experbia

been a programmer for nearly 25 years now… i understand what you mean. i find a lot of joy in not just making a program “go”, but building it elegantly and efficiently. there are a lot of design guidelines and patterns that make that easier and more predictable, but i always feel there is a lot of value in trusting your sense of aesthetic and building stuff by way of discovery and refinement, sculpting.

yes! I used to live there. it’s bonkers.

Basically all the lakefront property is not owned by people directly, but leased under highly permissive terms from a single entity (ominously named “The Lake Corporation”) so they can apply restrictions about land use to owners to prohibit public access, and act collectively to try and prevent public access attempts. It’s basically a Union for rich people to use to collectively bargain to keep poors away from them. totally wild.

They exert undue influence over the city’s politics which is usually evident by their inherent inequity and hostility to non-members in the city… but the county they’re in (Clackamas) tends to fight them a lot. The city’s officials are usually in tight with the Lake Corp (or ARE Lake Corp) so it’s basically a corporation vs the county/state trying to keep poor people away.

The city’s dedicated police force, unsurprisingly, are very keen on the Lake Corp… so even if you (legally) access the lake, they will send a boat out to hassle you until they find a reason to move you along - usually with the lie “you had to trespass to get here. you can leave and we’ll drop it, or you can make this hard”

These products are not built for consumers.

they’re often built for investors. they are feasible enough products that some people will even buy them, so you get investors. then, the thing is always just “one more issue we need to fix” away from “mass adoption”, “for real this time”… to keep milking the investors as long as possible.

When was it ever about improving it for the end user?

back in the day when it was about building the best interface you could to last the product lifespan, maybe.

that’s not profitable for the designers tho - chasing the current design meta is their version of planned obsolescence for interfaces. “oh that interface looks old so it doesn’t work anymore” - statements dreamed up by the deranged and greedy.

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bunch of fucking interface designers so deep into their shit that they’re forcing everyone to chase the UX meta and play ranked competitive UI when 90% of everyone is just trying to be casuals and play what they’re accustomed to so they can unwind at the end of the day

“yes well you see moving every interface element on your computer to a totally new location results in a 0.0001% improvement in the average user’s workflow, therefore: bite the pillow, changes are coming, we’re the experts you dumb schlubs!”

I agree folks are overestimating how many will switch. but also maybe you’re underestimating too - a lot of browser installations are managed by the “family tech guy”. the father, mother, brother, sister, aunt or uncle who sets up everyone’s new laptops on Christmas and has the suggestions when you look for a new phone. we all know the type. a lot of us are the type.

setting up granny’s laptop? I’ll install whatever browser lets me automatically block the most “1000th visitor!” banner ads and change the desktop icon to the old AOL icon because that’s all she knows the internet as. she doesn’t know of care about the browser options so it’s up to me. Chrome used to be fast and simple so it was the right choice. Firefox has caught up a fair bit on UX simplicity and speed and now offers better blocking and general security, so it just stole the crown for these installations imo. I trust it more to not let her mess the computer up, so even if I’m not using it as my main personal browser, it gets use here.

yes, they believe it’s one of the “in plain sight” pieces of evidence - that when you’re born, you have to have a berth (maritime) certificate that makes you like, property of the state or something because you’re recorded as “docking” with the country (which is actually a corporation that wants to own you and use your cache of money they hide from you that you receive at birth), and “they” get away with the ruse because us normal rubes just never think to ask if they said “berth” (maritime) or “birth” (reproduction). not even joking lmao

it is a funny pun, too, but they really think birth certificates are, in fact, secretly “berth” certificates for them in maritime trade law, which they believe is the only real law, in which we are all like… sovereign vessels that have been duped into signing away our independence.

same. I see outrage-obsessed people constantly talk about how using a custom domain or (gasp) running your own mail server is internet suicide and literally impossible because your addresses won’t be seen as real or your mail will never get delivered by anyone. I’ve been doing both for over a decade with no trouble whatsoever, so I wonder how badly these folks are botching their mail setup to be getting that treatment.

I agree with your general sentiment here (that such an arrangement is not trustworthy enough for me to feel completely private) but your delivery of said sentiment is really fucking rude, dude.

Even if it’s not secure enough for you or I to feel private, it likely exceeds the security necessary to satisfy most people’s threat models so they can not only feel private but objectively be more private than if they just used Google docs.

incremental or opportunistic privacy improvements are better than none, a fact that has seemed to be lost in elitist privacy circles these days.

bunch of fuckin art pirates. crying about software piracy while they have their own bots pirating everyone’s art.

wow. does the factory that made it have absolutely no quality control processes in place? I would be embarrassed to own a vehicle that did that, and more than a little worried about its safety.

same. an ad for a thing means the thing is shit. they have to try and trick you to get it instead of letting its quality organically speak for itself.

when things are actually good, you don’t need an ad agency to tell you.

