.

I asked it how to do something in oracle SQL, because I don’t know oracle specifically, and it gave me a terrible answer. I suspected it wasn’t right so I asked a coworker who’s an old hand at Oracle, and he was like “no that’s terrible. Here’s a much simpler way”

I found it’s useful for code where I know like 70% of what I’m doing. More than that and I can just do it myself. Less than that and I can’t trust and diagnose the output.

I’d rather have old fashioned stack overflow and tutorials, honestly. It’s hard to actually learn when it just gives answers.