How Facebook Promotes Conflict in Discussions

How Facebook Promotes Conflict in Discussions

Facebook discussions have become the preferred way to have a group discussion (this is an observation, not an endorsement). But the terrible software design promotes misunderstandings that lead to conflict and makes it harder to reach mutually beneficial conclusions.

1 - It is never clear what the Enter key does. In some cases it starts a new line. In some cases in sends the note without further prompt - no chance to reread your note, maybe notice that you forgot "not" at a critical point, maybe notice that your automatic spell checker made your note confusing or meaningless by changing a critical word. You can edit the note after it's been posted, but that may be too late.

2 - You can change your note, even after it has been responded to, with no "edited" notice. Pretty easy to make a responder look stupid, intentionally or accidentally, by changing the note after he/she has responded to it.

3 - Responses can be directed at a note and indented under that note, with the author of the first note included. But a quote of the note that is being responded to is not included. Indentation attaches the response to the original note, but it also makes it more difficult for readers to find the response. In long discussions, I have been informed that there are several new notes in the discussion, but have been unable to find the new notes because they are indented multiple levels and hidden.

4 - If you don't have the cursor in the right place when you start a response, you don't get the indentation and author of the note that you are responding to. I have seen many notes of agreement or disagreement with no indication of what they are agreeing or disagreeing with.

5 - If a person deletes a note that has an indented response, the note and all of its indented responses are removed without notice. Any important information within an indented response is deleted, but not by the person that wrote the response. Why are you allowed to delete someone else's note?

6 - To counter issue 5, it is useful to respond to a note without making it an indented response. But then, as previously noted, there is no connection between the first note and the response.

How did such a system get put into place? My guess is that the people who designed it have never used it for a real discussion.

Why did this system become the most commonly used forum software? It's convenient. And because so many people don't understand or don't care about how it warps a discussion.

Why does Facebook keep this system in place? My guess is that what Facebook cares about is advertising revenue. Promoting conflict gets more participants. Facebook has no interest in people resolving the issues raised in the discussions.

And one more thing - you can post animated GIFs in discussions. These are ANNOYING and add NOTHING to the discussion.

PS 12/09/2021- Point 5 can be applied to the entire thread. Don't like how a discussion thread that you started is going? Delete your original note and the entire discussion will be deleted. There is no indication that it ever existed. Anyone who was following it is cut off from any further access and any responses that they hadn't read yet.

PS 12/16/2021 - And another issue that I just noticed. Facebook defaults shown comments to "Most relevant". In other words - we will hide comments that our artificial "intelligence" thinks are not important. You have to explicitly turn on "All comments", every time that you enter the discussion, to see the complete discussion. If you forget? - it's easy to overlook the small indication that you are not getting all the comments. 

PS 4/18/2022 - Now the discussion comments default to "Top comments". Bad enough that they are leaving important comments out. But now the comments are not in chronological order. I first noticed this because bids on auctions were not in increasing value. Why are people bidding lower than the previous bid? Have the bidders gone insane? NO - Facebook has gone completely insane.

How Fast Can Google Destroy Android?

How Fast Can Google Destroy Android?

This is a time - "2:39". Two numbers attached by a colon tells you it's a time. Google apparently does not know this.

The Android 12 lock screen displays 2:39 as

02
39

The two numbers are not connected and there is no punctuation. People have been trained since the beginning of digital clocks to recognize a time. This is NOT a time.

Furthermore, the digits are huge and when they change, if they are in my field of view, it is very distracting.

This is on the lock screen of always on screens on modern phones. There is no alternative setting. This is my PRIMARY clock. I use it as my alarm clock and carry clock.

If there happens to be a notification on the lock screen, the display becomes a recognizable time. That's great. But if you have no notification on the lock screen, and then one shows up, and then it disappears (such as my weather app doing an update), the clock switches from awful to good and back to awful.

