Modern Web Woes - I'm mad at the internet

[Local Fed]

Who the fuck is falling for this?

Every single boomer with an iPad that their grandkid connected to the Wi-Fi for them.

 

[Newcomer 42]

Fahrenheit 451 (or '233 Celsius' as it was published in the UK) got some aspects of new technology pretty bang on in their effect on human society.

I used to think Bradbury was being too pessimistic. It turns out he was just not being harsh enough.

For internet woes, one probably mentioned already, not sure, are these ads that show up if you have adware apps, forcing you to use yet another program to disable these OR switch off the addware and thus have your pc flooded by ads.

 

[Critical Raxx Theory]

This shit right here:
View attachment 7574603
Who the fuck is falling for this?

The answer may shock you!

 

[Skeletonized Cow]

I've been making a few game projects. Nothing serious, just a few rinkadink things for hobby currently. I am not much of an artist however; I have been using photomanipulated images in lieu of just using trash programmer art.

I'm not releasing anything publicly yet, but I've noticed a possible problem with my scheme of using free images. It's led to the most entitled, and perhaps boomer-coded complaint ever, but I'm growing more frustrated with the prevalence of Creative Commons works these days. Please, just upload things as Public Domain, I don't want to have to double check every image for whatever esoteric licensing agreement it has. I don't want to accidentally snag the wrong picture of grass, and suddenly be expected to make all of my content "Crestive Commons Share-Alike."

 

[Mojo Thief]

This one is going to be pretty specific, but without PL'ing, I'm trying to specify some Siemens components for work.

So I go to their online configurator tool, and what's the very first thing I see?


When you create a project, what do you see so prominently posted next to the project tab? "GLOBAL WARMING POTENTIAL"


Bro, this site isn't for urban bugmen. Nobody who actually shops for this stuff cares that their circuit breakers, motor starters, process control sensors and variable frequency drives are ethically sourced and carbon neutral, crafted by artisans in the Dominican Republic.

What's the point of virtual signaling in a configurator tool for industrial electrical controls? The DEI hires in "Sustainability Engineering" at big companies aren't ever going to touch this application. I'm pretty sure the methane in the farts of the Chinese child slave who cobbled together the circuit breaker contributed far more to global warming than the materials he used to build it.

Back on topic: The site itself works okay-ish, but what bugs me about it that it replaced the downloadable configurator application that worked well enough for yet another bloated web app that doesn't play well with browser extensions. Plus the old application didn't blatantly virtual signal to me.

 

[Punished Derich]

Ive gone back to Fakebook and I'm down the rabbithole deep diving into the accouts that are posting on my feed.

I know nobody who posts on sites like this uses Fuckbook but I need it for some local stuff, the way to actually browse what you're following is to use the feeds tab and install FB Purity.

 

[Mr. 0]

Siemens

---

Also thread tax:
Sometimes when I use google maps it stops me with a 'suspicious activity' page because I have my VPN turned on and some IP addresses don't match or something IDK

 

[The Lawgiver]

Also thread tax:
Sometimes when I use google maps it stops me with a 'suspicious activity' page because I have my VPN turned on and some IP addresses don't match or something IDK

Google did that for me a few weeks or maybe a month or 2 ago without any vpn shit turned on, and some other sites around the same time did something similar. The common thing with all of them was that they wanted me to log in or make an account to "make sure I was a human". I figure it's a new tactic to try and force logins beyond the standard pop up one that doesn't let you use a website, but using fear tactics instead of marketing ones.

 

[Hellwalker]

I fucking hate that I can't even fucking turn off keyboard shortcuts in Firefox so I can prevent doing something that I didn't mean to do when typing. Why isn't this a fucking feature? Is it that fucking hard to implement? I'm tired of companies and the like pretending they know what's best for me and not putting in useful features to their products.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Now Yandex and Yahoo! JAPAN has the AI "answers" BS. AI can be good at making art sometimes, but it sure sucks at answering questions.

 

[stares at error messages]

I find my self using spreadsheets and wanting SQL features, like views. Then I start to think about what it would be like if I used SQLite instead of a spreadsheet and conclude that much of the user-interface with the spreadsheet application would have to be replace; can't use just SQLite I'd need a custom interface. What I think now is that spreadsheets need more SQL like features. For example a common thing I use is I'll have one sheet which is all raw data and then another sheet references the first and either does statistics on rages or does uniquely list all categories from the raw data and have an adjacent column count it. With SQL this is just SELECT DISTINCT and SELECT count(*), category_field.

