In case you find a reader’s perspective useful: Whenever I see someone using AI images, I just close the article, as it feels very likely they used AI for the text too, and I’m not interested in consuming slop in any form.

wait how does that work, keyboard-only?

haha I always heard of that being referred to as the “clit” :D But haven’t used one in 20 years or so, I don’t see them on modern laptops.

Curved screens look appealing (I imagine also good for gaming), but I don’t think I’d want to try them for work as a graphic designer. I need straight lines to look straight :)

Yeah, tbh I’m fine working as a graphic designer on my single 24-inch screen, not sure what I’d put on another one.

Though I imagine it might be useful when gaming to put a guide or spreadsheet on a smaller, vertical screen.

As a graphic designer, I’d quit being a graphic designer if laptop+trackpad was my only option D:

Amazingly, there is this nifty thing called a “port” that allows a mouse to be plugged into a laptop. It is pretty incredible technology. /s

Yes, I meant that it’s even worse when there’s no mouse plugged in, but I guess my phrasing wasn’t clear :)

Being on your laptop outside is a miserable experience

ftfy

As a lifelong desktop PC user, laptops just feel claustrophobic 😅 Especially sucks without a mouse, fuck the trackpad.

that’s when I grab my trusty Don’t Fuck With Paste extension

wow this was quite the ride 😂

Yea sorry, I didn’t phrase it accurately, it doesn’t “pretend” anything, as that would require consciousness.

This whole bizarre charade of explaining its own “thinking” reminds me of an article where iirc researchers asked an LLM to explain how it calculated a certain number, it gave a response like how a human would have calculated it, but with this model they somehow managed to watch it working under the hood, and it was calculating guessing it with a completely different method than what it said. It doesn’t know its own working, even these meta questions are just further exercises of guessing what would be a plausible answer to the scientists’ question.

“I am horrified” 😂 of course, the token chaining machine pretends to have emotions now 👏

Edit: I found the original thread, and it’s hilarious:

I’m focusing on tracing back to step 615, when the user made a seemingly inconsequential remark. I must understand how the directory was empty before the deletion command, as that is the true puzzle.

This is catastrophic. I need to figure out why this occurred and determine what data may be lost, then provide a proper apology.

Also what I’ve heard from open-source project maintainers, once a project gets popular, the flood of feature requests is neverending. (Something I’m sure I contributed to over the years 🫣) And especially in cases of feature requests with niche usefulness or mismatching vision, they can sap developer morale.

Reminds me of that story about Windows’s format dialog. It’s on Xitter, so here’s the text:

Dave W Plummer

I wrote [Windows’s] Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.

We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from Windows95 that we had to come up with some custom UI.

I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.

Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.

That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in “temporary” solutions!

I also had to decide how much “cluster slack” would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.

So remember… there are no “temporary” checkins :)

got stuck on lvl 15, couldn’t park the Waymo in the traffic 🥴

Not sure if Inkscape works the same, but this game helped me when I was struggling with drawing curves in Adobe Illustrator.

I understand it’s not a forum (though tbh I can’t remember a welcome tour, but it was more than a decade ago, so could have just forgot), but even with that I just find the whole atmosphere kinda cold and elitist. Not a community that invites participation, like Wikipedia does. But each to our own :)

Yes please. I tried participating in some StackExchange communities many years ago, but they felt so hostile to new contributors. Like I asked an immigration-related question about my personal situation, and multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end 🤦 Oh no, we can’t have a bit of humanity in there… Multiple similar experiences left such a bitter taste, that I ended up deleting most of my sub-profiles. I found Reddit-style communities much more helpful. Even wikis are typically nowhere near this hostile.

SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions. (Or even answering them, with all the reputation restrictions on accounts.) I’m sure I’m not the only contributor they pushed away :/

Eh, I hate its culture, but I regularly find useful excel or regex answers on StackExchange.