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Cake day: December 1st, 2023

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  • “engineering” is becoming just gluing together and managing cloud services and features.

    Temporarily becoming.

    Just like China had some social and cultural changes since being closed and till the Opium wars.

    Systems are built around people and limited by what a human can conceive and make work. We don’t evolve that fast.

    Also dependency on big centers has led to catastrophes in the past and will lead to those again.

    It will all crash with a huge bang.

    I’m confident of this, anyone who wants may call me a luddite.












  • When I switched to Linux (year 2011), jumping through hoops reduced significantly, because:

    running games on builtin Intel cards etc, that is, kinda second-class citizen hardware, was anyways PITA ;

    it made my stuff run terribly faster ;

    those hoops are not too different in complexity from installing mods for games under Windows ;

    for trying to learn programming Linux is much less problematic (have ADHD, so didn’t learn much back then, but) ;

    the main issue of uninstalling McAffee went away for free ;

    I was at school, so didn’t have any problems with office suites’ incompatibilities and such ;

    and also Linux in 2011 was in general easier, don’t believe RedHat fanboys and such, it was very nice before PulseAudio, systemd and widespread adoption of GTK3, say, to change colors you just needed a 20-line .gtkrc-2.0 and .Xresources, and your WM’s config file, it’s 20 minutes from fresh install to feel normal ;

    the community was friendlier, somehow back then RTFM was considered acceptable, but people rarely used it, now everybody behaves as if RTFM was very bad, but also too many people use it, sometimes to avoid admitting that they are wrong and a certain thing is absent in TFM.



  • It’s actually simple.

    HIG, UX, ergonomics, all that - it doesn’t build up. Acceptable complexity of a pretty mechanical normal 80s’ UI\UX is the same as of a modern one. Humans don’t evolve over decades, they evolve over spans of time which are as good as eternity. They still need the same kind of complexity in tools they use.

    A control panel for a loader that a factory worker should be able to use is as complex as a workflow on a computer can be. And that’s very explicitly accounting for the fact that loader’s or lift’s control panel doesn’t change every fucking day and the user remembers it, so computer UIs should be simpler than those of lifts and loaders!

    You just don’t make UI\UX more complex than that. There are things humans can learn to do, and there are things they often can’t and they shouldn’t.

    The issue is that this creates a bottleneck for clueless project managers, UI designers and such. They can’t throw together some shit in 30 minutes. They have to choose. They have to test. They don’t want that. And no regulation makes them do that, because if a loader has an unclear UI\UX, you might kill someone, while if an email program has that, you’ll just get very nervous.




  • … And when you want to create yet another centralized power which will certainly communicate the right information, you’ll get just a third source of the same, wasting thoughts, money, energy and blood on something which is not an improvement, instead of whatever else you could do.

    It’s funny, when you say you’re ancap and explain the ideology in a few sentences, people hate your guts or say it’s stupid or that you are a useful idiot.

    When you explain the same slowly over the years using current events as illustration, people either agree with you and have nothing to say, or what they say makes sense ; there’s a person in my family who is ex-military, nostalgic over USSR, has kinda Marxist views on the world which he uses to support a kinda fascist ideology, and all my libertarian things considered a channel of degeneracy at some point, yet in the last ~5 years we have no disagreements over how specific things work.

    This leads me to a simple thought that maybe social media as “a huge forum” is inherently harmful. Even when we discuss the same things with the same people regularly over years, we may not notice that and not have any progress in mutual understanding.

    Insularity allows us to have deeper exchange of ideas with the same people naturally, instead of taking your place in the ranks of blues and greens verbally pummeling each other, you are talking as an individual to another person which is an individual.




  • Any monopoly incentive does, it’s the same in developing countries with monopolized industries - people need them, so they keep paying, people don’t have choice, so they don’t leave, and no competition arises because of cronyism.

    Thus, say, utility companies in Armenia are such crap. Actually any companies in Armenia, it’s thoroughly oligopolized to the degree that locals think it’s all fine, because it’s all the same. Living in Armenia is as expensive as living near Moscow, while wages, eh, are definitely not the same. What I don’t understand is the locals’ stubborn belief that they can make things better without changing the society where oligopolies, things working via acquaintances, theft being socially acceptable, bendable rules and no responsibility are usual ; I suspect envy for people explaining why they can’t is a reason too.

    Why did I type this …