makecheck

Back when they had a developer survey, one of my feedbacks was essentially to get rid of App Review completely: not to try to fix it or reduce it but to literally shut the entire thing down. It really is that useless.

One of the worst examples is we (still) have PLANES flying with banners behind them in California. They make noise, pollute the air, and assault your eyes when you could be looking at a beautiful blue sky without them. And I don’t know why it’s OK to “rent” this “space” to advertisers because, unlike something like a billboard, it’s not like someone went to the trouble of erecting a sky board with limited ad space.

We need “dumb” infrastructure again, that you can simply pay for with few strings attached, where the provider cannot fiddle with things at all, leaving enforcement to other authorities.

We build roads; yes, those roads might be used to transport stolen goods but the road builder doesn’t get to sit there and inspect every vehicle (and accuse the wrong people sometimes and ban them from driving).

It’s just so damned complicated now and I don’t know how it got that way.

Having been at several companies, I think I was happiest about my career when I didn’t have a fancy title and did not really know anyone else’s either (aside from obvious managers). It was nicer just knowing who’s in charge of what thing, and seeing your influence grow as you are trusted with more things.

When I see titles, it just makes unhelpful thoughts enter my head, like: are all these people “at my level” really contributing as much as me? Sometimes I even thought the reverse, like: how can this seemingly-junior person still be stuck at that level, when he is clearly doing all this great stuff we depend on every day? Of course the especially soul-crushing case is when you encounter people that clearly suck at what they do, and they’re 1-2 levels above you; and worse, I have occasionally seen those people promoted further!

It is also hard not to look at titles on places like LinkedIn. I know I shouldn’t care, since titles mean different things at every company, and some especially-impressive-sounding titles can range from “meh” to “god-level” depending on where it is. And yet, it gets in my head sometimes, making me wonder every few years if I am at the level I should be.

When the title “matters” at a company, it also makes me consider it a factor in annual reviews. If I get a raise, bonus, etc. but see my damned title stagnate year over year, suddenly I care about this and take it as a complete lack of recognition by the company (that literally would not happen if they simply did not tell me what my title is!).

I think it was particularly egregious when macOS Big Sur came out. It was abundantly clear that they no longer cared enough to even apply a basic sense of unified style in their artwork, with a weird mix of 2D-ish and 3D-ish icons, every color combination imaginable, etc. And on top of it, so many of the “new” icons were just plain ugly and some were outright weird, and many had really basic problems like improper shadow effects. Frankly they should have delayed the entire OS release by two months just to fix the icons, and it’s still in that bad a state.

It is even more frustrating that the OS is slowly being locked down so much that you basically can’t “fix” UI annoyances anymore, not without rebooting into Void My Warranty mode. You can’t fix bits and pieces of apps because they’ll no longer pass code-signing and fail to launch. In the old days you could pretty much hack any cool icons you wanted into any part of the system, and it was really amazing what people came up with.

Gift cards are the ultimate anti-consumer scam:

- If you buy a gift card that isn’t worth enough for what you actually buy, the store “wins” because you will probably make up the difference with cash and they then sell you something you either would not have bought at all, or bought somewhere else.

- If you buy a gift card that is worth more than whatever you end up buying, the store “wins” again because they have received the full value and you did not.

- If you buy a gift card and by some miracle it is exactly matching the cost of what you buy, the store “wins” yet again because (a) you were still only able to purchase items from that store, and (b) the entire time you were holding the card, it was slowly losing value because only bad things could have happened: the store might have stopped offering what you wanted, the price could have changed, or heck the store could have simply gone out of business. Meanwhile, the store was already paid by you for the card (in yesterday’s dollars) so they could do almost anything with that CASH, including putting it in a saving account, and end up better off than you.

Simply put, it is never, ever, ever to your advantage to have a gift card. Ever!! Cash is better in every possible way.

This is what I wish we were doing with Retina displays and such: making truly nice artwork instead of whatever single-colored squares and circles pass for icons these days. :/

Yes, it takes tremendously more work and is difficult to get right on a variety of screen sizes but there are also multi-billion-dollar companies that are in charge of this and I think it’s time they hired some more artists.

There is a skill not taught in schools that I might describe as “how to conduct code reviews” and it applies in industry as well as HN comments.

