Pet peeves

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Re: Pet peeves

Postby NathanLoiselle » Mon Sep 17, 2018 11:39 pm

I hate it when people turn their Furby's into IEDs. Like why aren't Cabbage Patch Kids not good enough?
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby cmsellers » Wed Sep 19, 2018 4:52 am

Another one that I was reminded of because of the people who bitch about the people who bitch about therapod dinosaurs not having feathers: "It's fiction, get over it."

I really hate when people insist that we should ignore perpetuation of inaccurate information in fiction because it is fiction. Artistic license is a thing, but it has to justify my suspension of disbelief. All-too-often the justification for inaccuracies is some combination of laziness and familiarity. It becomes a cliche, but not a cliche that serves a real purpose, and lazy, annoying, pointless cliches break my suspension of disbelief

The example that reminded me of this peeve is featherless therapods: feathered therapods cost more to animate and are less iconic, so for one or both of those reasons therapods are still presented as unfeathered, or sometimes with a few weird token feathers that don't change the dinosaur's profile.

I see the same justification being used when myths are perpetuated. I can't think of a recent example, but I can recall that I have seen such examples and the reaction has been "it's fiction, get over it." There are cases where this would make sense, such as deconstructing tropes or having a pretentious character say something notoriously false. However I definitely have seen cases where the writers were clearly presenting an urban myth as fact, and when I googled it, I found the people who bring it up being assailed with "it's just fiction, get over it."

I am pretty sure I even saw this in the Cracked comments section occasionally, when a writer would invoke a myth to make a joke, but not a joke about that myth and not in a way that suggested they knew it was untrue. And of course people would call the writer out, and several people would insist "it's comedy, get over it."
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby ghijkmnop » Wed Sep 19, 2018 4:47 pm

Redacted
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Last edited by ghijkmnop on Thu Mar 14, 2019 3:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby iMURDAu » Wed Oct 10, 2018 10:46 pm

I get frustrated when people older than me refuse to learn how to use common technology but I understand. If the first half of your life was spent listening to vinyl records it makes sense that you wouldn't be immediately comfortable using Spotify and may prefer to not even bother. Habits are hard to break, preferences are hard to go against, learning new ways to do something you already do can feel like fixing something that isn't broken.

I get more than frustrated when people younger than me are just idiots. A customer came in to pay their electric bill today through MoneyGram. There's a $1.99 fee for doing that and the payment is posted in 2-3 days. The customer laid an android phone on the counter and paid with a debit card. I suggested just using the electric company's website and making the payment there. Immediately, not in a couple days, and for free. The reply: "I don't know how to do that". I said "Oh you just go on there and create an account and you can pay the bill there with your debit card and it doesn't cost anything." Again the reply: "I don't know how to do that".

It's just reading and following simple directions. It isn't any more difficult than making an account for any other site. But this person, and plenty others, will take time out of their day traveling somewhere to pay money in order to do something that can be done with the device they carry around with them everywhere.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby NathanLoiselle » Wed Oct 10, 2018 11:39 pm

My mom does everything in cash.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby Australia » Thu Oct 11, 2018 12:10 am

Is that because everyone pays her in singles?
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby NathanLoiselle » Thu Oct 11, 2018 2:49 am

Nah. She's just that ancient.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby iMURDAu » Thu Oct 11, 2018 8:57 pm

NathanLoiselle wrote:My mom does everything in cash.


And that makes sense if you're going to be traveling to places that offer a way to pay your bills. You can't yet feed bills into your phone from the comfort of the pile of couch cushions you made a fort out of. Yet.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby SandTea » Tue Oct 30, 2018 3:03 am

Watching TV and movies where a character has a gushing wound and 'fixes' it by burning it. This is going to, if it hasn't already, get someone killed.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby cmsellers » Wed Nov 21, 2018 7:25 pm

I have two related common things that I see that really annoy me.

The first is people who reuse images from websites where the author has an explicit rant about not using their images without permission. While I believe that copyright infringement is malum prohibitum so the infringement itself doesn't bother me, the only reason I find those images is because people reuse them without permission while properly linking back. If everyone obeyed the wishes of the photographer, I would never see those images, and perhaps it would persuade some of those photographers (the amateurs, anyways) to issue their images under a free license.

