Aceticon

I have the impression that most people (or maybe it's my faith in Humanity that's at an all time low and it's really just "some people") just want pre-chewed explanations given to them rather than spend time and energy figuring things out themselves - basically baby pap as ideas food rather than cooking their own ideas food out of raw ingredients.

Certainly that would help explain the resurgence of Populist sloganeering and continued popularity of Religion (with it's ever popular simple explanations of "Deity did it" and "it's the will of Deity")

Critical thinking, especially Skepticism, does not make for good Consumers or mindless followers of Political Tribes.

Middle and upper management are like little children - they'll only learn that fire hurts by putting their hand in it.

Good programmers (and I don't mean just at the coding level) make less bugs exactly because they want to avoid bug fixing as much as possible.

They still have to do debugging - and hence have to be good at it - just less often than if they didn't invest any time into figuring out ways of working that reduce the rate of bugs in their work (and, again, this is at more levels than just coding).

I think that misconception of "good coders do not produce bugs" in anchored in the totally wrong idea that it's at all possible to make code without bugs - the way I see it the path to being a "good coder" must go through being good at debugging and just wanting to avoid doing it as much because how how much more time it takes to have to go all the way down to using the debugger to find bugs than doing things like at least some analysis upfront of the program requirements, using proper naming conventions to reduce the likelihood of the kind of bugs that comes from confusing variables and structuring you code so that you don't get lost or don't forget things (especially for code you don't see for months and later come back to having forgotten the logic you were following with it).

I've done some programming without proper debuggers (embedded stuff in shitty shit microcontrollers, shader programming) and it's a total PITA.

The pain in the arse which is debugging is what motivated me to, as my career progressed, improve my coding, improve my software design, improve my systems design, even improved my software development process and standards and eventually that even extended to getting those I worked with to also improving those things as I sometimes ended up having to debug their bugs.

Debugging definitelly makes better techies, IMHO, mainly because of the lengths people will go to in order the avoid having to do it.

It's pretty much the same as AIs do - copy and past random code from Stackoverflow - but they do it automatically.

In my experience developing In-House custom software it's more "Managers" and "End-users": basically the requirements for the software that's developed are defined by the manager overseeing an area and hence based on their point of view of the business process they oversee, which is often not at all the same point of view as the people working in that process.

I've seen again and again software being made exactly to the spec provided by team/area management and then turning out to have lots of problems for the actual users to use.

In my experience the best results come from having the developers talk directly with the end-users, even if the language the devs tend to speak and their preconceptions at first don't match those of the end-users.

Stuff is done to sell, hence it targets those who make the purchases not the end-users.

You see that a lot in things like children toys, often resulting in the funny result that the kid that gets the toy as a gift ends up having more fun from the box the toy came in than from the toy itself.

Well, that's the thing, it's often the case that whilst the client is supposedly doing it for their users, in practice it's not and is doing it for other reasons.

Mind you, I think that is more common when the software is being developed for a client which is basically a Manager in the same company as the users of the software (for example in In-house Development or Consultancy work developing a solution for a company) were in the absence of the very clear pressure vector which is the customers not buying the product (internal end-users are almost never given a choice to use or not that software, though they can at times informally boycot software they think hinders their work and get the project killed) things are often designed for the Manager rather than for the Users.

(Note that this is not necessarily done in a knowing purposeful way: it's just that when it's some external manager providing the requirements to the developers for the software being made for the area that managers overseens - though sometimes it's even more indirect - things tend to be seen from the perspective of said manager not the end-users, hence designed to match how that manager sees things and thinks things work, which is often different from how the actual users see things. This cartoon perfectly illustrates that IMHO - it looks fine for the "manager" whilst looking quite different for the "end-user").

Even is B2C you see that: notice the proliferation of things like Microtransactions in Games, which are hardly the kind of thing gamers - who are the end-users of games - wanted to have but which definitelly the management of the big Publishers wanted.

"Family friendly UI" is "ultra-advanced" stuff for me: remember, before Kodi on a Mini-PC in my living room (and, by the way, I got a remote control for it too) I had been using first generation Media Players with file-browser interfaces to chose files from remote shares on a NAS, so merelly having something with the concept of a media library, tracking of watched status and pretty pictures automatically fetched from the Internet is a giant leap forward ;)

There are downsides to being an old Techie using all sorts of non-mainstream tech since back in the 90s. I'm just happy Kodi solved my problem of having an old Media Player hanging together with duct-tape, spit and prayers.

That said I can see how Kodi having all status (such as watched/not-watched tracking) be per-media rather than per (user + media) isn't really good for families. More broadly the thing doesn't even seem to have the concept of a user.

I haven't tried Jellyfin but people's talk of it doing transcoding (which Kodi doesn't need to do as it simply decodes the video stream and shows it on the video output) leaves me with the idea that it's not quite the same and does things I don't really need.

Having lived in the UK and even participated in a politics there (as a member of the Greenparty, FYI) it seems to me that both the English's power elites' support of an ethno-Fascist regime abroad even while it activelly commits Genocide (reminiscent of Thatcher's support of Apartheid South Africa and of Pinochet in Chile) and their authoritarian solutions to Environmentalism as a "problem" of people demonstrating rather than the Environment being destroyed, are all part of a broader pattern of Rightwing Authroritarianism were also fit things like the extreme Civil Society Surveillance denounced by Snowden (which, curiously, whilst in the US some was deemed unconstitutionally and walked back, in the UK laws were passed to make it all retroactively legal and the Press was shut up using D-Notices) and other general trends in the exercise of power in the country (remember how the Tories passed a law that de facto created minimum £1000 penalties in all criminal cases).

This is not even new - Environmentalist organisations were infiltrated by undercover police back in the 80s/90s who even left some women there carrying their children and things like kettling were used against demonstrators back in the big anti-Finance and anti-Austerity demonstrations in London after the 2008 Crash were even an unarmed and non-violent person got killed by a police officer (a case were the officer in question ultimatelly got out with no meaningful penalty).

Brexit wasn't born in a vacuum and compared with the rest of Europe the UK has been further Right and more Authoritarian, copying the worst bits of the American system rather than the best and mixing them with a heavily and well entrenched classism and the idea that people should know their place, with no tradition of rule by consensus and an electoral system - First Past The Post - that generally results in Winner Takes All outcomes were a mere 35% of votes is enough for absolute majorities which are pretty much all powerful since Britain foesn't have a written Constitution.

Having lived in a few countries in Europe, I came out of over a decade in the UK with the idea that it was the country in Europe most likely to turn Fascist. A posh style of Fascism but Fascism none the less.

Sadly New Labour, who ideologically are something else altogether than (old) Labour, seem just as prone to Authoritarianism as the Tories, which actually makes sense given that it was during New Labour's last period in Government that the most extreme civil society surveillance apparatus in the West was built in Britain.

TL;DR in summary, Britain even under New Labour is very rightwing and riddled with authoritarianism and their unwavering support (once again) for violent Fascism abroad fits the pattern and is a nice reminder of how its power elites think.