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zenforyen

@ zenforyen @feddit.org

Posts
5
Comments
123
Joined
11 mo. ago

  • Anyone else hating Shorts (the videos, not the pants or financial instruments)?

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  • They should create vertical TVs. It's insane, but at the same time, it would be actually less wasteful.

    Being forced to watch hours of vertical videos on a horizontal screen is probably one of the rings of hell.

    When one of your relatives films a family event for half an hour in portrait mode and later shows everyone on the TV.

  • Anyone else hating Shorts (the videos, not the pants or financial instruments)?

    Jump

  • If it is done in some tense scene in an action movie, it's fine.

    If it's your default mode, it loses any kind of narrative effect and is just hectic + cheaper because you don't need to many takes and just chop good pieces together -> faster and lower effort.

    I have nothing against fast cuts as an actual artistic device.

  • Anyone else hating Shorts (the videos, not the pants or financial instruments)?

    Jump

  • Yep, that could be me!

    Below the infinite trash stream of the algorithm there is still some actually good content in sane formats that does not taste like greasy mind fast food.

  • Anyone else hating Shorts (the videos, not the pants or financial instruments)?

    Jump

  • Fair point, clothing shorts are good shorts. The summer beginning is marked by me switching from jeans to shorts!

  • Anyone else hating Shorts (the videos, not the pants or financial instruments)?

    Jump

  • "nobody likes them but keeps watching them" - that confirms my theory that it's digital crack. I intuitively want to stay away because I feel that it cannot be good for my brain

  • Anyone else hating Shorts (the videos, not the pants or financial instruments)?

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  • Made me crack up a little :D

    I did not want to start a fashion war here :O

  • Anyone else hating Shorts (the videos, not the pants or financial instruments)?

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  • Haha shorts, as in short pants, I actually like in summer :D Did not want to insult a perfectly fine piece of clothing. But it's also totally cool not to like them ;)

    I don't know how these below 2 minute videos are called in general, like the Reels, TikToks, Shorts, it's all the same thing to me (or I don't know the difference)...

  • Anyone else hating Shorts (the videos, not the pants or financial instruments)?

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  • I totally feel you. My wife was also confused why I suddenly was somehow frustrated and angry. Glad I'm not the only one.

    Death by a thousand one-second cuts

  • Anyone else hating Shorts (the videos, not the pants or financial instruments)?

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  • With an ad blocker there are also no ads on normal YouTube ;) and there is even an extension called sponsor block that can help skipping over in-video ads

  • Anyone else hating Shorts (the videos, not the pants or financial instruments)?

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  • I'm ranting about any kind of shorts on any platform :D

    Except for the clothing, those I like.

    Yeah that half baked mental health content by people who have no clue is absolutely horrible. Might be it starts the path to actual diagnosis for some, but it's also a rabbit hole of misinformation and stereotypes...

  • How do children address a non-binary parent?

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  • I wish...

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  • Switch the company to something that feels more meaningful, if you can.

    I thought I had my dream job - being a research software engineer - but it turned out that there's only funding collected by corrupt professors, nobody has any clue where they want to go, most projects die the moment some PhD student graduates or there is some opportunistic incentive to just dump it and do something else, nobody even wants you to write software for them because it means they have to change their workflows, and all that leadership cares above is not useful software, but that it looks good in reports and presentations to get more funding.

    Just saying, one can be perfectly miserable even when working for the supposed "good side". My motivation was at an all time low once I saw through all the bullshit and grew hopeless.

    I quit that job after 3 years, and now I'm in a mid-size company with an interesting business domain, people care about my work, and I doing great. My team lead appreciates me, I get to actually do some stuff that's suitable for my qualification and also what I enjoy.

    I think with ADHD we can't force ourselves to work in jobs that do not feel meaningful or intellectually stimulating. Other people are also suffering in bullshit jobs, but we literally cannot take it. But in the right environment we can thrive.

    Ah, and "thanks" to whoever is responsible for the mess that is MSVC and Windows. I'm happy I can work on Linux 99% of the time (most teams are in Windows/ use Visual Studio), but we gotta support cross platform builds, and everything by Microsoft tends to be the odd, slow, half-broken special configuration, or imposes a limitation we have to work around. Because either it's not standard compliant or just buggy.