I just spent the entire evening adding a feature to my clock widget app (you can get this new/test version from rs.ravitz.us ). If you turn on the "RS" option, it keeps a persistent "RS" notification on the phone. I hope it's persistent anyway, it's still there after fifteen minutes. This fixes the issue but keeps an otherwise pointless notification on the phone.

Google - do your software designers use Android? Do they care whether it is useful, not annoying, functional?

WIWWYP and AOII

WIWWYP and AOII

More and more, I find myself staring at something and wanting to scream - WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

Google Pixel 4a phone, Android 11 September 2021 version, 90 GB of unused disk space - I was in a remote location in Utah, Dutchman's Arch, a week ago. No Verizon cell phone service - I don't know if that made any difference. I took a number of photos of the arch using Google's camera app. But every time a took a photo, it deleted the previous photo. No message, it just wrote over the previous photo. I have taken series of photos before, so I know that this should work. Maybe they changed it, but I couldn't find a "save" button. What good are all the fancy image processing features if the basic camera function doesn't work? Why can't Google write working software for its own hardware and operating system?

Android GMail freezes regularly. I have to force a stop, clear the cache, and then it works for a couple of days. If that's all it takes, why don't they clear the cache every time I use it, or maybe after it has been idle for an hour?

Headline today - "Google Chrome icon on Chrome OS finally updated with latest app icon ..." - Google - can you fix your dysfunctional software instead of confusing people by changing icons?

There is a news article today about RSS in Chrome. There is no definition of RSS, except that is has something to do with Google Reader, which it says is now defunct. What is Google Reader? What is RSS? Off to the Acronym Finder - I find roughly 50 uses of RSS - Russell Stover Samplers, Roaming Service Startup, Resident Site Supervisor, Rough Surface Scattering, Reduced Space Symbology, Rich Site Summary, and on, and on. What are they talking about? The article has NO meaning because I don't know what it is about. WIWWYP?

Does BLM refer to Bureau of Land Management or Black Lives Matter? Why don't you spell it out instead of making me figure it out from the context of your story?

Acronym Overload Induced Insanity is going to become a major problem. Thankfully, AOII has only two definitions on Acronym Finder so far.

A few more issues -

Journalists and forum contributors - where is Portland - Maine or Oregon? In the age of the internet, why do you think that this is obvious and not worth stating?

And forum contributors - "to" and "too" have different meanings, "there" and "their" have different meanings. Using the wrong word causes confusion.

I traveled across the country a couple of weeks ago, by car. There are no more paper towels in restrooms, just air blowers that are deafening. Okay, everyone is going to go deaf anyway due to the prevalence of LOUD "music" and the complete disregard for noise pollution in our society, but do we have to hasten it like this? And - it is painful.
 

Stacking Chess Pieces Printed via SLA

Stacking Chess Pieces Printed via SLA

A few months ago I designed a display stand for cabochons (aka cabs, gem rocks cut and polished, generally for pendants) to let you display a cab on a shelf. I printed a few with my FDM printer (fused deposition modeling -a thermoplastic filament is fed into a hot nozzle and layered onto the print, I use 1/4 mm layers). The print is functional but low resolution and not visually appealing. SLA (stereolithography - a liquid resin is cured in layers by UV laser, with 1/10 mm or thinner layers) is readily available as a service, so I tried printing the stands at ArtLab ( www.artlab3dprinting.com ). The results were beautiful - far better than my FDM prints, well suited to displaying cabs.

I tried an inexpensive LCD resin printer (similar to SLA but uses an LCD to mask UV light which cures the resin). The results were good - not quite as good as ArtLab's SLA prints. But the procedure is a nightmare. You need to wear gloves and a mask when handling the resin, after the print is finished it must be transferred to an alcohol wash and then needs additional UV curing. You need a lab with a hood to use these printers. So back to ArtLab.

Next, I tried a project for fun. I designed a set of chess pieces that stack for compact storage. This has been done before, but to me, they haven't captured the essence of traditional chess pieces. The initial design took a couple of days. But it became interesting enough to spend some time detailing the pieces. I made some changes to better reflect the traditional shapes and I modified them so that the rook, bishop, knight, pawns could be stacked in any order. Due to the height of the king and queen, they can only stack on top of the other pieces and not on each other.

