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Simplicity of IRC

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Re: Simplicity of IRC

#231

Post by franga2000 »

oarsinsync wrote: post #214
franga2000 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a legal, practical and technical perspective, any window displayed on any screen is equally succeptible to logging. I can't imagine the fact that the company disabled ctrl+c in the policy settings making any difference in a liability case.

> I can't imagine the fact that the company disabled ctrl+c in the policy settings making any difference in a liability case. Taking reasonable measures absolutely does absolve the company. At that point, it becomes a rogue employee who’s deliberately circumvented policies and technical enforcements, who is now potentially personally liable. It’s garbage, but hey ho.

Fair enough, they did "try", but still feels equivalent to putting sensitive documents in a glass frame with a "no photos please" label on it and then claiming you did everything you could to protect them. I can't imagine that would fly in court, but I guess as soon as computers are involved, all common sense is lost.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#232

Post by trixie_ »

laumars wrote: post #228
trixie_ wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re complaining a lot about the UI which is perfectly usable. The mobile app is especially nice. I can carry a meeting from my phone to my desktop without skipping a beat. They are constantly adding features and polishing, but already meetings with hundreds of people it handles no sweat. Yes the app is relatively new compared to slack but improving quickly, for example the last update - https://techcommunity.micro…

“Usable” isn’t acceptable when every other solution is intuitive. I don’t just want something “usable”, after 30 years of research in GUI design I expect something better than just usable from one of the largest software developers in the world. And this is why myself and others keep saying Teams is garbage. Why settle for something that is only just barely usable when there are a dozen other solutions on the market…

You call me a shill and then say you’d switch to IRC over teams. IRC has no features compared to teams - screen sharing, voice/video, threaded discussion, calendars, a mobile client with all these features, etc..

This implies you don’t really care about capability at all. You have some beef with Microsoft where you’d rather have nothing than something to avoid using a product you have a irrational bias against.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#233

Post by mdrzn »

dan-robertson wrote: post #6

It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer a…

This is how I learned how to code, by downloading Visual Studio and randomly trying stuff out. Visually you can have an immediate feedback about your work, and then you start learning the code.

Nowadays, it's all about interconnecting different microservices just to bootstrap something, let alone build something complete.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#234

Post by Qem »

qsort wrote: post #136
magpi3 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button The world that lived behind that experience - COM & Active X Controls - was extremely complex. If you needed to build a new active x control for your app, god save you. It's been said a million times, but in programming there is always complexity. Somet…

I think there's a difference between intrinsic complexity and accidental complexity, though. You're right to observe that programming involves irreducible complexity (one of the reasons why so many low code/no code tools fail is the refusal to accept this, imo), on the other hand modern toolchains are extremely complicated and could be a little more streamlined. It's a meme at this point, but there's no way having si…

The complexity of modern tool-chains suck, specially when you are just beginning. It gets you very confused, and some people end just giving up. Python is confusing with all the environment juggling if you're at the stage of doing something not trivial. But for the beginner, at least it gives you IDLE, a barebones IDE by default. I think there is a parallel universe where I use Ruby as my main language, instead of Python, as I tried Ruby before Python, several years ago. But in this timeline I got stuck trying to call the Ruby interpreter from Geany, and never came back.

Similarly, I tried to learn Clojure before Pharo. Spent over a hour setting Atom with all dependencies required to convert the editor into a Clojure IDE. But I botched the set-up somewhere, and ended with a dead REPL. Again, never came back.

The best experience I had so far, as a beginner trying a new programming language, was Pharo. You type a couple of lines in the terminal, and gets a full environment with _everything_ you need included in the system image. No need to spending a lot of time wrangling dependencies to get a functional system. I think the image-based development strategy from the Smalltalks is underrated.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#235

Post by lapinot »

jokoon wrote: post #87

I love IRC, unfortunately it doesn't work properly with smartphones because they have a "loose" connectivity (4G towers data etc). I'm not sure IRC apps can deal with this already. It would be nice to have some update to the IRC RFC. If it was well supported for smartphones, I'm still wondering if it would cause some bandwidth costs to servers. EDIT: I know about bouncers, but I would prefer to do without.

> EDIT: I know about bouncers, but I would prefer to do without.

Well doing without bouncers like other "modern" chat services is kinda like using another person's bouncer. An IRC server is just a realtime relay, it's not meant to store history, manage replay to different devices, etc. This would require much more code and a bigger database (and the logging of all messages).

