• 0 Posts
  • 163 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle


  • I don’t use Spotify. It feels kind of soulless.

    Bandcamp was the best, I think. They’re still around, but their future is uncertain after being bought and sold. They have human written posts about like “the best doom in Texas” or “what’s new in punk”.

    Whenever I talk to people that say they like music, and I suggest they buy albums instead of renting them from Spotify, they look at me like I’m crazy. They’d rather sell their soul for a little convenience. (And these aren’t poor people or teenagers with no money. I worked in tech and all my peers were six figure salary. They can afford to buy three albums a month for $18. Which frankly isn’t much more than a subscription, but then you get to keep something and eventually have a huge library)







  • Sidebar defaults are bad. There’s no home directory. How do you get to your home directory? Cmd+shift+H, but can you get there without that special shortcut? You can’t see the file system’s structure in Finder. The GUI doesn’t have a way to go “up” in the directory structure. I don’t think you can do it in the GUI alone.

    It won’t let you see stuff in like \tmp\ without a fight, too. I don’t know how to open stuff in places like that without cd’ing to the location in the terminal, and doing open . in the desired directory.

    The list view is the least bad, but it gets unwieldy if your directories are deeply nested. It’s also bad if you started in the middle of the tree and want to go up. Gallery and column view are really bad for anything non trivial.

    I often want to see the entire file path, and it really doesn’t want to cooperate. If I do find the file I’m looking for, and want the full path, it doesn’t want to give it. I don’t even know if there is a way to get it. Other than like cmd+clicking -> “new iterm2 tab here” -> pwd, which is not really that helpful of Finder.

    Contrast with windows’ default explorer. It’s not perfect and I think windows11 made it worse, but still. Open it up, there’s the “my pc”, click through to my user directory, music, some album, then i can click the top thing and get the path. I can also see the whole tree on the left.

    Whatever I was using in Mint was similar to windows’ Explorer. Had no complaints about it.









  • At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.

    Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.

    We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.

    I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.

    There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.



  • Try not to think too hard about how most of the evidence points to shorter work weeks being better on pretty much every metric.

    Or that most of the “return to office” mandates are counter productive cruelty.

    I think I saw an article that claimed most office workers in the UK do like 3 hours of work a day, and the rest is puttering and looking busy.

    Our system is stupid and it’s stuck stupid because of people. It’s not physics. It’s not biology. Like there’s not much you can do to fix like humans need to eat and sleep, but the workday is just made up.