    I totally can imagine how you can burn out from working at Microsoft. Feels like this company alone is wasting millions of hours of work all around the world.

  • Mozilla Say Google Search Deal Vital to Firefox's Survival

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  • In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most "alternative browsers" do - tweaking or repackaging.

    These days, a browser is like it's own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.

    I'd say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.

    So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop "apps".

  • Programmers: what would your job/interest be called if you didn't write code?

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  • I did that for 3 years. Funny how it seems to be a universal experience. Confirms to me how it's pretty much the same, regardless of project, funding or scientific area.

    For me it was a bit heartbreaking to see, because I loved the idea of writing software for research. But the reality was that academia simply does not have the right structures to support serious and sustainable software development and until that changes, it feels more like a thankless "bullshit job".

    You simply can't run software development in such a opportunistic and chaotic way like scientists do their research and write papers.

  • Programmers: what would your job/interest be called if you didn't write code?

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  • Nice! That also needs some reasonably good management to see your skills and talents.

    Can totally see why you might not like roles "above". There's always some point where you stop solving the kind of problems you find interesting and have more bullshit to fight than it would be worth.

    Like my team lead wisely said, "never become a team lead", and I'm absolutely not interested, seeing all the crap he has to out up with, manage and firefight (I'm happy he does it while I can stay pretty relaxed and keep doing all the fun stuff).

  • Programmers: what would your job/interest be called if you didn't write code?

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  • That sounds pretty cool, I could imagine myself doing that.

    How did you get into such a role? Is it some kind of consultancy?

  • Programmers: what would your job/interest be called if you didn't write code?

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  • My last job was: PowerPoint presentation and poster designer, educator, communicator and mind reader.

    Tried to be software developer in science, turns out that I had to spend much more time promoting whatever little coding I do to interested parties, and creating software based on guesses what they could need and what the right thing probably should be.

    It was a mess, for many reasons.

    Now I'm an actual software architect and engineer.

    As a metaphor, somewhere between apprentice dark magician (when sprinkling in some fancy things not many others would be able to do), gardener (need to clean up a lot of weeds, tidy up and revitalize the decomposing codebase, trim some rotten code branches) and strategist (when conceptually working on the mid and long-term planning and high level goals).

  • What was your cringe teen/preteen phase?

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  • For me it was more like:

    Ages 11-16: unaware sad cringe

    Ages 17-24: learning to hide it

    Ages 25-27: reaching achievement mountain, followed by

    Age 28: quarter life crisis valley and the realization

    Ages 29-now: unlearning to hide it and actually feeling good

    Life is a beautiful journey. Just need to look with the right eyes.

  • bruh they are asking for my home address now?

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  • Sounds like the teaser for "CommieNet: The Nerds Strike Back", but on a serious note, I think you are right.

    In some sense, digital resources are non-scarce resources, they can be copied and multiplied. There is no capitalistic pressure innate to information, not in the way we consider other resources to be scarce.

    But such a digital utopia still would have costs for hosting the content and it would need to stay afloat in the profit-oriented world with finite resources and hard costs for running servers. So it would have to be donation based, or subscription based. Ironically, inside it would have to be strict about prohibiting anything that is effectively monetizing anything that happens inside.

    And someone would get the money earned from these subscriptions or fees and this would necessarily end up being some non-profit organization which would have to be somehow community driven, and would decide what is accepted in the space it has to take care of.

    But this sounds like a kind of internal governance, like a whole state, a body of rules, that exists within the community of everyone participating in that special network. This council would have responsibility to prevent corruption on the network and at the same time prevent it's own corruption.

    I could go on, but I guess it's pretty clear that creating a uncorruptible social space is exactly the same problem as creating an uncorruptible truly democratic society. If you figure this out for an internet platform, you have figured it out for the real world.

    So I guess it's not gonna happen ever. It goes always like this - something nice grows, at some point it starts to rot, implodes, from the ashes something new can emerge, rinse and repeat. Just humans being humans.