A reason to be afraid to submit may be that the number of respondents that don’t know how to review may exceed the number that do, causing the net result to be more destructive than constructive. Which brings me to another skill — how to ignore input that (even if you receive it) does not really matter, or at least not right away or not as much as other things.

If only as a profession we could resist the urge to quibble about things that probably are fine (or at least not pressing) so that there is more time to dig into the heart of a design or implementation. Yes, that’s an interesting algorithm; no, let’s not segue into the choice of back-end on the web site that happens to host the documentation; yes, that will help with maintainability; no, the number of spaces here does not really matter; yes, that is a good recommendation but not under these time constraints; no, I will not rename 125 variables to suit your arbitrary choice instead of my arbitrary choice.

I would also add that “review” is often misinterpreted as “pure criticism” (again, in code or in HN comments) and it can be nice for unsolicited positive feedback to occur too. Things like “I like how this was done”, or “I’ve never seen anything like that, clever” as opposed to an unending wake of negativity that tries to tear apart any given project.

I feel like these are “somebody got a promotion” patterns.

Basically, somebody was able to “prove” to Higher-Up Managers that $X number of these videos were “watched” or “engaged with” (or whatever today’s BS lingo is), and therefore the business “benefited” in some way by “reaching” more people. Profit?

In reality, at least in my case, what happens is: (1) I say “WTF!?!?”, (2) I make a mental note to never ever visit the site again, and (3) (sadly) I see it again and again at different sites.

Laws should force an extreme balance in regards to company-customer relationships. Right now companies get most of the benefits: they can sign up new accounts and charge money very, very easily, by the millions, and yet if anything goes wrong they can basically ignore you or make things very, very, very difficult. That’s just insane.

“Balance” basically means that if you’re going to set up a business that can “easily” take money from millions of people or “easily” create millions of accounts, then you must ensure those people can “easily” reach you, “easily” inquire about status, “easily” cancel things, etc. What we have now is just absurd.

I’ve watched this kind of stuff unfold for several years and this is where I think we went wrong: we allowed software to become “free” or “cheap” when it used to be $300, without acknowledging that this stuff still basically costs $300 to make!!

So now, every stupid thing has to be completely free just to be considered by any consumer, and every software maker has to beg, badger and berate users over and over to get them to try things and download things and sign up for things, all because we collectively forgot that we could have just paid them 40 bucks and moved on.

You used to have to pay for operating systems, and for a while it actually became more expensive (e.g. macOS was $99 but went up to $129 to everyone’s surprise before becoming “free”). You definitely used to pay through the nose for apps but you got a lot for that money. Mobile devices are largely responsible for the 99-cent-ification of software, most of which is now “free” with “in-app purchases” which is ironic since these “cheap” replacements sometimes cost hundreds of dollars more if you actually add up all the recurring in-app purchases they contain. And, of course, subscriptions.

So great, Windows is “free” now and web browsers no longer cost money like Netscape did but instead we get all this crap in our faces. Personally, I think we have lost a lot and we desperately need to re-learn how to pay, once, for software, again.

True but performance wasn’t the goal (I tend to run it once on smallish files).

This is easier to extend if I see something new to exclude (or comment-out some rule).

This is my script to “clean up” a typical macOS zip file. It assumes you’ve started by asking the Finder to “Compress” (which creates a zip file but one riddled with macOS-isms).

    #!/bin/bash
    
    zipfile=$1
    if [ "x$zipfile" = "x" ] ; then
      echo "$0: .zip file expected" >&2
      exit 1
    fi
    
    zip -d "${zipfile}" "__MACOSX*"
    zip -d "${zipfile}" ".DS_Store"
    zip -d "${zipfile}" "*/.DS_Store"
    unzip -l "${zipfile}" | sort -k 5

Yep, I write scripts to clean up zip files because the default behavior is so bad for cross-platform.

One of the things I hate about tech is seeing useful things slowly being repurposed into ad-spammers:

- A “notification” is not supposed to be for ads but it seems every other app uses it for (almost) only ads. To hell with that.

- A pop-up alert message is not supposed to be for ads but guess what happens.