The results are shown here, travel size (6 cm king), but easily printed at any reasonable size.    

The stacking of pieces suggests an interesting chess variation - a piece that takes another can stack on top of it and assume its movement options. This would likely need some limitations - let's say rook, bishop, and knight can assume movement options from a rook, bishop, or knight (only from the top piece of a stacked piece). So if a rook captures a bishop, optionally, it becomes a queen. If that same piece then captures a knight, it may become a super-queen. This has some interesting implications for trades.

The problem with SLA via service is the price. The complete set with 6 cm king costs over $100. Growing it by 25% (3 inch king), over $150;

If you are interested in getting a set, contact me (see www.ravitz.us for my phone, email). I am going to work on reducing the cost. See www.chess.ravitz.us for an STL file for printing these pieces.

Ubuntu Linux 20.04 and LXQt Desktop

Ubuntu Linux 20.04 and LXQt Desktop

I updated from Ubuntu Linux 16.04 (.04 is a stable release) to 20.04 recently. 20.04 has been available for over a year. I assumed it would be a good release. I also switched from LXDE desktop to LXQt desktop. LXQt is an updated version of LXDE, using the Qt library instead of the GTK library. I have no idea what these libraries do or why I should prefer one over the other.

The update required updating to 18.04 first, then on to 20.04. This took a couple of hours.

When finished, it worked. Running my 3D printer from Cura, printing to my Ethernet laser printer, running Wine programs (Windows environment), browser, old apps (except when they played music) all worked.

But there were some problems.

The system hangs during shutdown, depending on how you shutdown. This is my original write-up of the problem - I don't know if it is correct. Shutdown and reboot took a long time, I didn't time it, but a few minutes. Finding the problem took a long web search. Finally "sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove iio-sensor-proxy" fixed it. Why? Because it was looking for the light sensor. When it didn't find it, it just kept waiting and retrying, and refused to be interrupted. Why was it looking for a light sensor? Something about notebooks and laptops needing to know if the cover is open. My desktop apparently doesn't have a light sensor.

Next, every time I clicked on a shortcut icon, it told me that it is an executable (it is) and asked me what to do. Another web search - PCManFM-Qt (file manager) has an option that defaults to this behavior. I just needed to tell it to execute executables.

Next, no sound. Another web search - "sudo apt purge timidity-daemon". Timidity is a Midi player/converter. Apparently it keeps a background presence (daemon) which prevents the system from recognizing the sound output devices. Daemon purged, sound works. Well, the sound from the headphone output. The internal sound on my notebook still doesn't work.

The mouse arrow switches between large and small, depending on the current window. Another web search - run lxqt-config - Session Settings - Environment and create a new variable, XCURSOR_SIZE with a specific size.

Chrome keeps giving an annoying message that it is not the default browser. Clicking the button to make it the default does not get the job done. Web search - run lxqt-config - Session Settings - Environment and change the BROWSER variable to chromium. This does not work. Find the shortcut that is used to start Chrome, it was named google-chrome.desktop. Set the BROWSER variable to google-chrome - problem fixed.

An executable preload message was constantly appearing. And shortcuts to apps were taking several seconds to start the app. Web search - set the LD_PRELOAD path. This didn't fix it. When I removed it, both problems were fixed. I have no idea what caused the issue to be fixed.

I updated Wine (Windows environment). But the new version wouldn't start. Web search - a Wine program was already running at version 5, so version 6 wouldn't start. This shouldn't have taken me so long to find.

Wine 6 kept pouring out warnings about font page 20. Like ten at a time. Web search - no fix, but I found out how to suppress the warnings. In .bashrc (the terminal initializer script) - "export WINEDEBUG=fixme-font".

While removing "obsolete" software (a long part of the Ubuntu update), I lost OpenSCAD. Easy to replace. Thankfully, I didn't lose EasyABC (truly obsolete, but it does what I need and has not been replaced) or a down-level version of Cura that works much better than later versions.

