Mastodawn

Jernej Simončič �Jun 6

@cstross This, absolutely this.

Jernej Simončič �Jun 6

@cstross Discord is awful, but at least it's text.

@cstross There are worse things.
All it gives you is a Youtube video (which they call "user's manual" or maybe "quick start guide") which shows how to open the packaging.
Once you extracted the contents from the box, you are on your own, no manual.

Charlie Stross Jun 6

@Uilebheist Also, I LOVE cheap Chinese electronics where the manual is a 10cm by 10cm booklet printed in light grey 6pt type on white paper (bonus points for lemon yellow on white!), which turns out to be machine-translated from Chinese and simply tells you how to charge the device for the first time (using an unfamiliar foreign charger that didn't come with the device).

Then tells you to go to the manufacturer's TikTok account and follow them.

¹ https://polyglot.city/@Uilebheist/114637056813661565

@cstross I once bought a flame thrower¹ and the instructions explained in excruciating details how to:

1. unpack the thing
2. fit a gas cylinder (amazingly, a standard fitting which anybody who has seen one can guess).
3. follow them on twitter and become their friends on facebook,
4. err, that's it. There wasn't space in the booklet for minor things like how to use it safely.

They could have omitted 1, 2 & 3 to make space for safety instructions, but of course not.

Uilebheist (@Uilebheist@polyglot.city)

@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @cstross@wandering.shop It's really not the type one can attack a crowd with. I think, I never tried. It's sold as a gardening tool to very precisely burn plants one doesn't want while not touching nearby plants one does want. It produces a very small flame (although bigger than a lighter). It's more dangerous against the person who uses it (if used wrongly) than against a crowd. [Somebody who follows me here has seen me using it to light a BBQ a few years ago; that's how dangerous it is]

Polyglot City

@Uilebheist @cstross
> ¹ no, not telling why

Ordinarily I would understand that and not comment, but since a flamethrower was in the news in a really horrific way just a few days ago, you might actually want to tell *something*.

@dougmerritt @cstross "something"

@Uilebheist @cstross
Hey, it's up to you, but I am going to assume that you missed my point, which was to alert you to something that may not have occurred to you: some readers may understandably assume that you mean that you're going to attack a crowd of people with it -- again, because of events of a few days ago.

@dougmerritt @cstross It's really not the type one can attack a crowd with. I think, I never tried.
It's sold as a gardening tool to very precisely burn plants one doesn't want while not touching nearby plants one does want. It produces a very small flame (although bigger than a lighter).
It's more dangerous against the person who uses it (if used wrongly) than against a crowd.
[Somebody who follows me here has seen me using it to light a BBQ a few years ago; that's how dangerous it is]

@Uilebheist @cstross
There we go. That actually sounds awesome.

@dougmerritt @cstross [And yes, I didn't see that news item; with all the news of presidents having a kindergarten fight with billionaires, well, some things don't quite reach here]

@Uilebheist @cstross
Ah. Yeah, there's too much news for any of us to see it all.

Charlie Stross Jun 6

@dougmerritt Also, unless you're not actually in Silly Valley, @Uilebheist is on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean from you.

@cstross @dougmerritt My location is East of Greenwich. That's precise enough, right?

@cstross @Uilebheist
Yes, but I thought that someone using a flamethrower on a crowd of Jewish people advocating Jewish thing, which included a holocaust survivor, was the kind of thing that news services worldwide would pick up on, so I didn't think I was being provincial.

Although I am sometimes provincial in my worldview, to my embarrassment.

@dougmerritt @cstross Oh it appeared on news sites here. But the title made it sound like "oh, an American has opened fire on a crowd again". With "fire" automatically interpreted as "gunfire".
Quite why they haven't made things more obvious in the title, I have no idea, but they did make it easy to skip without reading.

@dougmerritt @cstross Anyway, off to use my flamethrower - the recent weather here has made it necessary.
The nearest person is about half a mile away, so that'll be safe enough.

@Uilebheist @cstross
Here's wishing that the Fire Safety Gods smile upon you and bestow their safe-use blessings.

@dougmerritt @cstross
Thanks.
There's heavy rain on the way. That's why I'm doing it now.
And I have a pipe connected to the rainwater reservoir ready if necessary.
(So far in 9 years I've had the thing it has never been necessary - but better safe than sorry).

@dougmerritt @cstross OK, since I perverted the thread from talking about product instructions to peaceful uses of flamethrowers...

Here's some other instructions. It's a bicycle horn (I have a bell to use to gently alert of my presence: I bought the horn for when "gently" turns out to be insufficient).

The instructions say: "Keep this information for future reference". That's the whole of the instructions (repeated in several languages).

@Uilebheist @cstross
> I bought the horn for when "gently" turns out to be insufficient

😆
Which is no doubt all-too-frequent. 🙄

> "Keep this information for future reference"

That would be funny if it weren't so ridiculous and sad.

