#also the software i'm using is dogshit

[iantimony]

a tuesday

listening: bionicle nostalgia playlist. ur welcome.

reading: mostly help forums for my dogshit software.

watching: olympics!! specifically fencing and a smattering of gymnastics. i think we all knew that lee keifer would win women's foil but it was so satisfying to watch happen. she really is a fucking steamroller, have not had one like her before and probably won't again for a very long time. her whole situation is insane - father was duke fencing captain and now a medical doctor, and now all three of his kids including lee are ALSO that and international fencers which is. insane. - and i am in awe of her etc. i did bring my fencing gear back to my apartment with me and i'm looking forward to starting that again, it's been like. at least five years since i last did anything with fencing and i miss it.

the other night i watched shaolin soccer with my boyfriend and roommate's bf. insane fucking film. they had both seen it already (my boyfriend saw it at least 20 years ago as a young kid, in the original canto/mandarin (which he does not speak) with no subtitles which i'm sure was a fucking experience) and . film of all fucking time, i think. insane plot and premise, makes absolutely no sense, overall story has confusing holes, but i'll be damned if i didn't have a great time watching it.

saw new house of the dragon on sun. i cannot bring myself to care about ulf. blacksmith guy is a little better but clearly still not great considering i cant remember his name. some of the writing this season has me like. squints. which beloved mutual pngjpeg reminded me that this one was written during the writers strike which does explain a lot i think. i'm still enjoying it, i really loved alicent's decision to just fuck off to the woods for a bit. she's so real for that. ophelia-coded lake float and all (which is ironic, because, fire and blood spoilers, i'm pretty sure alicent is one of the few people to make it out of this alive).

finally, roommate's bf has been putting on modern family every night in the living room so therefore we have also been watching modern family. brainrotting type of content (derogatory)

playing: soooo much pokemon go. it has become a vital part of my workout routine. i catch pokemon in between weight sets and also when im doing cardio LOL

making: made some coaster blanks in pottery for Secret Gifts ... hopefully they are done in time, gonna really grind them the next week or two!

eating: because i am back in my home base: many many good things. pictures courtesy of my boyfriend. we really said Protein Over Rice. in order:

harissa chicken thighs with shallots, this time with real harissa instead of gochujang - that shit is SPICY goddamn. it's really good though. my roommate's bf has an immersion blender and is in his Homemade Mayo era and i used some of that to cut the spice on my portion and my god that was so fucking good. this was followed by chicken and egg bowl (leftover chicken thighs with scrambled egg) and gyudon.

misc: on one hand i'm really glad to be back in my place! on the other i'm losing my mind a little bit because my roommate's boyfriend has moved in and i don't move out til aug 8 so i'm going a little insane with how disorganized my everything is right now. like i can't unpack anything because it makes no sense to so im just living out of my big ass suitcase. it's fine i'll be fine but like aaaa. also he re-organized all the cabinets and pantry so i don't know where anything fucking is any more !!! agony. i can't wait to have my own space for real.

my work ethic lately has been .. not great ... my advisor also is kinda leaving me on read which isn't my favorite. shrug. onwards and upwards i suppose. look at this crayfish hole and swallowtail butterfly from a walk in a park yesterday

[biggaybunny]

Modern software sucks shit because modern software development sucks shit. No one knows what they're doing and when they do they'll usually be told to do something else anyway. Non-transferrable skills are treated as transferrable; "programming" is an extremely broad field that we are still just beginning to map out. I'm not trying to oversell it here, I have no agenda, I just need to try and convey some perspective here that you can do a lot of different shit with computers, and lumping it all under "writing software" is kind of like lumping all "machines" together and expecting engineers who work with things like planes, cars, pumps, and cranes to be able to figure each other's shit out. There's some specialization happening in the field, but to be honest, most companies are pretty slow to catch on (outside of, yknow, searching resumes for whatever buzzword we're using now)

That's only the beginning of it, too. I don't know I could actually fit all the reasons software development sucks shit into one post. Basically, businesses hate the way software is made. They want software assembly lines, I've had as much said to me by a manager before. They want software products that are specced out, assembled, and shipped out. And that *really, really* doesn't work. Most of the time, when it comes to developing a software "product", they don't even know what they actually want or need. A lot of software bloat comes from early development work that had to be course corrected or repurposed; it's like being a sculptor and having someone behind you try to describe what they want sculpted, but also they're rushing you and don't understand what's even possible to do with sculpting in the first place.

