WTF Bites
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Microsoft Word has templates to create a new document, so you'd naively assume you can use a template to create the most basic thing: a simple letter. But of course you'd be wrong.
Word has all this garbage:Besides an empty document, they even abused their templates to put a fucking tutorial in it (2nd entry). Or extremely useful things like printing your own fucking calendar, which I'm sure is a thing normal people do regularly.
Even filtering just for letter gives this:
What is this garbage?! Who sends letters like this?
I just want a plain and simple letter in DIN format so I can put the address in the right location to put it in a window envelope. Fold markers optional but appreciated. Like this:I am 100% sure that this simple template would be used more than every other of these stupid things combined, if they bothered to include it. By a huge margin.
But it's $CURRENT_YEAR and they're a small company, yada yada.
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@topspin mine has basic letter templates. Do they show if you search in English?
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The “document as tutorial” is an interesting concept because you get to be really interactive about it, and I know I’ve seen other things do it, e.g. Scrivener.
But the broader case of “who uses these” is the same group that used to use WordArt back in the 1990s, because they wanted to show off and had zero artistic or design flair of their own to execute anything even remotely tasteful.
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I know I’ve seen other things do it, e.g. Scrivener.
I don't know what else you've seen do it, but I've seen Inkscape do it.
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@Zecc I haven’t used Inkscape in many years, probably before they added that as a feature. Vector drawing is an area I try to avoid.
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
@topspin mine has basic letter templates. Do they show if you search in English?
No results for "letter".
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
@topspin mine has basic letter templates. Do they show if you search in English?
No results for "letter".
Classic Microsoft.
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@Arantor fine. Include all this crap because you have tons of employees who can create this shit for your massive user base. But maybe also include the one thing people need. You've had 30 years.
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@topspin it's worse because those templates do exist, it's just they're apparently not visible to everyone for reasons.
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I am 100% sure that this simple template would be used more than every other of these stupid things combined, if they bothered to include it. By a huge margin.
But it's $CURRENT_YEAR and they're a small company, yada yada.
I like the "80s letterhead" best. I'm not sure whether they had this designed by their 17yo intern who imagines that's how letterheads looked in the 80s (perspective—when my son says "this looks so 90s" it's equally likely for the thing in question to look like 1990s or 1700s) or they want to pretend they were a cool&hip company at the time when people at Apple were dropping acid while at Microsoft you wore a bit of unkempt hair with your ironed shirt to be rebellious.
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@LaoC I mean, I guess it looks fine if you intend to send out a kid's birthday party invitations by letter. But then why does it talk about CEOs?
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Because CEOs act like kids?
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@Zerosquare either that or they’re so out of touch they’d find it appropriate.
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@Zerosquare They do now, but IIRC in 80s most of them still acted like adults.
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printing your own fucking calendar, which I'm sure is a thing normal people do regularly.
Boomers, man!
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Besides an empty document, they even abused their templates to put a fucking tutorial in it (2nd entry). Or extremely useful things like printing your own fucking calendar, which I'm sure is a thing normal people do regularly.
Hmm, JANUAHR... What language is that?
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I just want a plain and simple letter in DIN format so I can put the address in the right location to put it in a window envelope.
Let me try!
First off, WTF is "DIN format" so I can know what I'm looking for...
Seems reasonable enough, here's to hoping some German uploaded an English version...
Hrm. Nope. Nobody uploads that kind of template. Closest I got was a letter of resignation or other stuff that doesn't appear to have the specs deliberately in mind for this.
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document as tutorial
That's how vim's tutorial works. You call
vimtutor
, it copies the tutorial into a temporary file then opens it in vim.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
WTF is "DIN format"
DIN is the German variant of ISO. Or, since it's a national standards body, rather the German variant of ANSI. Paper is usually sized DIN A4 in civilized places (it's also ISO 216), but I guess you people use US Legal or US Letter.
With a letter in DIN format, I meant DIN 5008, which describes the layout of the letter, i.e. where to put the address field, date, text, etc. You can see how that looks like in the image linked above. The only reason I care about that is so that I don't have to measure myself how far from the top the address field needs to go such that it's positioned correctly in a windowed envelope. (Of course that would've taken seconds, which is faster than writing a rant, but we're talking about 30+ years of incompetence here.)As far as conventional usage goes, everybody knows what "A4" means, nobody knows what "DIN 5008" is, but they'd still recognize that none of the garbage Word provides is a bog-standard letter template that would fit in an envelope.
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none of the garbage Word provides is a bog-standard letter template that would fit in an envelope.
Be the change you want to see in the world....
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@Zerosquare They do now, but IIRC in 80s most of them still acted like adults.
