• 0 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
Cake day: January 19th, 2025
  • tomenzgg@midwest.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•RTFM is SageEnglish
    21·
    8 days ago

    I mean, – in college – the running joke in my CS department was to try reading the man page even though it would likely be impenetrable.

    I think the issue is that they’re written from the perspective of someone in deep knowledge of the entire system already rather than someone who might be using it for the first time and trying to figure out their was around.

    Let’s take the first fragment of the first sentence of ls’s page: “For each operand that names a file of a type other than directory[…].”

    Well, what’s a directory? Most people use the term folder; that could arguably not be fair as the term directory came first so let’s ignore that criticism.

    What’s an operand in this scenario? While an accurate term, not exactly the most familiar (and certainly not helpful to, say, my partner who, due to dyscalculia, is almost certainly not to be familiar as it’s most often used in math). But we crack open a dictionary and find it’s the bit manipulated by an operator.

    So…the text we give ls? Does that include values we give to the flags (not that I’d know what those are, yet, or what they do). And, of course, the SYNOPSIS describes that text we give as “file” while the very next sentence lets us know that operands can also be directories (mostly, most people think of files and directories as different things) so there’s already an overt disconnect between the verbage, description, and examples, disallowing any pattern matching of my brain to quickly piece concepts together.

    All of which will probably be hard for me to quickly comprehend as I’m expecting a description of a thing to start with what the thing is rather than immediately describing a small facet of the thing.

    Like…I’d argue it’s poorly written, on it’s own face, but it’s utterly bewildering for someone who isn’t even entirely certain what all the pieces of the new world they’re exploring are, yet, and is trying to piece things together via concept clues.

  • tomenzgg@midwest.socialtoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.world•nobody in webdev knows what graceful degradation is anymoreEnglish
    6·
    1 month ago

    It’s not the bulk of your point (of which I agree with) but your mention of the back button reminded me how much I despise – sometimes above everything else – how much these sites override basic functionality of the browser, overriding inbuilt history navigation, screwing up Ctrl click behaviors, stealing my right-click menu or default key bindings.

    There’s a lot of reasons one might not want to use TikTok but the reason that stops me before even having to consider other reasons (but I can’t really explain to most people) is that it’s a site designed without any really respect or regard for the user.

    Alt+d doesn’t work and Ctrl+l pops up some modal about logging in. I can’t open any of the recommended videos in a new tab because they clearly must’ve just done them as onclicks and not real anchor tags so right clicking doesn’t give me the option and neither does Ctrl clicking (which – also – that’s…got to be an accessibility violation, right?). And more than half the time the full page doesn’t even load because it’s such a strangle of resources that it needs me to click a button on the page because it wasn’t able to load the videos listing of an account in time.

    The whole thing is just a nightmare in terms of design and primarily not even in terms of inefficiency but direct hostility to UX. Absolute garbage.

  • tomenzgg@midwest.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•Sounds like the most sensible optionEnglish
    91·
    1 month ago

    Honestly, that was the biggest difference for me, when I switched.

    A bunch of my issues I’d had on Windows just went away, overnight. And, sure, I ran into other problems; but I would’ve on Windows, too, except I can usually resolve them on Linux.

    My machine is so much more usable, just on a daily basis; and I’ve learned so much more about my computer naturally since I switched.

  • tomenzgg@midwest.socialtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•"Literally" literally does not mean "similar to".English
    3·
    1 month ago

    A very easy way to square all this (and what I assumed everyone understood to be going on before I ever heard of this discourse) is that people are just using exaggeration for emphasis (a very common rhetorical tactic).

    Of course people aren’t saying it’s literally thing-they’re-referring-to but that it has so much in common that it’s “practically” almost exactly that thing.

    I feel like people overcomplicate what needn’t be complicated, sometimes (like people hallucinating a “fourth-person” pronoun to explain a convention perfectly already provided by current linguistical constructs).

  • tomenzgg@midwest.socialtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why do some people hate drinking water?English
    1·
    2 months ago

    I expect it’s just a taste thing; water tastes fine but, like, it could taste more interesting if we added a bit of sugar or flavor to it (I was a huge justice fan).

    For my own end, it was an easy way to keep my emotions/mood simulated or engaged against my depression that was low effort and easy to supply; that said, I switched entirely to water last year and, now fully comfortable drinking nothing but water and being fairly averse – previously –, I can’t say the previous reasons really make that much of a difference for me, now. Maybe it’s just having drank to my non-water content, already, but drinking nothing but water’s been pretty great and removes low-key health fears I always had.