I tell people about lemmy and send them links. Mostly people don’t care about anything. Abstract or remote things like “should a platform be owned by one asshole?” just doesn’t even enter their brain.

I’ve thought about switching. I do like the password saving and syncing between Android and desktop that Firefox does, and I’m not sure if the forks do that.

No regrets on switching to Linux here. Almost all of the time I just use the GUI to launch steam or Firefox. No AI nagging me (aside from whatever nonsense Firefox is up to)

I guess I’m lucky almost no one I know is trying to side hustle slop their way into money. I don’t think I would put up with that happily.

Microsoft 365 is a worse name than Microsoft Office.

I think most people are kind of bad with money, and I think that scales with income.

I think a lot about some old coworkers (six figure salary). We all wanted to go out for a party after work. A bunch of then paid like $80 for a car. I paid $3 for a subway ride. Got there at the same time.

Maybe that’s not so much “bad at money” exactly as have incomprehensible to me values.

Been pretty happy with Linux for the past year or two.

A few minor problems here and there. I was struggling to figure out how to adjust the screen brightness (pop!_os defaults). Found a command line tool to adjust gamma - my girlfriend was a little baffled. Then I realized I should just adjust the brightness on the display itself, on the hardware.

I feel like every retro I’ve attended has been a farce.

“What went bad? We said doing it this way would be harder and more risk prone. Management insisted we do it that way, and it took longer than and caused a site outage.”

"What should we do differently?’

“Listen to the team next time”

“That won’t happen”

I fundamentally disagree that users should not be allowed to install whatever they want from wherever they want.

You can install whatever dodgy file from wherever you want. I (and many others) don’t think that should be the default

There’s definitely a lot of cargo cult* thinking in software. People don’t understand the why of things but they want the results. That’s why most “agile” I’ve seen is a waste of time.

*Is there a less problematic phrase for this?

I’ve wasted entire days with people like that because they couldn’t be fucking arsed reading error messages and figuring things out by themselves.

I’ve had a couple interview tasks that are like “clone this repo and run it. Try to do [action]. Tell us any errors you find and how to fix them”

One of them was some sort of redux app, and the problem was a state mutation. Another one, the CSS had some weird so stuff rendered crazy. Both were pretty easy to track down and fix. You could probably also do something that’s like an error thrown, but people would probably just feed that into an AI now.

One of the guys I worked with said be prefers the chatbot because stack overflow always made him feel stupid when he’d ask for help. The emotional dimension is big for some people.

I just recommend checking things from the live boot environment. I found out once that some things didn’t work (HDMI , Ethernet, Wi-Fi) only after installing, and it was a hassle. Ended up switching to a different distro that did work out of the box.

The worst is when people don’t know how the system works, and then won’t listen to answers

Like I was at a job and product was going on about “our system has no concept of project owner. We have all these projects but there’s nothing unifying them under a single owner. We need to build this!”

I was like “… what? That’s just not true. There’s a “company” object that does that. It’s got a foreign key with project in the database. I guess it’s a weird name but it’s there”

It took several back and forths over multiple meetings. They eventually got on the same page and I saved us doing a whole useless project, but they did insist I rename it to “account” in the database and code. I would’ve rather left it because that could’ve been dicey, but alas. (The rename did go out fine, but I had to go looking for every reference.)

I know it may be hard to believe if you only browse Lemmy (like myself), but the average person actually likes these so-called “AI” tools or at least a significant amount of them do.

This is probably true but makes me sad. I tell all my friends not to use the lie machines but a bunch of people at work use them all the time.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that AI needs to be baked into the browser. They have a robust extension ecosystem for this sort of thing.

For the code, open source is probably the way to go. People should be able to build from source. Otherwise, how do they know you’re not doing something shady. Open source is generally a net improvement on security, assuming people actually look at it.

For screenshots, first fix it so the screenshots render nicely on narrow displays.

Would probably need to be open source to be trustworthy. Running a random executable from the Internet seems dicey.

Needs more screenshots. The two that are on the site don’t render great on mobile. Can only see a small portion.

I’m unclear how you find another user and verify who they are.

Website should have a clearer feature list. The user manual wants to download a text file instead of showing it in the browser.

I don’t know if YouTube is full Nazi bar, but it’s pretty close. You shouldn’t go to the Nazi bar just because they have good cocktails and there are some good performers at the open mic.

Sometimes you have to skip things you like. There’s other content and other platforms.

Microsoft doesn’t have to compete very much. They’re not a monopoly, probably, but a strict definition. Apple exists. Linux exists and is better than the terminal hell the average person thinks about. But that’s not enough pressure to make microsoft actually try to appeal to customers. Most people are basically stuck.

We should break up all of these companies that are so big they can coast with shitty products for years.