totm nov 2023 Thread to discuss negative things in a very general way, just see where it goes y'know?

[Shpaget]

Me, two of my colleagues, a random stranger and a specialist just spent 5 hours chasing a kitten.

A two-ish moth old kitty wandered into our business and straight into the basement behind all the clutter that you find in a cluttered basement. I went to a store to get some cat food (salmon and chicken), but kitty had no interest in that.

We chased it for a good hour, managed to capture it into a cardboard box, to give it to a random lady that expressed a wish to find it home, but a colleague wanted to see the cat. He opened the box and the cat just jumped out and bolted back behind the machines and whatnot. Another hour of chasing it and we caught it. This time, for some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to release it in the yard. Well, it ran straight into the wheelwell of the boss's car which was parked all the way in a corner so passenger side and back were right up the wall. Dilemma: move the car and risk injuring the cat or leave it and hole it will get out on its own. We couldn't even see where it went. So I gently moved the car (car turned off, rolled down the slope) a bit and finally we could find the cat, but we couldn't reach it and the cat wasn't cooperating. Feisty little thing squeezed into the suspension, so we didn't want to move the car any more, but took out the jack to lift the car and give both us and the cat some more room. While we were dealing with the jack, a bystander commented that the cat got out and ran into a nearby hedge that was on the other side of an enclosed yard that we don't have access to.

Spent another 45 minutes trying to lure it out, but no luck. The lady that wanted to give it home returned and brought a specialist from an animal shelter, but after waiting for an hour, trying to call it out and into a cat box, they were getting ready to abandon the mission, so my colleague took some leader, jumped the fence, and tried to catch the trespassing kitty. One acrobatics move later, that Wachowskis would not hesitate to use, the kitty vanished.

It took the ladies another hour to lure it into a carrier.

It was a cute little gray/white kitty, but with mean attitude. It did not like being grabbed and fought valiantly. I guess I can get back to work now.

[IncongruousGoat]

State bureaucracy can really get on my nerves. So, some backstory: A few months ago, I moved from New York State to Seattle. Shortly after arriving, I sold the car I had driven out west in and bought a new one. I transferred the old car's title to the scrap dealer I sold it to, registered the new car with the Washington DMV, cancelled the insurance on the old car, and got a Washington driver's license within the appropriate time frame as set by the State of Washington for transferring a license from a different state. All fine, right? Apparently not, because now the NY DMV is mailing my old address telling me that my NY driver's license (which I don't have, because I'm not a resident of New York) is suspended because of the insurance lapsing on the old car (which I don't own). And I get to wait until Tuesday to do anything about it, because the DMV isn't open on weekends and Monday is a federal holiday. Whoopee.

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, Shpaget said:

just spent 5 hours chasing a kitten

Now we must hear the kitten's side of the story.

[richfiles]

8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Now we must hear the kitten's side of the story.

Meow! Meeeooow! Meow! Hisss! Merrreaow, meow, meooow!
'I was being chased by giants, and one leapt around like something out of a Wachowski movie! It was terrifying!' 

 

[Shpaget]

11 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Now we must hear the kitten's side of the story.

Last night I actually started writing it, got about half way through (quite a wall of text) but decided to call it a nap time, thinking the editor will remember the stuff I wrote and I can continue this morning.

Well, the text is lost. Probably for the best, considering the cringiness of it all. I'm not much of a story teller.

[Chel]

Bushfires are going on across both states, it's really smoky and hazy and the whole world is covered in this red - yellowy glow.

Started coughing about 5 minutes after I got out of the house, this is horrible. I hope those who are responsible for starting these fires get very lengthy sentences. 

It's horrible 

[Superfluous J]

23 minutes ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

I hope those who are responsible for starting these fires get very lengthy sentences. 

And I hope their gender reveal party was otherwise a success.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/02/us/az-off-duty-border-patrol-agent-wildfire/index.html

(note that was from 2018 so it's not this fire. But MAN can people do dumb things for dumber reasons)

On 11/9/2019 at 4:59 PM, IncongruousGoat said:

the NY DMV is mailing my old address telling me that my NY driver's license (which I don't have, because I'm not a resident of New York) is suspended because of the insurance lapsing on the old car (which I don't own). And I get to wait until Tuesday to do anything about it, because the DMV isn't open on weekends and Monday is a federal holiday. Whoopee.

Well the good news is you're no longer paying the tax dollars they're wasting.

[Lisias]

So, that's the history.

I have been working hard on fixing every single glitch that have the bad luck of happening under my nose. I didn't cared about who was the maintainer, if I could fix it, I did. And published a pull request when possible so everybody else could have the thing fixed too.