In spreadsheets you have to do this:

=IFERROR(INDEX($Sheet1.$B$1:$Sheet1.$B$149, MATCH(0, INDEX(COUNTIF($A$1:A15, $Sheet1.$B$1:$Sheet1.$B$149), 0, 0), 0)), "")

=COUNTIF(Sheet1.$B$1:Sheet1.$B$149,A16)

I've tried Libreoffice Base, but it's really very much like DB Browser for SQLite, meaning it's just a GUI for generic database management. Some of the features I would want from spreadsheets in a database is highlighting rows, adding rows and dragging a highlight to data, and have it be a file per database like SQLite. The features I would want from database is views, more dynamic access to data between cells. Currently it works fine, but it certain situation in causes the program to really chug. Having views would fix that because the program knows that this only needs to be rendered once and run the equations for all cells as needed instead of chugging when highlight and copy is used. I it would also be nice to have quires. Spreadsheets sort-of have this already with logical functions, but select statements have much more flexibility. Basically I want to be editing a normal spreadsheet and then seamlessly start using higher level database features without having all the clunkyness and pre-planning required with a spreadsheet. What I want does not exist. Either solution meets you half way but do not provide the features which would be most helpful.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

wanting SQL features

They did add simpler stuff for dynamic functions/tables in 365 (or LTSC if you want to pirate/buy), but also you can look into the M PowerQuery language. It's not at all SQL, but it's pretty neat also to generate views.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I think I can sum up the internets of Current Year in a single line.

[Indian accent] "This website has been optimized for Google Chrome."

That or "new viral video by an influencer on the TikTok app no cap".

 

[stares at error messages]

They did add simpler stuff for dynamic functions/tables in 365 (or LTSC if you want to pirate/buy), but also you can look into the M PowerQuery language. It's not at all SQL, but it's pretty neat also to generate views.

My issue is that I'll have a spread sheet with raw data in it and I benefit a lot from having click and drag and highlight feature, but then if I want to do statistics on it SQL type situation is so much better. I could just do all SQL (other languages would be about the same) and have columns to replace meaning of the highlights, but I would lose the visual of having a spreadsheet. I think if I have View Sheets that didn't have their own data but ran tables in away that didn't slow down when doing these operations. Mostly it's just chugging when I highlight to copy the field when it's running complicated operations that I know would be very easy in SQL.

I started playing around with it again and basically I'm trying to have a column which is a group by field from SQL but in spreadsheet. Google also has the query function. How would you do this in M language?

-- CREATE TABLE "test1" ("id"    INTEGER, "fruit"    TEXT, "colour" TEXT,  PRIMARY KEY("id"));
select colour , count(colour) from test1 group by colour;

After double checking this is actually what the equivalent would be in SQL that I want in spreadsheet.

Above is basically what I'm having trouble with. Just selecting from one table to another in the same sheet doesn't post a chugging issue. I have a feeling that there is probably a better way to do this in spreadsheet than I have been doing.

 

[Civillian 18]

My issue is that I'll have a spread sheet with raw data in it and I benefit a lot from having click and drag and highlight feature, but then if I want to do statistics on it SQL type situation is so much better. I could just do all SQL (other languages would be about the same) and have columns to replace meaning of the highlights, but I would lose the visual of having a spreadsheet. I think if I have View Sheets that didn't have their own data but ran tables in away that didn't slow down when doing these operations. Mostly it's just chugging when I highlight to copy the field when it's running complicated operations that I know would be very easy in SQL.

I started playing around with it again and basically I'm trying to have a column which is a group by field from SQL but in spreadsheet. Google also has the query function. How would you do this in M language?

-- CREATE TABLE "test1" ("id"    INTEGER, "fruit"    TEXT, "colour" TEXT,  PRIMARY KEY("id"));
select colour , count(colour) from test1 group by colour;

After double checking this is actually what the equivalent would be in SQL that I want in spreadsheet.

Above is basically what I'm having trouble with. Just selecting from one table to another in the same sheet doesn't post a chugging issue. I have a feeling that there is probably a better way to do this in spreadsheet than I have been doing.

Can you not replicate things here (and from your previous post) with methods like COUNTA(..) and FILTER(..)?

