Billiam Bakesale

An ape could though.

Eh, congrats! New Job?

When was the last time you got a 63% raise?

This whole thing just makes me want to steer clear of wordpress entirely.

It gives a false sense of security to beginner programmers and doesn’t offer a more tailored solution that a more practiced programmer might create. This can lead to a reduction in code quality and can introduce bugs and security holes over time. If you don’t know the syntax of a language how do you know it didn’t offer you something dangerous? I have copilot at work and the only thing I actually accept its suggestions for now are writing log statements and populating argument lists. While those both still require review they are generally faster than me typing them out. Most of the rest of what it gives me is undesired: it’s either too verbose, too hard to read, or just does something else entirely.

It was a lot easier to pretend to be a good person when every moral failure you make wasn’t broadcast around the world the moment it was discovered. Case and point, look into Bill Gates more. He wasn’t always a respectful guy, got caught up in the whole “filthy communists” schtick when the government was investigating his company, advocates for more restrictive control of aid distribution favoring manufacturers more than those he’s trying to help, conflicts of interest in his charity, opposing twitters ban of Trump after the insurrection, etc.

Counterpoint.

Because schools cannot forcibly out students to their parents SpaceX is now incapable of working there? Seems like there’s something else going on.

That’s a contributing factor to battery life remaining stagnant. Manufacturers use those advances while continuing to slim phones rather than making an actually flat brick that uses those advances to drastically increase battery life. Regardless of the energy needs of the phone manufacturers can use the difference in height between the back of a phone and the camera bump to include more battery capacity and it will increase both the daily and usable life of the phone.

So let’s keep making phones thinner and thinner while simultaneously growing the camera bump instead of making a flat profile with, say, 2 days of life!

Grab 5 of the top engineers, sales people, and marketing at the company, double their pay, and grant them a $1,000,000,000 bonus in 5 years time if they beat certain performance metrics. Have them sit on a board as coCEOs and watch true motivation. Kick out the guy that’s demanding 3 times your annual income as “motivational” compensation.

Deleting my grub config instead of editing it. Fortunately that’s pretty easy to recover from, just annoying.

F’ed up installing graphics driver and had to reset everything from another TTY, also just annoying.

Chose the wrong permissions or path on a chmod call and locked out a big party of the system. I think that was during a setup though, so I just started from scratch again.

I used Ubuntu until PAE became required and then switched to either Puppy or DSL (tried them both, honestly don’t remember which I stuck with). Eventually got a new computer and used Fedora and Arch (btw) for years. I’ve recently switched to Debian on a machine I just don’t wanna be arsed with worrying about breaking.

They also fuck up because they aren’t designed and implemented properly.

• Walmart’s don’t accept tap to pay.
• Whole foods’ requires manual keying in of pastry items as different options (they don’t have danishes in their DB so they need to be rung up as a bagel; per the human worker that resolved the issue for me when I predictably couldn’t find the item they failed to include).
• None of them allow you to cancel the order (such as when you want to check the price of an item because the store neglected to actually list the price on the floor).
• None of them let you remove an item (such as a duplicate scan or removing a luxury item that stretches your budget or rang up higher than you were expecting).
• You can’t purchase shaving goods, alcohol, canned air, or other adult items without intervention (probably no way to actually avoid this one, but it doesn’t promote a smooth flow) and the kiosk often locks down until aided by an associate preventing you from continuing to scan your items while you wait.
• Often locks the kiosk when placing a reusable bag in the bagging area.
• Inconsistent payment methods: some allow you to scan your card at any point in the process, some process payment the moment your card is scanned, some require a manual trigger on screen prior to scanning your card.
• Often forces popups between scans (“This kiosk is in card only mode,” “Enter your loyalty card number,” or “how many bags did you use today?”)

I’d like to:

• Walk up and set down my bag
• Scan all my items
• Remove arbitrary items
• Tap my card
• If required; verify my age and have an associate clear any blocks
• Grab my stuff and leave

Instead what often happens:

• Walk up and set down my bag
• Kiosk locks because there’s an item in the bagging area
• Pickup my bag, move to a different kiosk and set my bag on the floor
• Scan my first item
• Dismiss the card only pop-up
• Dismiss the loyalty pop-up
• Scan the item again because the first scan just wakes the machine and the order doesn’t start until you dismiss 2 popups
• Put the item in my bag on the floor
• Scan the next item
• Dismiss pop-up about first item not being in the bagging area
• Take first item from my bag on the floor and set it in the bagging area
• Kiosk locks until associate clears it
• Scan a razor blade
• Kiosk locks until associate clears it
• Scan the remainder of my items
• One of them scanned twice
• Click the visible delete button next to duplicate item
• Kiosk locks until associate clears it
• Tap my card
• Realize that this unit works differently than the last one I used and click the “Finish and pay” button
• Select card as the payment type (on the kiosk in the card only queue getting run in card only mode)
• Dismiss the bags used pop-up
• Tap my card again
• Move all my items from the bagging area to the reusable bag on the floor
• Collect my receipt and goods and leave

I’m glad that you’ve consistently had a good experience with them, but I have not. While each of our experiences are anecdotal, the machines’ failure to routinely accommodate my expected use case is an engineering failure. I am a software engineer by trade and know how to interact with computers well. While we have a running joke about customers not reading what’s on their screen that’s no excuse to design an interface that cannot properly react to unexpected or unusual inputs or tasks.

Self checkouts don’t work the same across stores, don’t accept the same methods of payment across stores, require human intervention the moment anything off the happy path occurs (like not moving an item fast enough and it scans twice), provide constant interruptions during the execution of their single purpose, and are unfathomably slow and inconsistent at what they do.

They just don’t work well.

I’ve been following Relativty for a bit now. It might be up your alley.

I have a tablet running fedora with gnome. While it works for me I cannot recommend it at all for something I’d give to someone else.

On the surface gnome looks useable as a mobile DE, but the reality is that it requires several gnome extensions to get it in a useable state (I’m talking having a reliable way to copy and paste). Those extensions are not necessarily updated at the same cadence as gnome or fedora so my ability to consistently use the device in a predictable manner is gone if I install the latest updates when available (and after years of training users to install updates when available someone you give the tablet too will click the update pop-up).

Regarding drivers, the only thing that doesn’t work on mine is the camera. I’d recommend trying out a few choices on a live boot and seeing just how much effort you have to make it useable.