The other thing companies hate about making software is that you can't throw just throw more people at the problem. It's like that math problem "If an orchestra of 50 people can play Beethoven's 5th in 40 minutes, how fast can an orchestra of 500 people play it?" That's how the people in charge want software to work, and after decades of absolute horseshit business paradigms (agile, kanban, scrum, agile-at-scale, extreme programming yes it's called that, etc) it's very clear that this will NEVER be the case, but by god that's not going to stop companies from trying. Because it's about maximizing profits, right? You couldn't possibly get better returns by like, investing in employee retention (dogshit in the business btw) or employee QoL. Just get more people fresh out of a javascript bootcamp and throw them at the issue until something works. So software development gets diced up into thousands of little pieces that can be worked on simultaneously and then glued back together, and as you'd expect end up as dysfunctional Frankenstein monsters. Plus, none of your employees are actually improving at software development because they're only allowed to see such a small piece of the puzzle.

And at the end, it just has to work. Not be good, work. Which is why companies skimp on QA all the time, and then undermine the QA they do invest in. The corner cutting is everywhere. Because it saves costs, you see. Why invest in QA? Just don't write broken code, obviously (this is not how this works). How much security do we need, really? Corner cut, corner cut, corner cut. Rush, rush, rush. Is it any wonder that the cleanest pieces of software tend to be made by small teams or even individuals, working on their own timeframe?

I could've summed up this entire post with "capitalism sucks" but I wanted to explain more. Software development isn't going to get good in a couple years. It's not going to get good in ten years. It's going to suck absolute shit for the foreseeable future. Corporate software, anyway. Maybe if open-source software got a little more love and support... well, who knows.

[qsycomplainsalot]

@vinyl-noodles when I'm using an household appliance it feeds me or washes my clothes or cleans my dishes- all things I would still NEED to do while using AI, which would only bring me nonsense like this picture above while stealing from actual artists. You're using the same argument as people when they said, early on, that "oh well Covid isn't that bad it's killing about the same amount of people as the flu" like it wasn't something to be worried about that twice as many people would DIE from seasonal diseases. Nobody's gonna stop using their AC in the middle of summer to generate some dogshit pictures of six fingered freaks, that energy consumption is going to get tacked on top of what pollution we're already producing. Climatologists are directly linking developed countries' failing their emission cut goals by a wide margin WITH stuff like crypto and AI using massive amounts of energy to power complex softwares whose only purpose is to disenfranchise working class artists, BUT ALSO to support the huge quantity of server space used by said softwares, monopolizing high tech equipment that itself uses heavy metals and is polluting to produce. OH AND ALSO IT'S FUCKING THEFT. The techbros making these plagiarism machines have AMITTED TO IT. Respect of copyright laws would make any of these learning models non viable and it's only through the complicit inaction of our governments that this has been allowed to take place you fucking scab.

AI people: we're just as much artists as you are, you gotta be so observant and go through so many correcting phases for the picture to look good uwu also AI people:

[netrunnervt]

Not bad, Intel: Arc Battlemage announcement

So Intel just announced their new series of GPUs, and they look... pretty good! I'm kind of impressed.

Two cards have been announced today: The Arc B570 ($219, January 16th) and B580 ($249, December 13th). They're decidedly midrange cards, but at least they're actually priced like it. Breakdown under the cut.

Image credit: Intel

Looking at Intel's claims, the B580 looks like a solid improvement over the A750 (comparing price to price) and a decent competitor for the RTX 4060:

Image credit: Gamers Nexus

It's also a 192-bit, 12GB card, priced at $250. Like cards with that tier of memory system should be, Nvidia. The 4070 remains insultingly dogshit.

XeSS has been updated too - Intel's equivalent to DLSS and FSR from Nvidia and AMD respectively. The newest version, XeSS 2, introduces "Xe Low Latency" (think of it as a counterpart to Nvidia Reflex or AMD's Radeon Anti-Lag) and "Xe Frame Generation" (which you already know my feelings on, but at least the graphic they used to explain it was pretty good). Of course, they also presented some generative AI hardware acceleration features, but that's worth even less than frame gen is so I'm skipping it. Encoding wasn't really brought up besides maybe one slide listing it so I'm guessing there's no major improvements there.

