WTF Bites
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status Annoyed. Facebook has evidently added a new feature. If you switch tabs away from FB for too long, when you come back, it auto-refreshes.
HEY! I wanted to continue from where I was!
So many things in modern apps / websites make me go: you know, this really would be a lot less aggravating to use if you just didn’t do that. It’s quite impressive how much time is being spent developing negative value features.
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@topspin they're not negative value to social media because they'll get you to see new ads (for which they've taken 2x payment, first for the ones you didn't quite see the last time and now for this time)
In any case, this sort of reading is
you are supposed to scroll and scroll and not look away because then you might not see their ads.
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status Annoyed. Facebook has evidently added a new feature. If you switch tabs away from FB for too long, when you come back, it auto-refreshes.
HEY! I wanted to continue from where I was!
This happens to me only when using the "Memory saver" feature in Chrome/Edge.
More often than not, the timeline just resets in the infiniscroll instead with no indication I'm actually back at the beginning.
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status Annoyed. Facebook has evidently added a new feature. If you switch tabs away from FB for too long, when you come back, it auto-refreshes.
HEY! I wanted to continue from where I was!
But does it refresh under your cursor just as you are clicking a notification?
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status Annoyed. Facebook has evidently added a new feature. If you switch tabs away from FB for too long, when you come back, it auto-refreshes.
HEY! I wanted to continue from where I was!
But does it refresh under your cursor just as you are clicking a notification?
That's more of a specialty of the site that's trying to steal the logo of a display server.
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status Annoyed. Facebook
welltheresyourproblem.heic
has evidently added a new feature. If you switch tabs away from FB for too long, when you come back, it auto-refreshes.
Including ads, right? One more page impression. It's an ad delivery network
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they're not negative value to social media because they'll get you to see new ads (
That's because with "social media" you're the product. But the complaint also applies for actual products where "treat the user like garbage" shouldn't be one of the goals.
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they're not negative value to social media because they'll get you to see new ads (
That's because with "social media" you're the product. But the complaint also applies for actual products where "treat the user like garbage" shouldn't be one of the goals.
The specific claim about long scrolling things reloading and losing your place is mostly the socials, though… haven’t seen many other apps do that.
But I’ll grant that there’s a ton of shitty other apps out there for any number of reasons why they are shitty and/or user-hostile and whose creators/maintainers should never be let near software again.
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Status: On Sunday I visited my mother. While I was there, she asked me to show her something on the computer. She had been sent an invite to a zoom meeting today and wanted to know how that works. She had already written down the insanely long link (to take part directly) and the meeting code / password. So I told her: oh, that's really easy, you needn't have written that down. (And typing that link would have been basically impossible to do without typos anyway.) Just click the link in the email, it'll open the browser. From there, click once more and it'll open zoom. You don't need the codes, the link does all that.
So goes the theory. Now I went to demonstrate it, shouldn't take more than 3 minutes. I start the computer and click thunderbird for mail. It takes surprisingly long to start. I click the link and wait. And wait. Once Firefox has finally popped up, I click to start zoom and nothing happens. I start task manager to see what's going on. Even though I'm logged into the desktop, the thing is apparently busy installing updates, fucking up everything. First Windows update whatever whatever takes up 100% CPU, then there's 30% CPU spent in the kernel in DPCs, there is a nice process called "Microsoft Content" which even has the MS logo, some Microsoft Edge updating thingy, the Microsoft malware scanning thing, who knows what else, later on bottle-necking on IO instead of CPU...
I don't want your fucking Microsoft Edge to begin with, just nuke it. And "Microsoft Content"? Fuck off! Why is all this shit not installing in the background. Like, actually in the background, so that the computer stays usable for what its actual purpose is. Don't you have, like, a scheduler in your kernel that could make the user experience a little bitnicer?
I'm not exaggerating, this "should take 3 minutes to show you" took literally half an hour of the computer not being usable. Fucking 3 trillion dollar company.Once it's finally open, Zoom itself installs an update, which takes a minute instead of an eternity, and it works.
