What makes it bad:
First of all, it uses Electron, thus it is laggy and wastes too much resources. Maybe it is just a pet peeve of mine, but I hate, if an application does not look native on my GNOME Desktop and does not follow any HIG.
Another factor is the proprietary nature of MS Teams. If it was open, there would probably be some other client/some way to have a real native client.
My preferred alternative would either be Jitsi or Matrix, although both have just electron clients they atleast attempt to have a usable GUI. (Except this one thing in Element: The search button is next to the "Start Videocall"-Button)
I mean aside from technology choices, It's just very bad at video calls.
I don't want an "artistic" layout of people that is constantly switching around, or comedy "sitting in a theatre" options. If someone doesn't have video on it'll confusingly highlight some random other participant while they are talking, and when nobody is talking it'll choose a random person with the microphone on and boost whatever background noise (or typing) it can up until it matches speaking volume.
Despite randomly boosting silence, it'll aggressively gate anyone talking, with an obvious fade-up at the start of their sentence and if you are lucky, aggressively cut off the end of their sentence. If you aren't so lucky, it'll do this in every pause between words.
Add to that, random disconnects, chat randomly not working, finding it hard to actually get a list of participants, and that it apparently wants to be slack but makes it hard for people to work out how to actually re-use a channel for the next meeting.
But of course it gets bundled in with all the other office stuff the company purchases; making it the "default" that you have to fight against using. We were only saved against moving to Teams for _all_ our telephony by the fact that it's linux support is really, really bad and that's what all our engineers use.
I use Teams on Mac, and frankly while I started off just disliking it because of the Electron lagginess, over time that's been overshadowed by a bunch of other stuff:
- It's basically a Skype reskin, so it has a lot of visual elements and quirks that carry over from that — most of them haven't aged well. The reacts alone are taken straight from Skype, and they never seem to sync up if people react to a comment in quick succession. It seems like a small complaint, but it's really surprising to see in something built by a trillion-dollar company.
- Speaking of UI issues, why does Teams insist on using a custom notification bubble instead of using the native ones that all other electron apps seem to be able to do? They don't play well with full-screen apps, and they're generally pretty clunky.
- Video calls also fall apart if you have more than 4 people in them (even if most people aren't sharing video). This has led to screenshare drop outs for seemingly no reason.
- I don't understand why Microsoft thinks Teams needs to do _everything_ productivity related; it's a mediocre video chat client, a _really_ mediocre text chat client, and possibly the worst calendar I've ever had to work with, which is saying something, because most other calendars I've had to use are pretty awful. The scheduling assistant alone is one of the most counter-intuitive pieces of UI I've ever used, and managing event ownership is a nightmare. IT had to be called in to delete a zombie event that was supplanted by a new event, but the owner of the original event had left the company.
Not to put too fine a point on it: I've had to use a lot of chat clients over the years, from IRC, to Slack, to Jabber, plus some less professional-oriented software like Discord and Steam chat (which is itself pretty bad), and I can say honestly that my loathing for Teams burns with the passion of a thousand suns. That anyone would deliberately choose to pay for it baffles me.
I don't think anyone chooses teams - Microsoft uses their monopoly power to bundle it in with Office, which people do choose. And why pay a bundle for Slack when you've got Teams included?
I came on here to say "Teams", and here it is, right at the top.
Try doing a video call with 4 computers. Rather than the oh-so-obvious 1/4 of a screen each, one person gets half, two people get quarters, and you're in a tiny square in the bottom corner.
Even more comical is when one of the participants in using a laptop with two people in front of the camera. Teams will often centre the image, clip the sides, chop off both people, and show the other participants just the empty space between them.
How on earth did this pass QA, or any kind of design review?
To add to what others said, another crap piece of Teams' UI is the file manager: it plays very badly with the browser (can't middle click a file to open it in another browser, pressing the back button is broken) and it has a shitty pdf viewer (why the hell does it need an integrated viewer anyway?).
My university pays for Google Meet too, and has a server running Moodle, so I have no idea why professors prefer Teams over Meet+Moodle. And don't get me started on Google Classroom...
Teams is a shim on top on Outlook Groups and SharePoint. It’s kind of a brilliant approach, as it allowed them to ship without needing to reinvent the security model, ediscovery, etc.
The downside is that it is clunky. But even then, it’s exponentially better than native SharePoint, WebEx, etc.
Over time, I’m sure they’ll do what they did with “OneDrive for Business” and build services over time to replace or augment that underlying stuff. OneDrive was a turd a 6–8 years ago
but got much better about 2 years ago and seems to get incrementally better.
My kids have been trying to use Teams this last week while isolating at home with covid. It's easily the worst software I've ever had the misfortune to use. The UI is an absolute mess and none of it makes any sense, there's multiple locations where we have to try to find files. I have twins, so they're in the same year but in different classes - only one of them has a working login so both had to log in as her on different laptops and then they weren't able to join different meetings. It has no redeeming features whatsoever.
The thing that drives me up a wall with Teams is that when someone shares a screenshot with me, I can only expand the thumbnail in the chat to the full-size image maybe 5% of the time successfully. Most of the time I just go into a blank tab that never renders anything.
I think part of this is the fucked up way that Teams handles storing content, because it uses a mishmash of SharePoint sometimes for real file attachments, and some ephemeral blob storage for pasted images.
But it's infuriating because there is no error message, or any way to force reload; you just have to keep trying and hope it works, or go into your AppData folder, nuke the cache, and restart Teams.
Damn I thought I was alone! I get this about half the time too, although now I think I've identified a pattern: the second time I maximize in a given conversation always breaks down. The "fix" is to click on another conversation and then come back.
It really doesn't make sense to me how such a simple common functionality would break in such a major product. Do they not use Teams... at Microsoft? Did they not notice?
Thanks for this tip. I usually resolve this by opening Teams in the browser and find the image I need to see. It's very disruptive that an important UI feature randomly (or perhaps reliably) fails.
Teams v2 won't use Electron[1]; but for now you can get a small performance boost by just opening Teams using a modern web browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox) at https://teams.microsoft.com/ -- you can even set up a PWA-type app shortcut.
You can uninstall the client after that. I think there's maybe one feature (popout chat windows) that the client has which you can't get in the browser.
Until recently Firefox releases had all kind of problems (e.g. hardware enumeration)
That's why we recommended Chromium/Chrome for at our faculty for Jitsi usage
I'm a Firefox (beta) user myself, but I would rather try another browser before blaming a webapp -- many issues.
Teams is also horrible if you are in multiple organizations, as it simply fails to consider that you might want to easily switch between two different Teams meetings with different authentication, like it's trivial to do with e.g. Slack.
If you have access to multiple tenants as an external user via the one 365 account, there are some great edge cases.
- I need to use the main menu to enter as a named external user in one tenant, to join and bypass the waiting gate to enter the call. Despite my main account being the same email, and indeed SSO!
- While in that call, you receive notifications from chat messages in your main tenant chat inbox.
- You can't use chat in your main tenant, as you're currently logged into a call as an external in another tenant (still using your main account), so you can see notifications for your messages, but can't reply to them on that device (!)
This is before you consider the use-case of having multiple actual 365 accounts (which Microsoft seems to amazingly have failed to deliver on, despite the fact supporting it would likely increase their bottom line, by making it easier to add contractors into a tenant more easily). Strangely, this is supported far better on mobile, but not at all on PC (!)
It seems they've built it on such a complex architecture of accounts, external users, guests, tenants etc, that they need to unwind this complexity to make it work - which tenants' policies should apply when on a call as an external user, but chatting in another tenant simultaneously?
You’ll get a notification from a Teams instance in one tenant, but you need to switch accounts entirely in order to take action on it, which is REALLY slow for stupid reasons.
Also, you can’t run multiple instances of Teams signed into multiple tenants to work around this, and video conferencing is broken in all sorts of ways if you use Teams from the browser
The main reason Teams sucks has nothing to do with tech. It's the fundamental design vs Slack.
Slack is organic free flowing conversation, like a chat, that you can thread out of for expansion of a particular though via threading.
Teams is forced threading on each thought and then constrained followup with no ability to thread because you're already in the thread.
I can deal with the tech limitations it's the fundamental UX that makes it a huge garbage pile that is being forced on people because "we already pay for it and all our employees are in it. Also hard to build custom bots for if your organization limits admins.
I have this weird issue with Teams that I haven't seen mentioned yet.
Often messages just... don't load. To be precise: in a channel you have posts with replies below them; the default view shows the last two replies if there are more. So far so good. Then I click on the button to show more of them, and zero, one, or two more show up -- of the tens that are there. If I reload the page (back to 2 replies) then click the button again, it works as intended, including loading even more if there are many replies.
Then I switch to a different channel and back to here, and it's broken again. Have to reload and retry.
