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tante
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The term "single use software" currently lives rent free in my head.
People use LLMs to create software specific for their needs. But neither can other people use it (hardcoded variables, no rights management, too specific), nor do they use it again (too specific, easier to produce a new one).
Single use software is not maintained. Nobody understands it or has an interest in keeping it working.
The creation of single use software feels cheap, but isn't. It takes time to create the software, it needs infrastructure and power. The time is experienced as short compared to how long it takes to create maintainable and reusable software. But once you take into account how many people benefit from reusable software, the single use software takes way more time to create than what it saves. The infrastructure and power costs are hidden because the data center isn't visible. The costs are subsidized by venture capital.
Like other single use items, single use software brings risks of unforeseen consequences. From data loss or leaks to issues for maintainers of reusable software (eg. verbal abuse, less motivation and lost income).
As an example of single use software is a German LinkedIn post of a person who slopcoded a HEMS (home energy management system). It took them more than a week. While open source projects like https://evcc.io/ already provide the same functionality. They could have used it for free or paid 100€ and got support for some additional devices. But they decided that they know better how it should work and now have a single use software. If it breaks there is nobody they can ask. There won't be updates and no community to discuss and develop new features. No organization will ever be interested in officially supporting it. And even if it works, it only benefits that one person.
(This doesn't mean people shouldn't build things that only they use. But they should enjoy doing so.)
Wow, SwiftUI and all of the competent designers retiring has made #Apple so bad at UIs. I helped my mother set up a MacBook Air yesterday. We set the UI size to the maximum so she could see it easily. Around half of the setup boxes then had buttons that were either off the bottom of the screen or obscured by the dock (and therefore not clickable).
Almost all of them had huge amounts of empty space in the middle and so could easily have fitted if some idiots private aesthetic had been considered less important than accessibility at Apple.
All of them were either modal or app-modal (hey, Apple folks: you might like to read your own Human Interface Guidelines, they explain in detail why this is stupid). You couldn’t progress or go back until you’d hit the button that was off the screen and, because some were system-wide global, you couldn’t go to settings and change UI size without killing the thing that produced the box.
All completely preventable if anyone in QA had bothered to try the first-time setup flow on an Apple device using each of the five UI-size options.
Oh, honourable mention for #Microsoft if you install Word or Excel, the first launch window is a massive thing (which, at least, can be scrolled, unlike the Apple ones) giving you a bunch of options to buy an M356 subscription. There is no option anywhere in that window for logging in with your existing subscription. There is an option in the app menu, but it’s greyed out. If you close this window, the app exits. In your next release testing, try asking someone on your team to figure out how to log in from a fresh install. I eventually figured out the flow, but I was very close to the point of saying ‘let’s just put LibreOffice, Pages, and Numbers on this and not bother with the M365 stuff’. And I have a PhD in computer science and worked at Microsoft for five years: how do you think a vaguely normal human will do?
@david_chisnall that last point is something I see frequently on the internet as well sadly, where you have "Sign Up" Buttons all over the fucking place with a "sign in" placed somewhere odd and gray on white or some shit like this. I really wonder if ANYONE still cares for their stuff being actually USABLE or if that metric went out the window some time ago.. But sad to see that apple also apparently completely dropped the ball here
The term "single use software" currently lives rent free in my head.
People use LLMs to create software specific for their needs. But neither can other people use it (hardcoded variables, no rights management, too specific), nor do they use it again (too specific, easier to produce a new one).
Single use software is not maintained. Nobody understands it or has an interest in keeping it working.
The creation of single use software feels cheap, but isn't. It takes time to create the software, it needs infrastructure and power. The time is experienced as short compared to how long it takes to create maintainable and reusable software. But once you take into account how many people benefit from reusable software, the single use software takes way more time to create than what it saves. The infrastructure and power costs are hidden because the data center isn't visible. The costs are subsidized by venture capital.
Like other single use items, single use software brings risks of unforeseen consequences. From data loss or leaks to issues for maintainers of reusable software (eg. verbal abuse, less motivation and lost income).
As an example of single use software is a German LinkedIn post of a person who slopcoded a HEMS (home energy management system). It took them more than a week. While open source projects like https://evcc.io/ already provide the same functionality. They could have used it for free or paid 100€ and got support for some additional devices. But they decided that they know better how it should work and now have a single use software. If it breaks there is nobody they can ask. There won't be updates and no community to discuss and develop new features. No organization will ever be interested in officially supporting it. And even if it works, it only benefits that one person.
(This doesn't mean people shouldn't build things that only they use. But they should enjoy doing so.)
@luca I honestly understand the urge for a new setup if he's paying tens of thousands for the old one (that's what the "fünfstellige" bit is, right? My German's poor to say the least), but I really don't understand why he chose five weeks of slopping instead of doing a week of research to see if there already was a cheap/free and maintainable solution available.
Not what I wanted last thing on a Friday night: a flood of #MediaWiki spam account creations and user pages created on archives.org.au. My own fault really for having a super simple captcha (now updated), but it's worked fine for a decade or more. I should probably just move on with retiring this wiki.