And on a related note, the people who have those rants on their websites but don't have a robots.txt also annoy me. Most unauthorized image reuse comes from crawlers, and you can block crawlers with a robots.txt much more effectively than you can block humans with an angry disclaimer. By doing this, you are presenting yourself self-righteously as a victim of infringement while still driving traffic to your site.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby cmsellers » Fri Nov 23, 2018 1:05 am

Another literal pet peeve: people who insist on bringing their dogs fucking everywhere.

Several related literal pet peeves are the excuses they give for not controlling their dogs when I make it clear that I am very uncomfortable around dogs. "He's just being friendly." "She's just a puppy." "He's just wants you to give him attention."
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby NathanLoiselle » Fri Nov 23, 2018 4:35 am

I have a pet peeve related to Sellars latest pet peeve.

Dogs are not robots. At best you can expect them to be as controllable as a three year old child. Unfortunately they really don't get any better. Don't expect them to be controllable.

I do agree that there are places you shouldn't take your dog. Like the stadium or the restaurant or the doctor's office.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby cmsellers » Fri Nov 23, 2018 5:07 am

If you can't control your dog, maybe you shouldn't take it places you don't have to, unless you know everybody there will be a fan of dogs.

The presumption should never be that other people should have to accommodate your pets outside your home. Even in your home, if you're working on that premise, you should warn people in advance. People would think I was a colossal dick if I didn't put my birds away in my own house (and theirs) when ornithophobic people visit. And yet with dogs, the presumption some dog owners have, the presumption you are expressing, is that everyone else should have to accommodate the desire of a dog's owner to take it nearly everywhere. The only exceptions you appear to be making are where sanitation is a serious concern and sporting events.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby CarrieVS » Fri Nov 23, 2018 11:32 am

Code: Select all
/**
 * Method to frobnicate a whatsit
 */
public void frobnicateWhatsit(Whatsit whatsit) {
    // Teh codez
}


This is a very techie peeve that encompasses two separate, related sub-peeves:

Method comments starting "Method to..." just make me want to scream "yes I can see it's a method!"

Method comments that restate the method name adding nothing except spaces and connectives. Tell me why I'd want to frobnicate a whatsit, any side effects, any restrictions on which whatsits can be frobnicated. Tell me what it does if the whatsit is null or invalid. If it's not obvious from the definition of the words, give me a brief statement of what frobnicating a whatsit actually means. Tell me what I need to know to use this method. But please, do me the courtesy of assuming that, if I'm capable of reading the code or even the documentation at all, I have the basic comprehension to know that something called frobnicateWhatsit frobnicates a whatsit without being told - and if you really can't find anything to say besides that, the method does not require a comment.

explanation of techiness
That code block there is just a fake example of computer code. It's written in Java but applies to any programming language.

In Java, anything between /* and */ is a comment - it will never be interpreted by the computer as code, it's just there for people to read. In some languages, the extra * at the start makes this a special comment that can be used to automatically generate documentation about the code.

A method is just a piece of code with a specific purpose that you can run. (In other languages or situations, something similar might be called a function or a subroutine. These have a slightly different meaning and context but a very similar concept.)

The first thing in the method definition tells you what other code you can run this method from (public - any code can run it.)

The next bit is what sort of thing you get back when you run the method (void - nothing. This method just does a thing without giving you anything.)

Next is the method name. Good method names tell you what they do, like frobnicating a whatsit.

In parentheses (round brackets) is what input you need to give the method to work on (a Whatsit to frobnicate.) This has two parts - the type of input (a Whatsit, whatever one of those is) and the label you'll refer to it by (whatsit).

The braces (curly brackets) contain the actual code of the method.

Anything following //, in Java, is another kind of comment. Here, I've just used it as a placeholder instead of actual code. ("Teh codez" is just techie nonsense slang.)

Frobnicate is also techie nonsense slang - it often means "toggle [a switch or button]" but here is just used as a generic verb. Whatsit is just a generic noun: the example doesn't depend on what it is or what's actually being done to it and engineers are far too lazy to make something up so we just use these placeholder terms.


Related.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby Marcuse » Sat Nov 24, 2018 1:14 pm

That happens in gaming too, when you hear "to execute the enemy, press the execute button". Yeah and are you going to tell me which one of those that actually is? I have a whole keyboard here to choose from.
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