This happens for many but not all reply threads (haven't figured out that pattern yet). However, either a thread always works or it always works only after a reload. Fully deterministic.
This same issue happens with emoji reactions on posts (sometimes only appear after a reload), and the three-dots more-options button in the hover panel of posts: the three-dots button will just be blank white and not do anything until a reload. There is a slot for the button though. It's funny until you have to deal with it (can't edit!).
This is infuriating since it means that when I'm monitoring some channels as TA for a course, I have to constantly reload the page -- which in turn means that I need at least one browser teams open. This is because:
- In firefox, I cannot video call, only voice call. (Why does every other conferencing software work in firefox but not teams?)
- In chrome, I can video call, but while I screenshare my own camera gets disabled -- deterministically. This is something I see with everyone (their camera turning off when they share their screen), so it's not just a quirk of my setup somehow.
- In electron desktop teams (linux), I can do everything, but I cannot reload because it's not a browser! So I cannot fix the brokenness caused by the not loading of content that I described above.
I've reproduced the content not loading issue on another person's Windows pc in native teams, so it's not a linux quirk -- but even so, it also happens in the browser for me which shouldn't be platform-dependent.
My coworkers have joked that maybe MS is designing for this because people having two instances running at all times, frequently reloading one of them, increases engagement metrics significantly.
Does anyone else have this or is my account just broken?
EDIT: I wanted to report to MS but it's impossible to make a screen recording that doesn't reveal personal information of roughly everyone. And MS says that a recording should not contain personal information.
I could use 80% of whatever does Teams do with just an AMD Athlon an 256 MB of RAM. With inline image, Latex and video previewing, video calls and so on.
That with Kopete and KDE3.
MS could write a multiplatform QT5 client perfectly by using 1/10 of the resources.
Discord. I basically don't use it, avery few months I'd say, but I still hate it, because it drains all the good Q&A's from the internet and puts it into its chatlogs, with a mediocre search ontop.
Discord for gaming ramblings and chitchat may be okay, but I hate when software projects misuse it as a support channel.
Give me some forum instead, I know many ppl here on HN dislike discourse, I don't get it though, for me it's a great way to do a forum in a modern way. Can't perceive any UX issues with it (I do know the arguments, I just think they are not true, or much less of a hassle than claimed).
Maybe we need something like discord, but it should have a way to group a question and the following conversation including asking back and answers, and send that to a website where it appears like a forum thread. Basically just select it with mouse, right-click, pick some option, select some keywords for taxonomy and good to go. Should be 5 seconds of work after the person with the problem is satisfied. Yea that is something I would not hate I guess.
I actually prefer IRC over Discord. I'm not sure why. Discord feels a bit excessive in its features. I don't like the bots. It doesn't handle multiple channels well, not as well as Slack, and yet something about it makes people do so many, unlike IRC. There's the mess of roles/self roles.
There's just something about it that encourages overcommunication. You have announcement channels that people just tell you to mute if you don't like announcements but, well, you miss out on all the announcements. The logging means that too much documentation goes on in a server, alongside memes and motivational posts.
I've actually been playing a game where all spoiler related chat goes in channels that get cleared every 3 days. 90% of the conversation is spoiler related. This is a lot more pleasant - things get documented off discord, and yet there's plenty of chatter and banter.
That's not really a problem. Like a phone number, you just want the other person's number, not the server provider.
I still get on DALnet but it's less active now.
In Malaysia, #kampung on KampungChat is popular, often around 1000 people on at any one time. Many of them who used to hang out on IRC during school days.
However, thanks to the magic of internet anonymity, it's full of 40 year olds jacking off now. You have to control the conversation, similar to Omegle. I've had some nice conversations on books and especially chess on there. It appears that the kind of people who join IRC are also nerds in some form.
I can't put my finger on it but every time I have to use Discourse, it feels like something is 'off'. It feels like it's just a mashup of reddit + stack overflow + forums. I much prefer the older style phpBB forums setup. I would take that style just implemented in a newer tech stack over Disourse any day.
Do you mean content-wise, or from UX point of view? I try to understand the arguments against discourse, but to me it's simply not much of a difference when I watch "active topics" on a phpBB or a discourse-one, both feels like "forum" to me. Highly subjective ofc, not trying to preach, just want to understand, as I said :)
I think for me, someone who is actively diving deep into Discourse and hoping it'll work because I love the search and the open-source aspect of it, I still find the UX to be off. I guess I'm used to shorter interactions online, in comments sections or on social media, and Discourse doesn't seem to do those that well.
Now, that being said, they have an alpha version of chat, which is the main reason I've jumped more into it as of late. By being able to take conversations from the chat and port them to topics, making them longer-term group memory and more searchable, gives me some hope.
Still, some of the things just feel clunky. I wish I could put more words to it, I'll try to reflect more.
edit: it also doesn't have a mobile app (it has DiscourseHub, but that's not dedicated to each instance). While the mobile web version is better than most mobile web versions, it's still not an app, which can frustrate me on iOS.
I like the Fig app but from what I know it's no longer being updated, and with the new chat function coming, I'd hope it would get updated for that.
I think there's just a much higher learning curve. I keep learning keyboard shortcuts but I don't know how many of my community members will. Who knows, maybe with a focus on chat will bring a new focus to mobile (and with iOS getting better support for PWAs)
I recall this is the exact purpose of Spectrum.chat, though it can't interoperate with Discord, it's a new chat network. It allows making conversation threads available publicly and indexed on search engines. I've seen it in Google results a couple of times, but it doesn't look like it has caught on much, likely because of the network effect required to make a closed chat software popular.
Yes, when I talked about discord in the last paragraph, I actually meant "something like discord, with the same level of popularity" - which doesnt exist though. Discord itself would never implement such a feature, they are all about the lock-in effect.
Teams. It's an abomination. Slow, clunky, polluted UI, consumes memory like it's breakfast, terrible ignominious Linux support, useless "user voice".
Can't change because I trapped myself in a company that is MS partner, and have all the Microsoft's suite.
I can expand on some points:
- useless user voice: just go to feedback hub and see it for yourself, years old (now "renewed" because of the migration from User Voice) requests, with default response from the developers "hey! We hear you..." No, you don't;
- terrible Linux support: the current version of Teams for Linux is months old, from October 2021, and I think it's just a wrapper for the web version, but worse, because it uses an electron version that doesn't support screen share on Wayland;
- it's slow, every action you try, hover, focus, text,etc just feels slow and unfinished;
There's still some fight internally between people that like teams (those who has an RTX 3090, that can run teams without sweating) and people that don't, the latter created a channel/group/whatever is called, to change from Teams ("Teams alternatives"), but I think it's a lost cause.
Signal. I dont like having to tie it to a phone number. I would much rather use email (eg wire) if I need to pick one or the other, but a random session id (eg session, torchat) is much better. I also dont want to be limited to only using it on a mobile device. (Yes I know theres a "desktop client" but it has to be linked to your phone anyway, so it defeats half the point of having a desktop version and it also uses electron, which imo is trash.) I also am put off by the fact that they work so closely with Facebook and other Big Tech companies. Call me paranoid but it raises red flags.
The alternatives I've explored include session, and wire. Session probably would be a great alternative, or at least it seems so superficially. But the user base is extremly small, it still uses electron and they dont seem to release updates very often. It's also essentially just a fork of signal, so you might as well just use that for a few reasons that I'll omit for brevity. As for wire, theres a lot to be desired. But the main complaint I have is that theres no way to put a lock on your session the way there is with signal. I emailed them about it, and they told me they had "no plans to implement such a lock out at this time". I also have issues with it not sending and receiving messages properly. And so on, as such...
Wow, that's interesting. I didn't expect to see Signal listed here.
Disclaimer; Signal is probably my favorite app in in the world. As someone that doesn't use any Facebook owned services, there wouldn't be any other way for me to chat with my friends and family.
But I'd really like to understand what you mean and if I am falling for a scam. How does disclosing my phone number make it insecure and not end-to-end encrypted?
I've put Whatsapp for broadly the same reasons. So not the Op, but my 2 cents:
I cannot listen to any discussion of "privacy" or "encryption" when the software doesn't let me create multiple anonymous accounts on computing device of my choice, and instead it insists on tying itself to my most personal device and ID at the very beginning.
I don't know if Signal does it, but Whatsapp additionally explicitly requires access to your phone contact list. At which point, the end-to-end encryption feels like sarcasm. What's left? You have my identity and you have my social graph. You can tie me to anything you want six ways to Sunday. You've asked for my most treasured things in the first 30 seconds of installation. Everything else feels like ridiculous security theater that makes my life explicitly worse (especially the lack of seamless multi-device support) for positively zero benefit for myself or any of my friends & family.
I understand broad first-principles discussion, but for me personally:
I DON'T care if my discussion with my mother in law is encrypted.
I DO care if everybody I want to chat with gets my phone number and social graph.
