The minor rants thread.
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@remi said in The minor rants thread.:
(have you tried googling a lengthy error message when you have to type it by hand in your phone?)
Yes. I usually keep only keywords.
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@Tsaukpaetra btw, have I already said how I hate stuff that's called exactly like a regular (and very common) word?
Googling for information about the "nouveau" kernel module (and getting relevant results) is almost as hard as googling about my ISP called "Free."
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@remi said in The minor rants thread.:
@Tsaukpaetra btw, have I already said how I hate stuff that's called exactly like a regular (and very common) word?
Googling for information about the "nouveau" kernel module (and getting relevant results) is almost as hard as googling about my ISP called "Free."
Now there's a way to keep potential customers from finding negative reviews.
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Fuck GOG installer. In fact, cancel every turdbucket that still uses temp files for their exceedingly clever concept of "installashons". That is all.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The minor rants thread.:
still uses temp files for their exceedingly clever concept of "installashons".
I remember I had one program that wouldn't uninstall because the uninstaller relied on a log of the operations performed on install, which it saved in
%TEMP%, which had since been emptied.Obviously, it should have used the Recycle Bin.
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@error said in The minor rants thread.:
a log of the operations performed on install, which it saved in %TEMP%
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I have been really upset with the Toys For Tots situation this year. I like the idea of helping while also sharing a hobby that's important to me. Not even being fired from a job for donating one year has stopped me from doing so. This year, though, God damn is somebody trying to.
I can't drop toys off at Toys R Us because Mitt Romney murdered them last year. I can't donate money through a payroll deduction because state government delisted them. I had been dropping off toys at fundraiser events run by the local retirement community but they're still super locked down. I can't sign up as a drop off point because I don't have a physical storefront for my business.
The bit about payroll deductions still makes me angry. When they were delisted, I reached out to both TFT and payroll about it. Both completely blew me off. Twice. Really shocked me at the time, to be honest.
So, thinking ahead, I reached out to an online toy store I've done alot of business with and suggested perhaps they could add a checkbox to their checkout process that would route orders to their local collection box (at their warehouse), thinking it would help them move excess inventory as well. Nope. They want me to pay to have them shipped halfway across the country to my house. You know, where I have nowhere to drop them off.
Meanwhile, TFT has started nagging me to donate books in a separate drive. I'd rather donate toys but I can do books if they're serious about that. So I start browsing online book stores and think "wait a minute, where am I going to drop off these books?" Turns out they're only accepting donations through UPS Store locations...and none of the locations within an hour of me are participating.
I don't like being pushed to donate money. That turns it into a cold financial transaction. VISA, MasterCard, or hit the road. I wonder if they make kids reenact the mess hall scene from Oliver Twist too.
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@Zenith said in The minor rants thread.:
I have been really upset with the Toys For Tots situation this year. I like the idea of helping while also sharing a hobby that's important to me. Not even being fired from a job for donating one year has stopped me from doing so. This year, though, God damn is somebody trying to.
I can't drop toys off at Toys R Us because Mitt Romney murdered them last year. I can't donate money through a payroll deduction because state government delisted them. I had been dropping off toys at fundraiser events run by the local retirement community but they're still super locked down. I can't sign up as a drop off point because I don't have a physical storefront for my business.
The bit about payroll deductions still makes me angry. When they were delisted, I reached out to both TFT and payroll about it. Both completely blew me off. Twice. Really shocked me at the time, to be honest.
So, thinking ahead, I reached out to an online toy store I've done alot of business with and suggested perhaps they could add a checkbox to their checkout process that would route orders to their local collection box (at their warehouse), thinking it would help them move excess inventory as well. Nope. They want me to pay to have them shipped halfway across the country to my house. You know, where I have nowhere to drop them off.
Meanwhile, TFT has started nagging me to donate books in a separate drive. I'd rather donate toys but I can do books if they're serious about that. So I start browsing online book stores and think "wait a minute, where am I going to drop off these books?" Turns out they're only accepting donations through UPS Store locations...and none of the locations within an hour of me are participating.
I don't like being pushed to donate money. That turns it into a cold financial transaction. VISA, MasterCard, or hit the road. I wonder if they make kids reenact the mess hall scene from Oliver Twist too.
From an effectiveness perspective it's generally best to donate cash than things. I donate to actually help others, not to make myself feel like I've helped others. (second sentence not meant to sound as harsh as it did on rereading it but it's an accurate description of my outlook on it)
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@mikehurley said in The minor rants thread.:
@Zenith said in The minor rants thread.:
I have been really upset with the Toys For Tots situation this year. I like the idea of helping while also sharing a hobby that's important to me. Not even being fired from a job for donating one year has stopped me from doing so. This year, though, God damn is somebody trying to.
