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Free software scares normal people

danieldelaney.net

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Re: Free software scares normal people

#631

Post by bccdee »

listenallyall wrote: post #613
bccdee wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it rapid is taking shortcuts. There's no silver bullet for increasing speed while preserving maintainability and extensibility. Prioritizing speed is exactly the problem described in the post you're responding to.

Not implementing any solution and blaming it on "only so many developer hours available" is the problem I'm responding to. I'm not "prioritizing" anything. The scenario we're discussing is when an intern or low-level employee is able to successfully automate, enhance, or simplify a manual, inefficient business process that management has not seen fit to improve - so the worker does it themselves. Access and similar p…

I don't have a problem with accessible development tools like that, but they do have tradeoffs. An Excel spreadsheet is an excellent tool for some business calculations, but once you start asking questions like, "can we add some authorization to this? Can we add some permissions? Can we pipe this into a UI?" we've passed the limits of Excel and we need to implement a real application. The more you implement in your spreadsheet, the more you may end up re-implementing in a real database.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#632

Post by DrewADesign »

LtWorf wrote: post #612
DrewADesign wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples? Are they interface designers? Are they qualified? The existence of shitty designers is no more an impeachment of any design field or designers as the existence of shitty developers is an impeachment of development or developers.

I think at this point the existence of good designers is what needs proof.

Edgy.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#633

Post by simonask »

tombert wrote: post #605
fn-mote wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I would not give anybody good odds of booting from a snapshot on Ubuntu/ZFS. I would expect that booting from an older kernel would work, possibly in recovery mode.

I have booted from snapshots on Ubuntu with ZFS plenty of times and it has worked fine. I've also used Snapper with btrfs and restored from backup and it's worked fine. I've also booted from snapshots in NixOS and it has worked fine. I actually cannot think of a time where any of those examples didn't work fine. Windows system restore has never worked for me.

Setting up any of that is well outside the reasonable expectations of the average user.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#635

Post by DrewADesign »

zeroc8 wrote: post #418
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What pisses me off is that the “brutalist” style in the 1990s was arguably perfect. Having standardized persistent menus, meaningful compact toolbars was nice. Then the world threw away the menus, adopted an idiotic “ribbon” that uses more screen real estate. Unsatisfied, we dumbed down desktop apps to look like mobile apps, even though input technology remains different. Websites also decided to avoid blue underline…

The brutalist style also meant that I didn't need a UI designer for my applications. With Delphi I was able to create great apps in a matter of days. And users loved them, because they were so snappy and well thought out. Nowadays it seems I need a UI designer to accomplish just about anything. And the resulting apps might look better but are worse when you are actually trying to accomplish work using them.

Actual interface designers communicate functionality and state through an interface. If your designer is designing interfaces that look good but are less functional for the intended user base, you’ve hired a graphic designer that claims to be an interface designer. It’s not a problem you can generalize to design or designers any more than someone can generalize that web developers suck because the ones they hire to build a serious web app are really Wordpress plugin hacks that don’t even realize they aren’t web developers.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#636

Post by scott_w »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #601
scott_w wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In most organizations the problem is lack of urgency rather than lack of developer hours. I disagree: it's a business prioritisation issue (not necessarily a problem). Ultimately, a lot of the processes are there because the wider business (rightly) wants IT to work on the highest impact issues. A random process that 3 people suffer from probably isn't the highest impact for the business as a whole. Also, because i…

Yes, but often the "business priorities" get so screwed up that people's needs go unmet, and the business ends up wasting money as a result. My best example was a conversation I had with one of the scientists at my job when she mentioned that she had people spending hours every day generating reports from data our instruments produced. I pointed out that with the code we had it would be simple to generate the reports…

> That's it: about 4 hours of work and produced something this person had asked for a year prior, and that people were already spending hours each day doing!

This leads to the exact problem OP brings up: who fixes it if it breaks? If it becomes critical, now other priorities go unhandled as a person or team are dragged into resolution.