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#236

Post by laumars »

trixie_ wrote: post #232
laumars wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Usable” isn’t acceptable when every other solution is intuitive. I don’t just want something “usable”, after 30 years of research in GUI design I expect something better than just usable from one of the largest software developers in the world. And this is why myself and others keep saying Teams is garbage. Why settle for something that is only just barely usable when there are a dozen other solutions on the market…

You call me a shill and then say you’d switch to IRC over teams. IRC has no features compared to teams - screen sharing, voice/video, threaded discussion, calendars, a mobile client with all these features, etc.. This implies you don’t really care about capability at all. You have some beef with Microsoft where you’d rather have nothing than something to avoid using a product you have a irrational bias against.

> You call me a shill

No, I said you were shilling. I don’t think you’re a shill but your posts are definitely shilling the product

> and then say you’d switch to IRC over teams.

For text chat. Yes. I also said that was an extreme case however IRC is still more intuitive than Teams for text chat.

> IRC has no features compared to teams - screen sharing, voice/video, threaded discussion, calendars, a mobile client with all these features, etc..

Have you even read a single bloody thing I’ve posted? How many times have I said I don’t give a crap about mobile support because 99% of my usage is on a laptop? How many times have I said that Teams suffers from having too many features rather than doing one thing well.

It’s like talking to a brick wall…

Also I did say IRC specifically for text chat.

> This implies you don’t really care about capability at all

You’re conflating comparability with feature bloat.

I’m all for comparability as long as it doesn’t harm usability. But comparability can be in the form of supporting 3rd party API hooks - it doesn’t have to mean bundling every feature into a confused user interface.

This is where the UNIX philosophy comes in: everything in UNIX is compatible with each other but each individual program is designed to do only one thing and do it well.

Now I’m not saying we should have separate video conferencing, calendars, text chat, etc. However in the case of Teams it suffers from trying to do everything. It’s the “Jack of all trades, master if none”.

So naturally I will use a program that specialises in a specific area well if it improves my productivity. For me using a better text chat solution improves my and my teams productivity vs using MS Teams for everything.

> You have some beef with Microsoft where you’d rather have nothing than something to avoid using a product you have a irrational bias against.

Enough with the name calling. There’s no need. Especially when the issue here is your own reading comprehension.

I’ve given clear reasons why I don’t like Teams. You obviously disagree, which is fine. But at least read my comments before replying with your ridiculous bullshit. “Ridiculous” because you’re consistently citing examples of stuff I’ve already discussed as not a requirement in literally the previous post. Which you’d know if you’d bothered to read my entire posts properly.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#237

Post by gaws »

pmarreck wrote: post #208
Fuzzwah wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the OP, but the usual method is that everyone runs an irc client in a screen on a server that they SSH into from their workstation.

I did this years ago and this was indeed one way to do it (apparently still is)

I can confirm that I use this method. It works.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#238

Post by gaws »

mdrzn wrote: post #233
dan-robertson wrote: post #6

It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer a…

This is how I learned how to code, by downloading Visual Studio and randomly trying stuff out. Visually you can have an immediate feedback about your work, and then you start learning the code. Nowadays, it's all about interconnecting different microservices just to bootstrap something, let alone build something complete.

> Nowadays, it's all about interconnecting different microservices just to bootstrap something

What is an example of this?

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#239

Post by gaws »

thenerdhead wrote: post #93

I miss IRC. The simplicity in design is one thing. I think the other part I miss is the pseudonyms and having an identity not be directly attached is another. I remember joining so many IRC channels to learn about everything in college. You'd get help and be humbled by the many regular names in each channel. There was more of a human element to it as most people simply acted as extensions of themselves. You think abo…

> You can't always act like you would in IRC. You can't always be blunt and to the point. You can't call someone an idiot or to RTFM in the most sincere way possible.

You can absolutely still do that in IRC. Tens of thousands of people still use it to communicate.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#240

Post by gaws »

EamonnMR wrote: post #193
grishka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is horrible and I don't understand why so many people like it so much. First thing I do when joining a new "server" is to mute all and any broadcast (@everyone/@here/roles) mentions. Broadcast mentions should have never been invented.

People like it because people enjoy ownership and power. That and it's way more user friendly for newcomers. Also before Zoom got popular, it was the best voice chat for a while.

> People enjoy ownership and power.

What "ownership" and "power?" Discord controls it all.

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