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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • No children are being deprived of an education, and no one is having choice removed. Public schools are still being funded, and these children can go to them. If their parents aren’t satisfied with that, they can still send them to private schools. If you have concerns about the quality of education from public schools, feel free to explain to me how subsidizing private schools is helping that. And comparing subsidizing private schools when public schools are available to subsidizing children’s necessities is disingenuous at best.












  • Here’s my Jira experience. MS shop, have a programming department, but I’m not in programming and programming isn’t our core product.

    Need something that requires a Jira request. I use MS Edge because that’s what IT recommends and it’s not my computer. The only putative upside is that it knows who I’m logged in as. I click on the link for Jira, it asks me if I want to sign in with my account, which I assume is the MS one since it has the right email/user for it. It tells me that’s the wrong one. Would I like to use my Atlassian account? Sure, let’s use the same email. Whoops, you don’t have an Atlassian account, but there’s an MS account for your company. Do you want to use that, or something from the usual list of places that will log you in (Google, Facebook, MS)? Note that the MS option is only included in the list of third-party logins even though it knows my company has MS logins setup. So I click the MS option, and it may or may not ask for my password, because I’m already logged in via Edge, but it will certainly do my 2FA. And now I’m finally able to tell IT what is bothering me, and they wonder why people always seem frustrated.

    So, now that I’ve gone through that once, I can save a single click by not choosing the Atlassian account option and go directly to signing in with a third party. I can only assume this is supposed to be the streamlined process.







  • The other response said it well enough, but I’ll go a step further.

    MS made a tradition of moving functionality around in their OS for no other reason that I could glean than grouping things in an at least superficially comparable group and absolutely not where it was in the last version, merely so that certification from the previous version wouldn’t apply to the current one. They would do similar things with their Office application menus, in one version moving them around based on how often you used them (try doing phone support with that!), in another replacing them with little pictures that pretended they were related to their functionality, and again moving them around every version apparently for the sake of requiring recertification.

    To top it all off, they would also not give you access to the old menuing systems. You could argue bloat, but that would be ignoring the massive piles of it they added for the sake of animating their new menus alone (which has value, to a degree).

    I’m aware of some of the interesting bits of woodworking, as well. I can imagine the response if you told woodworkers that the only hammer/mallet they could use was a 16 oz claw hammer. And the reason we made all those different hammers is because they are the best option for the task they were designed for. You can get away with using a smaller set, especially if your workflow would require using some rarely enough that it isn’t worth adding in their storage and cost to be worth it, but a good woodworker will still be aware of those tools and be assessing their processes to determine if it’s time to expand their toolset.

    And the difference between the physical world and the world of computer interfaces is you aren’t limited to just one. The open source world is particularly fond of including deprecated functionality because there are a lot of pieces working together and it will often take years to get everything updated, and you will never know when the last dependency is removed. Likewise with UIs. A lot of the time, a deprecated one can be kept around for those who can’t be bothered to learn the new one, but the cost of keeping the old version around for a few years is usually relatively low (and the developer can determine how much they are willing to have that cost be and do things to help make it stay within that limit). That’s no reason to leave the old version as the default, though.



  • Just because someone got used to walking around on their knuckles doesn’t mean walking upright isn’t easier and better overall. Sure, it will be difficult, it will be uncomfortable, and they’ll have to get used to it before they see any improvement, but once they get past those hurdles even they will be amazed at how fast walking upright can be. And in the meantime, no one else who already has a tendency to walk upright will have to go through the pain and inefficiency of walking on their knuckles.