Great write-up and great find! You’ll find companies will often try to weasel out of actually honoring ethical programs more than not, but that doesn’t mean give up! If nothing else, the learning will lead to long term education and basically forever employment in various fields.
Chicken fried water heater?
It’s shitfunny because this is a perfect opportunity for apps like this to play into Capitalism and succeed twentyfold.
Open up the app to everyone for free during the hurricane, remove that after hurricane. So many people will go:
So many opportunities for longer-term profits missed by idiocy.
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We know the best ways to suck, even our storms!
I was trying to think of a mental image that was internet-safe to imply something like you’re stuck in deep mud that is pulling your boots off but at least you survived. Or less internet-safe, you’re trying to get home and have no ride and for some reason the weather turned to a storm of actual shit and you’re walking home with shit raining down upon you but you must survive.
It definitely wasn’t scientifically accurate.
Hey, friend. Definitely not saying Windows is better.
That being said, in this example, a UI open dialog that will blindly consume any file fed into it with behavior bad enough to crush the entire computer into absolute uselessness is… let’s just say, not something one would want to run into on a bad day just trying to deal with life stuff.
Now, if one were piping /dev/urandom into the framebuffer expecting to load Firefox, that’s another matter.
Hey, good to know. It was one app that was only available as a Snap. Will look for alternatives.
And jumpers and terminators and make sure your SCSI IDs don’t conflict!
No diss. I read that slot comment above you and went, “yep, yep, yep, makes sense. Man our standards are often dumb.”
Laughed with joy at your comment, because I totally get how foreign this shit is to so many people. It’s like if I walked up to a building engineer asking how they know that iron beam is safe for another 50 years via their skills and I’d just be like “…do what now?”
You know. It’s interesting. I’ve been trying out Debian 12 with KDE Plasma. It actually has been a joy and feels like what Windows 11 should have grown into, had Microsoft actually been designing software with the customer in mind.
…but then there have been times where things so easily critically break until you fix them. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll go mess with kernel code if I have to, so I’m comfortable, but… I just want my computer to work. Windows, for all its shittiness, still keeps working through it like a slow cargo train pushing through a park piled in millions of pancakes.
I had one event the other day where I was installing a Snap app for the first time. Decided rather than installing the Snap package manager because I wanted to avoid Canonical if possible, I’d just manually put it in /opt. Figured out how to edit the KDE “start” menu to add the app using the included GUI tool. Wanted to use the app’s icon. The snap app had an icon embedded in it that Dolphin file manager recognized and displayed.
So I went, “ok, sometimes applications can parse out images from binary files. I’ve seen this work for decades,” so I tell the menu editor to ingest the snap binary for the icon, to see if it will scrape the icon. No icon showed up, so I found a a svg online and assigned that to the icon.
Then I went and saved and launched another application.
GUI slowly started not working and eventually the entire OS locked, even the alt text consoles would not load. Ctrl+alt+backspace was dead, caps lock died, which was when I knew, “he’s dead, Jim.”
Tried rebooting, tried launching that program again, (bearing in mind, not the program I manually added to the “start” menu) and every time the whole OS freezes up. Tried launching apps in different order, launching from command line, etc. When the one app launched that wasn’t the one I created a launcher icon for, same thing. Freeze. (It is possible that the bug is in fact time-based or boot-sequence-based, and since I was trying to reproduce the bug rapidly, the other app had nothing to do with it.)
I go remove the start menu link, hoping that, what I assumed was part of Plasma was trying to load this binary as an icon even though it should have checked the file, recognized it as “no I can’t parse this,” and done nothing or displayed an error or parsed it and showed the icon. Especially after I assigned it another image. I just hoped whatever screwed up would be connected to the code executing that app launcher icon config, and deleting the config for that application would delete whatever mess that was created, and hopefully was created discretely.
Shit you not, the computer became rock solid stable again after that and one more reboot. Hasn’t glitched since.
It’s shit like that that makes me proooobably give up on this experiment and end up on a commercial OS like MacOS again despite the cost and downward trend they are also suffering in a lack of innovative energy.
They’re made very aware of things on social media, they internally have tools that scrape social media to surface hot issues. They should be leveraging them. They likewise have instrumentation to see how users use every element of the operating system. If they see that widget being installed->deleted, they should have the metrics to drive “something is fundamentally wrong with this thingy.”
The poor cartoon duplo UX is a fundamental design problem. You’re just buying into the whole corpo “hey we do a beta so you get a voice (but actually we’re just lazy and laid off a bunch of QA to crowd-source their job for the lulz)” experience. It should not be the job of the end user to (unpaid) tell the corporation how to do their job.
Posts like OPs are just surfacing an, “I’m annoyed at this dumb thing” user experience. Venting to others is cathartic, corpo should be smart enough to gather this intel. Filing a bug report that could lead to 60 follow-up questions from the corp that they expect you to keep submitting more information and will likely not lead to any meaningful change is just pointless (because it’s unpaid) work that their engineers should be doing.
Although if a person likes to donate their time to the company they already spend thousands of dollars at to improve the product that shouldn’t have been shipped broken, that person should go ahead and do it.
Having left the platform for 5 years and migrated to Android, been considering migrating back due to Android not showing a promising future.
Playing with iOS again to see if I can tolerate it, it feels like everything is giant font giant icon Duplo Brick UI. Which could very well be why they’re so terrible at space management. Do they realize some people have eyesight? That widget has a terrible amount of wasted space, but then so does most of the OS.
“Please do Apple’s UX work for them, unpaid, of course.”
Good theory, I like it.
I’ve wondered for quite a while if there was ever any truth to the rumors that Meta apps “listen” to people. It doesn’t make logical sense, as the OS should expose they are doing it. Unless they had API access to allow microphone access without triggering the microphone icon. These companies have had API access in the past, like when Uber had full screen display capture access, and Meta definitely has some agreements with the fruit company to access some kinds of data. Or, when iOS first introduced the location tracking symbol in the status bar, I was able to write a program that allowed gathering of location access without actually triggering the icon.
Most of the time, the events can be explained away by knowing how adtech works, like, I was drinking a beverage, a friend asked what it was, the next day I started getting ads for it.
In that case:
Some stories I’ve heard are more strange.
It does make me wonder if it was true the whole time, but they now have to ask for permission.
Don’t use the platforms myself or I’d try and set up a test experiment.
Sally was her name, IIRC. That show was a pretty dark thing for kids to watch Saturday mornings.
Yes
To
Definitely
Liking
Playback
I think I used my toaster 7 or 8 years ago?