wandering cartographer


tob
@tob

I need to fuss for a moment about the impenetrable nature of github. I see REALLY promising tools and alternatives to things like YouTube and other bigger sites that are on monopolistic rampages BUT, to the layman that shit is a different language. I can work my way around a fair bit of technology, I'm not inept but I am aware that my depth of knowledge is still pretty surface level. So, when I open something that is a possible youtube alternative and see this:

and then the install instructions are like this:
Its no wonder why there isn't mass adoption for using alternatives.

I'm not saying this isn't impossible, I'm not saying its unlearnable, but as someone who is starting to look into alternatives for The Usual Suspects, it is discouraging. I know alternatives will also not have the inherent creature comforts that a lot of people are used to, but so much of the stuff that's on github feels out of reach or unobtainable cause I don't have something that can run a certain code or can't parse out which parts of code need to be edited to get something to function properly. I just dont know these things and finding people to ask feels equally impossible sometimes. Hell, even people who DO use github for stuff say it's whack how stuff is laid out sometimes.
Also, the one I used in particular, this isn't a jab specifically at them, it's just the site as a whole, I've run into so many instances of wanting to try something and being unable or incapable because I'm missing some fine print Somewhere that says I should be able to run this thing but for now it remains feeling like a 50ft wall when I have a 5ft ladder.


nago-
@nago-

github was never meant to be a software distribution service. it was definitely never meant to be a product distribution service. git was never meant to be that. It's meant to share source code between developers. But, there's a few factors that muddy the waters:

  1. Every other actual software distribution service is paid, for-profit, big C Capitalism

  2. Open source stuff is generally "free", or at least "free" enough for the hobbyist

  3. software packaging, distribution, testing, maintenance, review and documentation is easily the hardest part of writing software and 95% of your time commitment. even new developers do not understand how much of their time is rightly spent not coding. I am still probably underestimating it.

  4. Hobbyists, like me, often write little "useful tools" and throw them up for free in the event they might help someone else. If another developer gets use out of it, that's awesome

  5. 99.99% of things on github were never designed for non-technical users to engage with in any way, shape, or form.

  6. There's nothing scarier than when a free little script or tool gets picked up by a social circle outside of the developer's and you have to rush to try and "turn it into a foolproof thing", often without help, pay, or any even vague sense of reward while users scream at you for your buggy, broken crap that they are now demanding support for

  7. We mean well and want to help.

  8. That lone maintainer is now so mired in technical debt and burnout that they have no time to actually add a reasonable landing page or add reasonable instructions suitable for their user's technical level. They do not have time to review any contributions from anyone that might help fix this.

  9. Shit stays a big box of wires because as the demands grow, engineering capacity diminishes.

  10. Everyone is so used to big, venture capital backed "free" corporate software products that the demands placed upon "also free" software are simply not possible to solve with the engineering power available to them. every last good open source project was built on crunch and crunch alone. but twitter was never profitable, it never should have existed. it was never sustainable. You're just witnessing how the level of polish and guidance you want is not possible with small teams working for free in their hobby time.

  11. We (the maintainers and developers) all become so increasingly bitter and despondent that we are rightfully accused of being huge assholes by users who just don't know what they're stepping into.

  12. but we still have shit we wanna get done so we trudge on with the same broken tools and websites because who has time to engineer something better on top of fixing the passion project's problems....???

  13. it's so, so hard to say "no"


nago-
@nago-

and to be super clear I am in the same boat even as a Professional Open Source Developer:tm:. I find most projects to be fucking inscrutable and hugely frustrating. even and especially ones I work on full time.

but I've been in the soup and I can confidently tell you exactly why they're all like this, my own projects included.

community outreach, docs and usability testing does not happen at the FOSS library level and we do not get paid or promoted for that shit.

Saw a tweet once talking about google/amazon's promotion process and how what the industry needs is "meticulous glue work" but that promotion committees specifically reward everything except precisely that and you can feel the consequences echo throughout the entire tech stack, and it's true.



cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
giwake
@giwake asked:

i think we should make more cool weird computers and stop making Gamer Computers

i thought i replied to this ask but i guess i didn't, so: i have three answers to this.

  1. yeah

  2. we are past the point where "weird computer" makes sense. we're past the point where "weird phone or tablet" makes sense. we have polished most of the edges off of computing, and except for minor things that don't even count as innovations (put more FUCKING buttons on the phones! put more FUCKING switches on them! stop taking them OFF and put more ON) the fundamental components of computing are pretty much figured out, and that's a good thing. it's good that most computers are pretty much interchangeable, and a lot of our pining for "weird computers" is really pining for being part of a frontier that was tamed by the time many of us were in our teens, if we were born at all.

