Author Topic: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.  (Read 440574 times)

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Offline rdl

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #275 on: October 25, 2020, 10:18:01 pm »
Not only are indicator LEDs often too bright, but on top of that they will use clear lens (point source) type which make them even more annoying.
 

Offline Syntax Error

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #276 on: October 25, 2020, 10:18:52 pm »
Hole dots, genius!  :-+

Trouble is most LEDs are 0805 or smaller SMDs on the end of a glued-in-place light pipe; replacing them is not straight forward. But for the sake of sanity, replacement HAS to be done.
 

Online Siwastaja

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #277 on: October 26, 2020, 09:24:01 am »
Our eyes have difficulty focusing on the blue light, I don't remember the exact reason for this but I think it's something to do with the way the different wavelengths behave when passing through the lens.

Human eye has this fairly simple single lens optical path, and the problem with single-lens optics is they focus different wavelengths to different planes, hence causing "chromatic aberration". Camera optics get around this by using combination of lenses. Human vision system implements a very complex AI algorithm instead, but there are limits what that can do. Light blue targets contain enough green so human brain can use high-resolution data from green receptors, combined with the color obtained from the blue receptors.

You can actually try this out: sometimes you can see company logo signs that contain deep blue color (it needs to be very deep blue!) which, as a result, looks blurred at night, while adjacent other colors look sharp. You can actually force your eye to focus on that blue (you know, by forcing your eye muscles to defocus the image); then the blue suddenly looks focused, but red and green becomes clearly defocused. This test confirms the weakest link in human vision regarding blue is in the lens, not the receptors (although it is also true the number of blue receptors is lowest; obviously it would be a waste having more!)

Quote
CRT projection TVs used to slightly defocus the blue gun, I believe for a similar reason.

No, the reason here isn't similar, but instead about chemistry of the phosphors. In order to compensate for the effect in eye, they would need to project blue to actually different distance, which would be nearly impossible. Defocusing is done on tube (adjusting the electrostatic/electromagnetic focusing), not even on the lens. The reason is that the blue phosphors used in the tube are quite weak and can't produce high illumination level; similarly the blue tube is the first one to wear out. But by defocusing the gun, tiny bright spots can utilize a larger area of phosphor, reducing peak intensity, utilizing more phosphor to emit the light. The obvious problem is, the resolution suffers. But lo and behold, didn't we just describe that the human eye sucks on blue resolution (because our eyes focus based on green and red)? So we can accept that defocused blue tube.
« Last Edit: October 26, 2020, 09:35:02 am by Siwastaja »
 

Offline Syntax Error

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #278 on: October 26, 2020, 09:49:08 am »
The CCIR (rough) rule of thumb for converting colour images to monochrome, whilst preserving visual 'luminance' is :
1Y = 0.3R + 0.6G + 0.1B

The blue end of the spectrum holds very little 'information' or importance for mammals living in sunlight. It's the green shades our ancestors needed to distinguish when swinging from tree to tree. Maybe this is why blue LEDs just do not look natural?

If you are a Bee 1Y = 0R + 0.1G + 0.3B + 0.6U and violet LEDs are the coolest colour ever.
« Last Edit: October 26, 2020, 09:51:35 am by Syntax Error »
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #279 on: October 26, 2020, 12:40:00 pm »
Psychovisual models show that bright blue light in otherwise not predominantly blue nor extremely brightly lit environment is "unnatural" to the human visual processing facilities.

This is the reason emergency vehicles have bright blue flashing lights, and why they are usually banned for other vehicles.

Having a bright blue LEDs in a dimly lit room, say a bedroom or a livingroom when reading a book or something, is a distraction to the human visual processing facilities: it will always "label" that bright blue light as an anomaly.  How the rest of the being reacts to that label, varies.

