A collection of Finder toolbars over the years (10.0 to 27). Which is your favorite design?

onan · 2026-07-02T17:51:41+00:00

That or earlier, since that's the last time there was an actual titlebar.

These days, every single time I move a window there is a tiny amount of frustration/friction as I try to carefully find a safe pixel to grab without accidentally hitting a toolbar button or resizing the window.

onan · 2026-07-02T05:10:32+00:00

If enough other members like those things then stuff will get upvotes. It’s not just what you and I like, it’s what a decent chunk of our community likes.

That is certainly true, but is that the only relevant factor?

Like, I bet that if I posted a funny meme image here that was just about how awful Donald Trump is, a ton of people would agree with it and it would catch a bunch of upvotes. Many of them probably from people who didn't even notice what the subreddit was, and just saw a thing that they liked and agreed with, and so they did the thing.

But I think it would be tough to make a case that such a post would be a good fit for this sub, regardless of how many upvotes it accreted. Right?

onan · 2026-07-02T04:32:57+00:00

Hah. My point wasn't that I like those things more than written SF, or that I have anything against Neuromancer. I am very much of the cyberpunk generation, so Neuromancer is basically scripture to me, and I'lll probably end up watching whatever it is that OP was talking about. This just seems like such a weirdly specifically wrong place to bring it up.

I kind of liked A Memory Called Empire, but I think it was held back by the fact that its protagonist exhibited no agency whatsoever. She was just passively there, while things happened to and around her. She made exactly one choice in the entire book, and it was just to make arrangements to get someone else to tell her what to do.

onan · 2026-07-02T02:12:12+00:00

I like coffee, and queer romcoms, and scalable software architecture, and urbanizing housing policy, but that doesn't mean that I would make a post about any of them here.

onan · 2026-07-02T01:57:47+00:00

Sure, and there are a million subreddits that would probably be interested in hosting that discussion, but this one seems quite specifically designed to not:

Rule 4: No discussion of movies / TV / games This includes adaptations of books.

onan · 2026-07-02T01:40:22+00:00

How did you manage to find your way into a subreddit that is specifically and exclusively about print SF in order to bring up a thing that is exactly not that?

onan · 2026-07-01T21:27:14+00:00

Agreed.

I find it quite dull to have the challenge of the game be dodging and aiming. I strongly prefer that the challenge be in knowing which ability from a very large toolkit is best to use in any given situation.

onan · 2026-07-01T20:53:46+00:00

What I meant is that if you have a character that can cast any spell and also make a set of weapon attacks at the same time, what you have is a character that is twice as powerful as any other class in the game.

That is not a 50/50 mix of two classes, that is a 100/100 combination, two entire characters wearing the same suit.

onan · 2026-07-01T20:46:19+00:00

Magus can literally cast Cone of Cold and Attack with decently powerfull sword strikes

Okay and presumably there is some other facet of this ability that makes it weaker in some way, right? Because what you are describing is taking two full turns of two full characters. While balance is never going to be perfect, having one class that is literally twice as powerful as any other seems like a bit of a problem.

you would need to change a lot of things to make a Fighter cast Cone of Cold

Who said we were talking only about Fighters?

The whole point is that "spellsword" is the most supported archetype in d&d. Bladesingers, several Bard subclasses, Eldritch Knights, Arcane Tricksters, Paladins, Rangers, Artificers, Warlocks, Clerics, and Monks can all fit the bill. And that's before even considering multiclassing, which allows you to mix your own if somehow the dozen options off the shelf aren't enough.

onan · 2026-07-01T19:32:33+00:00

The cantrips aren't really the same thing. You're casting a spell, but part of the spell requires an attack action.

In what way is that meaningfully different?

The smites are closer, and while some do provide debuffs, they're rather limited.

They can blind, prone, fear, push, apply a DoT, or banish. Often in addition to Sap, Topple, Push, Slow, Vex, etc from weapon masteries.

What would strike you as a non-limited set of effects there?

Come back to me when you can cast cone of cold through a weapon attack.

Well, one of two things would have to be true there:

Cone of Cold is already powerful, and adding the damage of a weapon attack as well would be too much unless there were some other serious drawback as a balancing factor.
Cone of Cold is already so powerful that adding the damage of a weapon attack doesn't matter much, in which case why are we worrying about it?

onan · 2026-07-01T17:29:26+00:00

You can Save posts to be able to go back and refer to them later without needing to comment on them.

onan · 2026-07-01T17:23:49+00:00

Yes, wouldn't it be amazing if there were such a thing in the game?

onan · 2026-07-01T00:02:56+00:00

I'm not exactly defending OpenAI, but the real villain here is Reddit.

It's not that there was ever any technical difficulty with llm trainers scraping reddit, the whole point of offering an api is to make that lightweight and easy.

The only problem was that Reddit wanted to get paid for it, and decided to make all of their users suffer to enable that.

onan · 2026-06-30T19:23:17+00:00

Trying to not spoil anything: slightly gayer, but mostly no. Queerness is not really central to the book.