- When you mistype a web address, Internet protocols prescribe what the correct response should be; guess what your ISP does instead?

- When you launch an app with the intent to do some specific thing, instead of the app allowing you to start doing that thing, your intended action is usurped by an at-launch screen (i.e. ad for something completely unrelated to what you launched the app to do). Bonus points if it manages to forget the on-launch context entirely, e.g. conveniently forgets the document you asked it to open and just stares at you blankly after the launch-ad goes away.

- When you pause a few seconds to gather your thoughts and haven’t gotten around to doing something, guess what happens now? OH THE USER IS IDLE, BETTER SHOW THEM STUPID STUFF. (Thanks, Netflix.)

- If you use anything, seems like you get E-mail later that day, and the “unsubscribe” is now just “manage your f*cking preferences” where they present you a page of 50 checkboxes for the INDIVIDUAL UNWANTED THINGS (all pre-enabled of course), that you have to uncheck and “save”, that then “take 3-10 days to take effect”. I want these people fired and banned from their industry.

Every other action now is clicking-away, swiping-away, tapping-away things I didn’t ask for and don’t want, with no option to turn most of it off (or if it is, the option is ultra-buried and conveniently forgotten on the next update).

A fingerprint is a user ID that is usually treated like a password, which is the main problem here.

They should add at least a 2nd layer (that doesn’t reduce the convenience too much).

For example, people could probably remember a simple Morse-code-like sequence of finger presses, e.g. your extra token is that you set it up to use “tap, tap, longpress, longpress, tap”.

…and collectively billions of hours of wasted time are returned to consumers everywhere.

Generally though, we really need some efficient mechanism for saying “hell no” to new things that are clearly anti-consumer, instead of letting them be conceived, implemented, and insufferable for years before anything can be done.

Complex password rules haven’t been shown to improve security in any way. They have been proven to torpedo security, e.g. they make people forget so they do blatantly-insecure things like writing passwords down or relying more frequently on things that reduce account security like having to reset the password entirely through simple E-mails or codes, etc.

And speaking of banks, I am livid that so many of my financial accounts essentially require absolutely terrible passwords. A lot of them don’t support E-mail for log-in either.

Meanwhile, your basic “correct horse battery staple” [1] works pretty well.

[1] https://xkcd.com/936/

One of my pet peeves with so many services! Their obnoxious pre-ads can play flawlessly (stealing your time/eyeballs and giving them benefit), and they can still fail to give you the content you exchanged your time/eyeballs to see. Worse, they can repeatedly fail and repeatedly drill the same ads into your brain.

There ought to be a law that essentially says if ads are “paying” for content, there must be a flawless link between ads and content such that the system can tell if the content is available (or detect after the fact that something was not delivered properly). And then, based on that, it either is required to ensure the ad never plays (since the content cannot be delivered), or that the user must be compensated in some way (e.g. we see you were forced to see an ad but got nothing so we are crediting $1 to your account).

Yeah, and I’m terrified by the “new” UI Outlook keeps prompting me to “try”, knowing that one day the old one will probably just go away.

The new UI takes up way more space and completely messes up my preferred split-screen approach (e.g. instead of working in a 50/50 layout, the new UI basically forces the split to be more like 70/30 with less useful stuff on screen).

I used to be much more of a curmudgeon about wanting to clean up existing code on sight but a few bits of reality seeped in over time, such as:

0. Existing code is probably working fine, and making changes (for any reason) risks adding a bug. Worse, reviewing code with a bunch of reformatting is tedious and the reviewer may assume you’ve only done reformatting and not notice the accidentally-changed behavior either.

1. You have to merge, a lot. And “fixes” that do little except reformat or redo are a pain to deal with when all you really care about is getting functionality in. This multiplies across branches and team members, and might require multiple manual merges.

2. There is a decent chance the code you’re not pleased with will be ripped out entirely as part of some bigger change, at which point all effort to fix unclean parts is moot.

3. Far more people than you are familiar with how it used to be, warts and all. The “cleaned” version now looks alien to everyone else and might slow them down.

That said, there is a time to clean things up; it just has to be at a well-defined point in the project. It involves a combination of things from the article (e.g. talk to the team) and the above (e.g. do it when many features are merged in and there are few branches to deal with).

