• 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle


  • I tried to use Copilot but it just kept getting in the way. The advanced autofill was nice sometimes, but its not like i’m making a list of countries or some mock data that often…

    As far as generated code… especially with html/css/js frontend code it consistently output extremely inaccessible code. Which is baffling considering how straightforward the MDN, web.dev, and WCAG docs are. (Then again, LLMs cant really understand when an inaccessable pattern is used to demonstrate an onclick instead of a semantic a or to explain aria-* attributes…)

    It was so bad so often that I dont use it much for languages I’m unfamiliar with either. If it puts out garbage where i’m an expert, i dont want to be responsible for it when I have no knowledge.

    I might consider trying a LLM thats much more tuned to a single languge or purpose. I don’t really see these generalized ones being popular long run, especially once the rose-tinted glasses come off.


  • Power users love to bash accessibility features like this. Its a classic case of “I don’t need a wheelchair ramp so i dont know why the library added one!”

    Accessibility is way more than screen readers. It’s more than specific disability-minded modes. The web needs to be friendly to everyone, including people who may not know they could benefit from accessibility features. Everyone benefits from this type of work.

    There are definitely some legit feature concerns and priorities being called out here. Mozilla has left a lot to be desired of late on that front. But a power user is more than capable of jumping into settings or about:config to turn things like this off, or finding an extension to get by for now.

    Also the firefox dev team isn’t tiny. This isn’t blocking other work or anything in a substantial way, it’s a fairly isolated piece of UI, and there’s no guarantee that skipping this would change the timeline on anything else.






  • The political aspect is especially true. The FOSS confusion is often similar to the communism confusion, especially when it comes to small-scale things.

    Take the concept of a neighborhood garden that no one is expected to pay money into, for instance. “Wait, so the people here who like gardening don’t expect me to pay or provide labor unless I’m able to? What do you mean i should take only according to my needs? What about Jimothy, he never helps but he takes way more than I do! What do you mean Jimothy contributes as he is able or in other ways? How can i trust everyone to be fair?”

    Take the money for goods/services exchange out of the equation and it can really throw people off.



  • not seeing all my open apps is weird, also not being able to open or close from the panel is weird

    The extensions that enable this are so simple too. Its a real shame its not built into the settings out of the box, even if they want that to be the default. I wish they made extensions more discoverable too, since you kinda need to know they exist in order to go get them, and easier discoverability would help people solve tbose problems faster.

    UIs need to be compact when needed. Not everyone is a child and settings are not that simple.

    I really wish these things were built in settings. Thunderbird Supernova’s setting for this is a fantastic example of how much of a difference it makes. Yeah, it’s a bit spacious by default. But once you drop the spacing to medium or small based on your needs and dpi, it feels great. Opinionated design done well makes for great consistency and feel, but it also needs to have some room for adjustments without needing to install stuff.


  • I’ve also been a Gnome user for a while, but i am looking forward to plasma 6 as well. I highly doubt I’ll make any sort of switch, but I’ve never had a good time running plasma 5 so i would love to like kde more. Wayland by default is going to benefit gnome too since it’ll put more priority on bugs and lack of support that is still somewhat common among the less desktop-tied apps.

    (My Plasma 5 woes have been on multiple devices, multiple times over multiple years, with and without basic customization. i was basically never able to go a day without some sort of major shell crash. I got way too familiar the the command sequence to restart the desktop ui)

    I do find KDE to be a bit info dense and it doesn’t look like 6 is changing that aspect of things (at least by default), but it does look a bit less busy at least. I also never like basically anything about classic windows UI, layout, or task flows so KDE leaning into those just doesn’t work well for me. That said, while i like gnome being more minimal, i do wish it had a bit more capability to expose hidden/nested options more easily than requiring extension installs.

    I’m similarly excited about cinnamon 6. A bit unfortunate (and understandable given its goals and usage share) it is still X11, but there’s a lot about it that demonstrates a solid middle ground between gnome and KDE.




  • If you are feeling like social media may be a negative factor in your life at the moment, then take a break. Intentionally stepping away for a week or more helps me from time to time. There is also nothing wrong eith deciding to skip lemmy/kbin/etc for now and only using a server/platform that you find most helpful. Some people hate mastodon but love firefish. Theyre both pretty much fully federated eith each other and offer microblogging, but the experience is different. Kbin and Lemmy have some key differences, too, which can chsnge how you experience the fedi.

    I think, especially with lemmy and mastodon, that the time i spend is positive. I avoid the busy generic communities and spaces and focus on ones specific to interests. But sometimes fedi drama or a bad actor that moderation was slow to handle can make for a bad time. Or even just bad news in the wider world can make the fedi less of an escape.

    With mastodon, i picked a server with a heavy presence of people in my career space and social similarities, but also with a decent amount of diversity, and that has meant that the moderation and especially the local feed are more likely to be neutral or positive than negative. Honestly, time spent on mastodon, for me, tends to be almost exclusively uplifting and informative because of that server choice. I value several mutual connections highly. That’s not to say there isn’t negativity or that I am in a box… thats why diversity was important to me. I rarely found twitter to be uplifting and it was only sometimes informative, and i never had mutuals on twitter that were this active and made social media worth it to me.

    If you are seeing a lot of stuff you’d rather not, changing up your server could help. There’s nothing wrong with having multiple accounts on different servers, or even following the same people from different accounts. There’s nothing wrong with being on a server that is more aggressively moderated if that gives you a better experience for YOU. You could have an account for casual use which is intentionally less dense on content to avoid doom scrolling, for instance. Federation means that you can use these platforms as isolated or loose forums in addition to or instead of being connected to the wider federverse.

