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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • We just don’t make tech for old people the way we should.

    My mother in law says things like “Wow, your son is just so good with computers.” She was impressed at how “tech savvy” he was because he was able to change the brightness on her phone for her so she could show him a picture better.

    A lot of our UIs are built for absolute no-thinking usability. How would you propose changing the brightness on a phone that would make it more “old people friendly”. It’s not a matter of difficulty. She just doesnt remember these things, and a different flow may not necessarily be remembered either.

    And I’m not saying its her fault or that she’s bad because of it. She was raised learning how to do and remember things a certain way and that has necessarily changed over the years.

    A phone can do a lot of things, so unless you want to have 100 apps on your home screen, you’ll have to group some together. For instance, putting WiFi into a Settings app. Having every individual setting just available on the home screen potentially complicates things even worse by being overwhelming.

    Genuinely curious how you think things like this could be redesigned to be more old people friendly.





  • Counter point… Both are generating perfectly valid JSON, so who cares?

    Python 3.13.2 (main, Feb  5 2025, 08:05:21) [GCC 14.2.1 20250128]
    Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
    IPython 9.0.2 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.
    Tip: IPython 9.0+ have hooks to integrate AI/LLM completions.
    
    In [1]: import json
    
    In [2]: json.loads('{"x": 1e-05}')
    Out[2]: {'x': 1e-05}
    
    In [3]: json.loads('{"x":0.00001}')
    Out[3]: {'x': 1e-05}
    
    Welcome to Node.js v20.3.1.
    Type ".help" for more information.
    > JSON.parse('{"x":0.00001}')
    { x: 0.00001 }
    > JSON.parse('{"x": 1e-05}')
    { x: 0.00001 }
    

    Javascript and Python both happily accept either format from the string and convert it into a float they are happy with.



  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

    even if you can figure out specifically WHAT a function does, it’s not always clear WHY a function does, and honestly, if this function wasnt labeled in the code, no way in hell would I know what it does.

    It has an entire wiki page dedicated to explaining it, and it involves enough math that most people wouldn’t be able to follow along.

    Nothing this atrocious lives in any current codebases I work on… but if you work at an old enough company, some of the load-bearing code will be tricky to figure out what is calling it, but also it was written in a time where little hacks were needed to eke out performance.

    You only have to experience it once for it to be a memorable enough thing that you will cite it for the rest of your days.

    Or more realistically, it IS comprehensible, but the level of effort necessary to comprehend it is not worth it. So you leave it as “undecipherable” and move on.


  • XMPP has been an option for decades, if your contacts aren’t using it by now, they arent going to. And with communications tools, both parties have to agree on a tool. Even if one party doesn’t care about privacy or security.

    Raw brute force security isn’t the point most of the time, and ease of use and simplicity of setup are going to be major factors in adoption. Signal is much easier to get started with for most people than XMPP.






  • If we assume “half a day” is 4 hours, and 500 pounds. That’s 125 pounds per hour. Which isn’t the worst rate. Assuming it’s actually capped at 4 hours and we all know that if it’s your dad’s friend, this is not going to be a set and forget kind of thing. So that 4 hours quickly becomes 10. And suddenly you’re down to 50 pounds per hour. And then if it’s actually static and simple and good, you still have high odds of getting insane feedback demanding changes to make it worse. A motherfucking website would actually be the best option, but wouldn’t get you paid. At that point youre just doing it for the lols.

    But ultimately, this isn’t even about the rate or how much time this will take. this whole scenario depends heavily on the son here. Is the son unemployed and living in dad’s basement for free? Then yeah. Sorry, he should probably take any work he can get for any rate he can get. His dad gets a lot more say in how things work financially if the son is relying on him financially. But if the son is already working a full time job and living in his own house? Then no, I don’t care what the rate is. Don’t commandeer other people’s time. Don’t make deals that people haven’t agreed to. Come to me with opportunities, not demands.


  • The “start button” is the kde plasma logo. So this would be Linux of some sort (makes sense given the community and what OP has said) and not windows

    The question is just whether OP is using steamOS that comes on the deck (and uses KDE plasma for desktop mode) or if they have installed a different distro that fits the desktop use case a bit better.




  • You’re right. There are multiple definitions of the word stable, and “unchanging” is a valid one of them.

    It’s just that every where else I’ve seen it in computing, it refers to a build of something being not-crashy enough to actually ship. “Can’t be knocked over” sort of stability. And everyone I’ve ever talked to outside of Lemmy has assumed that was what “stable” meant to Debian. but it doesn’t. It just means “versions won’t change so you won’t have version compatibility issues, but you’ll also be left with several month to year old software that wasn’t even up to date when this version released, but at least you don’t have to think about the compatibility issues!”


  • Debian aims for rock solid stability

    To be clear, Debian “stability” refers to “unchanging packages”, not “doesn’t crash.” Debian would rather ship a known bug for a year than update the package if it’s not explicitly a security bug (and then only certain packages).

    So if you have a crash in Debian, you will always have that crash until the next version of debian a year or so from now. That’s not what I’d consider “stable” but rather “consistent”