Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe substack?
Or Ghost. The reading experience was so good on Medium a couple of years ago.
Nice! I made my first Ghost post! https://in-the-beginning-was-the-command-line.ghost.io/the-m...
The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
421–430 of 458 posts
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, 1,000%. The one I don't quite know how to solve is when I'm tapping a device to connect to -- whether a WiFi router or an AirPlay speaker or whatever -- and I swear to god, half the time my intended device slides out from under me a newly discovered device enters above and pushes it down. Or sometimes devices disappear and pull it up. Maybe it's because I live in an apartment building with lots of devices. I've…
I also wish you could blacklist/permanently hide individual devices so that I could prune the list of 400 smart TVs, Bluetooth speakers, electric toothbrushes, other people's phones, smart fridges, etc that come up every time I try to link to my earbuds in my apartment. It seems like a super easy fix.
I have never had to deal with this issue because my airpod pros auto-connect to whatever device I'm actually using /shrug
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or Ghost. The reading experience was so good on Medium a couple of years ago.
Nice! I made my first Ghost post! https://in-the-beginning-was-the-command-line.ghost.io/the-m...
This is one reason why I prefer keyboard-based UIs that do not automatically change anything that affects the UI while the UI is active (and being able to select things by entering a number or a name also helps, rather than having to use the arrows). (I also dislike touch-screen for many other reasons.)
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#424This just sounds like perfectionism. I believe it is a curse, because I hate working with teammates like this. They'll spin their wheels solving some insane problem no one asked them to do because it's "better" while ignoring the larger scope and goals of the project. I've tried to coach people out of this mindset, because I used to have it very early in my career, til I realized the sheer impracticality of it. I use…
> submit a patch for it to fix my annoyance. But why?
To not be annoyed? How is that not a worthy goal in itself?
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#425> Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. Not now, not later, but eventually. Libraries deprecate. APIs change. Performance regressions creep in. Your once-perfect tool breaks silently because libfoo.so is now libfoo.so.2. Since I started using Nix flakes to build everything and pin to specific versions this largely stopped being a problem for me. I happily run thing…
> Since I started using Nix flakes to build everything and pin to specific versions this largely stopped being a problem for me. I happily run things I last touched many, many years ago without worrying about stupid stuff like this ^
It only solves the "Libraries deprecate" part. APIs (at least the internet ones) still change, hardware still changes, problems you're trying to solve change, all outside of your control. Nix doesn't solve any of those.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me this doesn’t sound like you find programming very fun - but as a chore to get to something else. That’s not a bad thing - just find out which part you actually want to do
Responding to this as someone who has struggled with similar inner conflicts, the "chore to get to something else" rings true for me. In my case, being good at programming was my means to feeling valued and valuable, and the sense of "I should" came from feeling useless and not needed, specifically after being forced into early retirement. (but the same pattern has been with me since childhood) Not having a family or…
> it quickly turns into "what is worth doing"
Yeah this is a threat to every project. For me it usually manifests as procrastinating by doing new projects - or smaller more care free ones.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. Low tolerance for frustration. Starting something is easy. 20% of the work gets 80% of the results. It's beautiful to see. Then you gotta do the last 20% and you see the 80% of the job ahead of you. Seeing it through quickly gets frustrating. It turns into a job. How to get away from this? Just start a new project...
Does that cycle connect to the question of why you're starting those projects in the first place? If it's "play" and experiencing joy, then quitting after the fun part would seem to do its job.
Part of the reason is wanting to make cool stuff. I'm not even half as brilliant as guys like Fabrice Bellard but I certainly would like to be.
My strongest reason to start a project though is very much along the "self-soothing" lines described in TFA. I do it to prove to myself I'm not insane for thinking that something is possible and that things could be different. If I can think of something, surely people much smarter than me would have done it already, right?
For example, I wanted to embed data into ELF executables and access it at runtime. The accepted solution was to add sections and have the program find, open, read and parse its own executable in order to read those sections. That just didn't seem right to me, I couldn't accept it and I didn't rest until I figured out the real way to do it.
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/self-contained-lone-...
I got the Linux kernel to find, open, read and parse the executable for me. It memory maps the data before the program even starts. When it does, it just needs to follow a bunch of pointers to find it. Simpler and more robust. As far as I know, no one else has done this. At least one linker out there gained features just to make this easy and efficient.
My most painful free software development experience was when I tried to contribute one of these "insane" ideas and someone described it as schizophrenic. Pretty much just dropped it and never went back there again. Patches are still on the mailing list so who knows.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#428> This is what I’m trying to learn now. After the excitement. After the obsession. After the burnout. I’m trying to let things stay a little broken. Because I’ve realized I don’t want to fix everything. I just want to feel OK in a world that often isn’t. I can fix something, but not everything.
Sounds like we're making excuses for a world left far behind. Not all of us do this for the paycheck. This world is in some deep shit.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#429Yeah, this resonates, and not just with software. I have a “jack of all trades” attitude passed down from my father and grandfather. If I don’t know how, I learn. I do my own large tree work, electrical, plumbing, car repair, and haircuts. In many ways this is good- it’s saved me money and in the case of the zombie apocalypse I think I could last a few months at least. Sometimes I think I should pay someone else, but somehow that always feels like more trouble. So I end up feeling like I should do it all. And then get overwhelmed and in a rut with all the psychic weight of the things I need to do.
Similar with software. I always tell my clients “yes I can do that” because, well, I can. But then I end up juggling too much, working nights and weekends, and not having time for the tree work and haircuts I have to do at home.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#430Oh wow. This hits hard in the feels. Here's my personal submission for "UI problem that has existed for years on touch interfaces, plus a possible solution, but at this point I'm just shouting into the void": https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3... In short, an interface should not be interactable until a few milliseconds after it has finished (re)rendering, or especially, while it is still in…
The thing that kills me about touch uis is the chance that this problem can happen at all. For some unknown reason designers insist on putting most controls at the top of the screen. I guess because that’s where they usually are on desktop but when you think about it, it makes no sense. All the controls get put exactly in the place where you can’t reach them easily on most devices. Where you’re likely to misclick on notifications because they’re in the same spot. Where your hand will be covering most of the screen when you reach for them. It would make so much more sense to put controls at the bottom, content at the top. You could reach them without stretching, you wouldn’t cover the screen with your hand to reach them, and they wouldn’t conflict with pop down notification systems. Why on earth are all the controls still at the top?!?