I can't drop toys off at Toys R Us because Mitt Romney murdered them last year. I can't donate money through a payroll deduction because state government delisted them. I had been dropping off toys at fundraiser events run by the local retirement community but they're still super locked down. I can't sign up as a drop off point because I don't have a physical storefront for my business.
The bit about payroll deductions still makes me angry. When they were delisted, I reached out to both TFT and payroll about it. Both completely blew me off. Twice. Really shocked me at the time, to be honest.
So, thinking ahead, I reached out to an online toy store I've done alot of business with and suggested perhaps they could add a checkbox to their checkout process that would route orders to their local collection box (at their warehouse), thinking it would help them move excess inventory as well. Nope. They want me to pay to have them shipped halfway across the country to my house. You know, where I have nowhere to drop them off.
Meanwhile, TFT has started nagging me to donate books in a separate drive. I'd rather donate toys but I can do books if they're serious about that. So I start browsing online book stores and think "wait a minute, where am I going to drop off these books?" Turns out they're only accepting donations through UPS Store locations...and none of the locations within an hour of me are participating.
I don't like being pushed to donate money. That turns it into a cold financial transaction. VISA, MasterCard, or hit the road. I wonder if they make kids reenact the mess hall scene from Oliver Twist too.
From an effectiveness perspective it's generally best to donate cash than things. I donate to actually help others, not to make myself feel like I've helped others. (second sentence not meant to sound as harsh as it did on rereading it but it's an accurate description of my outlook on it)
Well, Toys for Tots is for giving toys as Christmas presents to underprivileged kids, so in this case giving things makes sense. I'd say that it definitely helps, though obviously in a different way than other types of charity.
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Downloaded yesterday the latest Nvidia driver for my new GPU. Why the fuck is it SIX HUNDREDS fucking MB??? For a driver!
Probably because the package also contains the "GeForce Experience" thingy that's equally likely to be gamer wanking material ("oh look I've got a customised profile where I can get 0.01 more fps in that specific game!") or adware ("please sell your first born for a chance to buy our next-gen GPU") (inb4
), but almost guaranteed to be 100% useless.Thankfully there is an option to not install it. But then why the fuck isn't there an option to not download it?????
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@remi
They need the extra upload traffic to mask their use of all those 3080s that got purchased “by bots” to control the world cryptocurrency markets
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@remi On the assortment of "nv*" DLLs it installs without Experience take about that much.
nvoptix.dllalone takes 148 MB.
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@remi Related: My Radeon software notified me of a new driver update a few days ago, so I tried updating it. It got about 90% through "checking compatibility" and then hard locked the whole system, forcing me to hold the power button down to shut down and restart. So I tried again, this time with nothing else running. Same thing. I tried deleting and redownloading the installer (1.15 GB, tabarnak), and again it froze in the same place. Looks like I will not be installing the 20.9.1 update.
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@boomzilla I also want to make sure it's good stuff being donated. @mikehurley may not know that the distribution chain has utterly collapsed here in the last several years. Bare shelves were the norm even before COVID-19 provided an excuse. If TFT sends shoppers to stores, they may end up donating the equivalent of lima beans and pig knuckles in a food drive. I've never been able to get an answer out of them about their sourcing strategy with respect to the monetary donations. The part about having to jump through hoops, like the hoop jumping is more important than wanting to help, irritates me but there's more to it than my inconvenience or self-satisfaction.
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@hungrier said in The minor rants thread.:
the installer (1.15 GB, tabarnak)
Wait, does that include a copy of Windows XP or something?
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@remi said in The minor rants thread.:
Probably because the package also contains the "GeForce Experience" thingy that's equally likely to be gamer wanking material ("oh look I've got a customised profile where I can get 0.01 more fps in that specific game!") or adware ("please sell your first born for a chance to buy our next-gen GPU") (inb4 ), but almost guaranteed to be 100% useless.
To be fair I've never seen it push an ad, it stays out of the way until there's a driver update available IME.
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@loopback0 That's what it used to do. Now it hooks every app and if it looks like it might be a game it runs Chromium and overlays animated "Press Shift-F2 to open GeForce Experience", "Press Shift-F2 to launch Ansel", "Press Shift-F2 to run Optix", and "Press Shift-F2 to stream with ShadowPlay" banners.
Oh, and if you elect to install just the drivers, now it does that with a "Press Shift-F2 to learn how to install the full driver package" banner. And Ansel too.