And then comes the icing on the cake, which is somebody else's WTF: All of this would have been easy, even for my mother, if it hadn't taken forever. Comes today, she tries it and it doesn't work. "What do you mean it doesn't work?". Since this is already a problem with video conferencing and just describing a problem over the phone sucks, I instead have her video her computer screen over the phone camera to see what's going on. And yes, it's not working and she's not doing anything wrong. When she clicks the link in Firefox, nothing opens, unlike two days ago. So I tell her to just open the start menu and start it manually. There's no more zoom entry there. There was one Sunday, I checked. Type zoom into the search, nothing shows up. Wait, there's some "zoom_really_long_string_of_garbage.exe" entry under the "apps" category. Click that? Nothing happens. I'm not sure yet if that's the zoom app and it somehow fucked up the name and start menu entry, or if that was actually the installer it found from ages ago in the downloads folder. Will have to check next time. Yikes! Where did everything go?
So instead click the link to use zoom in the browser. Enter meeting code / password, it finally loads. And there's a popup from Windows Firewall.
My mother was just about to say "should I close that" and dismiss it before I could stop her with "noooooo". I'm not sure how to fix it again if she had blocked it. So letting the fucking thing through the useless firewall and it finally works.
So much for "this is easy". And actually none of this was her fault. Somebody else apparently had the same problem that the Zoom app just fucking disappeared into nirvana. (3 days ago, so I guess Zoom's updater nuked itself. And no, my mother's computer is running Windows 10, not 7.)I am literally this close
to saying: fuck it, you're getting get a Mac.
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@topspin I'm not sure why the “thick” zoom app even exists. It's the web version wrapped in electron anyway, so it can just run in the browser directly, which generally works after you decline the option to install it.
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@Bulb Web pages are sandboxed and transmit limited telemetry.
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@topspin I'm not sure why the “thick” zoom app even exists. It's the web version wrapped in electron anyway, so it can just run in the browser directly, which generally works after you decline the option to install it.
I'm not sure, but the full app doesn't have the firewall issue (I think? Maybe I just forgot) and for some reason I couldn't quite discern from the web page, the web version only offered to connect with audio. Couldn't see any video button, which definitely worked with the app. It also didn't really look quite the same to me as the app, but whatever.
But that's the best I could discern quickly, and since she was already running late, she just clicked that. No idea actually what she needs that meeting for, but I assume it'll be fine without video.
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@topspin I didn't use zoom for a while, but I think video worked in the web version just fine.
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I am literally this close
to saying: fuck it, you're getting get a Mac.I guess you'd just substitute one class of problems for another. I got my mother an Ubuntu with XFCE4 ever since her Mac Classic became too small because she didn't understand the concept of "documents" and kept appending everything she wordprocessed to The Only Document Ever. Everything is nailed down in docks, no icons on the desktop that you could accidentally delete or put somewhere unexpected, only the simplest software installed, and yet she had a shouting match with my sister these days because she complained that "every time you visit, my mail program is weird!!!" and it turned out someone (in all likelihood she herself) hid the message view in Claws Mail which I didn't even know was a thing and she couldn't figure out you can double-click instead of single-click a mail in the inbox which would have just made it work.
Sometimes I don't want to live on this planet any more.
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I'm not sure, but the full app doesn't have the firewall issue (I think? Maybe I just forgot) and for some reason I couldn't quite discern from the web page, the web version only offered to connect with audio. Couldn't see any video button, which definitely worked with the app. It also didn't really look quite the same to me as the app, but whatever.
The app probably has suitable metadata descriptors set to avoid all the problems with just using the straight web version. It's the sort of thing for which having an app version actually makes some sense.
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status Annoyed. Facebook has evidently added a new feature. If you switch tabs away from FB for too long, when you come back, it auto-refreshes.
HEY! I wanted to continue from where I was!
Yeah, it's annoying, but probably less so than before this where your feed would update like once per day even if you hard refreshed.
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So much for "this is easy".