=COUNTA(FILTER(<range>,(<range>=criteria1)*(<range>!=criteria2),{0}))

Obviously that is not correct syntax (!= is supposed to be <> in Excel but for readability) but you can chain those filter*filter statements and trim everything down to your specific requirements.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

How would you do this in M language?

I rarely did stuff programmatically with M, the editor is better for novices and it's fine for most stuff. You pull up M from Data Tab->Get Data->Launch PowerQuery Editor.

Spoiler: Autism here

Here's an example with your table:

A is the source table, your workbook has to be saved to be able to be used by PowerQuery.
B is each step (M is a functional language) applied after another, you can easily change prior steps and see the results later on.
C is the resulting table,
D is what it looks like as the code but again, unless you do hyperspecific stuff, the editor is enough for almost everything, for yours I just selected the source and Transform Tab->Group By->Choose column,
E when you click close & load, it'll put the table C in a new sheet (or one you choose).

M isn't an easy replacement for SQL, but it's very useful to generate views you use often but never change. When you add data to your source table and refresh your workbook data, it'll refresh the M table/query and you can reference the results elsewhere.

 

[stares at error messages]

Can you not replicate things here (and from your previous post) with methods like COUNTA(..) and FILTER(..)?

=COUNTA(FILTER(<range>,(<range>=criteria1)*(<range>!=criteria2),{0}))

Obviously that is not correct syntax (!= is supposed to be <> in Excel but for readability) but you can chain those filter*filter statements and trim everything down to your specific requirements.

Index and match do the same thing. I just use it because it's more comparable with different spreadsheet programs. The issue is that I want the columns to automatically find the criteria. That's why it looks at the cell above and then chooses to add it if it's not already in the column in the current sheet. A year ago when I was using this it was giving me problems, but after playing with it now it's not chugging like it used to. So I don't know what changed.

After looking into it you can have colours in SQLite if you use ASCII terminal colour codes. I haven't been able to get it to work, so it is not part of the standard for SQLite3 interpreter. It seems like a hack. https://archive.ph/oxlYp Other SQLite environment don't support it either. If I were to program something custom it's not worth it. If it did work I would just add to my commands to have colour formatting based on a column with bitmask flag for which colour to apply.


In other Woes: Old Amazon listing will be permanently unavailable, but if you search the product you can find the same product from a different seller or different listing. Amazon continues to be more and more like AliExpress: same products sold but with higher prices and a mess of different listings all trying to sell the same crap. It would be a good idea to add a "find similar listing for this product" button so you don't have to search for it, but that would be a positive improvement which would make people happy and the sun will implode if that were allowed to happen. Now here is a picture of a someone else's dog to make you feel pissed off and confused.

Spoiler: dog (nsfw)

 

[ToroidalBoat]

"Photobucket" was like "Imgur" or "Pinterest" in the '00s. Before the latter 2 went big, PB was already there, and was already a crapsite. Just like "Imgur" in Current Year, they seemingly freely took down pics they didn't like IIRC, and IIRC there was BS making it hard to access pics on the site. "Protect more of your memories for less" my ass.

 

[The Lawgiver]

Amazon

I already brought up amazon a few times too, ahah, especially the naming of official listing like schizophrenic bootleg listings from like 2017-18 that started showing up everywhere on there. This reminds me though While I was checking prices on things days ago I just realized something. I can't copy/save the video for some fucking reason but there's a video preview on a number of amazon listings for the products and the people handling them in the videos act like they aren't human and never handled something human hands normally contact with. It's below 0 effort somehow.

Here, have this one as a good example. Last spot in the product images on the left.
https://www.amazon.com/Transformers-Studio-Galvatron-8-5-inch-Converting/dp/B0D952GBRL
Figure is mangled in a weird stance at the start, gets flipped and manhandled in a way that shows off the figure infinitely worse than the actual stock photos. It talks about accessories on the figure and the person POINTS TO HIS DISLODGED HIP SKIRT

I have barely seen talk about these horrible things they started putting on some listings a year or 2 back and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I glance at them. It's not isolated to action figures but this is the most recent example because I like the small robot men. This is so much worse than the "seemingly imitating bootleg listings for product photos"

Someone looked at this and somehow thought "yes, this is the intended appearance of this product"

Literally below sectoid level logic.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

I hate the proliferation of subtitles on videos, used to only see them on shorts/reels but now I see them on regular youtube videos. The addition of subtitles as focus also renders the video content secondary, which is to say videos essentially become audio with optional visuals.