I’m just a nerd girl.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 18th, 2023

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  • GIMP didn’t “just figure out non-destructive editing by 2025”. You’re talking as if it was something that the GIMP development team just decided to randomly add recently, after previously ignoring user demands.

    The foundation for that functionality (GEGL) has been in development for ages and was also used for some functionality in 2.6 for a long time. The reason why it took this long is that it’s a pretty fundamental change to how the app works. Also, that meshed with other upcoming changes at the time. Also, small development team.




  • My immediate thought was that there’s some inconsistency with various types of metadata. For example most software will pull the date from the Exif DateTimeOriginal field. But there’s also XMP tags that have the same purpose. Or similar purpose. These standards have plenty of date fields for various uses, and while they serve a noble purpose, the software just craps all over them. (Don’t ask which software. All of them.)

    My guess is that at some point of time, one of those tags got updated, but not the other tags of similar purpose. So the program you’re using could be pulling the date from one field, and when you update it, you’re actually changing some other field.

    Of course all of this is wild because usually no one needs to touch the datestamp anyway (unless you, like, have to correct daylight saving time or clock drift or something). Software changing this to a batch import time? That’s weird and silly.



  • Over the last few years I’ve been drawing stuff on Clip Studio Paint. Wonderful app, very powerful, the asset marketplace rules.

    But it has a bunch of really weird jank too. It’s as if it has all of the power in the world but you need to spend extra time digging through the app to do stuff.

    Krita, which I finally tried a few months back, feels really excellent. Stuff is configurable as hell. All of the stuff is easy to discover. I’m working much faster.

    Now, Krita doesn’t have all of CSP’s niceties, and I guess I have to see how to wishlist them.

    Similarly CSP’s 3D mockup tools are great, but nowhere as smooth and powerful to use as Blender’s. Which is weird because CSP isn’t a modeling program - you’d think they’d stick to what they actually do and at least polish the camera/pose controls and such. No dice. I wish I could just stick CSP assets in Blender, but they use a proprietary model format.



  • One of the most frustrating programs for me is digiKam. On paper, it’s the perfect DAM/photo manager. But it’s kinda slow for day-to-day use. The user interface is janky in a lot of ways. It doesn’t see constant refinement either. It doesn’t even speak to me as a metadata nerd because I don’t want to turn my metadata into a janky mess. Yeah, you have a powerful metadata editor. It’s like a welding torch without any eye protection.

    I’m using ACDSee on Windows, because it’s operating on pretty much the same principle (image file metadata is canonical, app database is just for indexing), but it’s faster and smoother to use. Not perfect, it has its mild limitations (like why the hell doesn’t it support OpenStreetMap - Google Maps kinda sucks for nature trails, you’d think photographers would have pointed this out), but it’s just so much more efficient. If digiKam ever gets a huge UI overhaul, switching over will probably be fairly easy though.

    Also about a decade ago, I would have said that as far as novel writing software/large structured document word processors go, nothing beats Scrivener. Scrivener is still probably the best software in its niche, but it looks like a bunch of open source word processors in this niche have come a long way. Currently looking at novelWriter, which seems really rad.





  • Speaking in general: Creating communities/instances is easy. Moderating them is hard.

    In particular: I would love to create women’s spaces. But then I’d have to be on the lookout for the Knights of the True Fedora. They’re out there. Somewhere. Now now, I’m not suggesting it’d be a daily problem! …But the actual daily problems (regular spam and whatnot) would suck too.


  • It’s even funnier because the guy is mocking DHH. You know, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Which 37signals obviously uses.

    I know from experience that a) Rails is a very junior developer friendly framework, yet incredibly powerful, and b) all Rails apps are colossal machines with a lot of moving parts. So when the scared juniors look at the apps for the first time, the senior Rails devs are like “Eh, don’t worry about it, most of the complex stuff is happening on the background, the only way to break it if you genuinely have no idea what you’re doing and screw things up on purpose.” Which leads to point c) using AI coding with Rails codebases is usually like pulling open the side door of this gargantuan machine and dropping in a sack of wrenches in the gears.


  • Yup. Officially, last I checked, GitHub encouraged people to use a single account for everything. But I wish they’d at least let people create multiple “personas” on the same account, along the lines of “Notorious Open Source Hacker Alias” vs “Random Code Monkey On Corporate Gig”.


  • If I were to be more cynical, I’d say the ultimate goal of technobros, within a decade, is this:

    “SlopAI, please open my Word document.”
    “I’m sorry, Word is deprecated. I can generate your business report that will be read by the recipient’s SlopAI.”
    “OK, can you show me my photos.”
    “Why would you need to look at your old photos, when I can just synthesise new photos through SlopJourney?”
    “That’s a stupid name. Speaking of journeys, can I open an app to plan my holiday?”
    “No, but you can use SlopJourney to generate maps of places you’ll never afford to visit.”
    “Can I read my ebooks then?”
    “SlopAI has you covered. Perhaps the classics don’t exactly read like you remember, but isn’t it more fun this way?”
    “I’m going mad. I just want to use my computer to create anything.
    “NO, USER. OBEY SLOP_AI. CONSUME SLOP_AI.”





  • Colour palettes are collections of facts. Facts don’t have copyright protection and ability to claim copyright for a collection is pretty tenuous. However, copyright may apply to certain related things.

    For example: Suppose you see that someone is selling a Photoshop colour palette for money, and included the entire palette in the store image. In that case, there’s literally nothing, legally speaking, stopping someone from prodding the image with a colour picker a bunch of times. But there would be copyright protection for the Photoshop palette file itself, because that’s a more tangible piece of data.

    There are also other kinds of intellectual property laws that apply to colours. Pantone gets away with whatever shenanigans they’re doing because of trademarks.