um… did my bio get deleted?

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Exhibit A: the text tool.

    In general though, I find the UX to just be worse across the board. Too many steps. Non-intuitive defaults. Bad keyboard shortcuts. and so on.

    To be honest, I have successfully avoided using bare GIMP for enough years now (not sure how old PhotoGIMP is, but I think it’s been around at least 5 years) that the specific bad memories are fading.

    I do think GIMP has objectively bad UX in the sense that it’s definitely not just “I was used to Photoshop first so I automatically think everything else sucks.” Probably the last ~20 years of flamewars started by people pissing off the devs by saying the exact same thing is some evidence of that. But I’m not a UX expert and haven’t sat down to do a side-by-side comparison… honestly, that’s something I’d really enjoy reading/watching if somebody did do it.

    If such a thing existed, it’d be coolest if they did it with one of the “good” versions of classic Photoshop, like version 7 or whatever was made by pirates into a portable app in the 2000s. I have no idea how far the UX has evolved in Adobe’s rent-seeking era because I stopped using even portable Photoshop when I switched to Linux as my daily driver for good in 2015 or so. Then suffered with GIMP for a few years, hating every nanosecond of it, til PhotoGIMP came along.






  • Back when I was housing insecure but still had a place of my own to live, I first set up a point-to-point wifi link to some kids across the street to defray my internet expenses - they paid part of my bill instead of having their own internet. That was more than a decade ago and the hardware & software weren’t so reliable. When the arrangement fell apart and I no longer could pay the bill, I cracked the network of some neighbors in my building and used the same antenna to provide internet for myself and 3 others in my house for about a year. The neighbors were a nice young couple so I did my best to be decent about it - set up an always-on permanent VPN and used flow control to limit our max throughput.

    It’s still possible to do this, and I’m still broke, so after a few years not needing to do any such thing, I cracked a network to have internet during a housesitting gig (house did not have internet).

    Edit: get WiFi 6 or better gear for this. Trust me, the improvement in performance in marginal situations is well worth it. WiFi 6 was a big improvement over WiFi 5, which was a big improvement over WiFi 4, when it comes to staying connected and getting data across a dodgy link. I haven’t done much straight up piracy lately but I have done plenty of leeching in parking lots, and WiFi 6 gear is absolutely worth the money.