The purpose of using phone numbers in many of todays services, is to shift the work of validating the authenticity of the user to carriers. Of course this has given rise to inumerable vendors of accounts or forged prepaid cards, but it raises the barrier just enough to make mass cheating, boosting, spamming unprofitable.
But the benefit of curbing spam doesnt outweigh the cost of abatement of privacy. Though more of my issue is being forced to have it on a phone, when I only want to use from my laptop.
Non-cloud Jira as a workflow manager is pretty good. It’s intuitive, powerful, quite fast (again, on-premises version only). But my current company uses the cloud version as an agile project management tool, and it’s awful just because it is soooo slow. And they keep changing the UI, sometimes with good ideas, sometimes not, but because it is so slow nobody wants to use it to update their progress. For example I update my times once a month because it’s an awful experience, and just use a spreadsheet the rest of the time.
I have used cloud JIRA and non-cloud JIRA. They both have the same (99%, at least) awful UI and UX. They both routinely lag out performing even the most basic operations. They both crap out on me if I leave a tab open overnight and try to do something in it the next day. They are both miserable to use. On-premises is not some solution.
It’s way faster than any cloud instance I’ve used. Sure, it’s just public browsing, and most features are hidden behind login, but good luck getting that performance from the cloud version.
Wow, thanks for sharing! This is legitimately the fastest Atlassian product experience I've ever had. Probably by an entire order of magnitude. It makes a little more sense how they bamboozle execs into foisting JIRA on their entire org now.
I can definitely believe that a well-tuned, properly specced on-prem JIRA can be faster than the cloud version ever can be, now. TIL!
However at least you (well, someone in your company, maybe not you) has the capability to upgrade the hardware Jira runs on if necessary. (Where I work we use Jira on-prem and it's fine speedwise.)
Also, on-prem means you can decide when to upgrade i.e. you are empowered to prevent the UI from changing daily (in our case at work we haven't upgraded for years).
Shortcut was formerly called Clubhouse for anyone who used it before September 2021 [1].
Somewhat ironically, they renamed the company to de-conflict with the other Clubhouse (the audio chatrooms app) although at this point said app has all but faded into obscurity less than 6 months later.
With respect to the Shortcut product itself, my experience with it ~1.5 years ago was positive and I would try it again.
We switched off to Jira + Confluence for feature parity that Clubhouse lacked, at least at the time. But it looks like they are very rapidly iterating on the product and adding new features (threaded comments look awesome). I look forward to giving it another shot and watching as it evolves.
It looks like they also now have a Confluence competitor [2], currently in private beta.
Jira, bitbucket, and confluence are complete abominations. I hate Jira so much that it will be among the first questions I ask when I interview for my next job. I miss gitlab so much.
As a way if enabling corporate bullies and toxic managenent behaviour, I would agree Jira has no peers. Want to ambush somebody in a meeting? Open your jira tickets in the 5 minutes leading up to it. Even better, create some new, obscure category and pile them into there over a week and ask your target why they aren't done during the bi weekly standup.
As a mechanism of abuse of employees it is superb.
Counterpoint. Want to automate reporting the amount of toil on a team based on ticket assignment with pretty much any language that can talk HTTP? Want to create super-easy dashboards that are easy to read and use, and then export that into code? Is your company trying capital-A-Agile and wants to experiment between using scrum, kanban, fragilefall, whatever? Jira can do all of these things, and it can do them easily.
What you describe has nothing to do with Jira, but with how people are using it. If someone were to do the same thing in e.g. Linear would Linear be responsible for the bullying?
Ticketing systems can be communication and tracking tools that serve practitioners, or they can be surveillance and control instruments that serve bean counters and micromanagers. It is possible to configure a JIRA instance either way, but JIRA’s extensive workflow, permissions, and reporting systems target the latter in ways that other ticketing systems just can’t.
This is something my team is struggling with at the moment. Gitlab issues (and Github issues, and similar) are fine if what you're doing is only software development. The problem is that Jira works really well for tracking all the things, not just 'bugs in our current software', and having something that keeps track of all the work in one place makes life a lot easier.
Right now, my team uses Jira for tracking bugs and features and whatnot in our custom software development. We also use it for tracking issues and work related to our infrastructure, access requests to our various data centers, budget requests from the team, software and change management planning, site audits, and probably a couple other things I'm forgetting off the top of my head. And yes, there are likely better products for each of those things individually, but then you wind up in the hell of "oh wait, audits go over here in Freebly, but software releases are over there in FrobniTZr", and if you run those tools it's suddenly fifty-leven more hosts and apps to support and keep patched.
Much like Excel, Jira might not be the best tool for all our use cases, but it's pretty good at several of them and good enough at the rest that having everything in one bucket outweighs the potential benefits of a better tool.
On the other hand, if someone would like to fire up a start-up to develop a similarly flexible on-premises work management product to replace it, you'll absolutely find me in line with my wallet open...
Lack of service desk in other applications has always been what keeps our org on Jira (on premises). Anyone have any suggestions on deeply integrating service desk tickets with engineering tasks?
The reason parent poster can’t replace Jira isn’t that there aren’t alternatives, but because a large part of the corporate world has decided that Jira is the best issue tracker because it has the most bells and whistles; it supports the SCRUM / Kanban / whatnot style workflows.
Rockwell Automation's Factory Talk software. It is used for developing GUIs for screens on industrial machines. Horribly expensive, laggy and broken. Versioning is a nightmare with crappy backwards compatibility (if it even decides to open the old project at all without crashing or locking up). God help you if it decides it doesn't want to deploy the screen programs over the network because then it becomes a song and dance to get it working over a USB key. Don't let windows update either as it seems like updates constantly break it. Sometimes it breaks itself and more often than not their (very expensive) support says to nuke everything and reinstall.
There are alternatives, some worse but most better and cheaper. But Rockwell is the industry standard in North America. So their screens get spec'd.
Rockwell has been pushing out superflakey software that I have encountered going back 25+ years. Starting with "pyramid integrators" back in the early 90's, daily updates to the software from the US overnight, generally three steps backwards and one forwards, if you were lucky.
On the other hand, I did a project with Schneider Unity Pro, similar PLC prog type software and it only crashed once in a whole year, and I blame windows for that crash.
Rockwell, if you go a day wihout a crash, then you start to feel like checking your files to check it hasnt corrupted some shit on the down low.
In more recent times GE royally screwed the pooch with the prog software for their new PAC range.
I don't understand how one or two automation companies can get it so right, and others so wrong.
Hey, I'm a software test engineer in Factory Talk. Let me see if I can act on your feedback, can we chat? You can find my email address in my profile. Cheers
automation industry is horrible. but there's beckhoff with open protocol, integration to visual studio, few open source projects and growing community... i even work for inxton.com where we developed ST to C# transpiler - makes it easy to do high level stuff.
it still sucks, but other solutions suck even more
Latex. The document object model is stupid. The Latex language's syntax and semantics are weird and idiosyncratic. Every Latex package uses its own weird conventions. It's slow. But there are thousands of packages out there for almost any conceivable problem you might have. And that makes Latex very very useful. But it is not well-designed software.
I have used LaTeX “forever”, basically since it was first created. As so many longtime LaTeX users, I have a love-hate relationship to it: I love it for what it allows me to do. Nothing else comes close. And yet, the number of hours wasted swearing at it while debugging something or other is beyond count.
There is an interesting ongoing project to replace it, though: Namely, finl (“finl is not LaTeX”) by Don Hosek, himself a longtime TeX/LaTeX user and developer.
That is a very ambitious project though, and not one finished in an afternoon. Se we will be stuck with LaTeX for years to come.
There's not DOM outright: each command is just a macro that is designed to expand to "the right thing". More or less.
More in general, I tend to hate all macro languages, like LaTeX, M4 and the C/C++ preprocessor (fortunately in the latter case the impact is usually more limited, because the C/C++ preprocessor layer is thinner than, e.g., a LaTeX document). They tend to require a lot of shenanigans even to make easy things, so the source quickly become a tangled unmaintainable mess, when each time you touch something, you make seemingly unrelated errors appear.
For a trivial example, consider in C:
#define IDENTITY(x) x
In any reasonable language you would expect that if you see `IDENTITY(y)` you could replace it with `y`. Of course not with macro languages.
Yes, I spent several months lovingly creating an open source LaTeX tool in the last few years. And yet... yes, you're right of course. I hate those stupid PDF "manuals" that each package has -- they have to be one of the least successful media for teaching anyone how to use anything!
I guess it is a case of eat your own dog food. But LaTeX and PDF have existed for longer than any more flexible format suited for the task. And last but not least, if the documentation is to actually show you the typeset result using the package, it is hard to get around the PDF format. (Though you can always embed images of typeset excerpts in documents of a different format.)