This is the first GPU launch in a good while that I'm not left completely disappointed by. With Nvidia laughing all the way to the bank, AMD straight up unable to compete and both of them more or less abandoning the budget GPU market, at least Intel is now here to say "Hey, we can squeeze in a 12GB puncher here and undercut everyone else's prices".

Here's hoping it'll kick the other two into actually competing. Hell, here's hoping the performance will actually be as good as Intel is claiming, because all they've shown is 1440p and maybe other resolutions kneecap the card.

Overall? Not bad. Solid hardware, fair pricing, respectable performance improvements, software suite up to speed with the competition. If the performance claims pan out, this will be one of the product lines to look for, especially after prices start dropping given some time. You still need ReBAR enabled, but if you bought your computer any time in the past five years you should be completely okay.

[celestial-dimetrodon]

ggghhh god i fucking hate tech culture. i love computer science, it's fascinating and powerful and complex and yet the main thing it's used for is dogshit slop that's making our society actively worse. the tech industry is tapping into something that's genuinely powerful and potentially revolutionary, just open tiktok and you'll see the sheer power of data and machine learning algortitms. AI, including but not limited to generative AI, is a technological marvel! image recognition, predictive models, the entirety of the goddamn internet, it's all fucking amazing! but that's the problem, isn't it. the way our society works means that all that reality-warping power is used to extract every last drop of money, time, and attention from as many people as possible. just open tiktok and you'll see what i mean. you can only understand it if you've experienced it for yourself. imagine if a fraction of the money poured into developing reccomendation algotithms that fill every spare second of your limited time on earth with useless slop was spent developing technology that made our lives materially better. i want to work in ecological management. imagine if we spent that money on collecting environmental data? if tiktok can distill such a potent formula for extracting human attention, what would happen if we gave that power to people who actually care about helping their communities? it's unacceptable that we as actual human people are being stripped for parts by these companies, our identities are being co-opted, sanitized and crystalized into nothing but fucking content. it's genuinely horrifying. data is powerful, but instead of using data to increase our understanding we're using it to understand less. to hijack the brains of millions of people, to inject useless shit that distracts us from the fact that they'd prefer the spark of humanity inside all of us to be snuffed in favor of predictable sources of attention and ad revenue. it makes me sick. and i honestly feel like i'm being taken advantage of as someone with adhd, like these apps know where the dopamine button is in my brain and they keep fucking pressing it, keeping me hooked and distracted and out of control of my own mind. i can't help but feel almost violated. machine learning algorithms are powerful, and the control they have over our lives is sickening. i've stopped using tiktok, i dont open twitter anymore, i'm trying to stop scrolling through instagram and pinterest for hours a day. we all have to resist this slop. make bad art, listen to people's messy and genuine thoughts and share your own with real actual human people. don't let the shape of your life be dictated by an algorithm. but don't fall into the trap of being "anti-technology" either. there's a reason it's being used to control us, and it's because it's powerful. i genuinely believe that we need more technology and computer science education. they say you can't use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, but what if all the smart and compassionate people who want to make a difference had the skills to make their own tools? of course the people in power aren't going to let that happen if they can help it, but i won't let that stop me from trying. do you know how to pirate software? do you know how to spot AI images? do you know how to protect your online identity? if not, then learn. i love the posts that go around on here sharing open-source software and peer-to-peer sharing sites, because i think it's genuinely important for people to know how to use technology critically. technology isn't magic, tech companies just want you to believe it is so you can't make informed decisions. also, please learn some basic internet safety. don't incriminate yourself on social media or in public forums. don't share any identifying information about yourself. always assume someone can see your activity unless you've made damn sure they can't.

sorry for the long rant. hopefully nobody will read this but i just wanted to vent about some big feelings i've been having about my career trajectory and the work as a whole.

[offmychest-official]

also am i the only one who doesn't care about ai being tacked onto every software under the sun like 90% of the time you can just not click that button. idk what dogshit search engines you're using that give you fake results i use ecosia and i'm fine. now unskippable ads? those are the real "forced onto us" awful software developments

.