  3. gamer computers are the only thing keeping computing interesting

#3 is very important. gamers are the only reason you can buy a keyboard that isn't a rubber pad and a membrane. gamers are the only reason your mouse doesn't have a 300dpi non-laser optical sensor. gamers are the only reason you can buy a power supply with clean rails all the way up to 1500W, modular cables, caps that don't die after a year, and adequate ventilation.

"gamer chairs are stupid" before gamer chairs the only thing you could buy (unless you had $1200 for a herman miller) was an office depot special. every store sold the same one, and they were all the same cheap black pleather. six months after you bought it, the leather was cracked and the tilt mechanism had bent internally so the chair always hung at a five degree angle to the left. the back was held on to the seat by the ABS plastic armrests and if you leaned back too hard, they would snap in half and dump you on your ass.

a lot of gamer chairs suck shit, but there are some that don't. secretlab is treated like the raid shadow legendzzz of chairs, but they sell the only chair I've literally ever sat in, other than a steelcase, that didn't feel like it was going to fall apart, and then later did in fact fall apart. i have a titan XL that has stood up to two years of abuse without any of the usual failures, except for the inevitable rumpling of the armrests.

secretlab is a shitty company! as much as any other! their advertising campaigns are gross in their content, tone and quantity. their designs are also terrible - if I wanted a chair with a given videogame on it, I would be so disappointed with theirs. they clearly employ no actual designers, it's just slapdash copy and paste license bullshit. also, i wrote about how i bought a new revision of the same chair and it's garbage now. they definitely pulled the usual modern-age-of-shit bait and switch, where they made a product that was better than everything else for a year in order to build goodwill, then cut costs and are now living on the word of mouth they generated. it'll be five years before anyone notices their product got worse. but at least they made something good, once. i lived through almost 15 years of the before times, and this simply never happened.

before Corsair made "RGB gamer bullshit" an entire market segment, you simply couldn't buy... anything. nobody made anything. it was just a handful of zombie brands like belkin, selling relabeled china sludge. there were literally no keyboards in brick and mortar or online stores that were not membrane based. you had one choice of mouse, in ten different cheap plastic cases. logitech was as bad as anything else, they were just a little sturdier.

i don't think you could buy an AIO water cooler for any price, anywhere, in 2010. you had to build it from parts and then the seals failed and destroyed your PC 100% of the time. nobody had high refresh rate monitors back then, but they never would have made them for "enthusiasts"; only gaming made the expense worth it.

do i love that all this stuff is explicitly "gamer"? no! of course not! i much prefer my first response - we should have weirder stuff, etc. but this is my "we are unfortunately mired in capitalism" response: under the economic system that is likely to persist for the rest of our lives, we are forced to thank Gamers for making computers good, at all.


Queso2469
@Queso2469

I think about this a lot, sitting on my gamer chair, with my gamer keyboard, mouse, mousepad, headset, monitor, and more. But here's the thing. I'm 6'4". I don't get ANY options in my size for normal consumer products most of the time. My desk* is the one place I can afford to be comfortable. They make things that are either with enough options, or adjustable enough, that I can actually not literally crush and destroy them.

*My desk is a 6 person ikea dining table. It looks like a normal desk until sit an average sized person at it.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

likewise, I am 6'2" and Not Thin, but even when I weighed 100lbs less, every chair I ever sat in felt cramped and fragile.



PhormTheGenie
@PhormTheGenie

Just so everyone is aware:

This is an ongoing arms race between YouTube and AdBlockers. YouTube is coming up with new ways to detect and screen out users with AdBlockers, while AdBlockers are coming up with new ways to circumvent detection.

This is happening on a daily, if not hourly basis.

I bring this up because whatever solution is working right now is likely to stop working soon, so be aware.

I hate to suggest going to this website, but there is a rotating pinned thread at the top of the uBlockOrigin subreddit with the most up to date instructions on the situation and how to block YouTube's ads.

Alternatively, if you're into longform videos, a downloader program like youtube-dl to grab the videos and watch them locally might be the best option.



joewintergreen
@joewintergreen

Years ago, I was making a stealth game in Unreal that I've since had to cancel amid circumstances beyond my control. At one point I was trying to make my characters' eyes nice, and the gold standard for that was (and arguably still is) Half-Life 2.

HL2 takes a novel approach: the eyes are not rotating sphere meshes with bones, they’re more-or-less flat planes with a shader on ‘em that makes 'em look like balls and points the iris/pupil where you tell it. The eye "plane" can be stretched as the eyelids open or close without affecting the visual, and you don't get any mesh intersection issues (which is why you've never seen the gman's eyeball push through his eyelid even though Gmod exists) or the uncanny appearance of rotating "with the head".

To get this right, I asked Valve's Ken Birdwell about how they got such a good sense of eye contact with this shader back in 2003. Here's the scoop: