• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It also doesn’t help that once you’ve paid the large fee for the Pro version, it doesn’t actually guarantee any support if you encounter a bug. You get access to a different issue tracker, and might get a Unity employee to confirm that the bug exists after a couple of months (and maybe close it as a duplicate, then reopen it as not a duplicate when the fix for the other bug doesn’t help, then reclose it as a duplicate when it turns out the fix for the other bug also doesn’t fix the other bug, and at the end of a multi-month process, there still being a bug with no indication an engineer’s looked at it).

    Anyway, I’m glad to no longer be working for a company that uses Unity.


  • It’s easy to get pressured into thinking it’s your responsibility. There’s also the risk that an unhappy company will make a non-copyleft clone of your project, pump resources into it until it’s what everyone uses by default, and then add proprietary extensions so no one uses the open-source version anymore, which, if you believe in the ideals of Free Software, is a bad thing.





  • In the UK, you’re not meant to get within 6ft of a bike when you’re overtaking it (although it’s pretty common for drivers to get muddled and think that rule’s talking about inches). That means it’s not safe to overtake if there are oncoming vehicles in the opposite lane or solid white lines in the middle of the road. Another bike a metre or so from the first one doesn’t change that if you’ve got to cross into the opposite lane anyway, and it’s better if they’re two abrest as you don’t need to be in the opposite lane for as long.

    There are plenty of idiot cyclists who endanger themselves, but there are also plenty of drivers who accuse people of being idiot cyclists when they’re following The Highway Code to the letter.


  • Personally, I can ignore the effects of artificial sweeteners on insulin levels as they, like everything else, have no effect, and my insulin levels are only affected by when I inject it. I’m type 1 diabetic. When people make incorrect claims based on effects that aren’t reproducible or weren’t statistically significant in the first place about the safety of sweeteners, it causes direct problems for me. I’ve had bartenders mess up my blood sugar levels by lying about serving diet drinks because they think they’re dangerous. Plus, if the people who push for artificial sweeteners to be banned had their way, there are plenty of things I couldn’t ever eat or drink again.





  • You can’t trust users to make informed decisions about cybersecurity as most users don’t have the necessary background knowledge, so won’t think beyond this popup is annoying me and has a button to make it go away and I am smart and therefore immune to malware. Microsoft don’t want Windows to have the reputation for being infested with malware like it used to have, and users don’t want their bank details stolen. If something’s potentially going to be a bad idea, it’s better to only give the decision to people capable of making it an informed decision. That’s why we don’t let children opt into surgery or decide whether to have ice cream for dinner, and have their parents decide instead.

    The comment you’re quoting was replying to someone suggesting a warning popup, and saying it would be a bad idea, rather than suggesting the secure boot UEFI option should be taken away. You need at least a little bit more awareness of the problem to know to toggle that setting.






  • When the internet was becoming a world-changing technology, there weren’t thirty years of websites to keep working and malware to protect from, web standards were far simpler, and a much higher proportion of users were enthusiasts who were excited by anything they could get and didn’t mind if things were rough around the edges. Similarly, two brothers could make the world’s first aircraft that flew under its own power, and yet with the combined might of everyone working for Boeing, people are worried about airliner doors falling off and an eight-day space trip has become an eight-month one. Mature technologies need a lot more effort to build and maintain than emerging ones.




  • If you’re doing things properly, you’ll know your Microsoft account password or have it in a password manager (and maybe have other account recovery options available like getting a password reset email etc.), and have a separate password for the PC you’re locked out of, which would be the thing you’d forgotten. If someone isn’t computer-literate, it’s totally plausible that they’d forget both passwords, have no password manager, and not have set up a recovery email address, and they’d lose all their data if they couldn’t get into their machine.