[quohotos]

Okay so this is gonna be a big rant. I didn't check my sources, I'm going to say things that are wrong. You're going to have to live with it.

Around the time of windows 8 Microsoft tried to reinvent itself. It was tired of being the stuffy, skeuomorphic machine you were assigned at work. They wanted to be cool. Part of this vision was a complete redesign of the interface

And I don't know, call me crazy, I think this visual design fucks. I mean look at this. It's simplistic but gorgeous. The rest of the industry was running away from skeuomorphism towards simplicity via rounded bulbous corners. This was distinct, it was colorful, it had contrast, it was sharp. It literally looked like a bunch of windows in a pane.

At the time, Microsoft was also launching a windows phone (much to late to make a difference. They missed the boat but they didn't know it yet) and were designing a new Xbox that would have architecture near identical to that of a PC. The idea was that they were expanding beyond just stuffy PCs, there were a lot of new product categories and they wanted a universal version of windows that could handle all of them. You could build a "Universal Windows Platform" app that would run on any version of windows on any device. This was achieved using the C# virtual machine that us CS people tentatively affectionately call "Microsoft Java".

The future that Microsoft envisioned would be that there would be a new walled garden of software that you would run on all your pretty new windows devices. They would all share and sync and be perfect and pretty, and the same app on your phone could be played on your xbox, pc, and holy shit AR GOGGLES?

Yeah these fucking things. Microsoft bet big on the idea we'd like to start doing shit with holograms. They made this cool-ass device that used projectors to shine shit into your eye so you could see holograms and poke them and move them about. These were Windows devices that ran actual full-on windows, but that meant that Windows' identity had to grow to accommodate them. All the UIs had to work in a world where you'd see them on a touch screen OR as a hologram. All of the first party software had to have that in mind.

MS paint? Nah that shit's ancient. We got PAINT 3D and it's the most dogshit thing you've ever used

All the sloppy jank of MS paint but now you can put horrible fucking 3d models in it. I'm holding back my full Paint 3d thoughts for a later post that's still being worked on in the drafts, but here's a sneak preview.

Paint 3d allows you to dip into a catalogue of 3d models and plop them into your regular MS paint canvas. There's still no layers, no vector support, but hey at least you can add transparent backgrounds. Paint 3d let you export your horrible janky creations both as a regular png/jpg but also as a 3d model.

that's your short answer. They added that 3d models folder because of paint 3d. If you want to leave now you can... but this post keeps going as you can see.

The idea would be that as more of our tech moved to AR and VR you would be acquiring 3d models at a similar rate that you do other file times, so it made sense to have a built in folder. Maybe you work at one of those offices in an microsoft ad where I guess people just email each other .fbx flower pots for some fucking reason? Maybe you're downloading them from the metaverse (we weren't calling it that back then).

Your friend using a hololense would make a 3d model and then send it to you, you'd add some shit to it in paint 3d using its kafkaesque interface, then send it back. Wow. The future is so much fun.

You could even stick your 3d models in your very own VR start menu. Yeah. To go along with the AR goggles they released some dogshit (well they were good for the time and also cheap compared to the competition) VR goggles. These things ran on the SAME uwp platform as everything else, so theoretically I could make some abomination in paint 3d and then send it to my dad who works at the flower pot factory or some shit and he could put it on his virtual desk in his virtual cliff house start menu where he would virtually alt tab between a hovering window of Microsoft word and some freaky VR porn that his boss couldn't catch him watching because it was all in the headset.

That didn't fucking happen. We don't do that. And it's not just because it was a terrible idea but also because Microsoft wasn't committed to the bit.

See this house of cards came crashing down for a lot of reasons. The first one being that it wasn't backwards compatible. This cool 3d virtual, cross-device future wasn't with the win32 api, but the new UWP api. Devs had to remake their software in a less performant programming language and format just so it would run on all windows devices... but windows for PC still ran the win32 style apps that already worked. So you were expecting devs to port their windows app to... to windows... so it could run on windows... even though it was already running on windows. Oh yeah, let's just rewrite our whole accounting software stack so that bill can use it on his windows phone because phones are definitely for doing accounting and not playing fucking candy crush.

xkcd 927

UWP added the functionality of "It works on xboxes, vr googles, windows phones, AND computers but just a little bit worse than the other ones and you have to remake it from scratch". It was just one more competing standard, and the use case of cross platform didn't really help that much.

The windows phone died out early on because it was too late and it couldn't cross the app gap (even though it's UI totally fucked and you play a halo twin stick shooter on it). The hololense died because it cost them ONE THOUSAND dollars just to build the screen assembly for one eye, you needed two of those + an onboard computer to run AR + a fuckload of cameras + proffit. No one was ever going to spend that kinda of cash just so they could pinch and zoom semi transparent holograms in a tiny 40 degree feild of vision in for two and a half hours because yeah the battery life was shit too. Developers never made software for it because there would never be any install base because something that superfluous can't ever be that expensive while we're all getting poorer.

Now, the VR headsets on the other hand, they kinda sucked... but they were cheap and they were competent. With a bit of elbow grease you could make them be just as good as the pretty boys, and they were the first to market with inside out tracking which was legitimately freeing back in 2018. Microsoft could have integrated it with the Xbox to compete with PSV but they just didn't for no fucking reason even though they both ran UWP apps and were on the same appstore and used all the same ports and the Xbox was just about powerful enough to play some games in VR. Yeah they just didn't commit to the bit and abandoned their VR headset line because it didn't instantly become a monopoly despite them putting very little effort into it.

So windows phone died, windows VR died, hololense died, and now regular windows 10 is full of the corpses of this cross platform vision. We have the 3d objects folder even though nothing really uses it anymore. Windows 10 never fully upgraded to the metro theme. It's like... half metro but some settings require you go to the old XP control panel. Some windows are in metro style but then when you right click on them there's just a standard win32 dialogue box that's ugly and white. It's been that way since 2015 and rather than finishing windows 10 and making it pretty they stuffed it full of bullshit and ads and then said "FUCK IT, WINDOWS 11"

And windows 11's whole thing is being ugly and simplistic and rounded corners and wasted space and designed for a touch screen because even though the windows phone died at least the 2 in one windows tablet market was doing okay.

Windows is a collection of good ideas, followed by a bag fumble, followed by an admission of defeat and a retreat to the familiar.

And somewhere along the way we got a new folder for 3d objects, and if you really want you can use paint 3d to make this shit I guess:

[omamervt]

I'm gonna be real with you, I don't really fear the Copyright Infringement Bots. Do I think, short run, they're gonna cost some people some jobs? absolutely, it's already happened, just look at supposedly reputable news sites just throwing up the first thing generated when the headline is inputted. Do I think the people using them instead of actual humans care that the quality is dogshit? No, again, see previous example. Photographers were replaced with something objectively worse and nobody in charge cared.

But I also think there's a bit of a silver lining.

First off, one of the biggest investors in the tech is Hollywood, and if writers and actors don't budge on that issue in their strike, and more importantly, if the newly-formed VFX union joins in, those investments will be for nothing and subsequently dry up. That's important because ChatGPT alone costs more money to operate per day than it makes in a month. It's only stable because of a constant flow of investor money, and it still may not be enough. But this also applies to machine learning-based generative art tools. Long story short, these people took a shortcut to beat out more honest competition and as a result, they grew too big, too fast, and there's a slight chance that they implode as a result.

Second, regulation almost always comes for something this disruptive, and for the first time in a while it may not be too little, too late. The EU has spent 2 years working on a law that would essentially require anyone using machine learning to be transparent about their data sources, and a court in the US recently set precedent with a ruling that stated anything generated by machine learning cannot be copyrighted unless the producer has provable legal access to the data used to make it and/or a human hand was actually involved in the process. (as I understand it, that means things like Epic's MetaHuman app is fine because the human base models came from Quixel scans, being used in software owned by Epic.) I understand others' concern about the exceptions but a) the results from these programs are so bad that you basically have to start from scratch anyway (not that this has ever stopped anyone) and b) it's a necessary inclusion because otherwise, hundreds of video games could lose their copyright. The good news is that if both the EU Law and the US ruling are enforced, the current business model becomes unsustainable because the art theft will be made transparent.