I’ll bring a couple more counter arguments:

- When I was running an internal enablement team, I reckon I had 12 months worth of work of these simple requests at any given point in time.

- Even that time saving might not be worth it, if it means those 4 hours could have been spent building something the company can sell (which for a SaaS product, is literally millions over its lifetime).

Just to be clear, I’m not saying you did the wrong thing at all. Hell, I’ve done this stuff myself. I’m just pointing out it’s not as easy as “just spend 4 hours on it and it’s done!” I’d go on but I think I’d just end up regurgitating the article.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#637

Post by kmeisthax »

renewiltord wrote: post #367
kmeisthax wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually a fair bit of highly influential CC-licensed artwork out there. Wikipedia made a whole free encyclopedia. The SCP Foundation wiki is it's own subculture. There's loads of Free Culture photography on Wikimedia Commons (itself mirrored from Flickr). A good chunk of your YouTube feed is probably using Kevin McCleod music - and probably fucking up the attribution strings, too. A lot of artists don't real…

I like this explanation, though there is one form of creative standardization: brand identity. And I suppose that's where graphics folk engage with software (Plasma, the GNOME design, etc.). Amusingly, I like contributing to Wikipedia and the Commons so I should have thought of that. You're absolutely right that I had a blind spot there in terms of what's the equivalent there of free software. Another thing is that t…

> Anyway, all to say I liked your comment very much but couldn't reply because you seem to have been accidentally hellbanned some short while ago.

OH MY FUCKING GOD THANK YOU. As far as I remember, I got 'disappeared' off HN right after some major upgrade in August, but it never got fixed, so I just assumed someone at YC was pissed off about something I said about (insert authoritarian dictator here).

Re: Free software scares normal people

#638

Post by pseudalopex »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #577
pseudalopex wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developers seem to have a product that people can actually attach a value to, but art and music; not so much. This says more of your perception I think. Many people attach value to art and music. Many people do not attach value to software.

That's possible, but remember that I used to be an artist[0]. I have sold a number of works, and I'm familiar with attaching value to art. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886

I sold art works I produced. I do not believe this is required to observe how people do or do not attach value to art or programming.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#639

Post by DrewADesign »

LtWorf wrote: post #389
sjamaan wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was ranting exactly the same just yesterday. Nowadays UI designers seem to have forgotten all about affordances. Back in the day you had drop shadows below buttons to indicate that they could be pressed, big chunky scrollbars with two lines on the handle to indicate "grippiness" etc. A few days ago I had trouble charging an electric rental car. When plugging it in, it kept saying "charging scheduled" on the dash, b…

I've had long discussions at work with our designer, who thinks that people on desktop computers should perform swipe actions with the mouse rather than the UI reacting to mouse scroll events. 99% of the users are not using the mobile version.

Get a new designer. You have hired a graphic designer that thinks they’re an interface designer. They’re wrong.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#640

Post by stefs »

singhrac wrote: post #120
gspencley wrote: post #98

A lot of this type of stuff boils down to what you're used to. My wife is not particularly tech savvy. She is a Linux user, however. When we started a new business, we needed certain applications that only run on Windows and since she would be at the brick and mortar location full time, I figured we could multi-purpose a new laptop for her and have her switch to Windows. She hated it and begged for us to get a dedica…

One summer in middle school our family computer failed. We bought a new motherboard from Microcenter but it didn’t come with a Windows license, so I proposed we just try Ubuntu for a while. My mom had no trouble adjusting to it. It was all just computer to her in some ways.

after my father got an old work notebook without windows preinstalled, i suggested trying ubuntu, his first contact with linux. installation went without problems and a few days later i asked him wheter everything was ok. he answered that everything was great, except for that "edgy desktop background of a skull" (he mentioned something about that being a typical linux hacker thing).

it was the "intrepid ibex" version and the "skull" was actually a stylized ibex.

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