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@TwelveBaud Mine doesn't do any of that, although that's probably because I've turned the in-game overlay off.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The minor rants thread.:
@remi On the assortment of "nv*" DLLs it installs without Experience take about that much.
nvoptix.dllalone takes 148 MB.TBH I'm not even surprised by that, and it may well be that the full 600 MB are indeed required for the drivers. Still, that to me is just one more manifestation of the laziness and sloppiness and [insert rant] of modern development. I can't see how you possibly need something that large to show pixels on a screen.
But then again, I downloaded some Dolby-whatever app to get 5.1 sound working (spoiler: it does... more or less!) and that thing was also 100 MB. And it included some sort of splashy shiny slowy main window (probably in some variant of JS) that's almost totally entirely useless.
I know that having a low bandwidth is not really the norm nowadays, except... it still kind of actually is, in many parts of the world (and I'm not talking shit holes, unless you define a shit hole by its network connection, which honestly isn't that bad of a definition...).
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@remi said in The minor rants thread.:
I can't see how you possibly need something that large to show pixels on a screen.
Not that it can stand in the way of a rant, but...
Much like what The Old New Thing tells us, those drivers are full of compatibility shims to draw those pixels in a very specific way, from architecture and model fixes in software down to API versions (and we have many of those - DirectX 9/10.x/11.x/12, OpenGL 2/3/4, Vulkan 1/2), Windows goblins, engine bugs and specific game workarounds.
One important thing about those fixes is that you can't have long chains of conditionals on how to draw each frame. You have to determine all the facts on init and then run only that particular thing. This results in metric fucktons of mostly copy-pasted code, but one that mostly stays on the hot path.
As to how many legacy cruft they support - currently 600 series (Kepler 40nm) is still getting the latest drivers. It was released >8 years ago. Since then there have been 3 new architectures and 2 refreshes. I couldn't possibly tell how much actually gets fixed (every major driver release contains tens of pages changelog), but on paper 8 years of support... well, it's a lot.
A game released in {not_current_year} expects certain behavior, which what with gamedev being the second worst place to work after EA (
) is most likely broken in some way. NV is likely to fix their side, because they both can afford to and can't afford not to. Gamedev is usually the exact opposite.Then NV releases some new and hot (sometimes literally) architecture, but the game is long since done and selling for $3.99 on some GAME2PWN or something. It actually amazes me at some level how those old games have all sorts of problems, but when it comes to drawing pixels, it's all there... mostly because great part of that was never their responsibility to begin with.
Finally, nobody cares that, for example, a piss-poor GT 710 can barely move the framebuffer around, much less do any tray-racing. That
nvoptix.dllis going to be there anyway. And it's also installed on Win 7, which can't into RTX at all. And some old crap can't do HW video encoding either, but thatnvenc.dllis also going to be there anyway. You can opt not to install PhysX, but, for example, Steam will install it for you anyway if the game needs it (even if you wouldn't select the settings that actually do). So it's going to be there anyway.
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@TwelveBaud said in The minor rants thread.:
@loopback0 That's what it used to do. Now it hooks every app and if it looks like it might be a game it runs Chromium and overlays animated "Press Shift-F2 to open GeForce Experience", "Press Shift-F2 to launch Ansel", "Press Shift-F2 to run Optix", and "Press Shift-F2 to stream with ShadowPlay" banners.
Oh, and if you elect to install just the drivers, now it does that with a "Press Shift-F2 to learn how to install the full driver package" banner. And Ansel too.
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@TwelveBaud said in The minor rants thread.:
That's what it used to do. Now it hooks every app and if it looks like it might be a game it runs Chromium and overlays animated
I have literally never seen this occur.
Perhaps I need to download newer drivers than the latest from the official website?
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I write a lot of Java and Typescript these days. It's not uncommon that I go to do a lambda / arrow function in either one. It takes me way too long to realize that the error the IDE is complaining about is for using
->instead of=>or vice versa.
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I have a Spider Solitaire game on Switch. Whenever it starts, it requires me to press L and R on the controllers, whichever controller I'm using. It's one of if not the only game I have that does this, and it's kind of annoying. But it's even more annoying because the game can be played entirely with the touch screen. Not only that, but if you do the thing and then disconnect the controllers from the system, it makes you do it again. So, despite being a game that can easily be played on a touchscreen tablet, it forces me to either keep the joycons attached to the Switch, making it a bit heavier and more awkward to hold, or disconnect them and leave them powered on, wasting their internal batteries.