And third, the results are just... bad. It's true that it's possible with refinement the results of using machine learning generative art or large language model text generators could improve, but the people behind this technology have no interest in refining the software when they could just scrape more data instead. Again, their whole business model is taking shortcuts. Yes, the more data the model has, the better results it could produce over time, but they have to store it somewhere. the bot has to be able to then process the larger amounts of information, and all that means it becomes less convenient for users over time while simultaneously costing more to maintain. And the amount of data needed to see noticeable increases in quality becomes bigger and bigger over time, as well, with the quality increases becoming smaller and smaller. I know everyone was worried after the huge jump in quality between Dall-E Mini and Stable Diffusion, but the results are still pretty bad, and they're gonna be bad for a long fucking time. It's the exact same reason that while a difference in graphics quality from PS1 to PS2 was obvious, and the difference between PS2 and 3 was mind-blowing, PS3 to PS4 was clear, but underwhelming, and PS4 to PS5 is really only impressive if you know what you're looking for, and console to PC only matters in that there's no real performance limit for things outside graphics at this point. This is because the amount of extra fine detail needed to have a noticeable leap in realism increases with every leap, and the amount of computational power needed to do that in real-time increases even further. Dall-E Mini to... what we have now, is the biggest quality leap we're probably gonna see for years. And with the other two points factored in, the technology may not HAVE years to continue stealing from artists without consequence.

None of these things alone or even combined are a guarantee that this shit stops being a threat, but they're reasons to maybe be hopeful. So fight them, yes, understand what you're fighting, obviously, but also take a moment to realize that it's very much a winnable fight.

[hobiscloset]

@punkrockbrokemy--heart submitted a request for us to roast these looks. Thanks for the visually induced trauma bestie! Guest-starring the amazing @textsfrombangtan (marked as L)

E - Let's go from left to right on the top picture. A - it's just all so bad! im having a mild breakdown about this whole picture

Jimin E - so you know theater kids? A - Yeah, you and me E - Hey! but it's true. this is theater kid but in the early 80s late 70s. paint-splattered jeans and a flannel layered A - oh you are correct. it's not tech week though E - yeah this is during set building

Jhope N - Jorts is just going to a highlighter party A - he's a village people stan. before the word stan existed. so a village people groupie L - i'm not entirely convinced he isn't a village person A - its not a coherent enough theme to be a village person in this fit L - fair enough. this man has never seen a coherent theme in his life E - some kind of like burning man neon party

Jin N - my dad in Paris in the 70s A - I was gonna say the flashback dads in mama mia. so like same dif E - he's just one of the guys in Mama Mia 2 A - Bill E - you are absolutely correct and should say it L - strong agree. bill because he's definitely thinking "why did it have to be me" throughout L - i feel like he got off the lightest here but it might just be me looking at that damn face N - No he definitely made out the best E - i feel like overall they always take the least risks on Jin. like idk what it is but 8/10 times im like "eh" to his clothes A - they're like 'people just want to look at his face, put him in a button up and be done with it' N - Because if they go too hard with it he will wear it to music bank again L - this or jin just goes "no." and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. jinhitent Jungkook A - baby is a 17 year old who decided yesterday that he was now into black smithing L - baby again with the butt flap this time in the most unfortunate colour A - look at my cool leather apron its so authentic N - Baby is my brother in high school before he asked me how colors work A - he doesnt care about colours he just wants to make knives. ive known this exact child. four of them actually E - yeah i was gonna say like kid with odd hobbies and no anxiety. his goal is to get on Forged in Fire and make a knife in 2 hours that gets thrown at a wall A - Precisely

RM A - Quite literally one of the bullies from the power rangers E - i know the exact guy L - ash ketchum on steroids E - ash ketchum if pokemon had been made live action when they did that horrible dragon ball z movie. like he's got a punk/grunge phase L - precisely and the jeans... they're so long N - A toddler allowed to choose all his own clothes

Suga E - he just looks like every bisexual i know after going to the thrift store like "youll never guess what i found", pulls out yet another bowling shirt A - its true but hey! L - this is a wham! fit. like club tropicana vibes. beach club promoter but the club is dogshit and he knows it N - Mamoru from the original sailor moon anime (pause while E looked it up)

E - oh god you are absolutely right ! A - A VERY SOLID CALL L - aksjdbsbajzjs accuracy 100 N - I know my sailor moon bad fashion