@samwilson i ended up just blocking new account creation on mine. I got sick of spam accounts getting around everything I did to stop them. I think your wiki is a good idea, are you really thinking of retiring it?
I’ve been pretty angry these past few days, over a dispute relating to the reimbursement of travel expenses that’s left me quite a bit out of pocket.
The details are unimportant. What matters is how awful it’s left me feeling, how helpless I am to get the parties involved to do what I regard as the right thing. It’s left me stewing with rage, in a way that’s overtaken my thoughts in quiet moments.
Well, I decided I just didn’t want that feeling in my body anymore. So the next time a wave of anger rose up on me, I decided to try and figure out what was going on.
It seemed obvious to me that my rage was bound up in impotence and humiliation – in lacking the power to change a situation I regarded as unjust. So I was tempted by the proposition that anger is a failure mode of control: that it arose because I couldn’t make the situation behave in the way I wanted it to.
But on reflection, that “wanted” is at the core of it. What I really mean is that anger is a failure mode of *desire*.
@jonny a computer scientist what the fuck am I reading.
Also a computer scientist and, as the author of the fourth most-downloaded paper in the ACM Digital Library, I can claim some experience with publishing in our discipline.
I gave up a few sections in. I have absolutely no idea what the paper is trying to show nor how they are trying to show it. Or even what ‘clean’ means in the context of the paper.
The Fulcrum 🏴☠️ ⛓️💥 🛠️
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théorie :verified:
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On leur arrache les yeux pour plus de productivité : la face cachée des crevettes de supermarché
Pour produire plus, de très nombreux élevages de crevettes sectionnent les pédoncules oculaires – soit la tige qui relie l’œil de l’animal au reste du corps – des femelles reproductrices. En théorie, cette mutilation est censée jouer sur le système hormonal des petits crustacés et favoriser des pontes plus rapides, donc une meilleure production.
🔪 Joel May-Kill 🔪
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Does anyone have access to archival JAMA research?
A friend is trying to track down full text of this article from 1924.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/238191#
doi:10.1001/jama.1924.02650310026009
hypebot
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'Pilze' #FotoVorschlag
A couple of years ago, I saw this cluster of fungi along the way. There's so much beauty along the trails. Sometimes we simply don't see it.
I grew up during the cold war, expecting that one day we might be at war with Russia.
I just never expected we would be at war with Russia backed by the president of the USA.
@randahl Same, same.
Never thought the racist and misogynist system underlying the US electoral process would result in a fascist elected 2X by a minority faction, bolstered by an equally fascistic Congress and Supreme Court.
I hope Mitch McConnell is living in hell on earth, trapped in his body, knowing he is cursed and reviled, after stealing a SCOTUS seat and refusing to convict and remove Trump. One man should not have that much power.
Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch)
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The inscription on this monument built by the Ancients was damaged, but we were still able to translate it. Looks like we will find many valuable relics and treasure if we dig here!
Natouille 🍷
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Ah du coup l'info importante et gravissime pour les malades de longue durée c'est ça: https://code.travail.gouv.fr/actualite/indemnisation-arret-maladie-ce-qui-change-au-15-octobre-2026
La réduction "de 3 ans à 1 an la durée maximale de versement des indemnités journalières par l’Assurance maladie pour certaines affections nécessitant un arrêt de travail de longue durée."
Depuis le 15 Octobre de cette année, au calme.
Et AUCUN, je dis bien aucun, grand média n'en parle.
Et pour être sûrs de BIEN enfoncer les malades bien profonds, une nouvelle sanction a également vu le jour! 😃
Friends don't let friends work at google or uber ....
Or meta, palantir, openai, anthropic, mistral, spacex, microsoft, aws, coreweave, nvidia, apple, adobe ...
#basiskort I dag prøvede jeg at gå til den station, der er tættest på mig, der har en 7/11. Målet var at putte penge på mit anonyme basiskort. Desværre ser den 7/11 ud til at være under ombygning, eller måske er den lukket. Den var der i hvert fald ikke.
Nu tager jeg til midtbyen, hvor jeg ved, der er to 7/11 på Nørreport station. Tanken er, at dette forbedre mine chancer.
Jeg må undersøge om man kan tanke på andre måder, for det er, indrømmet, lidt besværligt.
Konrad Förstner 💻🧬🦠
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It is fascinating and rather unexpected for me to realize I haven't found a need to reinstall my primary #NixOS machine since I wrote this blog post in 2020. Even when I migrated to a bigger ssd, I just copied the whole disk (via #btrfs snapshot send) and continued as before (with some grub & uuid fiddling).
Intuitively it would feel that an OS that has a major release twice a year and only a month (!) of support for the previous release would have more chance to have screwed up an install at some point. But in practice it's the opposite. And I have a somewhat less common disk setup with encrypted grub and such.
This is not to say NixOS is perfect, and it's certainly not for everyone. It's an exotic distro with its own functional programming language that manages everything.
It has its own pain points and surprises (probably deserving a new blog post at some point).
But one of the quite unexpected experiences for me is the total absense of any need or desire to wipe and start afresh.
