Had a refinement yesterday, where we decided that we should add all tickets of an epic individually into the milestone (except for two).
And for whatever reason, our project manager had decided to use the in-browser split view and was struggling against that, but also just was about to do it in some cumbersome way. I think, he wanted to manually compare the list of issues in the epic vs. the milestone.

Either way, I could tell that he’d need 10+ seconds to even get started. And telling him how to do it would probably take equally long. So, I just open each issue of the epic in a new tab and check on each tab that the issue is in the milestone or add it, then close the tab. And yep, I was long done when he was still trying to find the issue list for the milestone.

That was certainly one of those moments. 🫠

He isn’t entirely familiar with that issue tracking UI, so it’s fine, and of course, it is my job to be good with computers and all that, but still felt wild that he could’ve easily needed ten times as long to do the same thing.

Last week, some LLM bot commented under one of our issues and it became apparent pretty quickly, that it is a bot. So, I went to report it (incredibly the report menu did say they want reports for bots).

I filled out the reporting form probably five times in total, trying at different times of the day. Every time, I got an error 500 (Internal Server Error) as response.
Later, I checked my mails, and saw that actually two of my reports did go through, meaning I created two tickets on their side.

What those mails also said: They’re very sorry, if it takes longer, since they’re currently experiencing a higher number of reports.

Gee, I wonder why.

Seriously, though, when you work in IT, you constantly use VPNs as basic infrastructure, just to connect devices into larger networks. It is such a fundamental technology that the Linux kernel – the core of the operating system – ships an implementation (WireGuard).

Trying to regulate that is akin to regulating cables. Sure, cables can be used to access things you might not want. But good luck writing a law that prohibits the use of cables only specifically for the things you don’t want, without being so complex that it results in tons of bureacracy for all kinds of organizations.

And even then, it would necessarily lead to legitimate use-cases being prohibited, because you often cannot, and really should not be able to, see the traffic that users send over the infrastructure you provide them.

Yeah, I do kind of hate the word “train” for that reason. It just makes it sound like the animal is braindead and all the effort was on the trainer’s side.

In reality, it’s much more of a communication problem. You need to explain to the animal without using speech that you will reward it for a specific action. And then you need to explain that you will do this repeatedly and not just today either. Well, and the animal has to actually want whatever reward you’re giving it, too.

So much training advice seems to just boil down to communicating clearly and not breaking the contract of “do the thing → get reward”…

The funny part is that upon reading your question, I figured surely the Wikipedia page would have that information. Then I saw that it said in the first few words:

Xbox (stylized as XBOX)^{[[2]](https://www.theverge.com/news/931918/microsoft-xbox-rebrand-caps)}

…which links back to the same article. Which is how I found out that the article answers your question. 🙃

The use of all caps for Xbox is a return to original form, though. Microsoft’s first Xbox logo for its console was all caps, and the company has favored using similar capped versions for the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X / S console logos.

It’s a reference to another Microsoft classic: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/microsoft-caught-plagiarizing-graphics-with-ai-slop-microsoft-continvoucly-morged-my-diagram-there-for-sure

Apparently, that’s American English. And for whatever reason, it’s the British that are less hoity toity about it:

• “brackets” or round brackets ( )
• square brackets [ ]
• curly brackets { }

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket

Yeah, differentiating between multiplications vs. divisions and additions vs. subtractions doesn’t make sense, because they’re the same thing respectively, just written differently.

When you divide by 3, you can also multiply by ⅓.
When you subtract 7, you can also add -7.

There is one quirk to be aware of, though. When people notate a division with a long horizontal line, that implies parentheses around both of the expressions, top and bottom.

It certainly does!

…but, uh, well, it’s a widely-spaced monospace font in this case. That’s the one situation where kerning actually cannot matter.

Which seems intentional. I believe, the cartoonist is being more clever here and referencing a common ligature, specifically the first of these two:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)

Presumably the two letters got written together so often in this futuristic universe, that “fi” has actually become its own letter. Like how in German the “ß” came to be from a ligature of a long S (ſ) and a Z (which was written as ʒ), so together “ſʒ”.

Maybe someone who’s deep into Simpsons lore can confirm that theory. 😅

Having a third arm, so you can continue typing and also facepalm at the same time does seem quite good.

Pʀᴏʀᴛ

It’s a mockup I found on image search (from searching “neobrutalism GUI” or the like): https://www.magnific.com/premium-vector/hand-drawn-neo-brutalism-ui-elements-collection_186004756.htm

And yeah, that theme you linked is already pretty cool. Not terribly enamored with the retro aesthetic personally (especially with bad contrast like here), but if that can be done with KDE/Kvantum, then an actual neobrutalist theme, or just one with the papercuts fixed, is likely just as possible…

Well, this kind of design language is actually referred to as “neobrutalism”, so you might find a theme under this name. But from what I’ve seen so far, it’s mostly a thing in web design at this point…

I also always find the minimalism vs. maximalism debate interesting for usability. Lots of minimal designs are so flat that you can’t tell a button from a label or icon.
At the same time, iOS’ new Frutiger theme regularly confuses me with its transparency, e.g. yesterday I saw that the silent-mode notification had a ➋ inside. It was centered and everything. Then the notification went away, but the ➋ stayed, because it was from an app icon behind.

I wish, we could throw out the bad eye candy, like transparency, while keeping the good parts, like 3D buttons and such. I feel like this kind of neo-brutalist UI design isn’t the worst direction to go in:

(This particular example isn’t perfect, like the buttons are flat, while there’s useless shadows around the boxes. But yeah, could just move those shadows to the buttons and it would still look fine.)

Apply as much force as you can. Realize the door is now moving quite fast and about to crash into something on the other side. Leap for the door handle. Body-check the lady into another dimension. You’re alone now, so walk through the door like nothing happened.

I mean, kind of has to be the reason for the top image. When the door opens into the room, you’re really not helping by opening the door and then not just following through into the room.

That’s so awkward to push down the handle and then step back to let the other person go first, especially since it’s actually slower for the other person than just letting them operate the handle themselves.

Oh man, of course that’s a thing now. Can’t copyright that shit, but you can watermark your territory and hope that no one bothers to distribute the non-copyrightable non-watermarked version that you’re selling.

It has a watermark, so presumably a stock photo…

Hmm, for whatever reason, I’m on 2.31.4, so that might be the difference.

That version was tagged two weeks ago, because they apparently still release patch versions for rather old minor versions of nix. So, apparently I am getting updates, but I’m on some older release channel or something. No idea why.

I have to head to work now, so will have to debug in the evening or the weekend. Thanks for the clue, though.