Flamekebab

I loathe Windows, love Linux, but Macbooks are my machine of choice for laptops. My last one lasted over a decade of abuse and travelled all over the world with me. Perhaps another manufacturer does as good a job on their portables but I’ve yet to find one. I have a ThinkPad for work and by comparison it feels clunky as all hell on every level.

Is it that time again? Apple considers getting into gaming?

Even if I had that luxury, I really don’t want to spend my time fixing someone else’s UI. I have my own projects to work on.

I used to do a lot of user testing and I think it’s something every bit of software needs. I really admire projects that decide to do big pushes on usability and papercuts.

I thought it was just me! I’ve been using Inkscape for a long time now and I always feel I’m wrestling with the damn thing. I understand the principles behind vectors but I’ll be damned if I can consistently achieve what I’m attempting to accomplish.

That’s the polar opposite of how I work with regards to manuals. I cannot retain that level of in-depth knowledge without anything to anchor it to. Reading a dictionary for a language before learning the grammar syntax does not work for me at all (and explains why I wasn’t able to really learn languages until I was a teenager!).

I see where you’re coming from, but I’ve encountered many things in professional applications where the UX baffles me. I know what I’m trying to get the program to do but it seems to require me to keep notes as to how to achieve the thing. Menu entries with needlessly cryptic names, heavily nested functionality, that sort of thing.

It’s entirely possible to know how to use a program and still think its UI is dogshit.

I hear that. Given I need practice in refactoring code to improve my skills, it’s not useless to me right now but overall it doesn’t seem like a net gain.

I’ve found it can just about be useful for “Here’s my data - make a schema of it” or “Here’s my function - make an argparse interface”. Stuff I could do myself but find very tedious. Then I check it, fix its various dumb assumptions, and go from there.

Mostly though it’s like working with an over-presumptuous junior. “Oh no, don’t do that, it’s a bad idea because security! What if (scenario that doesn’t apply)” (when doing something in a sandbox because the secured production bits aren’t yet online and I need to get some work done while IT fanny about fixing things for people that aren’t me).

Something I’ve found it useful for is as a natural language interface for queries that I don’t have the terminology for. As in “I’ve heard of this thing - give me an overview of what the library does?” or “I have this problem - what are popular solutions to it?”. Things where I only know one way to do it and it feels like there’s probably lots of other ways to accomplish it. I might well reject those, but it’s good to know what else exists.

In an ideal world that information would be more readily available elsewhere but search engines are such a bin fire these days.

If you’re referencing the video, I didn’t watch it. It was a serious question because I don’t know whether using LLMs for any large scale coding task is a (terrible but real) thing or an elaborate joke. It’s hard to tell with some of the hideously stupid bullshit that has been happening in the last few years (e.g. NFTs).

Is “vibe coding” a real thing? I thought it was a meme.

The joke doesn’t really work if you look too closely.

Tell that to my tattoo.

I honestly just find the extra layers to make it harder for me to know what my code is doing. I’d rather set proper CSS margin-bottom than mb-1. Having to learn the Bootstrap way of doing things when I already know the traditional way mostly feels like a waste of my time. It’s not, but it’s hard to stay engaged when I can already do a thing in a more standardised way.

Kind of like a site I’ve been stripping the jQuery out of. You don’t need that to show/hide a couple of form fields, FFS. Or the special JS library for doing pop overs. Come on, there’s three fields on the entire website that use them, just use HTML5 popovers.

I imagine Bootstrap is probably more useful for stuff where more complex layouts are needed, or when a site needs to be more responsive to different browser shapes (as in desktop vs. various mobile form factors).

I had to look it up myself - so I learned about it too!

details and summary?

I can use Bootstrap, much like I can write CSS, I just don’t think it’s a good use of my time.

There’s a lot of things I detest - bananas, generic medieval fantasy settings, reality TV. My life isn’t better for disliking them, it’s just the unfortunate reality of my character.

I’m glad someone does! I don’t like disliking it.

Mainly because I already understand CSS and HTML and having to learn their way of doing things is extra work and overhead.