I think my problem is that they never seem to contain an introduction to how to use the package; they seem to be a mixture of API reference and jumping-immediately-into-obscure-details.
Confluence is absolute garbage. Atlassian uses the interrupt early and often design philosophy. It’s next to impossible to just write in flow with confluence. Formatting never works, it’s actively worse than simply composing in notepad. Also discovery is laughable. Confluence is where documentation goes to die. I’ve often found myself knowing that a document exists, some key words and what team owns it and I’m still utterly unable to find it. Documentation discovery is like thing two after “get out of my way and let me write”
Confluence is a perfect example of failure 100% in implementation. What they do is exactly right, how they do it is wrong in every way. I’ve used a dozen documentation tools and I tell you confluence is worse than nothing. I’d you have nothing at least you didn’t waste time writing something nobody can ever find.
It’s bundled with jira though and jira is how most companies do scrum or agile or whatever planning work in sprints is called these days. Jira isn’t so bad but it brings brother confluence to the party so don’t let it in.
I use Notion these days. At least it gets out of my way and lets me write. The todo template is mostly sufficient for sprint planning.
I used https://github.com/kovetskiy/mark at my last job where I had to use Confluence. It wasn't perfect and some touchup was generally needed after a sync but it definitely helped me stay sane.
Hate is too Sterling for these gripes, but this is relatively the best fit:
Windows 10, useful for some games with friends, because of the “nudges” to change my behavior, like asking if I really want to keep using that program, the magic-fingers messages on installation (suggesting I just blindly trust), and the difficulty to install without an online account, among other things. I can’t replace it yet, but the day will come, one way or another.
I'm astonished by how user-hostile Windows is. I'm excited when there's a new MacOS or iOS update with new features, but I only trust Windows updates to jam my computer for an hour or two without asking, break a few things, and sneak in unwanted changes against my best interest.
I would be wary of dating a Microsoft employee, because they don't seem to understand what consent means.
This is a silly take. Game Pass is the best value in gaming today by a huge margin and I say that as a general naysayer of MIcrosoft. It is a reasonable take for someone to stay with MS because of the service.
Theres no reason to be childish. There's lots of alternatives to game pass that will net you significantly high quality experiences without supporting convicted monopolist Microsofts Disney-ification of the games industry.
This take is ignoring the social nature of much of gaming. Changing which set of games I play is one thing, convincing my friend group to go with me is another. Especially for my friends whose primary way of playing games is on an XBox, meaning we rely on cross play as much as we can
Hmm... Xbox Cloud Gaming works for me on Chronium on Linux. Is that something different? Wikipedia is implying that's the sane thing to me. Is it possible you just haven't tried?
Switch to Linux and you'll find many more reasons to switch back to Windows... like most of your hardware working as intended most of the time is a big one.
If you can get a copy of the LTSC or Education distros, they're leagues ahead of the common Win 10 experience: much less clutter and nagging, being able to defer content updates, less tracking.
I noticed most of the replies in this thread refer to mobile / desktop software, but nothing compares to the hell that is car infotainment system for me.
Using the Audi MMI is painfully clunky, inconsistent, and riddled with subscription-locked features. At this point I just immediately wait for CarPlay and avoid touching anything in the car’s native OS.
Honestly they could probably just save a lot of development time by just having a dumb monitor / audio setup that you’re plugging into.
EDIT: Oh, and the Messages.app on macOS makes me pine for the days of iChat.
I just recently did this. The radio was $89 and had the fewest features I could find: CD, USB, aux, am/FM and NO Bluetooth or touch screen which exactly fit my requirements. It's replaced my terrible touchscreen system and given me 2 single din slots of storage space. Replacement was relatively easy and as long as you have a headphone jack on your phone, there are no issues. Just need a soldering iron, removal kit, car-specific mounting kit, and model-specific wiring harness.
Of course, it's much easier to find one with Bluetooth; there are tons of other ones with "smart" features that are the same price.
I’ve had pretty serious connectivity issues with the ‘21 A4 as well: having to turn on and off the MMI, Airplane Mode the phone to try and reset, and even when it DOES work, there’s a noticeable delay between car on and CarPlay being available.
Let’s not forget the fun prompt of whether you want to use the car’s data plan, which if you haven’t subscribed will make your phone unable to stream music.
This is something I hate to love and love to hate. I can avoid MS Office, but I can’t avoid Adobe like Lightroom that is my 2nd nature and hard to completely replace (too much is tangled together.)
Don't forget that they basically want to you to install a rootkit (Adobe Genuine Service) now because even with cloud activation they still have a growing pirating problem.
iTunes/Apple Music. I use it to manage a huge collection, and the Ui is terrible. Examples: some file I can’t find has a bogus header or something, so every time the program opens or if I add something it spends 10 minutes doing some gapless playback analysis. None of the fixes suggested online address it. When it’s doing something like that or ripping/converting music, you can’t scroll around your collection since every time it moves to the next song it snaps the UI back to whatever you had selected before: this can be infuriating. Editing large amounts of metadata is awkward: way more clicking than should be necessary. The metadata editing is song focused, and which makes it awkward when editing albums/multi-disc shows.
I admit: my complaints are likely a side effect of being a niche user. I don’t think people curating their own collection of 60,000+ tracks is a use case they worry about.
The only reason I use it is I depend on iTunes Match to make my music available on all of my devices. That’s the one thing it does do seamlessly. The collection is too big to copy to all devices, and some devices require streaming anyways. I have searched everywhere and have never found a viable alternative. I can find alternatives for parts of my use case, but not everything. So I’m stuck with this software..
I have this dream that one day I’ll have the patience to figure out how to write my own GUI for it, but I’ve given up every time I wade into the apple developer docs. I’d pay good money to someone to stub out an app for me so I don’t have to figure it out from scratch, and go from there.
The new "Music" app that replaced iTunes is a complete pile of shit, inline with all the "modern" iOS apps such as Music/TV/Podcasts/News/Home - while their predecessors may have had functional issues, their new incarnation has similar functional issues but has also been gutted of most features, replaced with lots of whitespace.
It's not just niche users. I hated with a burning righteous rage every single release of iTunes. The overhead of all kinds that it imposed on access to my collection of music never made any sense.
doesn't really handle the Match aspect. I too would pay for a service/app that did this. not only am I reliant on iCloud to get to my music, that ridiculous program completely trashed my catalog - missing songs, duplicates, songs spread across multiple 'albums', etc.
All search engines. They are all horrible and getting worse by the day. All the results are spam, they ignore words and can't do basic things they used to be able to it.
Outlook - Slow, buggy, cluttered UI. It loses mail, especially with shared mailboxes. The search function is slow and fails to find some mails.
There seems to be no real alternative though. All I want is a fast, native email client that supports conversation view and has a good search function. For work, I also require the calendar function, but I don't think implementing that is the hardest part. I know IMAP (or MS Exchange protocol) is a mess, but talking to the server is not the part that is broken for me in Outlook and most other clients. It is search and responsiveness of the UI. But isn't (instant) search basically a solved problem?
Have you tried outlook.com? I migrated from the desktop app and enabled a bunch of ublock filters to get rid of the ad pane, works pretty well for me. Haven't used shared mailboxes though so can't speak to that.
When holding my phone up to me ear after answering a call, the screen won't switch off and random buttons will then get pressed because you know, I'm holding it against my ear.
Can't find any options in the seeing to fix this issue.
My wife has exactly the same problem despite using a different make of phone.
How can Android fail at the most fundamental task?
The alternative of Apple is too expensive for me... More than I'm willing to spend on a phone at least.
I have worked on technology related to the proximity sensors on phones (the thing that’s supposed to detect when your phone is at your ear while on a call) and have known people who have worked on several proximity sensors on several different phones and other devices.
These are generally simple sensors but they are sort of hard to quality control in the factory and tuning them generally takes some significant amount of work.
The problem for phones without a “notch” like what the iPhone does is that the OEMs tried to put the proximity sensor below the screen. It generally works - but the problem is that the IR pulses emitted by the sensor excite the display and will turn on pixels and create a grey or white spot over the sensor. Product managers later decided that they don’t like this spot, so engineers had to put in all sorts of software mitigation, mostly involving turning off the sensors and making them less sensitive.
An expensive phone generally has a larger team of engineers who will tune these sensors, work on the factory quality control problems and generally make things reliable. Apple, with their strong engineering culture has generally refused to deal with the white dot on screen thing entirely by putting the sensor on the notch.
Unfortunately with lower end phones, you can’t get the same quality that you will get with a $800 phone. There are people who work really really hard to make things better, but its mostly underfunded engineering teams trying to fix problems in software that honestly should be fixed in the sensor hardware by the vendors.
Unfortunately, it boils down to org charts and who talks to whom in a company.
An engineer who owns the proximity sensor device driver is usually not invited to the meeting where the industrial design lead is showing off the latest iteration to the product and marketing team.