I tested. I diagnosed. I borked some times. But yet, as times goes by, the problems started to be rarer. No more crashes. No more misbehaviours. No more loosing savegames. One or two glitches are still there, but these ones I know by name and they are harmless - only nuisances that were caught due being similar to real nasty problems, and it's too much of an effort to code yet more Safeties to try to sort them out of the bad ones (and then risking a bad one pass through). Sometimes, it's cheaper to just take the hit.

So I thought it's finally the time to rescue my stalled savegames since the late 2018 (including that one that started it all). Let's begin with the more recent one, from April 2019 (I'm starting to name the savegemes using the current year, by Kraken's sake!). I had some very good work, exploiting some very interesting concepts on that savegame - things that I want to be developed again, things that I spend as many hours on it as I did on maintaining my Add'Ons (not a small figure, believe me).

So I did the migration. Being cautious, I choose to migrate the 1.7.0 one into 1.7.3 (before the 1.8 leap!). Work on it the whole WeekEnd, sorting out the Add'Ons that should be updated from the ones that should not. Most updates worked fine by the way - at least, to the moment. Well spent 2 days, I thought. Now, finally, some playing!

Or not.

On the very first savegame, on the very first craft, there were missing parts. But how? I was upgrading the thing, not downgrading - and even that, almost every Add'On updated were just little incremental versions with bug fixes or simple recompiles (whatever be the usefulness of this).

(sigh). Everything was too good to be true. Let's debug the thing again.

And then I figured out the problem. A very important Add'On to me, on a build release (not even a minor one) had dropped support for some parts, as the maintainer choose to replace them with new versions of it.

Newparts are good news, losing very used parts? Not that much.

Well, let's rollback that Add'On, right? But I have a problem - it have a very serious bug when used with some newer Add'Ons. The really nasty kind of bug. So I have to decide to take my chances with the bug, or plain forget about a considerable amount of crafts on my savegames. Or to stick with the older KSP version forever.

One may argue that I could fork myself the thing and "fix it" myself. I do that already every other day, so why not? Perhaps the maintainer would notice that it was a bad move and then he would merge back the changes and everybody would benefit from this. Sounds like a good idea - but I can't. The authors choose to change the licensing terms of the thing, I can't (legally) fork and fix it myself anymore. Our hands are tied on the matter.

(sigh) It's hugely frustrating.

KSP is not a disposable game. We keep playing it for years - not rarely, the very same savegame!! Right now I just gave a hand to a fellow Kerbonaut looking for the best version of some Add'On he like for… KSP 1.2.2 . Yeah, 1.2.2. That one from December 2016, three years ago. And I perfectly understand him, I feel his pain. Because if me, with a 1.7.0 savegame and very good coding and debugging skills, have my hands tied on a migration to 1.7.3 KSP (mere 3 minor releases), what we can tell about the average user? 

And now we have two guys tied to older KSP versions and so, there's no chance to try to sell us a DLC and with the money help to fund the Development Team (that guys that have bills to pay, mouths to feed and that spend all their time coding things for KSP).

It's hugely frustrating.

Users spend a huge amount of their scarce time doing things and then they get emotionally attached to that creations. They create, they love to create - and then they love their creations. And so they want their creations to thrive, not be thrown away and forgotten! 

You want the users to move on to newer things? You need to provide them a path, so they can bring their stuff with them - otherwise, they just won't: they will stick with the older stuff, or they will get fed up and ditch the whole thing (including you).

And then the ones that choose to stay will fight to protect their creations. I know I will - it's essentially what I'm doing for an year already.

You may be doing it for free, but this does not make their creations worthless for them (and they are paying for that, even if you don't get any money from it!). And doing things for free don't grant you the right to impose them what you want neither - even giving people biscuits for free can give you some jail time, you know…

On the bottom line, you just can't force their hand into doing what you think is right - even if doing it for free. You need to convince them, you need to talk to them, you need to listen to them - i.e., you need to work with them. Even by doing the right thing, they will complain to you if they get hurt on the process - and so you need to work out that hurt too.

Or you can just let them go, it's also an option - you don't have to do it if you don't want neither.

But then, just don't go scorched earth, please? Let us keep things going.

Users are our clients, not our subjects. Users will work with you or they will work around you to get what they want. Don't put yourself on a place where they may choose to work over you.

Spoiler

And them don't be surprised by Squad filling the need themselves with DLCs - Making History parts are working fine since KSP 1.4.1, and they want the users to keep going foward, not to be stalled on the past!

