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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • The 1st ½ of your comment sounds accurate. But…

    And also in Foss there are highly opinionated software where the devs completely ignore users, ban them from GitHub when they post issues,

    Right, but to be clear non-free s/w is worse - you can’t even reach the devs, generally, and there is no public bug tracker. FOSS is an improvement in this regard because at least there is a reasonable nuclear option (forking). The nuclear option for non-free software is writing it yourself from scratch.


  • That all sounds accurate enough to me… but thought I should comment on this:

    However - in larger enterprises there’s so much more, you get the whole SDL maturity thing going - money is invested into raising the quality of the whole development lifecycle and you get things like code reviews, architects, product planning, external security testing etc. Things that cost time, money and resources.

    It should be mentioned that many see testing as a cost, but in fact testing is a cost savings. In most situations, you only spend some money on testing in order to dodge a bigger cost: customers getting burnt in a costly way that backfires on the supplier. Apart from safety-critical products, this is the only business justification to test. Yet when budgets get tightened, one of the first cuts many companies make is testing – which is foolish assuming they are doing testing right (in a way that saves money by catching bugs early).

    Since the common/general case with FOSS projects is there is no income that’s attached to a quality expectation (thus testing generates no cost savings) - the users are part of the QA process as free labor, in effect :)



  • Linux won’t be viable for blind people unless major distros have full time accessibility folks, and refuse to accept inaccessible packages and patches.

    Sure, but you need to read what I quoted. I purely addressed the flawed claim that better code comes from those paid to write it. The opposite is true. It’s unclear to what extent that bias has influenced @noahcarver@rblind.com’s thesis. Though I have no notable issues with anything else @noahcarver@rblind.com wrote (much of which is beyond my expertise w.r.t accessibility).

    And to be clear, “better code” strictly refers to quality, not accessibility. Accessibility is a design factor.

    But that code you write at home is probably not accessible.

    That’s right. But then neither is the commercial code I worked on. That would be outside of my domain. I do backends for the most part. The rare UI work I did was for a tiny user base of internal developers within the org and accessibility was not part of the requirements. I worked on a UI for external users briefly but again no requirements for accessibility (which would be very unlikely for that particular product).

    In any case, this sidetrack is irrelevant to what you replied to. It’s important to correct bogus claims that being paid to write code is conducive to quality. Some right-wingers I know never miss the opportunity to use the phrase “good enough for government work” because they want to push the mentality that capitalism promotes superior quality. It’s a widespread misconception that needs correction whenever it manifests.

    Paying someone to write accessible code should theoretically work on both free software and non-free software. AFAICT the reason non-free software would accommodate blind users is that the market share is large enough to justify the profit-driven bottom line and those users are forced to pay for it (as all users are). In the FOSS domain, payments (“bounties”) are optional. Has this been tried? If not, then you’re relying on blind FOSS developers to suit their own needs in a way that benefits all blind users.


  • and that someone who is paid to write accessible software is generally going to produce and maintain better code.

    In my day job I’m paid to write code. Then I go home write code I was not paid for. My best work is done without pay.

    Commercial software development

    When I have to satisfy an employer, they don’t want quality code. They want fast code. They want band-aid fixes. The corporate structure is very short-sighted. I was once back-roomed by a manager and lectured for “gold plating”. That means I was producing code that was higher quality than what management perceives as the economic sweet spot. I was also caught once fixing bugs as I spotted them when I happened to have a piece of code checked out in Clearcase. I was told I was “cheating the company out of profits” because they prefer if the bug goes through a documentation procedure so the customer can ultimately be made to pay separately for the bug fix. Nevermind the fact that my time was already compensated by the customer anyway - but they can get more money if there’s a bigger paper trail involving more staff. So when you say you get what you pay for, that’s what you pay for – busy work (aka working hard not smart). They also want “consistent quality”. So if one module is higher quality than another, there is pressure to lower the quality of the better module because improving the style or design pattern of the lower quality piece is “gold plating”. When I make full use of the language constructs (as intended by the language designers), I am often forced by an employer to use more basic constructs. Employers are worried that junior engineers or early senior engineers who might have to maintain my code will encounter language constructs that are less common and it will slow them down to have to look up the syntax they encounter. Employers under-estimate the value of developers learning on the job. So I am often forced avoid using the more advanced constructs to accommodate some subset of perceived lowest common denominator. E.g. if I were to use an array in bash, an employer might object because some bash maintainers may not be familiar with an array.

    Non-commercial software development

    Free software developers have zero schedule pressure. They are not forced to haphazardly rush some sloppy work into an integration in order to meet some deadline that was promised to a customer by a manager who was pressured to give an overly optimistic timeline. #FOSS devs are free to gold plate all they want. And because it’s a labor of love and not labor for a paycheck, FOSS devs naturally take more pride in their work. I’m often not proud of the commercial software I was forced to write by a corporation fixated on the bottom line. When I’m consistently pressured to write poor quality code for a profit-driven project, I hit a breaking point and leave the company. I’ve left 3 employers for this reason.

    Commercial software from a user PoV

    Whenever I encounter a bug in commercial software, there is almost never a publicly accessible bug tracker and it’s rare that the vendor has the slightest interest in passing along my bug report to the devs. The devs are unreachable by design (cost). I’m just one user so my UX is unimportant. Obviously when I cannot even communicate a bug to a commercial vendor, I am wholly at the mercy of their testers eventually rediscovering the bug I found, which is unlikely when there are complex circumstances.

    Non-commercial software from a user PoV

    Almost every FOSS app has a bug tracker, forum, or IRC channel where bugs can be reported and treated. I once wrote a feature request whereby the unpaid FOSS developer implemented my feature request and sent me a patch the same day I reported it. It was the best service I ever encountered and certainly impossible in the COTS software world for anyone who is not a multi-millionaire.
















  • Yeah this article caught me by surprise. Natural gas is naturally odorless so that probably works against awareness.

    I tend to be lazy about turning on the loud fans which downgrades the ambiance. But I need to change something because grease cakes up on everything near the oven and on the cabinets. My range hood is also the ventless style, which must be totally useless against the benzine byproduct.

    I will certainly put more thought into kitchen design in the future. The gas appliances should probably be in the corner of the room so there are fewer directions to control, and the hood should probably be big, industrial, and vented outside. It’s a shame because I might prefer the gas stove to be in an island layout or at least centrally located.




  • Many coils pulse full heat to simulate different heat levels. Gas gives you very precise control over exact heat levels and it is instantly responsive to change.

    You’ve got the precision factor backwards. Gas is a clear loser on that.

    When you have knob levels 0—9, if you set the knob to 3 on electric you get exactly ½ the heat energy that you get from level 6. It’s perfectly linear. This is not true in the slightest with gas. A gas flame is non-linear as you go from 0 to 9. All you can do is eye-ball the flame and guess. Even when you have a flame size in mind, it’s not reproduceable because you’re still eye-balling it every time. You can’t trust the levels on a gas knob either because they’re so non-linear that you can get a big flame difference in certain points along the scale.

    Gas also has less precision of control because of the reduced range at both ends. The lowest possible gas setting is still too hot for some tasks. So the best you can do is manually mimic the pulsing of electric by turning the burner off and reigniting periodically. The highest temp on gas is also less than the highest temp electric can achieve.

    The only “precision” task that gas wins at is at the zero (off) level, and speed, AFAICT, which is related to precision. Both of those factors can be discarded for the most part when comparing induction because it adjusts temp demand fast enough.