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@hungrier Almost every Switch game I've played requires that, simply because it's the "wake up and pair" button/combination -- ensuring that the controller and/or joycons Player 1 intends to use are powered up, active, and (for joycons) correctly matched. Some third-party games use + instead; for those, if the controller you happen to grab happens to be powered off, you need to wake it up with L+R first before pressing +. That said, if you can play it without any controller at all, it seems stupid to require them.
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@TwelveBaud I can get the connect screen to come up with other games, but only under contrived circumstances: I have the joycons detached and the console in sleep mode, then turn it on by pushing the power button and tapping the touch screen. Normally I would wake up the Switch with the home button on the joycon, and never see the L+R prompt, just "press the A button three times."
What I'm complaining about is different. Unlike any other game, the card game makes you reconnect the controllers when starting the game from the main menu, even if they're already connected. Games that need a controller don't do it, and it would still be annoying if they did. But this has the added factor of the particular game being entirely controllable with just the touch screen, not requiring the controllers at all except for that prompt.
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@hungrier Ah, that screen. I think one of the requirements for certification is that games verify that the controllers are properly connected and identified. Most first-party games do that by having "Press L+R to Start" on their title screen; that key combo is enough to make sure that one player has both cons awake and correctly matched to each other, so there's no need to pop the OS unless additional players are added or removed. I also see that screen when switching from single player to multiplayer or back again, or when my joycons die in the middle of a game. I'm guessing the developer is required to ensure the controllers are connected throughout all gameplay and decided to just pop the OS all the time, and either didn't know about or didn't care about Nintendo's One Weird Trick.
Don't get me wrong, I do feel your pain. I just know that there's a (misguided) reason why it's pushed on you.
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Recently I've been playing Spider-Man on PS4. Quite a fun game with excellent movement mechanics and lots of stuff to do. One of the mini-games is circuit puzzles that play kind of like Pipe Mania, in which the later puzzles have a voltage element where you insert
+xand-yconduits that increase or decrease the voltage, to hit the target of the puzzle. The problem with this is that the numbers on the conduits are tiny:
This is a low-res screenshot but it's pretty representative of what I see when looking at the screen from a normal distance. The actual and target voltages are big and readable; the labels are small but still readable; the controls on the bottom are fine; the numbers of available elements (next to each element in the inventory on the left) are fine. But if you look at the inventory on this screen, the red and green items have labels with their voltage in the centre, which are microscopic.
But wait, all is not lost! The game, being a major AAA title released fairly recently, has accessibility options. Surely they would have an option to increase the size of the number labels that even I, with (glasses-assisted) normal vision, struggle to read on screen. Lets see:
I can increase the size of the subtitles, but they're plenty big enough for me. I can also skip the puzzles entirely, but I don't want that. I just want to have the number labels be legible.
The icons could easily fit a larger label: instead of
have something like 
or even 
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@hungrier the devs obviously only tested on 720p screens. 😇
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@Tsaukpaetra Where did they find 720p screens in 2018, the dumpster behind the abandoned museum where the stuff was too old for the regular museum?
But anyway that's probably sort of what happened; they were testing it on monitors at normal monitor distance, and never considered the possibility that
font might be a bit hard to read on a TV screen across the room. But even stranger still, they have a "bigger text" option but only for text that's already big enough
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@boomzilla Yeah. Sometimes you take a break from spinning webs (any size) and catching thieves just like flies, to tinker around as lab assistant Peter Parker
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@hungrier said in The minor rants thread.:
But even stranger still, they have a "bigger text" option but only for text that's already big enough
This annoyed me so much in God of War. The default subtitles size is okayish, but the GUI text is so incredibly tiny that I've had trouble reading it from 2 meters on a 60" screen. There's an option to make text larger, but it only applies to subtitles. You can't scale UI at all. And not due to lack of space either - most text fields are scrollable anyway!
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The minor rants thread.:
Then NV releases some new and hot (sometimes literally) architecture, but the game is long since done and selling for $3.99 on some GAME2PWN or something. It actually amazes me at some level how those old games have all sorts of problems, but when it comes to drawing pixels, it's all there... mostly because great part of that was never their responsibility to begin with.
Unless it's Shogun: Total War. (The first one.) Then every mouse-click happens at the camera origin instead of wherever you're clicking, when you're on the battle map.
(This could be a bug with whatever ratty pirated version I was playing at the time, but it vexed me most greatly and made the game unplayable. Which is a pity, because Shogun was at a very comfy level of detail for me, and later games in the series just kept getting more complicated.)
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@hungrier said in The minor rants thread.:
@Tsaukpaetra Where did they find 720p screens in 2018, the dumpster behind the abandoned museum where the stuff was too old for the regular museum?
