karaterobot

When we're looking to the actors guilds for direction, you know the future of our industry might be in trouble.

I've been quoting von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design for over a decade, since it is a great summary of why I switched from engineering to product design mid-career. That law is the one that says engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept. I didn't engineer spacecraft, but on web projects I noticed that whoever made the documents furthest upstream had a ridiculous amount of influence over the outcome of the product. Even just being the one taking notes in the first meeting gives you leverage in a process which, despite claims of being agile, is definitively path-dependent most of the time.

I'm sometimes asked to produce meaningless 30-page documents that nobody ever reads. I mean literally nobody, since I can see the history of who has accessed it. Me and a proof-reader, and occasionally someone will open it up to check that it exists. But nobody reads them, let alone reads them closely. Not the distant funder who added it as a line-item requirement to their grant (their job is adding line items to grants, not reading documents), nor the actual people involved in the project, who don't have time to read a meaningless document, and don't need to. It's of use to no one, it's just something that must be done because we live in a stupid world.

I've started having AI write those documents. Each one used to take me a full week to produce, now it's maybe one day, including editing. I don't feel bad about it. I'm ecstatic about it, actually; this shouldn't be part of my job, so reducing its footprint in my life is a blessing. Someday, someone will realize that such documents do not need to exist in the first place, but that's not the world we live in right now, and I can't change it. I'm just glad AI exists for this kind of pointless yeoman's work.

Some programmers are engineers, but not all programmers are engineers. A lot of us are plumbers, basically. We connect together things other people have engineered. There's nothing wrong with plumbing; it's an important, honorable profession. It's just a different thing than engineering. And I'm not saying that a really good programmer transforms into an engineer by virtue of being really productive, or smart, or whatever—I'm saying engineering is a specific activity that most of us don't do every day as part of our jobs. So, to the point of this article, I'd like evidence to be gathered from engineers, specifically, and not programmers like me.

I bought all the Affinity programs after ditching Adobe, which I'd used for 20 years or so. I'm a professional designer, and even though most of my work is in Figma these days, it's nice having dedicated bitmap editing and document design applications.

I bought (two different versions of) these apps specifically because they weren't a SaaS suite with a predatory monthly subscription model, and a constant barrage of cross-promotion and integration with their other products.

Now that Figma is public, it's rapidly become another fully enshittified SaaS suite whose only selling point is that there's nothing better out there for now. Affinity is now pivoting in the same direction. What a time to be a designer!

The headline is incorrect, it should say "A Browser That's Anti-Web". Many other browsers are also trying to destroy the web for their own benefit, including some you may have heard of.

The ideal scenario isn't the government forcing a sale of TikTok for political reasons. The ideal is that people stop using TikTok because they realize it's not good for them, but I guess I don't see that happening. Instead we'll just continue scrolling while wondering why we're so unhappy and angry all the time.

I guess I disagree that it's a good thing.

As a developer, I think most documentation is terrible both for developers and non-developers alike. And if you write your documentation so that it is useful to non-developers, it's still useful for developers.

There's no downside to writing accessible documentation, except that it requires a modicum of skill and effort. That's the real reason it's so rare, I think.

I also disagree that developer documentation is like academic papers. The ways they fail are almost opposite: academic papers are overly long and overwritten, because the authors want to be very careful and complete. Developer documentation is too short and hastily written, because they often don't care if it's helpful to anybody else.

The end result may be the same: neither are useful except to a small number of experts: the people who could probably do it themselves already, and thus may not even really need the write up to begin with. But that's a failure, not a feature to be celebrated.

You'd think so, but I've been hosting MM for about 6 years, and it's definitely gotten more user- and admin-hostile in that time. They've restricted really vital improvements to paying customers (basic stuff, like having a functioning search), removed existing features (like video calls) and started shoving in more advertisements and nags to upgrade to a higher tier.

The fact that they've ramped that stuff up so much in the last couple years does not bode well for the future, in my opinion.

My installation isn't associated with a business, it's just a chat board for about 30 people, so there's no question of me being willing to pay $300 a month for the privilege.

I'm sticking with Mattermost because there's no better option, and I've got hundreds of thousands of messages I don't want to lose. However, it isn't like they don't try to extort you just because they're better than Slack about it.

If it turns out the dip is caused by a lag between the implementation of new tariff rules and the implementation of processes to handle them, and that in a short time traffic to the U.S. goes back to essentially its prior levels, what will that mean to the commenters in this thread? All of the hyper-rational, fact-based people in this thread, I mean. Because that seems like the most likely outcome to me.

Jobs, who died in 2011, may very well have had some new or updated opinions himself by now.

> Precisely one reason comes to mind to have ROBOTS.TXT, and it is, incidentally, stupid - to prevent robots from triggering processes on the website that should not be run automatically

Counter-point: I have a blog I don't want to appear on search engines because it has private stuff on it. 25 years ago I added two lines to robots.txt file, and I've never seen it show up on any search engine ever since.

I'm not pretending nobody has indexed my blog and kept a copy of the results. I'm just saying the blog I started in college doesn't show up when you search for my name on Google, which is all I care about.

Check out the first 1 minute of the linked video for answers to both of these questions.

You know, I used to bullseye small thermal exhaust ports in my T16 back home, they're not much smaller than womp rats.

Here's how little I understand business: $45 million in revenue, earned by taking a totally fair 10% of subscriptions that other people do all the work to get, seems like it ought to be enough. If leadership is trying to scale up to be thousands of employees, or to go public, they are lunatics and deserve to fail. Why not just run a successful newsletter platform?