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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Ah yes, me, the demigod who can act up on all my worries. Tell me again my plan to get trump to fuck off the 2024 election?

    Not to be too sarcastic at you, it’s a good sentiment that I do sort of agree with, but it places too much “you can do anything” blame on the observer who literally is already worried. Aka, this runs a major risk of demotivating people straight into doomerism when they’re faced with worries there’s really nothing that they individually can do about.

    Unless I’m wrong and there is some legitimate answer to that sarcastic opening question that I, individually, can do about it, in which case, I’m all ears lol


  • That’s fair. Part of my job is converting non-technical users into technical users by teaching them things like problem solving approaches that are supposed to help them teach themselves how to learn whatever they need to actually do their job. I don’t teach them what to do, I teach them how to learn what to do.

    I agree that you gotta meet people where they’re at, but I try to teach them how to poke around any code repo site, like GitHub or gitlab, so they can use it. Usually I point them to the docs and start by pointing out my favorite parts so that they have somewhere to kind of start by themselves, but it is a skill set that can be practice, or at least I am convinced it is.

    I’m not very good at this part of my job, but also, no one is, so it’s not a bad thing, I just want to do better. I guess I never thought of it from a truly non-technical and not wanting to be technical perspective before. This could be solved by a secondary interface designed specifically for this kind of user. It would not allow code download or interaction, but it would allow for issue logging. I might put this idea in my ever growing project list because it sounds like it would be a useful product…


  • I’m interested in where the limits to expectations lie here. I’m not trying to be a jerk when I say this next part but I do worry I may come off that way but I’m trying to figure out the boundaries of what a “reasonable” expectation is so I can make tasks like this easier for my own team (completely unrelated to this project but it’s essentially the same problem).

    Is it not reasonable to expect people to type into a search engine something like “GitHub help” and then poke around in the links that come up?

    … Well I’ll be damned, I tried my own method before commenting, and the first link that comes up is a red herring, how obnoxious. I was hoping it’d be a link to the docs, not GitHub support. I guess I just answered my own question: no that is not reasonable.

    As a technical user, I am still at a loss for how to help a non-technical user in an algorithmic way that will work for most non-technical users x.x guess I’ll be thinking about this problem some more lol

    (I guess I’m rambling but I’m gonna post this anyways in case anyone wants to chatter about it with me)


  • Ah I get that, like the frustration of a sociological paper pointing out a societal issue but offering no steps on how to solve it due to fixes being out of scope (utterly infuriating lol).

    I still think the criticism is valid, but I do think I agree in that the criticism could be more constructive… But I still think laying the foundation of the argument, so to speak, is still constructive even though it may not go as far as one may need for it to cross the threshold back into polite…

    I am still convinced this is a knee jerk feeling issue more than anything truly being amiss, but I have been wrong before. What do you think?

    I agree it probably is a definitions thing, I’m very pedantic sometimes and it feels like my definition of constructive is much more optimistic/wider/encompassing than yours. That doesn’t mean that my definition is right or that your position is wrong though, that’s just what I think is going on here.


  • The first step to correction is understanding there is a problem in the first place. This is quite constructive, it may just not feel like it is because it’s framed combatively.

    You’re doing it wrong is the phrase that lets teachers teach at one of the most basic levels.

    The public is essentially a self teaching teacher, so this is just the process of public correction happening. It may look/feel like public shaming, and it may be if they’re going too far, but that is the mechanism that I think is playing out here.

    Does that framing make it any more palatable to you or does it still seem unnecessarily disrespectful?


  • That’s a fair perspective, but most people strive for as few clicks between users and their targets as possible. Forcing a user to become semi-tech-competent by sending them on a fetch quest to figure out their os, while not an inherently bad thing, does work against this overall goal…

    Idk, it’s like education vs service industry goal setting, that’s all I’m trying to get at here lol

    Edit: plus, there’s no guarantee that it will remain just the big 3 for forever. There was a time before Linux, maybe we’ll see a time after windows… Unlikely, but one can dream lol


  • Yeah, it works really well for me, but I also have taken it since I was young whenever I needed/wanted it, so it might just work well for me. I’d recommend starting with like a 5mg, give it an hour to work, then if you still don’t feel tired, I’d take another one.

    Worst case you’ll still have to deal with the shitty situation with a slight melatonin hangover (I warn you in advance that it can happen, but it usually only happens if you take too much and it can’t metabolize before you wake up. You’re just very sleepy until it’s done)

    Best case, you end up going to bed earlier than normal and you feel fine in the morning.

    Good luck!




  • Best to not switch away from the default (row) unless you really know what you’re doing. Here’s the guide I always consulted for flexbox direction help. I just consulted it until I got the feel for it. I could guess at what you’re doing but I think this resource will be better than me hemming and hawing over what you’re trying to do: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

    So some tips:

    1. column flips what the actual keywords of flex do (justify-content starts to act like align-items and visa versa).
    2. it’s easier to develop for small screens and then expand up to large screens. This is because you already know what you’ll have to expand from and you won’t have to squish anything down. (I’m not saying you should restart your project though, this is a future tip only. Only restart if everything is truly fubar.)

  • Hmm can someone tell me if I’m just in a “republicans are hysteric about it so it must not be that bad” mindset?

    It’s obviously spyware to some degree, but this really seems more like a case of red-scare. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, though. Makes me think I might just be reacting to their reaction.

    I guess, what exactly are they afraid that China is going to do with this data? It’s a missing puzzle piece that I’ve heard nothing coherent on besides “China gonna spy on muh datas”. Like, sure, maybe if you’re a government official, and I don’t think bans of tiktok on government devices are stupid, but I think the nationwide ban idea is pretty dumb and baseless. So I guess my actual question is, what are they afraid of happening, exactly?