It would have been under Linux
And no, my mother's computer is running Windows 10, not 7.)
:found_your_problem.jpg:
I am literally this close
to saying: fuck it, you're getting get a Mac.That would work too
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@Atazhaia As an additional
they were also offering a "wallmounted power adapter" as an option. I guess in case you don't want to be able to charge the laptop while out travelling.I "mounted" one power adapter behind my writing desk:
That's the adapter which came with my notebook. Later on, I bought a cheap adapter for carrying around.Btw, the side panel of the writing desk has a storage capacity of 2 TB.
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@topspin I didn't use zoom for a while, but I think video worked in the web version just fine.
For simple versions of "fine".
Because it is their low quality video crap which eats up lots of CPU.
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Beijing? I doubt it. That's not were the factories are.
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(from days ago, so not a spoiler)
I tried.
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@Zecc isn't an empty list by definition in the correct order?
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@Arantor But what if they did it the 1990ies Microsoft style, i.e. the
Listis eithernullor has one or more items?
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@BernieTheBernie this is the 2020s, we can’t possibly look at an uncool company’s work from 30 years ago, we must reinvent the wheel from scratch but more slowly and with new frameworks.
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@Zecc isn't an empty list by definition in the correct order?
I think a certain cat must be involved...
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@Arantor Some of which are made by the same uncool company, but now the uncool company >3 open source or some such shit.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
@Arantor Some of which are made by the same uncool company, but now the uncool company >3 open source or some such shit.
They hated open source and said bad things about open source for years, then they figured out how to profit from open source so now they <3 open source.
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@Gern_Blaanston said in WTF Bites:
they figured out how to profit from open source so now they >3 open source.
They... 4 it? 5?
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@Gern_Blaanston said in WTF Bites:
they figured out how to profit from open source so now they >3 open source.
They... 4 it? 5?
They definitely 2 it.
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@Gern_Blaanston said in WTF Bites:
they figured out how to profit from open source so now they >3 open source.
They... 4 it? 5?
They definitely 2 it.
Nah, that's <3 not >3.
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..
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I'm not sure. Are we talking about anal? 😕
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@Gern_Blaanston said in WTF Bites:
they figured out how to profit from open source so now they >3 open source.
They... 4 it? 5?
They definitely 2 it.
Nah, that's <3 not >3.
Oops.
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@PleegWat more like 3<
That’s certainly how I feel whenever MS is involved.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
I'm not sure. Are we talking about anal? 😕
Number 2 is definitely < 3.
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@Gern_Blaanston said in WTF Bites:
they figured out how to profit from open source so now they >3 open source.
They... 4 it? 5?
They definitely 2 it.
They think they 1 but they haven't.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
I'm not sure. Are we talking about anal? 😕
This is about Microsoft, so it definitely involves backdoored shit.
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What do you think happens if you call System.Type.GetType (.нет 7) with syntactically invalid type name and the second argument,
throwOnError, set tofalse?It throws
System.IO.FileLoadExceptionwith messageThe given assembly name was invalid.. What did you expect?
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Got a JIRA ticket assigned to me where the only requirements are a link to a half-hour long meeting recording video.
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@error bonus points if at the end of the video, it’s even less clear than before what the requirements are.
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@Arantor double bonus points if the video ends with "Do the needful"
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@TimeBandit triple bonus points if the video is auto-deleted half way through when you're watching it...
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Got a JIRA ticket assigned to me where the only requirements are a link to a half-hour long meeting recording video.
Read this at first as the resolution you were going to do is provide a link to the submitter to WTFM. Thought this was extremely copacetic. I may need to get away from helldesk for a while.
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@TimeBandit triple bonus points if the video is auto-deleted half way through when you're watching it...
That's best case. "Status: CLOSED, no requirements stated."
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Got a JIRA ticket assigned to me where the only requirements are a link to a half-hour long meeting recording video.
I asked for clarification, and got myself invited to another meeting.
At least this time I'll have the opportunity to ask questions.