My personal opinion: most obvious flaws in consumer hardware is just a reflection of flaws within the OEM’s org chart and the networks of people within the chart.
I never had such issue with Lineage OS. I'm using it over 7 years now. It sounds like HW related problem.
Btw price of iPhone is non acceptable for me from two reasons. Device could be easily lost and I do not need powerful HW with terrible battery life for calls and messages.
Well that's another problem with Android that I wanted to touch on: it's not trivial to try out different OS, which I think is more a fault of the phone manufacturers rather than just Google.
The whole smart phone ecosystem is all about walled gardens.
I agree about battery life for iPhone, pretty much everyone who owns one complains about how their battery doesn't even last a day. My Nokia X20 can last 3 days with light usage... Which I suppose makes up for the poor proximity sensor.
That’s incredibly pathetic. My phone’s UI (sxmo) is a bunch of desktop software and a handful of phone specific tools stuck together with shell scripts and it manages to turn the screen off while the proximity sensor detects my ear during a call.
If you’re willing to drop most native mobile apps and maybe spend some time tinkering, you could get the far niche-er alternative of a GNU/Linux phone for as little as $150 (plus ~15% more for shipping all the way from China).
I had a moto z that used pogo pins to connect the top screen proximity sensors, that after the adhesive weakend holding the thing together, lost contact.
That was the only time I had an android phone fail to block input when I was on a call...
Nokia X20, my wife has a Google (not sure which model) that suffers the same. In fact her previous Google also failed with the proximity test... Which is why I'm thinking there's a fundamental problem with Android rather than just poor hardware.
Hahahaha, also had a moto z with the same problem. I think the sensor driver got confused when the pins bumped and stopped working until a reboot for me.
iPhone 11 is 500-550 which is kind of mid range and still is a great phone (They're still selling new ones). I have iPhone Xs and don't plan on upgrading soon.
Grafana. Most of our dashboards are parameterized and half the time, using the dropdown to select a different value for a variable doesn’t work. The menu just closes and the variable doesn’t update.
The “stacked” option when displaying multiple series is a super dangerous footgun; it will show you numbers that aren’t actually occurring.
If you accidentally make a too-heavy metrics query the entire page becomes sluggish and crashes, and you have to refresh and start from scratch. There’s no way to simply abort the last mistaken change.
If you accidentally make in invalid metrics query (like wrong combination of variables) then the entire dashboard gets into a corrupted state where even if you return to a valid combination of variables, all you get is red. Again, refresh and start over.
I don’t think there’s anything better out there. Perhaps we are a few versions behind, but the last major upgrade we did only made it buggier.
The scrollbars are tiny so you can't really grab on to them and drag.
OK, so you use the mouse wheel or trackpad instead. If you've got lots of lines on a graph the key area itself has a little mini-scrollbar. So as you're scrolling down, all of a sudden your mouse is over that little area and it starts scrolling instead. It probably doesn't have much content to scroll but it doesn't matter, the page won't scroll while you're over that area so you have to move your mouse to some other part of the screen and try again.
OK, so you think you'll put your mouse in the navigation area on the left or something and use the trackpad there, as there won't be any little scrollable areas going by there. But if you place your mouse on the left-hand navigation pane, that doesn't scroll the window. So you really have to place your mouse in the actual content area to scroll using the trackpad, and just deal with the above "sticking" effect.
Infuriating. (Using macOS Chrome with a mouse with a scroll wheel and trackpad)
We’re required to use it for the project I’m working on.
Some things I hate:
* Project backlog is a mess UI-wise. Lots of fields, with little to no explanation of what they drive. Generally a bad UI for working with stories.
* Reviewing large pull requests is very laggy performance-wise.
* Compare branches is broken - I have to start to create a PR, then cancel it, if I just want to compare two branches.
* Release pipeline (not build pipeline) does not allow yaml definition, so you are expected to configure it by point and click, true to form for Microsoft.
* Logging in - I have to bookmark it because there doesn’t seem to be a good direct URL to navigate directly to my repo (as opposed to like a GitHub repo for example). Also the confusing branding with “Azure” probably contributes to this as well.
There are probably more things, but these are some that come to mind right away.
As much as they try to hide the fact, it is actually possible to join a Zoom meeting in your browser. That way you don't have to install a sketchy app with root privileges and directory traversal bugs.
I initially tried this when my language learning course had to go remote and the teacher insisted on using Zoom. But I ran into a dealbreaker issue with the web view: It does not have the grid view of all participants' cameras, and (to my knowledge) it also does not allow selecting the camera of a single person manually. This is an issue when I need to see a flash card that the teacher is holding up, but someone else is speaking, so the camera switches to them.
I'm currently working without this by using a device issued by my employer, where the Zoom app is pre-installed by the IT dept. and therefore using it for the language class does not make things worse.
Confusingly, there are 2 different versions of the Zoom web app:
1. The "Join from Your Browser" links take you to the worse version, which I assume is legacy or something.
2. There is also a progressive web app version [1] that has more feature parity to the desktop app. It has the grid view built-in, but for whatever reason it doesn't seem to show as many people at a time vs the desktop app grid view.
I also do this on macOS with Chrome, but I found that if I join mega Zoom call (say hundreds of people) then the video will suddenly freeze after some random amount of time. That makes it unreliable and especially nervous when giving a presentation this way.
I'm studying guitar remotely and my teacher recorded a small bit of the call so that I can review later. He was playing and talking, I was completely quiet and not moving. Zoom decided to record my camera with his sound. He said that it was like that for all his students that day and couldn't figure out why.
Tesla. Tesla provide service through the phone app only. The app is extremely slow, the fonts are small (almost unreadable). It is hardly fun to print on the phone. The app does not work in chromebook with android support.
I like GIMP, but started using krita recently because I needed its CMYK features. It's pretty awesome! More painting- than photo-oriented, but seems it can do most of what PS does. This link talks about what krita does that PS doesn't, then what PS does that krita can't.
Quicken (tracking personal finances). Has all the functionality I need, viewing individual transactions, reports (spending by category/account), tracking investments etc., and is local.
When I bought it in 2008 it supported integration with financial institutions (e.g., I could download transactions for my credit card/bank account into Quicken installed on my local). Then they forced customers to pay for this feature every year, I refused and its stopped working. I enter transactions by hand now, once a week or so.
Now they force users to buy license annually, otherwise software (installed locally) stops recording transactions (you can still open your data and see historical data though). My old 2008 version still runs for now. I looked into the options (local, I don't want to put my finances in "the cloud") and couldn't find much :(
Tried Gnucash specifically, it's not nearly as intuitive, I'm actually considering it for accounting for my numerous ventures, but for personal finances - not so much...
I wrote an OFX client for this purpose. That's the same protocol that Quicken uses. It pulls transactions from my bank and puts them into MySQL. It runs a couple of queries on that data but doesn't do much more than that.
Can’t be replaced because your code is either async from the beginning, or not. You are using either async libs, or some outdated libs because all modern versions have to support async Rust.
Standardisation is a commitment, and rust's stdlib is deliberately lean to allow that commitment to be very strong (long-term stability).
If in doubt, just use Tokio. It's much more widely used, has been around longer, has a history of solid engineering, didn't choose to put "std" in its name and race to 1.0 to fool people into thinking it was mature, ...
At work we are limited by whatever is in the enterprise catalog offering (very old school traditional public sector environment). So I end up hating a lot of software simply because we are forced to use it beyond its design parameters / intended usage. I.e. We took a quality management / testing scenario tool and repurposed it into a general knowledge management AND ticketing tool. So I can hardly blame it but dislike is there nonetheless.
At home, Light room and photoshop. I swear they are getting slower and more bloated all the time and they keep changing UI for no reason. The subscription model is what rises my hate though.
There are alternatives of course but
I have 15 years of catalogues
I have limited faith anything else will read is own catalogues 15 years from now. How do you pick stable software now (and one does need updates as cameras change etc)
1Password. I hate it because Agile Bits are so user-hostile now. I can't replace it because the alternatives, if they meet our requirements, are even worse.
I don't disagree that AgileBits feel like they're going to go user-hostile anytime soon, but so far I haven't noticed a significant downgrade using their hosted service with iOS & macOS clients so I'm curious to know what's your issue. I'm sure it'll come at some point though.
I could switch to AVR8 assembly but I want a better macro assembly plus the code would not be portable to more capable boards. I guess I could run a soft AVR8 on an fpga board and offload the heavy lifting to the fpga but talk about frying pan to the fire.
You would never guess from the Arduino docs/examples; it's all written for kids so it can feel like you are actually writing some super simplified C like scripting language like PAWN.
Awscli. It's not just the complexity or inconsistency; that kinda comes with the territory. It's just not discoverable. Constantly have to be googling stuff.
Boto is in a similar vein. Stupid capital letter arguments. No type information, no autocomplete.