V L - *sharp inhale * A - I get Napolean dynamite character vibes in the most (derogatory) way N - An art student who is very aware how pretentious everyone around him is and put on the worst outfit he could find to see how people would twist themselves up trying to call it Art E - oh i love that. troll art student. also whose fucking face is that and why am i convinced its like a serial killer? L - the face on his shirt is the face i made when i saw this A - have you ever seen a three year old that insists they dress themselves without any help E - i want my ballet tights and my fire fighter uniform and my dinosaur top A - its just 100 percent this Final Thoughts N - The argument could be made that all of them are toddlers who insisted on dressing themselves E - all together its very much like, kindergarten class vibes L - idk it just feels like they hit the random sim generator seven times and they got all the worst traits E -you know that computer program Cher has in Clueless? with all her clothes. this is what happens when you press random and shuffle at the same time L - yes and they only allow the fit when a big fat X comes up on the screen and cher goes "ugh as if" E - cher's outfit software, wrong answers only L - i think this whole thing can be distilled down to "wrong answers only"

[nhaneh]

wow yeah that definitely is some absolute dogshit commentary and I'm thinking it's gonna take surgery to get that boot out of their seagullet.

And since this is kind of my wheelhouse, look: while there's absolutely some things that you can only really address by throwing more CPU cycles, GPU cycles, or RAM at it - typically very processing-heavy things like video encoding, sound processing, graphical filters and what have you - most of those are actually not behind what makes bloatware be so bloated and sluggish.

Like, when people talk about Adobe products, for example, being bloatware, they usually don't (to my knowledge, anyway) talk about how certain visual filters take too long to process or how applying blur is too slow, they talk about the program itself and its interface chugging along at an impressively sluggish rate. Likewise, when people talk about games chugging along, it typically isn't because the actual game mechanics and simulation is being too slow (though those do happen - end game Stellaris is always going to be processing-heavy due to how the game works, even though there's definitely optimization they can, and to some extents are, doing), but because someone decided that a particular random object needed about a billion triangles and 8k textures for some reason.

Look, even modern day graphics cards have concepts like minimum optimal triangle size where polygons smaller than that incur drastic performance costs to rendering at absolutely no increase to fidelity whatsoever - there's a point to which polycount and texture resolution just actively becomes a flat out performance drain with minimal if any gains in visual quality, and sometimes just outright loss of quality. Efficient use of polygons and texture space and what have you is absolutely a skill, and not bothering is basically just the graphical equivalent of releasing a buggy mess of a game that just can't stop crashing.

And sure, I'm well aware that there are diminishing returns to optimization and bugfixing. Software development can be a really large and complicated affair and there are some very real limits to what degree of efficiency is achievable, both in economic and in practical terms. But also, there is no shortage of examples of developers/publishers/etc that could absolutely have afforded giving something a bit more work before throwing it out the door. Adobe, especially, could absolutely afford rewriting several parts of their software suites to not just absolutely suck ass and maybe also support just a tiny bit of multithreading as a treat. Likewise, there's loads of shit Microsoft could easily do to make Windows less of a hampered, ambling beast - it would simply be a question of not forcing so much unwanted garbage on their users and instead give them the option to disable a bunch of useless shite that they don't want.

tl;dr: bloatware exists primarily because some devs/publishers figured it'd be cheaper to outsource processing to their userbase, just as they also tend to outsource more and more beta testing to their user base. And while there definitely are limits to how much older and slower hardware can keep up with increasing demands, there's also absolutely an extent to which they're just being cheap, and people like the one screenshotted above are basically just easy marks who got conned into paying 2-4 times as much money for a performance increase that can sometimes barely reach higher than 10%

My solution for bloatware is this: by law you should hire in every programming team someone who is Like, A Guy who has a crappy laptop with 4GB and an integrated graphics card, no scratch that, 2 GB of RAM, and a rural internet connection. And every time someone in your team proposes to add shit like NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing or all the bloatware that Windows, Adobe, etc. are doing now, they have to come back and try your project in the Guy's laptop and answer to him. He is allowed to insult you and humilliate you if it doesn't work in his laptop, and you should by law apologize and optimize it for him. If you try to put any kind of DRM or permanent internet connection, he is legally allowed to shoot you.

With about 5 or 10 years of that, we will fix the world.