Siwastaja, have you considered using one of those fast color-changing LEDs as a power indicator? :-X
 

Offline NiHaoMike

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #280 on: October 26, 2020, 01:15:29 pm »
One trick I found for way too bright blue LEDs is to put a piece of fluorescent paper in front of it, dramatically cuts down on brightness and changes the color. Or if the actual problem is the LED being too directed, sand it to diffuse the light.
Cryptocurrency has taught me to love math and at the same time be baffled by it.

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Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #281 on: October 26, 2020, 03:51:57 pm »
I have used nail polish.  You can adjust attenuation will thickness.  Wife doesn't mind since it justified more purchases.
 

Offline Sal Ammoniac

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #282 on: October 26, 2020, 05:25:13 pm »
I'm not bothered by blue LED indicator lights at all. In fact, I quite like them as they tend to be more visible than other colors. I can understand the issue with indicator lights in general in the bedroom, and would probably cover them with black tape, but I don't have any electronics in my bedroom, so no issue there.
Complexity is the number-one enemy of high-quality code.
 

Offline Fixpoint

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #283 on: October 26, 2020, 07:28:37 pm »
- Any programming language that cannot understand when = means 'assign' and when it means 'compare'. This problem was solved in the 60's. And we are still fucking around with things like := and == because the parsers writers are stupid.

Hm. This is now the second time I read this from you ... in how many threads are you actually spreading this bunkum?

Maybe my pet peeve is comments like that above.

So, I will explain everything again:

No, this "problem" was not "solved" in the 60s. That's simply because it never was a problem. It is *trivial* to make this distinction in a parser. Again: It is a DESIGN decision. There is a mathematical difference between *statements* and *expressions* and some people deem it a good idea to make this difference explicit in the syntax. Some people agree with that, others don't. It's as simple as that.

Yes, yes, the "parser writers" are "stupid". Oh dear. Know what? Oftentimes, parsers are not even written but defined in a formal grammar which is then used to generate the actual parser implementation. So, implementing the difference between ":=" and "==" can be as quick as changing some lines of declarations.

I know, I am boring you. You don't want to know any of this. You just want to retain your belief system.
 
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Offline rdl

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #284 on: October 26, 2020, 07:53:09 pm »
I see often videos, which are not actually 16x9 or whatever (most frequently see this with those dumb ass vertical format phone videos) where what would/should just be black bars is filled with some distorted/stretched/blurred extension of the original video. I find this more distracting than useful. I've wondered if this is done on the fly (by some algorithm) or baked into the video file itself. Either way I wish it would go away.
 
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Offline TimFox

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #285 on: October 26, 2020, 08:23:34 pm »
Besides that, I often see wide-screen broadcast of still photos, either portrait or 3:2 landscape, with the sides filled in by distortion of the original image.  Luckily, my local TV station that shows local photography during the weather report has stopped this barbarism and now fills the sides with neutral padding.
 

Offline CirclotronTopic starter

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #286 on: October 26, 2020, 09:06:51 pm »
The rare times that drag races are on tv, or worse still, you are at a live event and you have some donkey commentator that just won’t shut up. The cars are tearing down the strip and he drowns out the whole show with a foghorn voice telling you something completely obvious like “Look! Fred Bloggs is pulling ahead of Bill Sykes!” Just shut up and let me hear the machinery! Edit - similar to various example on YouTube of monster trucks ploughing through neck deep mud at ridiculous speeds and there is some commentator jibbering and hyperventilating with some “c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon” nonsense like an auctioneer playing on 78. I’ll try and find some examples later on.  |O
« Last Edit: October 26, 2020, 10:47:03 pm by Circlotron »
 

Offline KL27x

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #287 on: October 26, 2020, 09:25:10 pm »
^ Commentators!
If I could watch sports on TV without the commentating, I would probably pay extra. Yeah, there's a mute button, but I want to hear the game. The crowds, the hits. What penalty just happened.
 

Offline Sal Ammoniac

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #288 on: October 26, 2020, 10:18:26 pm »
Ditto with space launches. I'd rather listen to Mission Control than the clueless network commentators.
Complexity is the number-one enemy of high-quality code.
 

