octorian

Okay, too late to edit, but I decided to take a look. The latest version of P4V actually is using Qt6, so I guess I have to stand somewhat corrected.

I'm just bitter about a couple of apps I use that are all permanently stuck on Qt4 where the vendor seems to have zero intention of caring to ever update them to a newer version of Qt. And ever since getting a HiDPI display, this has been continuously irritating me.

I'd be more curious about that specific app. Niche bespoke commercial apps have this habit of being permanently stuck on old versions of Qt that don't handle these things as well as the newer versions. And until they are totally broken on Windows, the developers will never be motivated to lift a finger to fix this.

I have no idea if this is the case with P4V, but it absolutely is the case with a few other things I use.

I'm personally not a fan of GitHub actions, because of those dependencies outside your control and more because they're a pain to debug. A lot of the time, it feels like I'm tinkering with this huge script then holding my breath and hoping I got it right.

The reason I use them, however, is because its more trouble than its worth to maintain build servers for the 3 platforms I care about (Windows, macOS, Linux) myself. Especially for projects that get built sporadically. I think one reason for this pain is that while you can easily run VMs for Windows and Linux on the same host, macOS is kinda its own special unicorn and might need a dedicated box. (But even that aside, maintaining machines you don't use every day can get annoying.)

And this is a case where there's a long tail of "niche issues" that they end up becoming major issues when taken in aggregate.

I recently upgraded to Pop_OS 24.04 because I was sick and tired of being stuck with an outdated base.

But after trying the new Cosmic desktop, I basically ran screaming back to Gnome/X11 (with a couple of extensions to give me the old desktop experience from 22.04).

Once 26.04 drops, along with Cosmic Epoch 2, I may give it another serious try. Or I'll just go to KDE6/Wayland and see how that goes. (I do use KiCad from time to time, so I wonder how usable it'll be on Wayland down the line.)

(For reference, my biggest gripe with Cosmic right now is how it can't seem to figure out how to manage window focus. Modal dialogs can lose focus to their base window, and sometimes become covered by that base window. And focus-follows-mouse hasn't been done right ever. Both have issues written up, I just hope they get attention. Meanwhile, throngs of people seem to "swear" it "works fine for them.")

Mostly some version of 2. Or more specifically, I have a lot of top-level note documents with somewhat clear titles and organizations. And then there are a lot of "thing to remember" snippets that frequently have no obvious place, and are often related to the greater topic of multiple note documents.

Do I hoard notes/links? Yes.

Do I struggle to turn them into actions? No.

Do I struggle to keep them organized for later reference? All the time.

Do I use Obsidian? No.

I actually use Joplin, which I switched to after deciding I needed to dump Evernote. And before then (and somewhat simultaneously with), I used a pile of disorganized text files (sometimes shared via DropBox).

And I'm reading this article while sitting at an EMC/EMI test facility monitoring the test for one of my products. Certainly an interesting, and somewhat on-topic, read.

I still think there's a benefit to sticking with EVs from companies that are actually "all in" on EVs. Otherwise you're buying the product that the company (or really the sales/service channel) really doesn't want to sell you.

In this space, Tesla does have competition (e.g. Rivian and Lucid), but nowhere near as much as they should.

I'm very happy that the "base model" of cars now has a lot of the modern tech. Not because I'd personally buy a base model, but because its what you get whenever you travel and need to rent something.

In the past, when traveling, I'd be shocked at just how bare the rental cars were compared to my normal home experience. Fortunately that's no longer the case.

Its also useful for developers to have a way of bypassing customer support to have direct visibility into what issues the actual users are experiencing. This can come in the form of browsing tickets, online forums, or social media.

Often something that's easily brushed off by a support rep will ring a bell in the mind of a developer who has recently worked in the area of the code related to the issue.

The last time I worked on a project that actually had all these roles, "architect" basically meant someone who sat in meetings all day and played very little role in the actual software development of the project.

There were plenty of times where it would have been useful to have someone providing real architecture/design guidance, but no such person functionally existed.

The Seawolf was kinda the first attempt at a next generation attack sub while we were still figuring out the technology, making it far too expensive. But it led to the Virginia class, which has gone into mainstream production.

In some ways there's a similar situation with the F-22 vs F-35, though those two may have a bit more of a difference on roles and requirements.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I'll take a car infotainment system that doesn't need CarPlay/AndroidAuto to be usable (and lacks it) over one that requires a phone attached via CarPlay/AndroidAuto to be usable.

I use Android Auto on rental cars all the time.

My daily driver is a Tesla (Model S /w MCU v2) that doesn't have it. And doesn't need it to provide a usable experience.

The endless list of "exception" cases is why I'm continuous skeptical about any sort of full-self-driving claims.

Sure, you can cover everything they can think of. But there are so many cases you can't predict, or which don't have an obvious solution, and it often comes down to a human judgement call that doesn't always have a programmatically-clear right answer.