Not all of them, though. I worked for at least one company in the 80s whose CEO was known to throw temper tantrums.
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document as tutorial
That's how vim's tutorial works. You call
vimtutor
, it copies the tutorial into a temporary file then opens it in vim.If you need a tutorial, you shouldn't be using vim. Go back to your toy editor.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
If you need a tutorial, you shouldn't be using vim.
But without the tutorial, you ain't quitting vim.
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@loopback0 These days, I mostly use gvim. For that, the red X works just like any other program.
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@Zerosquare They do now, but IIRC in 80s most of them still acted like adults.
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"Low"
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(Of course that would've taken seconds, which is faster than writing a rant, but we're talking about 30+ years of incompetence here.)
Really, who would rather press enter six times than rant about Microsoft?
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
If you need a tutorial, you shouldn't be using vim.
But without the tutorial, you ain't quitting vim.
But if you hadn't started the tutorial, would you be using vim at all?
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
If you need a tutorial, you shouldn't be using vim.
But without the tutorial, you ain't quitting vim.
But if you hadn't started the tutorial, would you be using vim at all?
Not deliberately.
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How can something be both? Isn't trendy the opposite of timeless?
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How can something be both? Isn't trendy the opposite of timeless?
"Good style never goes out of fashion"
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@Arantor Right, that's the idea. But "trendy" means it does go in and out of fashion
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@hungrier One assumes they're saying they have both timeless classics as well as trend-chasing products then.
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@Arantor You might assume that, but the whole promo email is about trendy styles.
What's that, I should stop pendantically overanalyzing email ads? What forum do you think this is?
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trendy styles.
I do not wear my optic adaptors correctly, style would never come into play...
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@Arantor Right, that's the idea. But "trendy" means it does go in and out of fashion
Look at you, trying to put logic on marketing blurbs.
Edit.
What's that, I should stop pendantically overanalyzing email ads? What forum do you think this is?
Fairy nuff.
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Status: What?!
fatal error C1060: compiler is out of heap space
Gotta love how useless Firefox's
about:processes
is.Well, at least it's not alone.
Task Manager's performance page:
Task Manager's user page:
Not quite sure if the caches count as used or free, but either way, that sums to ~22.5 GB in use and not 43.5 GB.
I assume the missing 21 GB are telemetry.
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I think I forgot to post this last week. (Otherwise you'll get a )
Good jorb!
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"Or else..."
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I assume the missing 21 GB are telemetry.
No.
They are a backup of the working memory.
Just in case, a byte might fail there.
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
I assume the missing 21 GB are telemetry.
No.
They are a backup of theworking memoryprevious telemetry.
Just in case, a byte might fail there.
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I had a little postgres self-own today.
'Why don't you use the index?'
set enable_seqscan = off
Still won't use the goddamn index.
What actually appened: The database stored dates as integers (unix timestamps), and I did something like this:
WHERE some_date < extract(epoch from '2024-02-08'::timestamp)
What the engine was actually executing was
some_date::double precision < extract(epoch from '2024-02-08'::timestamp)
and there was no index onsome_date::double precision
, only onsome_date
. Extracting epoch returns a double, because it can contain milliseconds, and it only casts upwards to avoid overflow. Everything works as designed, and yet I wonder how many times someone made this bug and didn't fix it, and now it's seq-scanning something in a bank, and they buy more hardware to keep it up.
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@sebastian-galczynski Aren't there calculated indices for such purposes in postgres?
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
@sebastian-galczynski Aren't there calculated indices for such purposes in postgres?
Yes, but you'd have to specify one (on
some_date::double precision
in this case).
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More database wtf. Our highliy credentialed expert, when creating his 12KLOC-stored-procedure-based contraption, also created an audit table logging all changes in most tables. Ok, fine. The problem is that one of these tables contained both:
- a bunch counters which a trigger updated every time something related changed, and that related thing changed quite frequently
- a ~2MB binary blob, because someone was too to use a proper file storage while maitaining real access controls.
The audit mechanism logged all columns, including those left unchanged, on each update. After a few years it resulted in about 500GB of mostly duplicated binary blobs. We decided to completely truncate old logs, because mere cost of storing this in AWS clearly outweighed the benefits. Accidentally, it also resulted in an immediate 10x speedup of everything.
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@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
12KLOC-stored-procedure-based contraption
@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
a ~2MB binary blob
oooooh, this gun be gud
@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
The audit mechanism logged all columns, including those left unchanged
@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
Accidentally, it also resulted in an immediate 10x speedup of everything.
Hooray architecture astronauts!
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Hooray architecture astronauts!
Indeed, he now works for one of the
FAANGFAGMAN companies ;)