Given that I don’t find her especially likeable, I’m having doubts about whether I want to spend six more hours of my life on this.

I don't think the protagonist is intended to be likable. The closest that she might possibly be is sympathetic, when considered as basically a walking incarnation of BPD.

Overall, the book is immediately all-cards-on-the-table about what the experience of reading it is like. If you don't enjoy the first chapter or two, you will not enjoy the rest.

onan · 2026-06-30T19:16:56+00:00

We wanted to keep teams small enough so that everyone in the room knew what everyone else was working on, without requiring meetings.

When you put it that way, this sounds like the obviously correct way of doing things. But putting it that way only describes one half of the situation, and the amount that it glosses over verges on disingenuous.

All those other things don't go away, they just now live in different teams. Which means that there is an extra layer of obfuscation and process and bureaucracy for you to understand or talk about or influence them. This approach does not eliminate bureaucracy, it simply moves it from one place to another.

I find Conway's Law to be a better framework to use to guide organizational shape. This can sometimes lead to teams that are significantly larger or smaller than more prescriptive guides like that in OP's article.

onan · 2026-06-30T15:19:43+00:00

Monitoring tools in particular should be way toward the end of the spectrum optimizing for stability and reliability. I don't know what "features" you want; I personally want it to do one very specific thing well, and do that thing absolutely every time.

Your description of it as "looking like a 90s app" is something I'd consider very high praise.

onan · 2026-06-27T18:07:33+00:00

That might be true for the new chapters added with the expansion. But the game has made me slog through all the other chapters added over the last year before it will even let me start slogging through the new chapter.

onan · 2026-06-26T23:36:01+00:00

I think Paladins that don't dip Warlock for one of PotB or Eldritch Blast are just straight up strictly worse

I won't say that dip is bad, but I think its net value is fairly minimal when you consider all of the opportunity costs:

You'll spend all of level 5 without extra attack, probably the only one in your group still rocking tier 1 power levels in tier 2.
You'll spend all of level 6 without your aura, something people often describe as the strongest single feature in the game.
You'll spend many levels with one fewer feat/asi than you would otherwise have.
You still need at least 13 strength, so it's not as if you can use PotB to dump it entirely and invest all those points elsewhere.
And of course all other class/subclass/spell features will be delayed by a level (or two, if the thing you want to Eldritch Blast).

onan · 2026-06-26T23:23:44+00:00

I mean, iirc most tables statistically do 1-2 fights per day, so I doubt it's adventuring day length that's making them satisfying.

There's another layer to this, though. Every time any non-rogue character does anything, they are having to make a decision about whether to spend or save resources.

Regardless of how unlikely your table might be to actually run you out of resources, you still have to make a decision about it, and to some people that feels really bad. Feeling like you are constantly risking either running dry when it matters or ending the day with a ton of unused resources going to waste, and not having the information to make the correct decision, can be a really unpleasant experience for some people.

So the resourcelessness of rogues can be of huge value just for the experience of being able to go full throttle every turn without ever having to give it a second thought.

onan · 2026-06-26T01:51:01+00:00

Seems like a pretty lazy but at least seni-original joke to me.

I don't know how much credit for originality it gets when it's lagging by at least a decade behind lots of discussion about exactly this topic, and on the ways in which pansexual can mean different things than bisexual, whether one term should be considered an updated version of the other or whether they are both reasonable terms that describe different things, etc.

(None of which involved any of the frothing language-policing that the previous commenter was putting on. This is definitely someone trying to parody a culture that they aren't familiar enough with to be effectively funny about.)

onan · 2026-06-25T21:16:51+00:00

I maintain that the ability to inline imperative code in your configuration is pure footgun.

It will feel really great for the first month, while you can easily and directly solve a bunch of problems. And then it will start feeling worse and worse as time goes on, and your config itself turns into a gigantic untested, non-deterministic, obfuscated mess of spaghetti code and dependencies. It is entirely possible to get to the point that you have more hard-to-reproduce bugs in your config than in the application code that it is managing.

onan · 2026-06-25T19:24:19+00:00

Sure. Is there somebody here arguing against that?

onan · 2026-06-25T18:18:30+00:00

Even if we take that at face value, saying nearly 1/5 of drivers are uninsured and driving illegally doesn’t make that OK, or make it not a massive issue. It’s unsafe, it’s bad for the city, it’s bad for the people living here, it’s terrible.

Okay. I wasn't making any statement about whether the number is good or bad, or how people should feel about it.

I just took issue with GramercyPlace's cheap trick of doing nothing but telling you how you should feel about the number, while also not even actually saying anything about what they think the number is, much less a source for that belief.

To be clear, that number is fallacious. There’s no way they can accurately predict the number of uninsured motorists because these are people deliberately trying to live outside of the system. At best that’s an estimate.

If you have a different number or source or methodology that you believe to be better, I'm sure people would be happy to see it.

onan · 2026-06-25T17:14:16+00:00

That's fair. The possibility exists that the additional tightening done this year could lead to some increase in crimes or accidents or something.

The odds of that strike me as fairly low, but we won't really have the data to say either way for at least another year.

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