FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Hacker, n: One who instinctively looks for exceptions to rules that allow them to make complex systems work in unexpected ways that benefit or delight them.

@tek @onepict my favorite definition of a hacker comes from St Jude

A hacker is someone who cleverly circumvents imposed limits, whether those limits are obvious ones imposed by authorities, but also the non-obvious ones such as your believes about what you're able to do or what you believe is impossible to do. A hacker is someone who is told "you can't do that" and responds, I think I'll do that anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id-im54HOY0&t=8m35s

in 2006, the bbc faced a problem. the reboot of doctor who was doing well, and had revived interest in the original series. there was clearly a market for selling dvds with old episodes. but many old episodes were erased after broadcast, and now lost.

you know this story so far.

Germany slipped into recession last year, and the reason was record sick time. "The large scale of sick leave last year led to a huge shortfall in production. Without sick leave, the German economy would have grown by 0.5 percent last year." Due to the large number of workers who were on sick leave, the German economy shrank by 0.3 percent.

I wonder why so many people are getting sick. Its a mystery! (Can't be #COVID19, can it?I thought the pandemic was over!) /sarcasm

https://www.koha.net/en/boat/407190/study-Germany-went-into-recession-last-year-due-to-medical-holidays/

Love this toothpaste label - let's roll it out across all products

THE FCC DOES NOT REGULATE THE GENDER SPECTRUM

hey all, I've been trying to help my partner figure out some stuff she's been dealing with these past few months.

essentially, she moved back to the UK as a citizen despite not living there for a while, with multiple prescriptions including HRT, and managed to get them all filled by a GP. she got a new GP recently, and everything seemed fine, although a few months ago they claimed that they needed a "medication review" and that they would not refill her medications until this happened, providing both no description of what this means and no criteria for the review.

being stuck in the US myself, I haven't really been able to help much, and I've been also preoccupied with my own issues. but right now, it's clear something needs to be done.

she has crippling anxiety and her apartment is like some kind of fucked-up faraday cage that has absolutely no cell signal inside of it. (that kind of shit shouldn't be legal.) they repeatedly refuse to acknowledge her requests to communicate via email or literally anything else besides phone calls, and only send delayed letters sometimes if phone calls don't arrive.

this isn't just HRT, but also her antidepressants, and based upon the crippling anxiety I mentioned, literally everything is getting worse. and this has been multiple months at this point.

like, I tried looking up medication reviews in the UK, and the only thing I came close to finding was just general practice around making sure patients are getting the right medication, and nothing nearly as clear-cut as "we're cutting off your medications with no indication of how to get them back on, bye~" which just in my mind means that everyone involved should just be fired and disgraced to ever call themselves a medical practitioner.

basically, I am going to work with her to get appointments to get back with these people to get back on her medications, but I want to know if anyone else has dealt with this, and if there are any particular safety nets that prevent them from forcing her to undergo the ridiculous waiting-list periods to be put back on the medications. she had existing scripts and they just pulled the rug out from under her, so, I don't think that they have any right to do this, but, it is a shit country after all.

THE FCC NOT LETTING ME BROADCAST NTSC TV SIGNALS IS DISCRIMINATORY AGAINST MY GENDER IDENTITY

@neuralex my partner recently had a problem where she thought Word was refusing to save her document

What had happened was that Word was saving directly to her OneDrive, and the OneDrive client wasn't running on her computer, so it wasn't syncing

When my partner tried to save the document it didn't appear to work because she couldn't see it in the Documents folder on her computer

It took me - a software engineer - about 30 minutes to figure it all out, unacceptable tbh

When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was people asking me for tech support help and me having to slowly, patiently explain to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.

But that's not true anymore.

User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.

My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.

#HCI #UX #UI #okdoomer

inside .git https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/01/26/inside-git/

C23, C2Y, and.... defer ?!

https://www.tiktok.com/@__phantomderp/video/7328442337095339307

The AI Paradox:

You're forced to add "AI "to your product in order to appear to stay relevant…

…but that makes your product worse, thereby hastening its decent into irrelevancy and possibly an ultimate demise.

The only companies who will be left standing at the end of the day are the ones who hold the line and care about genuine customer experience above all else. That's always been true, but it's more true now than ever.

@hazelweakly I wish I could figure out a good way to monetize managing and mitigating tech debt. At my last job I built something that *freaking worked* and I hear they are still using it with great effect.

New definition of tech debt: work that is considered so unvalued by the company that you can get fired for doing it

As I watch X openly support Nazis, Google search displaying explicitly incorrect information and misinformation, and the continued march towards a lack of foresight or accountability in tech I must reiterate that technology is and forever will be a political force.