The underlying API is similarly inconsistent and undiscoverable. I thought I could write a simple client for it but I was defeated by the sheer complexity that 100,000 code monkeys can generate.
use azure cli or gcloud if you ever want to fall in love with awscli again!
want to, say, log in? i hope you like OAuth and/or dealing with JSON
want to configure a less popular service? enjoy downloading plugins with documentation that’s one or two minors behind stable. (for azure specifically, enjoy like 75% of anything you’d actually want to do being “in preview”)
It's idiotic handling of direct messages history with its enforced uneditable limit of number of conversations shown, previous conversations disappear and become unsearchable cost me waste time, wasted nerves and wasted communications.
First, it doesn't let me create a userID & password. I cannot create an account on my tablet or computer. I cannot start using it anonymously. I cannot have multiple accounts for multiple purposes/groups. It insists on being installed and tied to my phone with my phone number - how ANYbody can talk "blah blah encryption blah blah privacy" when it's tied to my private protected hard-to-change personally-identifiable phone number right at the beginning is beyond me to the level I feel I'm in a twilight zone.
Second, it is completely unusable unless I give it full and privileged access to my contact list. WHY? I want to chat with 3 specific people. I want to give you address/userID/token of those 3 specific people. But no - it won't work at all. This is where discussion of "yada yada privacy yada yada encryption" further loses all possible meaning.
Third, I cannot easily use it on multiple devices. I have two phones, Galaxy Note 8, and half a dozen laptops and computers and tablets I use daily for various purposes in various locations. I have taken it as granted for the last 30 years that I can check my email/ICQ/AIM/MSN/Hangouts/FB/WHATever on any of those that I choose to. But nooooo... not Whatsapp. Why? Because Privacy & Encryption. L-O-L.
It is the most regressive piece of code I've had the privilege to have forced upon my by both techie and non-techie friends and family alike, and it makes me livid every time.
My Windows Vista VM that runs on my homelab, for the sole purpose of keeping my HP LaserJet 3390’s scanner working with modern software.
I got this thing for free on Freecycle and it works amazingly well mechanically, and the printer worked out of the box. No matter what I tried though, getting the scanner to show up as a device and be interfaced with any modern hardware required me to set up this virtual machine to be shared with the local network.
(Yes I tried CUPS which worked great for the printer but not the scanner.)
The installation software probably just copied some files to the wrong places, especially when it was written for a 32 bit system. It happened to me once with the drivers for my CANON scanner.
Apple and the App Store and generally the walled garden that Apple has is complete anti competitive bullshit. Hope every government tears them to shreds this year.
Apple will not hesitate to spend millions to ensure this never happens. I would not bet against their war chest, but I completely agree that the have been anticompetitive for decades and deserve everything they get that can be made to stick.
MacOS. Project scripts and software are hardcoded for Mac. The alternative is Windows, but making the project dev environment cross-platform takes time. I dislike non-standard keyboard shortcuts for everything, lack of FAR Manager (using Midnight Commander has the same problem as all the different keyboard shortcuts), its constant annoying notification popups that covert part of my windows, its problem with handling non-Apple mice (have to jump through many hoops to make mouse movements sensible, put mouse wheel in the proper direction etc), its windows rounded corners that cut at the application's view area (run Alacritty without status bar, the rounded corners at the left bottom corner will obscure part of the shell prompt), its support for Linux that is significantly worse than in Windows and probably more that I cba to remember.
The other thing that I dislike but can't get rid of is JVM. Mind you, Python, Go, Javascript and so on is worse, but JVM is what I have to work with, unlike the rest of them.
Android Studio (I have a recent macbook pro), I still have trouble running it fluently. it's so slow.
Confluence (slow and the awkward editor. I often need to directly modify the raw html to get the page rendered correctly. for example when needing to add long paragraphs under one bullet point.)
Jira, so slow and complex.
Gimp, its usability is the worst. but no other alternatives under linux.
Mathematica. Clunky interface on Linux, requires that you use the Notebook interface for most things, terrible to run headlessly on a server, need to be happy with the defaults that Wolfram provides, etc. However, it's still the best CAS around and open-source alternatives e.g., Sage, have a long way to catch up.
It is a horrible language, I think some called it a write-only language.
But what it can do is powerful. For something there’s no alternative.
They have provided a Python interface and I always want to use the Python interface more to work around the language problem. Also Sympy has a way to read Mathematica expresssion I think.
> It is a horrible language, I think some called it a write-only language.
TBH, I don't think that the language is badly designed for a CAS. Most CAS (e.g., Maxima, Maple, etc.) all use a language that's heavily influenced by functional programming languages. But yeah, Mathematica is terrible for numerical work, and doesn't play well with other external libraries or tools.
Actually as a functional language it is not bad. It is not the programming paradigm that it is at fault. I remember someone praised Mathematica as the best language out there because of its functional paradigm.
I’m not sure if anyone has called it a read only language too. But in some sense it is. You can look at a notebook and have no way you can write a code like that without working it through interactively. I once got one that basically there’re multi solutions and the next step chose one of the solution, where somehow which solution you pick is deterministic but you wouldn’t know without running it interactively. (There are perhaps better way to do it programmatically but the “best” practice wasn’t well known or encouraged.)
Another way to think about it is, it is not a language that one can just write a program on its own. It almost must be developed interactively. And because of that nature, it is easy to lose track when it is getting long.
Some of this are more general problem, like Jupyter which starts as something imitating the Mathematica notebook experience. But in those cases, it is much more easy to refactor things in a module and reuse them. (Where lack of namespace separation in Mathematica is a big contributing factor.)
I’ve developed a tiny Mathematica package for personal use, so I’m not an experienced Mathematica-ian, but I think what I said is well known problems of it.
Interesting, and thanks for the link. I didn't know such a term existed, although I'm a bit disappointed to see C and Lisp in the list, which some consider to be extremely well-designed languages.
> Another way to think about it is, it is not a language that one can just write a program on its own. It almost must be developed interactively. And because of that nature, it is easy to lose track when it is getting long.
I agree. Although Wolfram Inc. has been pushing WolframScript and Wolfram Engine (and the IntelliJ IDEA plugin), at the end of the day the Wolfram language is best suited for interactive development, i.e., through the Notebook interface. And Mathematica Notebooks do not play well with most version control systems and are best treated as binary files.
I agree C kind of stand out from that list (I don't know lisp).
But I think as C is a small language, some people can write pretty simple to read C.
But I guess the term is used to describe C as well because of how "close to metal" it is, and people can do some insane things to optimize their code, in a way that becomes "write-only".
One example might be Linux kernel code?
Another example from what I heard directly:
A few years ago, from one of the project nominated for the Gordon Bell prize,
one of the Scientist showed us their code. For perspective, this was to be run
on Intel KNL so it is extra hard for the compiler to optimize it well.
Since our machine is from Intel (and the contract stated they will provide support),
Intel engineers were involved in optimizing a kernel.
In the end they generated hundreds of lines of C code and committed to the code
base directly. It was partly because it is time-sensitive so they can't wait
until they modify the Intel compiler to optimize that code, so they sort of optimize
it manually.
Now if you read that source code, there's no way you can modify it,
rightly fit into the description of "write-only" language.
Also, there's a less well known term of read-only language. I can't find a wiki page for that.
But I think AppleScript is on the list, because you know, reading an AppleScript
makes it looks quite straight forward it should be written this way,
but if you're asked to reproduce it or write something similar, you can't.
Hence read-only.
Gchat, gdocs, gsheet, gmeet. These are the worst apps of their respective categories, ever to exist. But I am helpless, because I've to use what my company has bought.
The number one reason why they're bad is that they are not native apps. They need a tab in the browser, or a fake browser window.
The second reason they're bad is because Google does not care about the user experience. Each of these is probably assigned to a random intern every three months and she just does whatever she likes with it.
The third reason is that I know how good each of these category of apps can be. I've used slack, zoom, excel and word. Each one of those is lovingly crafted to satisfy the users every need, comparatively. Knowing that such apps exist makes it even more painful to use Google's half baked knock offs.
Agree on Google Chat, which we use at work because it's free with our GSuite (workspaces now?), is HIPAA compliant, it keeps all chats forever without extra cost, and... That's it. Slack is better in basically every way, but we can't justify the expense of paying to reach feature parity, especially the HIPAA part.
Disagree heavily on docs, sheets, and meet. Meet is a bit wonky in Firefox but I wouldn't trade it for any of the other options we've tried. I consider docs, sheets, and drive to be best-in-class for what we use them for, which is pretty much always collaborative.
Gdocs doesn't go without it's issues. Switching from GSuite to Office365 made me want to rip out my eye balls. The online version of word is awful comparatively and depending on always having an installation of word doesn't work in all contexts.
Gsuite in general is accessible and works well for Collab.
And of course Teams is on a whole different dimension of pain.
