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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • There’s a little historical baggage, but look at Windows: multiple letters for drives, and all of the paths can be modified, so you have to ask Windows where any important directory is physically mapped (like SystemRoot or Documents or Temp or Roaming AppData or many others), because it doesn’t have this nice consistent structure like Linux. Linux presents a logical layer and manages the physical location automatically. Windows makes you do the logical lookup yourself, but doesn’t enforce it, so inexperienced programmers make assumptions and put stuff where the path usually is.

    That’s part of why logging in to Windows over a slow connection can take forever if you have a bunch of Electron apps installed: they’ve mismapped their temp/cache directory under the Roaming AppData, so it gets synched at every login, often GiB of data, and they refuse to fix it.



  • Cars don’t scale.

    As soon as there is real traffic, cars become inefficient trains.

    If you’re somewhere that doesn’t have much traffic yet, it’ll seem fine, but that doesn’t always last.

    If you can make a bicycle work, that’s much healthier and cheaper to own and operate for all those people that can’t afford a car, or don’t want to be indentured to it. Cargo bikes even work fine for groceries, depending on your family size.




  • The portion of people that have these vehicles and fit the very narrow use case that it specifically satisfies is observably very small. People that don’t need a truck often can rent one. As mentioned by others, many of these trucks aren’t particularly good at what they were ostensibly built for. As my grandfather might have said, “those are just for sellin’”.

    Judgement is fair, partly because these trucks only exist because of the scam legal definition of “light” trucks, partly due to the climate impact, but most immediately because of how dangerous they are to everyone else.








  • I work in finance, and the only time I use office is when my coworkers infrequently send me something locked in an Office document. Plenty of non-technical coworkers are addicted to it, but there’s no need, because it’s awful.

    The Office programs are an ancient, bloated mess with an impossibly convoluted UI that to one uses more than a small share of.

    The styles in Word and PowerPoint are never consistent: the bullets in lists never really match, fonts change randomly without reason, &c. These are intelligent people who have used this garbage for actual decades, and the WYSIWYG lie just results in a sloppy mess.

    Even Microsoft wants everyone to stop using the desktop versions, and rent it from the cloud, which can be done from any OS.

    For years, there was progress in moving governments away from implicitly endorsing Microsoft, and toward the simpler (but often still overcomplicated) OpenOffice/LibreOffice formats, and Microsoft engaged in some pretty shady behavior to stop it.

    Markdown is better for documents, or maybe HTML, or LaTeX via LyX or something. Databases and legitimate file formats are better for data, with scripts for formulas. There are many simple alternatives around, but the addiction is so automatic and insidious, I can’t tell you how often over twenty years I’ve gotten screenshots pasted into an empty Word document rather than just sending the image.