    I mostly used reddit for a small handful of communities. It would not have mattered to me if those communities were on reddit or on forum software. i did most of my browsing from mobile, and i almost never used the website unless i was using it as a search engine. That definitely led me to use reddit far less than if it was an ever present tab on my computer.


  • No specific rust experience with either, but some thoughts on the popularity reasons outside of the language:

    I suspect a bit part of this difference in framework popularity may be due to GTK being more attached to gnome and friends, and by extension, Ubuntu (for better or worse, the most used desktop distro for quite a while) Most of the time that’ll be mainline Ubuntu which has always been GTK.

    So if a developer or company is going to target something, then it may come down to “what is the ideal platform to build on for Ubuntu as our main target? GTK? Cool, that’s what we will use.” Of course, either framework is just fine, and either framework targets other OSs as well. I don’t have any experience with either, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the choice of GTK more often is akin to Swift + Apple’s toolkits for iphone development being more popular by a large margin than Ionic/Capacitor, React Native, Xamarin, etc, even though the others provide some benefits (and some significant context-dependent downsides, of course)

    If i remember correctly, Qt was not fully FOSS for a while, so GTK was much more widely adopted and recommended early on. But that was pre-2005, I think.


  • Manjaro can be a real pain depending on your hardware setup. They make a lot of choices that are difficult to work around when you need to (for better or worse) which kinda defeats the whole point of arch (to not be opinionated)

    I have the same setup of packages on a few computers. 0 issues on one, plagued with boot issues on another. And unfortunately, the attitude of the devs and forum is that if you have boot issues its obviously your fault.

    It was definitely a good first arch distro for me, but pacman, aur, and everything else work just as great on Endeavour and all my devices are far more stable than when they were on Manjaro.


  • I find that most people are fairly understanding as long as it doesn’t effect them. Coworkers and friends tend to give the benefit of the doubt and are understanding. Sometimes you have to remind them, but usually that clears things up quickly. Sometimes, those of us with chronic migraine also develop some anxiety about missing things or letting people down, even if people are very understanding.

    The gaslighting… most of the time it’s people who don’t know enough about migraine (or don’t care) and start to see patterns as laziness, avoidance, or similar. Miss a few wednesdays in a row? Guess what, your manager might think you’re avoiding that wednesday team meeting… Miss a few tests or a presentation in class? Well, clearly that’s because you weren’t ready and wanted to buy yourself more time… Sometimes they’ve bought into some misinformation that all you have to do is eat some magical salt every day and you’ll be cured. Or they disbelieve the existence of chronic conditions entirely. That’s where a manager will find a way to use some performance metric to get rid of you or a professor will treat you like a drain on their time.

    All of this is in the context of the United States (I’m sure many other countries handle this a lot better, as usual). It’s really uncommon for migraine to be well-understood at work or school. Especially if you don’t have a current diagnosis, which is also common since doctors tends to brush it off or require some extreme logging to even consider, or insurance companies will refuse to pay for the testing and MRI scans usually required to have an official diagnosis and meet ADA requirements. Like any non-physical disability or illness, schools and employers tend to continually forget and fall way short of ADA recommendations. Especially with chronic conditions that may have phases of being worse or non-existent for months at a time. “Well, you didn’t have this problem last quarter, so what gives?”


  • Chronic migraine. People think its just a headache, but that’s really just the most obvious symptom and least complex symptom. Family practice/generalized doctors know too little about it to recognize it. Everyone around you thinks you’re just being dramatic. If they can push through a headache then why cant you push through a migraine?

    Migraine is a cycle that lasts days. It has phases: prodrome, aura, acute, postdrome. The acute phase (the headache part) is just one phase. Sometimes the headache isn’t even that bad, or long. Sometimes it lasts multiple days. Its a neurological disorder and, in a lot of ways, basically is like your nervous system short circuiting for a few hours or days. Triggers have a lot to do with severity, but there is also a lot of bad info about triggers too. With chronic migraine, you could avoid all triggers and still have 1-2 migraine events a month, and those events dont care about your calendar.

    Because information is so badly shared and everyone (mostly unintentionally) gaslights anyone with migraine into thinking they’re not suffering from a chronic condition, many of us go a long time before discovering useful information or getting diagnosed.

    There are a ton of signs during the prodrome phase which, once you know what to look for, can help you avoid (sometimes) the acute phase by taking meds soon enough and focusing on avoiding known triggers. Even standard over-the-counter stuff can short circuit a lot of migraines before the most painful part. But also, some of the prodrome stuff alone can make working or completing tasks difficult. I often start having trouble speaking, get very tired, have difficulty focusing vision. General brain fog. This can be hours or days before an attack.

    After the headache phase, the postdrome is often more brain fog, speaking issues, low energy, but also sometimes a euphoric state which can make getting back into your normal schedule really difficult.

    I miss family events. I miss friend events. I have to cancel stuff all the time. I worry about scheduling things for fear of being in a headache phase. I’ve been lucky with employers being understanding, esp with the work from home setup and mostly DIY hours, but i absolutely couldn’t work a job with shifts.


  • The main reason people are distributing podcasts via youtube or spotify and not via RSS is because podcast RSS (podcasting 1.0) gives limited visibility into audience or whether anyone even cares.

    Podcasting 2.0 is trying to build a standard that still uses RSS but provides the info podcast creators need to understand their audience. Basically, what can we do to keep people from relying on closed-source solutions and go back to RSS as the main driver of distribution. Its not intended to be used for targeting and mostly just provides download counts and such (which rss doesnt)