I agree. That's why I believe each of these apps should be a native app, built for your os. MS Word on windows 10 is an unbeatable word processor. Nothing else on the web comes even close. Same with Excel.
Just curious, why do you find Gmeet so bad? Among the three most common used (in my experience ar least zoom teams and meet) I find it the most usable.
1. No calling function. Most of the times I want to immediately call a person, like a phone. It should make the other person's computer ring, and they should be able to answer the call with one click. Gmeet doesn't do this.
2. Screen sharing options are extremely limited. Compare the ways zoom allows you to share your screen to what meet does. It's hilarious.
3. No screen annotations. No cursor control. No screen pointers. It's quite annoying to have to use such a limited product.
4. Screen sharing and video quality is atrocious. Again, look at zoom to find out what you're missing.
5. Screen recording is horribly low quality. It's almost impossible to read text on a shared screen recording, even though it was readable in the call itself.
6. Layout options. It seems Google has discovered the worst possible algorithms to lay out videos on the screen during a call. Many times it will even minimize presented content, and then everybody has to manually pin the thumbnail. There is no option to overlay the speakers video over presented content, which should be pretty high up in the list of features.
7. In call chat is lost after the call ends. It just goes straight to /dev/null. Who signed off on this?
I can go on, but I'm frustrated now just thinking about it. The problem is people don't even know how good the other stuff is. So it's hard to convey my helplessness.
1. It does have calling, but it's integrated with Gmail.
2. Elaborate? The screen sharing in Meet is what Chrome provides in general and I see the same options when using other web-based tools like jitsi. Zoom has a native app which presumably allows it do other things, but given that Chrome can "share entire desktop," "share a window," and "share a tab w/audio" I haven't actually found myself wanting any other behavior. Also, I consider not needing a native app an advantage and Zoom's web-based offering is trash.
3. Agreed, although to be fair I only find myself wanting this when presenting slides and Google Slides does have them.
4. Zoom supports 1080p while Meet does 720p, but if you're using any video features then Zoom apparently drops to 720p as well?
5. No argument there.
6. I've literally never experienced what you're describing. If more than one person is presenting content then the first presenter might be displaced by the second, which might look like "minimizing the presented content." If you have manually pinned anyone that always takes precedence. No option to overlay in Google Meet is a major annoyance.
7. Google Meet's chat is ephemeral unless you are recording the Meet. I think this goes into a bucket of design decisions that can all be lumped together as "No one is using Google Meet as their only communication tool." I've never needed things like Zoom's DMs that are inside a call. When I'm trying to have side conversations with coworkers I just use our normal chat tools. Google Chat is probably only better than Microsoft Teams among the "real chat apps," but it's definitely better than Zoom's built-in messaging.
Two things that have made it so that I cannot stand every over video calling product is that Google Meet does automatic video brightness adjustment, which helps a lot when you don't have a great set up at home, and the audio noise cancelling is insanely good. It is hard to overemphasize how good it is. You can whistle and clap and play music and type on your obnoxious self-indulgent clackity keyboard and other people will only hear your voice, plucked cleanly out of the mess as if everything had been mic'd separately. It's by far Meet's best feature and so far no one else has come anywhere close.
We use LastPass at work as well, don't understand why they perform search so poorly, the search you can do on the text field is really unusable, in the plugin it works better, but if I select an entry, en then instead of keeping the plugin open, it closes so I have to search it again for the OTP, such poor UX
I don't use anything from them myself, but I cannot avoid dealing with it because relatives and working colleagues still use MS stuff. Recently our school introduced MS Teams and it is terrible. ICQ was a better messenger than this abomination.
Accountants HATE Quickbooks. I wish I remembered which software the last accountant I talked to thought was better. I'd never heard of it, but apparently most accountants thought it was the best. It doesn't come up in search engines anymore.
Given that programming languages are also software products, C and JavaScript, I am unable to replace UNIX and Web platforms, which are the reason they exist at all, so there you go.
As for other software, anything Electron based that could be a plain Web application or a background process using the user's already installed Web browser or system Web widgets.
On that note anything that takes ages to start on Android or iOS, which are clearly not native, and I can replace them because they are key apps without alternative from the companies, like e.g. banks.
What's bad about it? I've somehow avoided using it in my professional career so far except to make some trivial support tickets occasionally with other teams. It seems fine to me from this very limited experience, but I would be interested in hearing from someone more experienced with it. A lot of other teams in my company use it and our new TL has expressed interest...
i have one major complaint: it is horribly, groaningly, wretchedly, unbearably slow.
So slow that it is a bad tool slow.
It has a totally insane smorgasboard of options UX, lots of jargon, a horrible markup syntax, limited interop with git forges, and a host of other problems, but the real showstopper is how goddamn slow it is.
3DS Max. It has bugs that have been unfixed for 20 years... I make models for Microsoft Flight Simulator where it is the only software that can export models correctly; there is an unsupported Blender exporter, but I'm not enthusiastic about learning that product from scratch; it has many of its own idiosyncrasies.
The software on the Sky Q tv set top boxes, literally can’t replace it. (Sky is a TV service in the UK)
It’s clunky to use, particularly with the apps. Things crash all the time and when it decided to do a software update it goes into a spinning loop for hours during which none of the TVs in the house work.
Hate it, but the household have decided to keep Sky…
Depending how much your time is worth you could probably get the same media on third-party services via a computer or Apple TV, or even go "sailing" if you don't mind breaking the law (if you see what I'm talking about!).
This may be too broad, but instant messaging. I only ever use it as a clipboard to share snippets or screenshots with people, but email is so much better to communicate. In person meetings can't be replaced by text, sorry.
I hold the exact opposite opinion. I hate in-person meetings, or voice call meetings or video call meetings because there's no written record of anything unless you're also transcribing, in which case you're not concentrating or thinking.
Oh, I'm always taking notes whether work or business. I have notes that go back to 2005 on my home computer dealing with rental payments, college transcripts, gas payments and bills when calling up 1800 numbers for support, etc. It isn't that I don't trust my memory, it is just that if I am being pressured to do something it is a lot easier when I can look at the outcome/promise from the previous conversation.
That's what I meant! Having a written conversation about X means the notes are all already there for you. I've worked with so many people, both colleagues and clients, who use phone calls / in-person meetings as a way to essentially pass the buck while hiding any evidence that that happened. An auditable paper trail is preferable to me in every way.
I think working at a .NET shop for a few years gave me Visual Studio Stockholm syndrome or something. I'm past that job now, but I still fire up MSVS over other alternatives just because I know all the shortcuts (& because it'll typically work without any additional configuration on my corporate-issue pc).
I hate it all. Every web browser is either chrome or firefox, or it's irrelevant and buggy. Java & Javascript are trash. Just having a couple tabs open sucks up more resources than everything else on the system combined. What is that? How is that acceptable? (By extension, this is also a major part of why I hate electron)
The web browser, which is a rather old version of Firefox in my case. The other ones aren't better; they are bad, too. I have ideas how to make a better one (one idea is all file formats and protocols are extensions (implemented in native code) and not built-in, and there are other ideas to make it better for advanced users only, and I have ideas about the C API and "document view" format and other features, etc).
There are some recent messages on Usenet about "Web considered harmful" and commentary/discussions about such things, including some of my own comments.
Anything from Red Hat. That includes PolicyKit (basically a backdoored version of "sudo", "su", and other time-honored Unix security tools), SystemD, PulseAudio, DBus, and a bunch of others. They're all 100% garbage, but Red Hat has convinced everyone else to depend on them so getting rid of them means being horribly limited when it comes to what you can run, even on FreeBSD.
While I detest Jira, I find Confluence to be quite good for writing documentation. It's full featured and mostly just works. For our customer facing documentation at work we use Zendesk and while it's good it's nowhere near as good as Confluence.
We're having this struggle right now trying to replace Confluence thanks to Atlassian's "no more Server licenses" foot-gun. The other wiki software that's out there just hasn't impressed me so far. This one is painful to set up and keep running, that one is awful to edit anything in (especially if you're non-technical), most of them don't support collaborative editing or inclusion of Office doc content on pages, and that's before the fun places where we've integrated Jira and Confluence to make workflows easier. I keep hoping to find something under a rock that really wows me (or that one of the existing competitors will really step their game up to pick up the people exiting Atlassian).
The fact that collaborative document preparation is as troublesome as this in 2022 is a damning indictment on the computer industry. (It's become very good at advertising though.)
It really is puzzling to me that there aren't more and better options in this space. On the one side of the fence you have things like SharePoint or some of the Google bits that are fine for synchronous collaboration on a page or document through a browser, but not very tech or API-friendly. On the other side of the fence you have things like Mediawiki and Dokuwiki that are super tech-friendly, but very manager-unfriendly and not particularly good for synchronous collaboration either.