@cstross @Uilebheist
Tangentially I wondered if I should keep using the word "provincial" in such contexts, so I looked at some synonyms:

I should try to avoid being a bumpkin, a hayseed, a rustic, a hick, a yokel. Someone who thinks in terms of their surrounds, not of the wider world.

@cstross @Uilebheist
Oh, and yes I'm in Silicon Valley, as you surmised; central San Jose to be specific. Pretty much the bullseye in the middle of Silicon Valley.

Philippa Cowderoy Jun 6

@cstross Should be illegal

Wilhelm Gere Jun 7

@cstross

Sometimes though, you don't know that until you get it in the mail, or whatever. Like my last cell phone. WTF? Nothing. Not even a quick setup guide on cardboard stock.

@cstross I find parts of the manual being only being on YouTube exceptionally annoying but it's not quite a deal breaker for me for some product categories (mostly 3D printers because if you exclude all of the ones which have parts there instructions exclusively on YouTube you end up eliminating 2/3 of your options)

Charlie Stross 6d ago

@addressforbots I'll grant a limited exception for complex physical machines (some assembly required) as long as there's paper documentation as well and the videos are primarily tutorials/how-tos. But for software, unless it's video-editing/3D editing software, it's a deal-breaker.

@cstross the only documentation for bleeping software being a YouTube video is annoying you know what's doubly annoying when there is written documentation and a YouTube video and a key piece of information is only in the YouTube video (or even worse there is no complete documentation in a single format and it's all scattered between the actual docs, YouTube videos and discord) and you only find out about this in the in the depths of a reddit thread after multiple hours of googling and debugging

patter 6d ago

@addressforbots @cstross conflicting documentation in several different places is too much like work.

don't need that kind of BS for stuff I've bought & chosen to use in my own time

@addressforbots @cstross Or indeed when the quick start guide lists four different install methods but neglects to mention that one of these is what all the rest of the documentation assumes and the others don’t have all functionality that’s listed in the docs. *hairy eyeball @ home assistant*

@Tubemeister @cstross yeah I just run the home assistant with their dedicated os thing on a raspberry pi these days used to run it on my main NAS box using Docker but gave up some time around when they basically phased out yaml configs for a loss of stuff

@addressforbots I’m still running docker, indeed. Might move the lot to a VM at some point but I’m sure that will have its own foibles. I’d like to keep the number of boxes running at home to a minimum so the general “just give it its own hardware” model has proved annoying.

@Tubemeister the funny thing is I'm in NZ you can basically get a raspberry pi for MSRP around here (not much from business/industrial customers here) so the whole give it a dedicated hardware thing isn't as much of a burden as it might be elsewhere (still annoying though even at close to MSRP modern raspberry pis' aren't cheap)

@addressforbots Oh I have a few spare pi4bs knocking around, that’s not the problem. It’s just that I have a few more little things to run and having two boxes sitting there mostly idle seems silly and wasteful. There’s no reason HA couldn’t be just another daemon on a little home server, as it is with the dockers.

Ah well. For now I just do without whatever extras the other thing offers and we’ll see when it breaks or gets annoying enough to bother doing something about it. ;)

@Tubemeister there are things like that that do occasionally need dedicated hardware if you want them to perform well basically anything to do with PBX stuff if you want it to work consistently at anything other than a couple of calls at once you're going to need dedicated hardware even if you only use a tenth of the processing power because of timing and latency (no I'm not bitter)

@addressforbots oh yeah I’d give that its own hw too. But I don’t run that at home, and I try to keep the HA from becoming truly mission critical too. It’s not that reliable really…

@addressforbots plus the raspberry pi kinda sucks. :) microsd cards are quite slow…

@Tubemeister the raspberry pi that runs my Homer assistant uses a USB 3 to SATA adapter to connect to a SSD that was originally intended as an upgrade to my mother's aging laptop but ended up being used for its current purpose when she decided to just get rid of her laptop because it was too much trouble

@addressforbots I run mine on an old HP T620 thin client. Nice m2 ssd without becoming a rats nest of wires.

Jürgen Hubert 5d ago

@addressforbots @cstross

I loathe it when anyone points me to a YouTube video as an explanation for stuff. I can parse text _much_ faster than any video, and I can search it for keywords, too.

Double loathing for climate change deniers who send me links to YouTube videos as "proof" for their inane blather.

@cstross @addressforbots As long as it’s done well, and not the usual dude with an interesting accent meandering and waffling on like an early 2000s Neal Stephenson novel.

Atomic Orbitals 4d ago

@cstross It will be only a matter of nanoseconds before someone launches a product where the only "documentation" for the public is an LLM trained on internal documentation. Attempts to follow the LLMs instructions will result in the product blowing the door to your office to smithereens, flushing all toilets in a 500km radius simultaneously and coating roads within 100km with poisonous mushrooms to at least a metre deep. The mushrooms will be on fire.