> There is nothing fun about sitting in traffic on your commute to/from work, and neither there is much fun in doing long-distance driving in a straight line on highway for hours on end

And I wish this would be more broadly recognized. Every time there's a story about someone important freaking out about something related to autonomous driving, I'm at least somewhat afraid they'll use it as justification to deny me access to it for those specific use cases.

And honestly, those are the only use cases I really care about or feel comfortable with right now. Of course my car is also too old to support much more than that.

Oh, its definitely a dumpster fire. And they keep changing the parental controls to make it less obvious what's appropriate for what age.

And then there's the constant begging for fewer restrictions and more things being permitted, to the point where you're basically screaming "no" in their face and want to smash the damn tablet.

Then it settles down, and starts up again a month later.

Just seeing that sentence fragment about "structures of power and violence" told me so much about the author. Its the sort of language that brings with it a whole host of stereotypes, some of which were immediately confirmed with a little more digging (and others would require way too much effort to confirm, but likely could be).

And yes, this whole "capitalism bad" mentality I see in tech does kinda irk me. Why? Because it was capitalism that gave them the tools to be who they are and the opportunities to do what they do.

And yet nobody wants to actually offer a tape-based solution that's practical, easy to get, holds enough data, and doesn't cost a blithering fortune.

Even if you are willing to spend that small fortune, good luck actually getting all the parts together without enterprise contracts.

Somehow I'm reminded of the Futurama parody documentary: "Don't Date Robots!"

I'm grateful they don't make truly stripped down models of cars anymore, because those were always what would end up in the rental car inventory. Every time I'd rent a car, it felt like I was taking a step back in time.

Now all rental cars actually have some reasonable set of features, without you having to pay for any up-sells.

One thing about this period that kinda annoyed me in the tech press, is that it always felt like these companies were making new/better computers for "their existing customers" as if they were only ever competing against their own older products.

Another thing, which perhaps "grinds my gears" a lot more, is that this late-90's/early-00's shift to PCs happened before Linux was sufficiently taken seriously. So lots of high-end applications that started on UNIX migrated over to Windows NT. And once you're firmly on Windows, its much harder to go to Linux. (Whereas commercial UNIX to Linux is easy.)

So now there are whole markets (that used to support commercial UNIX) where Linux users get the middle finger, and as someone who hates Windows, this really ticks me off.

Focus on farming also gives the issue a bi-partisan spin, which is something you really need to make any actual progress on issues in US politics these days.

This is an easy dodge. The problem is that when lack of repairability becomes the norm, the consumer no longer has that choice. Or they have to severely compromise their market choices in the search for repairable products.

And wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase. Its something that comes further down the line, when the purchase decision has already been made.

It would result in a situation where nobody could depend on the expansion module, if they wanted their game to have the largest possible market.

It would also cause a lot of confusion, where clueless older relatives would buy games for kids, not realize that an accessory was required (or have no idea if the kid actually had that accessory), and then the game wouldn't run.

We see this sort of problem happen a lot with computers of the 8-bit era as well, where add-on modules would fix a lot of the issues with the base system... then be supported by almost no software for these exact reasons.

Okay, this makes me think of QTBUG-56214, which has to do with Qt Creator suddenly not recognizing mouse scroll wheel events after a while. (often as a result of various device state changes common if you use a KVM on your machine)

Been following the issue for years, apparently it was marked as fixed a few months ago, but the issue is clearly still there. I wonder if this latest Qt Creator update will finally incorporate the fix, or if its not really fixed.

One thing that got a bit lost in all of this is that "BLM" stands for two things...

1. A literal phrase that's not very controversial on its own, which many automatically agreed with and stood by.

2. An organization with its own motives and agenda, which enjoyed a period of automatic support as a side-effect.

Most of the outpouring of support was likely for the phrase, whereas much of the pushback was likely against the organization. Not sure where all of this stands now, since its left the news cycle.

I would argue that software written under government contract is inherently awful and unusable, because...

- It is driven entirely by formal requirements and specifications

- These requirements are approved by "the customer," which is a set of people completely independent from "the actual users."

- A requirements document cannot easily capture "the UI/UX doesn't suck," because that sort of thing often tends to be more subjective or not well thought out in advance.

- The developers often pat themselves on the back for meeting the requirements.

- The customer has to accept the software and foist it on the users, because it meets the requirements.

...and...

- The competition is entirely about who gets the contract to build the software, and not for which software is actually the best.

The designs of those kits from the 80s and 90s were also very flimsy and would break easily if you started to play with them. So really, the original build falling apart and becoming spare parts was almost expected.

This really changed once they started including Technics pieces as structural parts of builds, rather than as a totally separate product line. Most things I've built in recent years are far more robust than what I built as a kid.