mhoyeJul 5, 2024

Numeronyms are fun, but they have one major problem: namespace collision.

What is a11y? Is it accessibility? Associatively? Axiomatically? Autobiography?

This is obviously a problem that needs solving.

My solution? SHAsum hashing.

We can avoid the ambiguity of "a11y" with this unique, cryptographically sound alternative:

Accessibility? a884a5f3609f2cca635fed56d4ec5795da56fb970y

Axiomatically? a20c4bcee8f977a3f5a3b6b499d52d7dd32584771y

Simple, easy to visually distinguish, everyone wins.

Show threadmhoyeJul 5, 2024

I was actually racking my brain for 'starts with a, ends in y, same length' words to make this dumb joke but then I remembered that /usr/share/dict has _huge_ flat-file lists of words of many languages in it, so I could just get them from that?

Ninety seconds of grep, awk and sort later, there it is. For future reference there's 223 of them, alphabetically going from abdominoscopy to axiomatically.

Y'all these computers have so much in them already. _So much_. But nobody knows.

Show threadmhoyeJul 5, 2024
You know what an accessibility problem really looks like? It looks like thousands of people standing up web services and slapping ads on them that do exactly nothing that you couldn't do 1000x faster without ever leaving your machine, because nobody knows how to make their machines do those things.
Show threadNitin KhannaJul 5, 2024
@mhoye like, seriously. Folks telling me to use online services like ClipChamp to edit or downscale videos. They don’t even know ffmpeg exists! It’s so absurd to me!
Show threadLisPi
@nitinkhanna @mhoye Honestly, even if you know it exists... the command line flags exposing /nothing/ but accessibility problems of their own.

So many opaque abbreviations.
Jul 5, 2024 at 10:55pmWeb
Show threadxrvsJul 6, 2024
@lispi314 @mhoye @nitinkhanna and the documentation is no less confusing
Show threadNitin KhannaJul 7, 2024

@xarvos @mhoye @lispi314

Don’t hate me for it, but I’ve taken to asking LLMs to create ffmpeg commands for common things I want to do. They do a good enough job for most things. For more complex stuff, they give a good starting point.

Agree that it’s not the most user friendly tool.

Show threadLisPiJul 7, 2024
@nitinkhanna @mhoye @xarvos I'd argue that when you start having to lookup search engines or LLMs for remote help to determine how to use a program, it has already thoroughly failed at self-documentation and usability.
Show threadNitin KhannaJul 8, 2024
@lispi314 @mhoye @xarvos yeah… I agree. Though, with something as esoteric as video manipulation and something as powerful as ffmpeg, it would be extremely difficult to get the documentation right. That said, if they could explain their damn filter options better, that would be worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.