li2uR3ce

In defense of the "bad developers", many "good standards" seem to be deliberately inaccessible to anyone not joining the faith and making it their life's work to understand it. Standards that require a new vocabulary of already overloaded words and concepts are not that good. Often you can't know part of a standard and be better off for it. If you want wide adoption, don't target the narrow.

A good standard lets the bad users grow into better users. It's like the gap between novice vs pro graphics software. It's a novice trap. The novice software is so limited and "easy" that when a user needs a "pro" feature they have to jump off a cliff to learn a new universe--all at once. The "easy" novice software is good at keeping you there at that level. It often does nothing to prepare you for graduating to the next level. The gap is so wide that it hardly matters if you started off using the "beginner" software. Inaccessible pro software combined with beginner software that avoids teaching... it's just never going to be a pipeline.

Good developers are a rare resource yet we push back on efforts to improve mining them with gatekeeping. Part of the reason you are the "good" developer you are today is because there are so many tools that let you do bad things which became lessons.

If you want your blessed standards to change bad developers then you have to build in footholds for them. I think if you look at the poorly adopted "good" standards you'll find that there's a strong correlation with poor accessibility. Are you going to turn all the bad developers into good ones? No, but you might be able to elevate a chunk them to less annoying mediocre developers and I think that's worth it.

Is it really surprising that bad developers ignore good standards which ignored them? Good standards nudge rather than trap.

This subject is way off topic but let me try and bring it back in (a wee little bit). Yeah, I'm gonna coddle the common folk some more... We hate the vibe coding from the riffraff but we went out of our way to not vibe with them! I look at the vibe coding as desperate feature requests. If we want them to come to us "good" coders instead of the AI... maybe we need to meet them where the AI did. Maybe just a little? Is it taking our job away if we weren't doing that job to begin with?

The toasters be uncovering stuff and it's time to get creative... because we're the ones that are good at creative, right? TYFCTMTT.

> AI is absolutely imperfect, just like teams of human developers.

The old "nothing's perfect therefore everything is equally imperfect" fallacy. It's not a binary. While everything is flawed, somethings are more flawed than others. Welcome to the world, it's complex.

> when we talk about AI code, it's always compared against some idealized

Have you ever seen a development mailing list? Seems like when human code is scrutinized it's held to a high idealized standard. "Technical debt" is a concept that originated from looking at human code. How then can it be true that applying it to AI code is setting a higher standard? It's setting the same standard. These things existed and were applied to human code before AI exploded.

The whole "many eyes" thing can be quite brutal. We don't always get the many eyes but when we do... wars are waged. It's brutal out there for anything getting scrutiny. Currently, AI code getting a lot of eyeballs. That's a good thing. Don't wish it away just because you're butthurt about your new pet tech being held to a standard. That's how it gets better.

The "problem" of AI being held to a supposed higher standard isn't a problem. It's a free pony.

>if the organization were seen as less leftist

I don't understand what you think should happen here. I honestly don't think that the EFF has shifted nearly as much as people have in this hyper partizan environment. The trouble with being "center" is that you get pulled around by the most extreme. The flag is tied to the center of the rope right? If the right pulls away should the EFF compromise their values just to be seen as less leftist?

When being the center is the principle value, you stop being defined by your own values. If you're the flag, you don't get to have a say. One side could hook a tractor up to their end of the rope. The flag has no agency.

Do I think the EFF should have more outreach to the right? Sure. But that outreach can't be: we compromised our principles to chase the moving target loosely defined as "the center" of the moment.

Of course the EFF had more allies on the right during the Obama years. They were suing the Obama administration! There is always going to be a nontrivial amount of tribalism going on. How do you think suing the Trump administration has affected the left? They are eating it up!

No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"

Given the context of what I personally think about the content, the AI is much more accurate than that.

(Is it any wonder why people fall in love with bots that always agree with them?)

We should use lead pipes because they are made from naturally occurring lead. Synthetic PEX pipes have to go because: synthetic.

I'd be happier if they stopped using percentages. When percentage points don't consume close to an equal amount of time, don't use them. It's just complete nonsense at that point. It doesn't give the user any useful information just false hope that it might finish soon.

Of course if Windows update wasn't so horrible maybe it wouldn't matter as much.

> companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better.

Companies need to sell the *idea* of making lives better. They don't actually have to make a customer's life better and many don't despite selling lots of product. Profitability is not a strict function of quality. If it were, we'd not give the slightest fuck about monopolies. It takes a great amount of effort to get companies to compete on "making lives better." If bettering lives is not the most profitable it is very often eclipsed by what is.