One more detail. If the border of a window is off of the screen, you can't grab it to adjust the size. Use alt/left_mouse_button, anywhere in the window, to grab the window and move it until a border is visible.

And I switched from LXDE desktop to LXQt desktop. There is not a whole lot of difference. LXQt has an integrated preference app - a big improvement. The CPU monitor is inferior to the LXDE monitor and you can't choose what icons are in the system tray. I will stick with LXQt because LXDE will not be updated (as I understand it).

LXQt lets you choose from several different windowing packages. But Openbox (the one used by LXDE) is the only one that has a "minimize" button on the title bar. I can't find any way to get a minimize button with the other windowing packages.

This all took about 12 hours. That's ridiculous. I don't know about other Linux distributions. Any suggestions?

Android's Descent

Android's Descent

My phone is a Google Pixel 4a with Android 11. I use True Phone (app) because it lets me look at contacts by group. Android Phone (Google's phone app) gives you one long list of contacts, with annoying icons beside the names. But Verizon Visual Voicemail is only available via Android Phone, so I use that when I have voicemail. (Visual voicemail automatically downloads voicemails so that you don't have to dial in to get them.)

This morning I checked Android Phone for messages. This is new - Android Phone will not start unless it is the default phone app. So I made it the default. And I tried to use True Phone. This is new - True Phone will not start unless it is the default phone app. So I turned off Verizon Visual Voicemail and removed Android Phone. But now I don't get notifications when I have new (regular/dial in) voicemail.

I suspect that this is due to Google's push for privacy, requiring excessive permissions for apps to access important information on a phone. Starting with Android 11 (I think), if I write an app that puts information in a "public" folder, I can't get permission to even look at it. GOOGLE - THERE IS A REASON THAT I PUT IT IN A PUBLIC FOLDER. Ultimate privacy will be achieved when the phone can't do anything.

GOOGLE - MY PHONE'S PRIMARY FUNCTION IS NOT WORKING.

I use Google's Gmail app for email on my phone. For a couple of months now, it crashes a couple of times every day. To get it going, I have to force it to stop and restart it. This is Google's email app. Has Android become so complex that its caretaker can't write working apps for it?

Android is descending into garbage. From Feb 2018 - I suggest another "law" related to computers (including phones, probably tablets but I have found no use for tablets), along the line of Moore's law about computer processing power. Every year, consumer operating systems add features and bugs/incompatibilities at about the same rate. This makes them less and less useful. Eventually they will all degrade to the point of being unable to handle basic features - screen, phone, internet. Then it's back to dedicated devices - flip phone, calculator, music player, ...

Additional Thought 1

I went to Verizon's web page to turn off Visual Voicemail. Couldn't find a way, so I tried Help. It had nice instructions, until it told me to click "Remove from Account" in the top-right corner. This did not exist. WHEN YOU CHANGE YOUR USER INTERFACE, YOU NEED TO UPDATE THE DOCUMENTATION. Or better, DON'T CHANGE YOUR USER INTERFACE UNLESS IT IS NECESSARY.

Additional Thought 2

I didn't see the details of Joe Biden's 16 areas where Russian hacking of US computers was not acceptable. Is it is okay to hack other stuff? Why don't we have hack proof computers? Why don't computers have a watchdog chip or some hard switches that prevent complete encrypting or erasing of the disc? The answer, apparently, is that switching to round corners on Windows 11 is more important to Microsoft than preventing ransomware. Why don't we have a national cyber force? Isn't that at least as important as a space force?

Additional Thought 3

Using Android and watching iPhone to decide if it is an acceptable alternative started me thinking about duopolies versus monopolies. Is a duopoly any better than a monopoly? We have Republican/Democrat, iOS/Android, Windows/Mac. They all seem to focus on features that attract customers, not core function. Why is Windows concerned about whether version 11 should have rounded window corners when ransomware attacks are causing major headaches for the whole country? Why is Google spending time refreshing the look of Android 12 when core applications aren't working correctly? With monopolies, there is little incentive to improve, but also no incentive to chase bling.