I don’t believe I’m immune to advertising but I don’t think advertisers are willing to admit that it’s just as easy to create negative brand associations as positive brand associations. when the only exposure you have to a product is frustrating and irritating and offensive, these feelings can bleed over when you see them on a shelf later.

after many years of trying to ignore advertising and pretending I’m not influenced by it, I’ve admitted I am, just like everyone else. so instead of resisting the effects, I try to turn the feeling of brand familiarity into a warning sign: if I’m drawn by familiarity to a particular product, I question why before I buy. if the answer isn’t “a friend or i have used it and found it valuable/good”, then i remind myself that it’s not good enough on its own. they have to try and trick me into liking it, so it can’t be that good. if it were good, they wouldn’t have to drop dump trucks of cash into an ad agency to try and trick people into buying it. an ad for a thing means the thing is shit.

People who are modifying Windows this deeply are not going to switch to Linux

I did. I was a heavy Windows customizer and deeply understand it as an operating system and target for application development. I left because, at some point, I realized the OS I (one way or another) paid for was treating me like a product instead of a user, and I resent that. I don’t like the feeling of slowly losing grip on the OS as it slides into becoming adtech tooling for marketing interests instead of the thing that runs programs for me. Despite my entrenched Windows knowledge, none of my primary personal computers run it anymore, including my gaming PC. Adaptation is a lot easier than most people expect, in my opinion.

ding ding ding

this is your reminder. 5 hours overdue, but here nonetheless.

but for real, your phone can do these things.

School recruiters are basically practicing pedophiles. They disgust me. They:

• hunt for vulnerable children, who might be more prone to complying due to trauma or disability or even just recent social happenings or baseline teenage angst
• try to talk to them one on one so adults won’t interfere
• entice them with treats or games or other such things
• try to convince the kids to agree to do something they don’t yet understand

The SOP of a school recruiter and that of a practicing pedophile are so similar that I wonder how many of the latter are created after someone has been the prior simply due to how the job demands you to operate and consider the kids as just resources… or how often the prior becomes a career path for the latter simply to justifiably increase their access to children.

Back in the late 2000s, I got pulled in to the office in high school because I told the recruiter visiting the school that he was a massive piece of shit and needed to stay away from me and my friends if he knew what was good for him. I said this after he sat down near me and, idk, tried to bond? By calling my female friend that left “a real hottie” and tried poorly to insinuate I could probably seal the deal if I was a hot army boy. Baseline revolting statement from an adult to a child for one, I’m gay for two, she was lesbian for three… so I said what I said and apparently my words were sufficiently hurtful that he ran to the admin to cry about it and I got told off because that kind of language and sentiment is unacceptable towards someone “just doing their job” at the school. They found no issue at the time with his ingratiation technique, though I never saw him again.

Retirement funds have millions of people’s retirement

and they exist within a continuum of risk profiles. there are safer (and less potentially profitable) options, and there are riskier (and more potentially profitable) options. they have made this decision.

you cannot pick the riskiest options for your retirement fund and then get mad there was more risk than the safest options and that you lost some of it. you cannot pick the safest options and then get mad it’s not performing as well as the riskiest. if you cannot afford to lose your retirement money, do not put it into any fund or mechanism that will gamble with it beyond what you are comfortable with. it is YOUR responsibility. alone.

as a result of your mentality, we will see less and less innovation. people who can improve the world see you and your opinions and decide, well, it’s not worth it. what intelligent person would ever work with organizations that you claim are justifiably ethically bound to stab them in the back and reward them the bare minimum possible?

and why, because grandpa ticked the “minimum risk” button in his sofi 401k and is mad he’s not getting explosive vc-tech-company-tier returns? or because your uncle ticked the “maximum risk” button and is mad he lost some money? you’re catering to the lowest common denominator of uninformed, entitled gamblers and are poisoning the well and breaking the whole system down as a result.

let me guess, you have an MBA?

that spent their retirement money to purchase shares

don’t invest (or gamble) what you can’t afford to lose.

using some people’s poor money management skills as an excuse to justify exploitation of the source of your windfall is exceptionally stupid.

a receding tide beaches all boats. every time something like this happens, another genius with another big idea sees it and decides it’s not worth it if they’re just going to get the result stripped away from them by parasitic suits.

came to say this. food is fuel, we are merely labyrinthine biological furnaces that chemically incinerates whatever unfortunate matter may enter us. the fuel’s affluence is not typically relevant, but I’m a little out of touch on the science, I might be wrong.