A very good test of a multi-item interface is to imagine it with exactly TWO items and see if it makes perfect sense that way. Or if it’s a toggle button, look at a single button and see if you know its state.

Now in this context, imagine the inactive item is invisible and clickable, and the active item looks like a button (that is traditionally clickable) but is not clickable. Imagine furthermore that you still have freaking buttons elsewhere in the same UI that look the same as the unclickable thing but are clickable, well, you have a problem. Now imagine the even bigger problem of reusing the exact same style for things like text fields that have an entirely different function.

This isn’t just Firefox, a lot of this is what Safari tried to pull, too. Or the entire concept of flat UIs.

I really, really want to respect the field of UI design and imagine that this stuff is hard, etc. but frankly some of this stuff is really not that hard to get right. There needs to be discipline, some science, some user testing, and someone with enough power to shoot down the truly dumb decisions, for a start.

And barring all that, I want a config file (or back in the day, ResEdit) where I can undo all the madness.

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse.

When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones.

There seems to be a prioritization problem at the very least. Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken things? But if they threw some money at this they could fix it.

I have never really gotten used to wireless buds, and still find myself reaching for wires half the time:

- Wireless buds don’t connect 100% reliably; sometimes I get one and not the other, or neither. Sometimes they will randomly disconnect during use.

- Sometimes the sound glitches out randomly, which is so irritating that I don’t care how good the sound supposedly is the rest of the time.

- Gestures and voice are simply not as convenient as buttons on the wire. If I tap the thing in my ear, it tends to get shoved further into my ear and may still not register.

- They fall out of my ears, no matter how “snug” they seem. This makes me only want to use them in places where I won’t lose them, e.g. at home but not out for a walk.

Crucially, there isn’t a single problem above that occurs when using wires. The only inconvenience is that the default headphone wires are stupidly short (provided by a company that sells wireless buds, hmmm) but that is fixable.

I recently turned down a FB recruiter on the spot without even finding out more about the job in question, telling them I just don’t like FB as a company.

I’m lucky to have been around long enough, to be able to pick companies for my own reasons. Society isn’t set up to give most people that kind of choice; FB will therefore never really have any trouble finding people, I’m afraid.

I would love to think that they take notes when receiving negative feedback from recruitment, using it as a clue to work on fixing a broken image problem. In reality, I think they just move on to the next person who will happily put up with them.

They may have thought that would happen but I saw just as much stuff end up in C:\Windows or \Users or (always my favorite) those “Documents” that are really just “whatever random crap every app wants to put there”.

I saw this recently primarily with Firefox and (presumably?) Firefox may have been updated to fix the issue because it is thankfully not happening anymore.

When it did happen though, it seemed ludicrous: that a single app could in a matter of literally minutes start burning through gigabytes of memory, to the point where the entire system seems to freeze with no option except to kill Firefox (and everything it may be doing) to continue. And, like the author, I had started keeping Activity Monitor open so I could pre-kill Firefox at a point when I knew it would probably start to be pushing it.

It never feels good to baby-sit a machine. It feels even worse when it’s an expensive new machine. And it means that the operating system is failing at its most basic task (arguably the entire point of having an operating system) — to manage resources well.

I would have to assume they could track accesses to the RSS feed if they wanted to. And they could embed text-only ad messages.

The problem isn’t that these things became impossible, the “problem” for ad companies is they couldn’t do it in their preferred obnoxious, overdone, and intrusive style.

Confirmations could certainly be a lot faster without being any less thorough. Why does a nation of over 300 million people need to task the same 100 people with this? It could still be 100 people per confirmation but for example there could be several groups of 100 in the government whose job it is to vet people and each group of 100 gets a different handful of positions to confirm.

I mean…if it was anyone else I’d say it’s good that they’re suing, they should be able to easily prove this, etc.

But this man has made a lifetime out of screwing people over and ignoring rules. There have already been literally thousands of lawsuits against his companies. Therefore, I strongly suspect this will be yet another instance of him using the law to delay, delay, delay, and by the time anything happens he’ll still have gained something. Heck he’ll probably counter-sue on some ridiculous basis.

We live in an age where things move very fast and we desperately need something better/faster than law courts to sort these things out.