My Mom has a 720p plasma TV from years ago as her living room TV. Still looks great!
It's probably too much to hope that a console game QA team does at least some of its work on a TV that's 8-10 feet away. :(
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@hungrier said in The minor rants thread.:
@Tsaukpaetra Where did they find 720p screens in 2018, the dumpster behind the abandoned museum where the stuff was too old for the regular museum?
It's 2020, and any 32" tv sold in Brazil is still 720P. And at viewing distance, I don't notice that much difference from my 4k 42" tv in the other room
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If you've been following my recent coding help threads you'll know that I'm working on taking user entered structured outlines and generating PDF documents with them. We've been getting lots of tickets that say, "spacing issue on p. 2."
OK, but...WHAT IS THE ACTUAL FUCKING ISSUE YOU TWIT?!?!?!?1
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What, are you blind? Can't you see that the left margin is 0.003 inch too narrow?
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@Zerosquare said in The minor rants thread.:
What, are you blind? Can't you see that the left margin is 0.003 inch too narrow?
Get it right!
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@Zerosquare said in The minor rants thread.:
What, are you blind? Can't you see that the left margin is 0.003 inch too narrow?
I don't even bother looking when the report is that vague. Not that they even bothered to include a screenshot. In theory they were comparing migrated stuff from their legacy system in our new system, so if they'd given me two shots of the same thing from each system it probably would have been obvious what they were talking about.
Fortunately, there's someone on the customer side tracking down all this bullshit, which greatly reduces the odds of me inappropriately ranting at lusers.
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@boomzilla said in The minor rants thread.:
greatly reduces the odds of me inappropriately ranting at lusers.
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@lolwhat said in The minor rants thread.:
@boomzilla said in The minor rants thread.:
inappropriatelyranting at lusers
I mean...it wouldn't be a good long term strategy. Our contract is up for renewal this year.
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@boomzilla said in The minor rants thread.:
@lolwhat said in The minor rants thread.:
@boomzilla said in The minor rants thread.:
inappropriatelyranting at lusers
I mean...it wouldn't be a good long term strategy. Our contract is up for renewal this year.
Ah. So you get to save it up for:
a) You know they're not going to renew
b) You know they're now locked in, moohaha
c) You're leaving tomorrow (retire, new job, etc)
d) All of the above
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@dcon when we started this project...ummm...about 15 years ago I said that there was enough stuff here for me to work until I retire. I think that was probably an accurate assessment. The customer really likes us and they contractually require stuff like, "No more than 40 hours worked per week, except in extraordinary circumstances, and then you have to get approval." The few times that's happened they've actually paid us for the hours over 40.
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Status: Got off hour+ long call with provider teir2 tech support because their "sync service" isn't syncing. "It's all cloud controlled" they tell me. Whatever.
It does have the ability to install a Windows service to do the needful!
However the program that does the actual syncing is the "launcher" application, and the service's only job is to tell the launcher to run.
Their assumption is that there will be a user that gets smacked in the face with a UAC prompt when they first log in and just shrug it away. Which is the Launcher application.
The sync service is not capable of running the sync application without a desktop session I guess?
MOTHERFUCKERS do you understand what the point of a Windows Service is?!?
I tried relating this situation to how Windows Update works: It will update whenever the fuck it wants without the user doing anything because of the Service, and you only configure the service with the
Control PanelSettings App. You don't need theControl PanelSettings App running in order for Windows Update to work, but it's there for status info and configuration.Anyways, this software does not do that. It apparently requires both the service and the launcher program running in order to work. Not work properly, to work at all.
Anyways, It's installed on a computer that's not normally logged into, but is always on (where other "always needs to be running" programs live). Normally the hackaround would be to launch the program via Scheduled Task.
This program apparently does not want to run as a scheduled task, or the Task Scheduler is being stupid and can't figure out "Hey, it's time to run this program. Do it!". Naturally it runs if told manually.
The fact that I'm even doing this at all is stupid, but even more infuriating is that it's just not working unattended. You know, what the service should be doing. But no, the service runs happily all alone, doing nothing of note, while Task Scheduler sucks its dick running OneDrive installer but not the launcher program.
Fuckin' donuts...
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You can easily solve this problem by enabling autologon for the Admin account and disabling UAC
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@Zerosquare said in The minor rants thread.:
You can easily solve this problem by enabling autologon for the Admin account and disabling UAC
Yeah fuck that noise. I created a WinPE environment that specifically runs this one piece-of-shit tray icon application.
They tempt me to do the same with this crap...
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What are you complaining about? It's completely automated! Just click Sync Now!