Does having multiple companies in a market help? Not when I was buying a sofa - they all made the same thing. Not when I try to find running shoes that don't change every year. Not when I try to choose a Linux desktop that does what I want.

This has been a frustrating day.

Covid-19 update

Covid-19 update (see Decisions, Mistakes, Regrets ... May 3, 2020)

This data is from https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data, then download the complete data in xlsx or csv. This is a huge database of Covid-19 statistics by country and date.

The second and third columns here are deaths per million people for May 1, 2020 and 2021. That is well after the pandemic had started.

sorted by 2020
India              1    154
Brazil            30   1912
Germany           80    993
Canada           116    642
United States    206   1742
France           360   1539
United Kingdom   404   1882
Spain            525   1673

sorted by 2021
India              1    154
Canada           116    642
Germany           80    993
France           360   1539
Spain            525   1673
United States    206   1742
United Kingdom   404   1882
Brazil            30   1912

India is currently in crisis, so expect their deaths to rise.

So how did the US do? 3x the death rate of Canada, 2x the death rate of Germany. Not too different from France, Spain, United Kingdom.

The US did poorly at getting masks started. It did great at getting a vaccine going (despite expert predictions otherwise - whenever experts are on television, they should have their past prediction accuracy displayed prominently - of course that would put them all out of the job). The roll out of the vaccines went as smoothly as I would expect. I don't understand the lack of acceptance of the vaccines - the near and long term effects of Covid-19 can be truly nasty. The side effects of the vaccines are relatively minor. The long term effects of the vaccines are unknown, but it is unlikely to me to be worse than the disease.

Here is an interesting graph. Cumulative Covid-19 vaccines given over time. Hard to look at the graph and say where leadership changed. Looks just like I would expect a ramp up to look, except that it starts falling off starting at 40%.

I suspect that without the vaccines, we would be in deep trouble right now. (And similarly, I suspect that without free, unlimited, clean energy, i.e. fusion reactors, there is no way that we will reduce carbon emissions significantly.)

So, it is what it is. Maybe we can learn from our mistakes. Except that we don't agree on what our mistakes were.

I got vaccinated at the University of Kentucky vaccination center. (To my knowledge, I never caught the disease.) Excellent organization, handles 3000 shots per day. Thank you UK and the many volunteers.

Why?

Why?

Why do web pages use today and tomorrow for a day designation? Both "today" and "tomorrow" only have meaning if you know what today is. It's about 11:59 PM on Monday. I bring up the zap2it.com TV schedule. The page shows "Today". Okay that's Monday. Unless the clock has ticked over to Tuesday. I have to look at the wall clock to see what day the schedule is showing.

GMail - who is on the From list? "me". I'm looking down a list for my name, which I would recognize instantly, but instead of my name it uses "me". And if there is more than one person in the list, it displays first name instead of last name. I know many people named David, Mary, etc. Why would you choose to use the least distinctive part of the name for the short version?

Why isn't there a required or automatically generated field in HTML (that's web browser script) that is the date of upload? How many times have I searched the internet and found an answer to my problem, only to discover that the answer is 10 years out of date and useless. No mention on the web page of when it was posted or what version of the code it applies to. Android deprecates useful function so fast that answers that are more than two or three years old are useless.

Why don't people who put schedules on the web include the year?

Why does Amazon Echo take so long to turn off. I say "Alexa Off". Alexa slowly fades out the sound. I often say off because I need silence NOW, so that I can hear something else. Or something on the "radio" is offensive and I don't want to hear it (usually Dynovite ads about stinky dogs). As I wrote this, I tested it. Did they speed up the fade out? Maybe. I need to listen some more. (No, still a long fade out.)

Why do running shoe companies change their shoes every year. And why doesn't one running shoe company try changing the paradigm. Maybe they could build a big customer base with people who find a shoe that works well and want to replace it with the same thing next year.