 

Edited November 13, 2019 by Lisias
Tyops as usulla…

[tater]

Was making dinner tonight, and I got a call from a friend. Me: "Hey!" Him: tentatively asking if this was me...

Sounded exactly like him, but it was his brother (who I met maybe once before, years ago). His brother was going through his phone calling people because my friend died, and the service is Friday.

He died in October. Heart attack at work (industrial chemist, was stuck working night shifts a lot since he's single). I had lunch with him probably a week before he died. We'd have lunch, dinner, or coffee sometimes frequently, sometimes with our different schedules only maybe once a month. I literally almost called him today, because I realized that October came and went and we hadn't hung out---odd, but not abnormal.

$#@!

 

 

Edited November 12, 2019 by tater

[Guest]

20 hours ago, Lisias said:

huge wall o' text

This is why you should implement some kind of standardized scripting language for your games, like Garry's Mod did with Lua, so that you don't have to update every single mod every update.

This is also why you don't remove major things you've added. Imagine if the Minecraft team decided to remove a block that's been there for at least a week, the amount of maps what would be damaged. Don't do it.

[Lisias]

8 hours ago, Aperture Science said:

This is why you should implement some kind of standardized scripting language for your games, like Garry's Mod did with Lua, so that you don't have to update every single mod every update.

Scripting Languages can't do everything. You remove a "system call", the script goes kaput the same. Lua would not had helped here - mainly because C# is itself used as scripting language (besides a somewhat fat one). Lua would make some things easier to do, but would not allow anything different than we have with C#.

On the other side, and perhaps this is what you are meaning and I miss it: yes, we need a standardized API for some things.  (that KSPe stunt of mine was intended to do that).

 

8 hours ago, Aperture Science said:

This is also why you don't remove major things you've added. Imagine if the Minecraft team decided to remove a block that's been there for at least a week, the amount of maps what would be damaged. Don't do it.

Removing things on minor releases is a terrible move. On major releases it can be a good one to declutter the API (but most of the time, the best practice is to deprecate it on a major release, and remove it on some next one - and the C# API has tools to do that). But on a build release? Please don't.

Parts are the same. Parts are to users what API are to programers. You remove a part, crafts will not load - just like that. And without some releases where both parts (the new and the old) are available, the user don't have even the chance to migrate.

But none of that would be a problem on an open source / CC BY SA license - there're no mistake that could not be fixable by someone else and even merged back to mainstream later (check the EGCS drama, beautiful example of how open source works).

There's a solid reason for some people be still using KSP 1.2.2 nowadays. And I can't blame them - right now I can't migrate from 1.7.0 to 1.7.3 no matter how good a developer I am.

Well, I can do the migration - I just can't do it without breaking forum rules (and some legislation, depending of the country you live in) - not to mention extortionists-wanna-be threatening to change the license if you fork their projects (as explicitly permitted both by Github and the license). 

[Chel]

Yeah so at school, when you go on youtube it's automatically set to restricted mode, which is fine. i can understand that, shouldn't be watching fortnite clips in class, etc.

But then at home, it's still restricted, but not, at the same time. What I mean is that if you go on youtube and search for stuff, it'll be restricted and filter results. But if you put the video URL in, you can watch it just fine. 

But now, with only 3 weeks left of the year to go, they decided to make it so that restricted mode is always on regardless of if you're at school or home, whether you're using the school internet or not. So now at home I can't watch anything on this laptop because its always restricted, and when we have stuff for assignments, they tell us to watch stuff at home as they'll be unrestricted, but now we can't do anything. I'm not the type of guy to go fish out my ipad from my room just to watch something, they really didn't have to do this 

Ach this is actually pretty horrible, we can't watch anything anymore. They changed it for no reason, if you're at home you should be able to watch stuff, just like you can go on game sites because the filtering ends at 3pm. But no, they just had to mess up one more part of our laptops. If its still like this over the 8 week holiday break, I'm going to punch something..

Ohh I understand what they've done.. They've turned off the restricted mode locked in browser, and just set it to always on. Not really a way to get around it now..

clever ba$tards

[KerbMav]

8 hours ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

But no, they just had to mess up one more part of our laptops.

Does the machine boot from a Linux bootable?

[KerbMav]

18 hours ago, Lisias said:

Well, I can do the migration - I just can't do it without breaking forum rules (and some legislation, depending of the country you live in) - not to mention extortionists-wanna-be threatening to change the license if you fork their projects (as explicitly permitted both by Github and the license). 

You can do whatever you want for personal purposes.

Just dont publish it.