It surprises me that Confluence continues to be the only thing sitting in the middle of those, and while some competitors have started to shyly emerge (Bookstack, xWiki, I think there's one in progress at Jetbrains), nothing feels like it's really aggressively going after the Confluence market-space directly. Given how many people I've seen comment that they're not fond of Confluence but can't seem to replace it (at least, not until Atlassian forced their hand with the server-license fiasco), it seems like a natural space for people to pursue.
> I keep hoping to find something under a rock that really wows me
Send me an email at Paul at dokkument.com and that's exactly what we are working on. Yeah unforturnely you will not see anything interesting on our landing page
Every website with cookie tracking. Which is every website.
Anything electron: massive hog of resources and will never be rewritten on a nonbloated platform.
Every single package manager and scheme still seems fundamentally broken and are bad compromises. But there's no money in fixing it so it will always be broken. I salute people doing the thankless work of packaging OSS and language libraries. You are fighting the good fight, even if it is a losing war.
Any and all OTP (time suck, blocks automation, debatable gain over "good passwords").
IDEs (every IDE becomes an intense love/hate relationship... Intellij is dragging to a halt on a couple "medium sized" projects... but what would I replace it with? Eclipse hahahahahaha?)
Javascript: still an awful language, even with a ton of improvements and typed options. May webassembly kill it, although webassembly is probably another google trojan horse to control the web.
Java: should stop "improving" itself and just work on the JVM and migrating people to Kotlin/Scala/Groovy/Clojure.
G Suite (well, it's better than outlook, but spying and the sword of Damocles with getting locked out with no recourse)
Microsoft Windows (still have an iron grip on games, I hate everything else about it since Windows 7), although a glimmer of hope is that it does eventually have a real unix core.
Bash: the number of stackoverflow searches per line of code whenever I have to write bash is like 5:1, as in five stackoverflow searches per line of code written. But what options do you have? Perl is dying, fish/zsh isn't ubiquitous, etc.
Installing any software written in python will probably fail, or worse, break all my other python apps. Example: AwsCli
AwsCli: again, stackoverflow searches to line of code/command ratio is terrible. options aren't well documented, responses aren't documented or well-exampled, error codes change between releases (seriously, HOW MANY DIFFERENT error messages can expired credentials result in?)
Aws: please someone start beating these people. Oh, the options are google and microsoft. Oh well.
OH! The AWS CONSOLE: What a piece of shit. How much money does AWS make every minute? Basically enough to actually fund a team for this? This is for ec2/secgrps/r53 aka the bread and butter. And they DID rewrite it, and managed to make it FAR WORSE. Performance is awful. Screens refresh and move items as you try to click on things. Do I have a choice for adhoc stuff? Oh the cli? See above.
After that you'll embrace Gopher, C, Perl, TCL and maybe Gemini happily,
discarding even web browsing for the daily news reading.
It happened to me, I don't even start X to watch movies, music or chat/IM.
Even gaming, then. Roguelikes and IF have amazing playability and stores,
and Mednafen has an SDL2 backend, so running it under the framebuffer/KMS does everything faster.
There's no ads, no notifications, no social media bullshit with mental manipulation, no Electron turds eating half of your RAM.
Wordgrinder and sc-im plus Gnuplot do magic in the CLI/TUI.
It's like the old K.Mandla/Inconsolation's blog but with a step taken further.
Perl is still alive at OpenBSD's base and it rocks. If awk+sh is cumbersome
for some tools with more than 10 lines, you can pretty much do all the advenced exercises of The AWK Programming Language in Perl in record time.
Zoom, Chrome.
Zoom is a resource hog and has a terrible UX, but I struggle to find anything better that works well on all OSes.
Chrome breaks privacy in many ways, but I can't find a decent alternative, similarly secure, blink based and with Chrome extensions support that doesn't have similar problems (Brave, Vivaldi).
No, an open source browser engine from my perspective it's not bad, especially if it has multiple contributors. I see that as an opportunity.
It's possible to fork and be up-to-date with it and it would still be less work than writing a different engine.
What's bad in Chrome is not necessary bad in Blink. Blink happens to work well and be very wide-spread, and also being open source. Usually I look for these 3 things together when choosing open source software.
Privacy means my data is private.
I don't know if security implies privacy, in my mind I'm referring specifically to protection from direct threats to my device that aim to access resources that my browser doesn't expose (filesystem, elevated privileges and that kind of things).
That being said, my statement still stands. In that case, I can just summarize it as "I can't find a browser as secure as Chrome" (implying that yes, Brave and Vivaldi do the same, they are just less open about that)
If people can access resources you don't think your browser exposes, then in fact your browser does expose those things. You just didn't realize it.
Security does imply privacy, because one of the most important things in warfare is keeping information away from your adversary. If your browser is freely giving away information without a care in the world about who gets that information, then of course that information will end up in the hands of your enemies, and from there it can be used to do something you'd more readily recognize as a "security breach."
That is working around my intended meaning, it is not trying to build on top of it.
The browser doesn't expose and allow writing to my filesystem indiscriminately, an exploit will allow that, but it's definitely not intended and that's what I'm referring to.
None give me capability based security. All are the equivalent of a fortification build out of crates of nitroglycerine. Any inbound inject of control that works turns them into a devastating resource for the enemy.
Not just the app but the whole user experience: Amazon. Specifically, they should have figured out search by now, but no: the mapping from search terms to results is just a stab in the dark.
Trello. It used to be my preferred project tracker, but the introduction of workspaces and their recent insistence on obfuscating posted URLs has broken our workflow and made me keen to move.
HTML - The language that lets you do everything except markup hypertext documents.
Seriously, why can't you add a markup layer to a hypertext document without copying it and embedding said markup? This exposes you to the dangers of copyright law, and the trolls that exploit it.
i don’t hate it per se. it’s actually quite good at what it does. but i don’t like paying for something i can implement myself but can’t because making time to do so and justifying it is challenging
It's a garbage app, made by a garbage company running like garbage on a garbage protocol. There is no realistic alternative because friends and family expect you to have it.
I quit Facebook in the latter half of the 2000's. Some of my family and friends suddenly stopped inviting me to things. I think anyone you lose because they have to send you a text message or email instead of a facebook invite/whatsapp message isn't really worth having as a friend.
Especially if the reason you ditch Whatsapp is for ethical/moral reasons.
I admire your steadfast adherence to your principles, but as far as I'm personally concerned, there's no way it's a +EV play to be somewhat of a PITA to everyone else, on the basis of a position that would be percieved on the other end somewhat like "weird computer man yells at cellphone software".
It really wasn't a big deal. I saw Facebook to be a negative influence. I made a decision to abandon it. Some of my acquaintances were jerks about it, some were not. The jerks self selected out of my life. Worked great, to be honest.
I meet someone. I want to send them a WhatsApp message. I should be able to type their number into the “To” field, type the message, and press “Send”. Instead, WhatsApp makes me create a new contact in my phone, going through the 4-5 button presses to do that. Then I can start a chat with this new contact. Massively inconvenient.
I mean in the sense you can just enter a phone number and hit "Start Chat". The URL feature is so you can embed it in your social profiles or whatever and people can message you from there. It's just really hacky to use it as a method of initiating a chat if it's not already a link you can just click on.
If you refuse to upload your entire phonebook to Meta, the app will HATE you for it. You will not be able to initiate any chats, the other party needs to start chatting you first. Also, instead of names, only phone numbers will be shown. (I cope by looking at avatars and inferring identity from the previous few messages.)
This would all be easily fixable. You could be able to start a chat by entering (or, more realistically, copy-pasting) a phone number. And instead of a phone number, you could be shown the other person's profile name (like in Telegram).
To be fair Telegram, privacy and security concerns aside, is a pretty high bar. Surely Facebook has the resources to make an exceptional app, but apparently they don't think it'd be worth it for them. I really wish something like Matrix had clients as good as Telegram's!
There may be good reasons why your ID can be your phone number but I've never heard a good reason why your ID must be your phone number. Do you have any?
Outside of SMS, I only use Skype, Slack and Whatsapp for instant messaging, and in terms of spam, SMS, which is bound to my number, gets the most spam, which is already quite rare.
Huh. What do you specifically not like about it? I personally think it's one of the good ones: it's simple, it works and the developers are careful about feature bloat. It sucks less than anything managed by their parent company.
What makes it bad: First of all, it uses Electron, thus it is laggy and wastes too much resources. Maybe it is just a pet peeve of mine, but I hate, if an application does not look native on my GNOME Desktop and does not follow any HIG.
Another factor is the proprietary nature of MS Teams. If it was open, there would probably be some other client/some way to have a real native client.
My preferred alternative would either be Jitsi or Matrix, although both have just electron clients they atleast attempt to have a usable GUI. (Except this one thing in Element: The search button is next to the "Start Videocall"-Button)
I can't replace it, as my university uses it.