Why do restaurants have wobbly tables and chairs, and tilted tables? They are not that hard to fix. And they annoy customers - me anyway.

Why do Linux advocates think that Linux software installation is so great. Just "sudo apt install package_name" and the system handles it. UNLESS IT DOESN'T. Then what? Don't have the package name right? Don't have the right support library in the system. Required support libraries are missing and the system can't find them? Required support libraries aren't supported in your version of Linux? Deprecated function in the new version of a support library?

Why are operating systems moving towards eliminating 32 bit software support? There is extremely useful software written in 32 bit code. There is nothing wrong with it. But it doesn't have enough users to justify being rewritten in 64 bit code.

The Total Failure of a Phone App Update

 The Total Failure of a Phone App Update

A few years ago, the TV Guide phone app for Android (I don't know about Apple) was a very nice TV listings apps. Good layout, good channel selection, easy time navigation, obvious notation of new episodes. About two years ago it was updated and the ease of navigation was lost. User complaints caused them to back up to the previous version. I don't know how any tester would agree that the update was an improvement, but they listened to their users and fixed it.

In January 2021, the app start giving notice that some of its features would be temporarily disabled and a new version would be introduced shortly. The disabled feature that I noticed first was that I couldn't select any channels, so the app became completely useless. I waited patiently and the day came when the update was released. I selected the over the air channels for my zip code and was shown about a hundred channels. I receive about 15 of those and use five. I tried to select those five so that I didn't have to scroll through 100 channels to find the schedule. There was no way to do that.

Okay, so I went on to look at the listings. The top half of the screen was an ad for a show that I would never watch. Scrolling down to find a channel that I often watch, I discovered that I can only get the schedule for now until four hours later. Since it was early afternoon, I couldn't find out if my favorite Monday night show would be on tonight or if it was a new episode. Or if there was anything interesting on another channel tonight.

And there was no way to choose another day, past or future. And there was no way to change the channels that I chose.

The new app is useless for the traditional TV schedule.

I went to the Google Play App Store to do a review. Changed my rating from 4 stars to 1 - the ratings go from 1 to 5. I wish I had noted the current overall rating at the time. I suspect it was about 4.

The next day, I looked to see if there was a response or update. No. But there was a long list of one star reviews - terrible, horrible, useless, pointless. The overall rating was 2.6 and the 1 ratings were about twice the 5 ratings (just a few 2,3,4 ratings). The next day, today, the overall rating is 1.5, with the 1 ratings over ten times the 5 ratings.

So what happened? At first I thought naive young people designing the new app - they only watch streaming TV. They love fancy graphics instead of information. They have no idea what is needed to convey TV listing information.

Then I remembered that the app used to note CBS Entertainment and now it only notes Red Ventures. I searched the internet and found that CBS has sold the CNET Media group, including TV Guide, to Red Ventures.

This next part is PURE SPECULATION.

They wanted to save money so they canceled some contract and this required an updated app.

They wanted more ad revenue so they put large ads at the top of the listings, reducing information density.

They went to the TV streaming services and sold ad space for their shows (ads pretending to be content), and redirected the aim of the app to streaming content instead of traditional television. But there is no schedule for streaming TV, so they moved to recommending shows instead of showing schedules.

They shorted the traditional television content because there was no time to do it all. Or maybe they thought it was obsolete.

END OF SPECULATION

The result is a useless app. And I expect that the ad revenue has dropped to near zero.

I watch streaming shows. I watch them whenever I want to. I watch whatever I want and I find recommendations to be pretty worthless. I don't need an app to help.

I switched to another TV listing app. Poor layout, only today and tomorrow. Can't find anything better.

And I'm not expecting them to revert to the old version or fix the new one. Smart phones take another step downhill.

ONE WEEK LATER

No comment from Red Ventures. Rating - 1.3 stars. And no change to the new app.

My solution to the problem - use zap2it.com in my phone browser. It has one big advantage over the old TV Guide app - you can tell it to start up with the time set to prime time. And a big disadvantage - just one hour displayed, with clunky scrolling.