Offline Microdoser

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #289 on: October 26, 2020, 10:42:12 pm »
- Any programming language that cannot understand when = means 'assign' and when it means 'compare'

I would like to add a subset of this peeve which is when the coders know what you mean and raise an error telling you that is what you mean but make it a fatal error instead of just a warning

"Error 42: You typed = when you mean =="
"Error 43 you typed == when you mean ="

If the parser is smart enough to know that is the error you made and also what you intended then ask the user if they want to change "=" to "==" (or vice versa)

If a parser is smart enough to parse:
if UserIsPresent:
    DoAction()

and know that you are actually asking:
if UserIsPresent==True:
    DoAction()

then it is just lazy coding to not include:

if UserIsPresent=True:
    DoAction()

as valid syntax and instead to make this a fatal error, not a warning.

EDIT: It would seem my peeve is against the DESIGN decision and the inability of the implementers of the DESIGN decision to make a parser for humans instead of just blindly implementing the DESIGN decisions without any thought for usability.

God forbid a parser might be made to make the user experience better or easier. All hail the DESIGN decision, it rules over all.  |O
« Last Edit: October 26, 2020, 10:53:00 pm by Microdoser »
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #290 on: October 27, 2020, 12:37:23 am »
Telling the user he doesn't really want what he wants is not unique to compiler writers.  Sometimes it is arrogance.  Detroit automakers sacrificed a dominant worldwide position to this.  Sometimes it is just that the user represents a small, unimportant market.  It sucks to have unique needs.  Sometimes it is just a failure to communicate with both sides sharing the blame.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #291 on: October 27, 2020, 03:00:30 am »
I forgot a big one for me, those stupid logos that every TV channel has floating in the corner of the screen at all times. It is incredibly distracting, like a smudge on the screen that I can't wipe off. It's so annoying that it drove me to completely stop watching any form of broadcast TV and go to 100%  discs and streaming.

Even worse are the stupid animated banners and graphics at the bottom of the screen advertising some other show, some of them even make sounds. It obscures the content that you're trying to watch! Whoever decided any of this stuff was a good idea should have been fired 20 years ago. Modern TV has had digital channel guides for years, there is NO reason to continuously remind everyone what channel they're watching or what's on next. Perhaps it deters piracy to some extent but only by degrading the content such that I don't want it even if it's free.
 
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Offline james_s

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #292 on: October 27, 2020, 03:02:44 am »
Human eye has this fairly simple single lens optical path, and the problem with single-lens optics is they focus different wavelengths to different planes, hence causing "chromatic aberration". Camera optics get around this by using combination of lenses. Human vision system implements a very complex AI algorithm instead, but there are limits what that can do. Light blue targets contain enough green so human brain can use high-resolution data from green receptors, combined with the color obtained from the blue receptors.

You can actually try this out: sometimes you can see company logo signs that contain deep blue color (it needs to be very deep blue!) which, as a result, looks blurred at night, while adjacent other colors look sharp. You can actually force your eye to focus on that blue (you know, by forcing your eye muscles to defocus the image); then the blue suddenly looks focused, but red and green becomes clearly defocused. This test confirms the weakest link in human vision regarding blue is in the lens, not the receptors (although it is also true the number of blue receptors is lowest; obviously it would be a waste having more!)

Ah, yes chromatic aberration, I knew there was a word for it but I couldn't think of it at the time. I'm curious though why deep red doesn't have a similar issue, are we just optimized for that end of the spectrum and blue is the extreme other end?
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #293 on: October 27, 2020, 03:40:13 am »
I forgot a big one for me, those stupid logos that every TV channel has floating in the corner of the screen at all times. It is incredibly distracting, like a smudge on the screen that I can't wipe off. It's so annoying that it drove me to completely stop watching any form of broadcast TV and go to 100%  discs and streaming.