It's much more complicated than the simple lie that "you get what you pay for."

FBI: See the problem we face is finding a needle in a haystack.

Morons in congress: Oh, we're really sorry to hear that, what should we do?

FBI: Give us more hay for the stack.

Hostility, it turns out is "engagement" which is profitable. We went from people organically paring themselves to algorithms steering people towards "engaging" encounters. Where we used to say "don't feed the trolls" we should now be saying "don't feed the algorithm."

I suppose we shouldn't feed either one but right now "the algorithm" is the bigger threat. I mean, I can usually get a troll to work for me with a bit of patience and perseverance... algorithms? They'll only work for me if it's profitable for someone else. It's so soulless.

Altering the deal is SOP where law permits it. Read any privacy policy or user "agreement" and note that they all have "Darth Vader" clauses where they get to alter the deal when ever it suits them. It's even your job to spam refresh on the page and use a diff tool to figure out what changed.

The difference is that these customers potentially can defend themselves with lawsuits and switching to a competitor.

Despite the gutting of desktop usability for the sake of being mobile compatible, many environments still have zero presence on mobile. Can I PLEASE have my fucking scrollbar back now?

I once spent a lot of my time and the time and the time of a developer trying to find a setting because there was no indication that a window had more content (a checkbox) to scroll down to. Something that would have been obvious before the onslaught of hidden scrollbars. The trouble is that having my pointer over the navigation pane--practically a guaranteed position--causes the scrollbar on the other pane to be hidden. Without the visual cue of a scrollbar there was no reason to move my pointer over to the other pane to discover there's more. Hell you might not even know it's a separate pane now that we've gotten rid of every defining border. I shared a screenshot with the developer, assured them that I was using the current version, only to have him say "scroll down." No doubt, I'm the fucking idiot (/s).

Just like on mobile, you're supposed randomly interact with every UI element in hopes of discovering how it works only to have that learned skill be unique to one fucking app. Tap it, slow tap it, slow tap it for a different amount of time, tap it faster, spam it... "google it"... oh, this time you're supposed to drag it to something that doesn't even look like a UI element. Stupid grandpas!

"Is the checkbox checked?" was never as ambiguous as "is the slider switch on?" Also, the checkbox uses less screen space! I'd argue that they optimized for neither screen space or user friendliness. It's optimized for a look and you can even make it worse by making it flatter. Go ahead make it look like two squares! Is the darker area the switch part? Who cares! It looks so clean and distraction free! I was so distracted by knowing what state the switch was in.

Sorry, time for my meds. I usually make it half way through the day.

Depends on what you mean by "stability." The number of crashes is down but UI churn seems like it's at an all time high.

Settings reversion is a constant peeve. Seriously, how many times to I have to set the height of the task manager. I have one screen that runs at the same native resolution it's always ran at. Tell me how hard it is to preserve the fucking setting? That's just the most recent annoyance but it's constant things like that where an update reverts a setting or two. No, it's not a distro thing. No, my package manager is not walking all the /home/*/.config trees--I checked.

Less annoying is the constant "how to turn off new intrusive feature" quests that occasionally you have to do. Setting something once and forgetting about it is tolerable. It's having to do it more than once that sets me off.

File indexing, a feature that I never asked for, seems finally under control. It's finally not sending me looking for the off button. Although, the number of times I've had to turn it off again after a new release? I really wish there was more respect for my preferences. Why is it on again??????? Good job fixing it but, jesus christ, why is it on again?

I'd like to not have to constantly set my audio output back to "Analog Surround 5.1 Output", turn the Mic off, and then turn the subwoofer back down. But this is Linux. If the last 20+ years have taught me anything it's that audio will always suck on Linux. Always. Forever. When someone replaces pipewire, in a few years, it will still suck. (BTW, bluetooth touches audio... connect the dots.)

But crashes? For me, they seem rare now. Fantastic job there.

> without having to take on a whole bunch of the footguns that would come from working directly in a language like c++ or Rust.

Don't forget the footguns of working with developers who do those things. Ask them to do something simple and you get something complex and expensive after months of back and forth about what is wanted. You're likely to a framework for a one off SQL query.

I hear it being said already, "You're using software developers wrong!" Well, maybe software developers shouldn't be so hard to use?

That's not been my experience with the original Pis. We ended up mounting cards as read only because they wouldn't last otherwise. Syslog and various other processes, even with light IO would render the cards useless after a month or two.

I'm not surprised Experian's security is shit. Equafax proved that there are basically no consequences. Here's some basic free credit monitoring that you probably already had for free.