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, KerbMav said:

You can do whatever you want for personal purposes.

Just dont publish it.

Not in all countries of this World. Things are pretty hairy on some Countries.

And, dude, what's the point of fixing something that I cannot publish? It's better not to use it at all. There's a reason we call this a "Community".

[Guest]

48 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Not in all countries of this World. Things are pretty hairy on some Countries.

And, dude, what's the point of fixing something that I cannot publish? It's better not to use it at all. There's a reason we call this a "Community".

my dude nobody is going to come after you for updating a ksp mod for personal use

[Lisias]

35 minutes ago, Aperture Science said:

my dude nobody is going to come after you for updating a ksp mod for personal use

Nobody would come for a girl talking about old games for old computers neither. Until they came.

You do what you think it's better to you. But please don't make it look as it's fine and safe, because it's not.

If you are going something in a grey area, do it knowing the possible consequences. The laws that give some protection to Americans against copyright trolling works only on America.

------- Post edit

But all of this is largely irrelevant, anyway, as I don't intend to waste my scarce free time fixing closed source artifacts.

I don't have any restriction on using them (I play KSP, right?), but since my free time for these things are not abundant, i prefer to use it on open source projects. And this settles the matter.

 

 

Edited November 13, 2019 by Lisias
Post edit.

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Nobody would come for a girl talking about old games for old computers neither. Until they came.

You do what you think it's better to you. But please don't make it look as it's fine and safe, because it's not.

If you are going something in a grey area, do it knowing the possible consequences. The laws that give some protection to Americans against copyright trolling works only on America.

literally, there is no way for anyone to know you've done it unless you publish it. Take having multiple copies (installs) for instance, IIRC it violates the EULA, but it's such a trivial thing that doesn't actually negatively impact anyone that you don't see Take Two or whoever owns KSP now suing members for doing it, even ones who are open about doing it.

There's things that just aren't worth prosecuting for. The day you go to the jury because "someone downloaded my rocket game mod and changed it for his own use", I'm pretty sure you're going to just get laughed at and told to get out.

btw I'm not from the US, this is just common sense

Edited November 13, 2019 by Guest

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, Aperture Science said:

literally, there is no way for anyone to know you've done it unless you publish it. 

Or you publish your KSP.log while looking for help.

(Dude, we live in a connected World)

 

4 hours ago, Aperture Science said:

Btw I'm not from the US, this is just common sense

Here, some more common sense for you.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47227937

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44726296

TLDR: you do whatever you think it's better to you. But don't publish videos, screenshots, logs, etc if you decide to venture yourself on the grey side of the force - unless you have a good understanding on the applicable laws.

There ARE loopholes. But they're pitfalls too.

By the way, Squad/TTI are not the problem (read the EULA, by the way - there are some provisions there). It's the lowlife scumbags looking for easy preys or to infringe indirect damage to someone's reputation the problem.

There are an Autarchy on Brazil responsible for collecting copyright fees from commercial shops that plays music on the place. You can't even put open radio (that already paid the fees!) to be listened by your customers or they will reach you to collect fees for every music you had played for your customers. The funny thing is... The music authors don't have a say on te subject, the Autarchy can collect the fees without consent from the music authors. The even more funny thing is that Autarchy doesn't need to reach the author in order to give him his share, it's up to the author to reach them regularly in order to ask for his share. It's plain nuts, a guy can be fined by playing his own records on his own shop.

And yeah, they collect fees for foreign music authors too. Ask The Rolling Stones how much they sent to them.

Don't expect common sense from laws. If you want to fight them, do it wisely: know the loopholes available to you and exploit them if you want. But do it knowingly.

Edited November 13, 2019 by Lisias
Hit "Save" too soon.

[Snark]

Folks, a gentle reminder not to get into politics, and this includes comparing / contrasting / making assertions about what happens in different countries.  Please drop the matter, thank you.

[Chel]

15 hours ago, KerbMav said:

Does the machine boot from a Linux bootable?

No, its a Windows PC 

[razark]

On 11/12/2019 at 4:15 PM, The_Cat_In_Space said:

But no, they just had to mess up one more part of our laptops.

Why would you let them do that to your laptop?

[Chel]

2 minutes ago, razark said:

Why would you let them do that to your laptop?

It's a school laptop, I have very little control over it except for finding out ways to disable/get around things that I want to do 

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

It's a school laptop, I have very little control over it except for finding out ways to disable/get around things that I want to do 

Okay then my complaint is nobody gave me a free laptop.

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

Okay then my complaint is nobody gave me a free laptop.

That's because you're skipping classes.