Even worse are the stupid animated banners and graphics at the bottom of the screen advertising some other show, some of them even make sounds. It obscures the content that you're trying to watch! Whoever decided any of this stuff was a good idea should have been fired 20 years ago. Modern TV has had digital channel guides for years, there is NO reason to continuously remind everyone what channel they're watching or what's on next. Perhaps it deters piracy to some extent but only by degrading the content such that I don't want it even if it's free.

We threw out the TV 20 years ago, never looked back - the best family decision ever! :D

Unfortunately the sum of our sins is a constant, so all kinds of other time wasting activities popped up to replace the time gained!
 

Offline Tomorokoshi

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #294 on: October 27, 2020, 04:20:24 am »
- Any programming language that cannot understand when = means 'assign' and when it means 'compare'

I would like to add a subset of this peeve which is when the coders know what you mean and raise an error telling you that is what you mean but make it a fatal error instead of just a warning

"Error 42: You typed = when you mean =="
"Error 43 you typed == when you mean ="

If the parser is smart enough to know that is the error you made and also what you intended then ask the user if they want to change "=" to "==" (or vice versa)

...

Somewhat related  is the use of "or", where in general English usage it means "exclusive OR" (Latin "aut") while in computer usage it means "inclusive OR" (Latin "vel").

The trouble with using "=" to mean both assignment and comparison is that within English, the term "equals" is, as it were, overloaded with both "is equal to" and "is assigned to" even though there is no need for it. In essence it's a homonym with the same spelling. Computer languages that separate out the two, whether by "=" and "==", ":=" and "=", or some other method, are getting past the unfortunate limitation in English of not having separate common usage terms.
 

Offline PlainName

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #295 on: October 27, 2020, 05:29:18 am »
Visual Studio.

During install you can tell it to install to whatever folder you want, and since I try to keep C: to absolute minimum, to enable fast and efficient disaster recovery, I put dev tools on G:. So this goes in G:/VisualStudio right? Wrong. It puts a few MB there and dumps GBs, and we're talking tens of same, on C:.

It's because of lazy programmers that my C: drive is 100GB with only 10GB free. And, no, Linux isn't any better - you don't get a choice where to install anything. Unless you compile from source yourself, everything gets dumped together. But Microsoft should know a lot better, and did at one time.

Also hate the tool IDEs that don't tell you what fun you're about to have until you see the bloody VS installer starting up...
 
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Offline Ed.Kloonk

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #296 on: October 27, 2020, 05:33:46 am »
Visual Studio.

During install you can tell it to install to whatever folder you want, and since I try to keep C: to absolute minimum, to enable fast and efficient disaster recovery, I put dev tools on G:. So this goes in G:/VisualStudio right? Wrong. It puts a few MB there and dumps GBs, and we're talking tens of same, on C:.

It's because of lazy programmers that my C: drive is 100GB with only 10GB free. And, no, Linux isn't any better - you don't get a choice where to install anything. Unless you compile from source yourself, everything gets dumped together. But Microsoft should know a lot better, and did at one time.

Also hate the tool IDEs that don't tell you what fun you're about to have until you see the bloody VS installer starting up...

Symbolic links?

But yeah, hard coding storage locations is sloppy.
iratus parum formica
 

Offline CirclotronTopic starter

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #297 on: October 27, 2020, 05:55:28 am »
^^ Like some older stuff from P&E Micro that gives you the option of where you want to install it but won't actually work unless you install in the default location.
 

Offline PlainName

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #298 on: October 27, 2020, 05:57:29 am »
I think you can (temporarily) move program files to wherever you want. So it should be possible to move it, install, put it back. I've heard there can be problems doing that, though.

I used symbolic links for C++Builder and some years later figured they were a fatal error waiting to be tripped over. But thanks for reminding me that the option is there  :-+
 

Offline PlainName

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #299 on: October 27, 2020, 05:59:12 am »
Quote
but won't actually work unless you install in the default location

Oh, that's a cruel one!
 


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