antidamage
Joined 13 years ago
Joined 13 years ago
You hear this story over and over about every kind of software.
There are two audiences every successful developer needs to cater to: the "I wish this did X, I want new features" side and the "I liked it the way it was" crowd and they're distinctly different groups.
For a long time I produced a popular technical art asset for video games and even I realised I needed to include every single version of the tool with every single installation. If a developer has to go and find out how to get "the right version" at all then I'm 90% likely about to lose a user.
Focusing on the "we did this right just keep going like that" and really understanding WHAT you did right and WHAT people like is really important. It's really hard to be impartial when you made the world rather than consumed it, but always take the win.
Years later I'm nearly 50 and have transitioned to female. My now divorced mother decided she likes having a daughter and so suddenly all of this support has materialised and with presumably less time to live the life I missed out on I'm making a conscious choice to start being a little dependent on it and shortcut some things that would have taken longer otherwise.
It's hard to describe but it feels like I'm living a more normal, less marginalised life now. I definitely have more friends, where previously I chose to avoid having any because I felt like having friends meant sharing burdens that were mine alone to carry.
I also see a lot of very similar behaviour in the wider trans community where most people's axis of behaviour revolves around some facet of not having support. We don't all handle it in a healthy way, but I now do my best to help my community find stability and adjust their expectations to having better outcomes.
My example case is I paid for a year of gym membership up front so I could feel the total I'd spent more tangibly. That got me to go regularly, even if I was just showing up to recovery stretching at first. Now I enjoy going and I look forward to it, and I didn't need a PT to motivate me this time.
Drapey clothing is probably the easiest to freehand without a pattern though. It's accurate fits that need more measuring, planning, temporary stitching, test garments, etc.
This looks more like something for making clothing as digital content - e.g. Marvellous Designer. Possibly more straightforward even.
Edit: found interfacing. It calls it "interlining".
Web pages took a minute to load, now we're optimising them for instant response.
Hypercard was absolutely dope as an entry-level programming environment.
BBSes existed at the same time and if you were into BBSes you were obsessive about it.
We had no AI policy at the time so I had to read up on CDL and implement it by hand. The concept is straight-forward and I also targeted regularity as acceptance criteria for the mesher, but making it optimal was hard.
I ended up having to park it after the ticket ran out of time, but now we have an AI policy this was the first problem I gave it. What it put out was similar but better structured and more informed.
I worry a little that AI will stunt our problem-solving in 20-30 years, we still need new algorithms, even when ML is capable of producing a model that can do the same thing. But right now it's much better at the things we've already done than we are.