Emotional support thread - feel free to comment here if you've ever been in a conversation about .NET, .NET Core, .NET Standard, .NET Framework and someoneverysmart has declared that it is actually very straightforward and obvious and then proceeded to explain in a way that is neither straightforward nor obvious, or is even plain wrong.

Feel free to link them to this thread. I guess it is unlikely these folks have the requisite self awareness to get anything out of it, but it is worth a try.

Finally for anybody about to comment here to explain the differences, please read the above three times, try to get it into your skulls that this thread is more about empathy and awareness than it is about the differences in .NET versions; and then go ahead and explain here anyway becauese I guess it will be a good cautionary tale.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink.

Does anybody know of ways to stop that horse from calling you an asshole as they die of thirst?

A moodlecloud subdomain is sending me unsolicited emails, I have no way of contacting them, and the moodle support team is just stonewalling me.

The lack of ownership in society really sucks sometimes

Has anybody else gotten to the point where people who need to mansplain how language models aren't truly sentient/conscious/intelligent are now more annoying than people who think language models are sentient/conscious/intelligent?*

While it has been a tight race but I think I have just about hit the inflection point.

The amount of time I've wasted because of someone condescendingly barging into a conversation with a iamverysmart 'actually you see they are just automata trying to predict the next text tokens'. When in actuality, everybody in the discussion is aware and that is not the point.

And to further exacerbate it, with a good number of them it is really difficult to get this through their thick little skulls. They just keep parroting the same thing over and over. Ironically, in their singleminded ego driven desire to be the Daniel Dennett of the chat they actually come across as less sentient/conscious/intelligent than a language model.

(*this should not be taken as endorsement for or against that idea - it is actually mostly orthogonal to this rant)

Two weeks ago this literal statement from client:
I reckon <Your Product> is almost at the point where we can bypass <Competitor Product> altogether, just need <Feature X>

After various much back and forth email, drilling into <Feature X> and asking pointed questions:

At the end of the day because of <Reason Y> I'm going to need <Competitor Product>'s <Feature Z> anyway.

While I appreciate this was necessary, valuable and saved my organisation a great deal of time, it is supremely annoying that it is necessary at all.

95% of of product management seems to be about preventing dolts from being dolts.

When people hate SAP and then they want you to take something and turn it into SAP by adding inane and poorly designed or even thought out feature after feature

Colleague at work gets pissed of when I 'tell' them what to do.

Change tack to suggesting things. These suggestions don't get followed and explosions ensue.

Colleague gets pissed off that I did not prevent these explosions. Simultaneously I get criticised for being angry that my suggestions were not followed, when what I'm primarily trying to do is defend myself for being blamed for the explosions in the place.

You can have your cake and eat it too folks!

What is it with people revealing their support requests like some sort of incremental escape room riddle?

Internal operations escalates an issue to development regarding an error importing a binary file format.

Confusion ahoy and blows out to 5 developers (3 senior) before the OP originally comes back 24h later to note that the client requesting this also added a note to say that the software that produces this binary may have changed formats. But they didn't think seem to think it was relevant enough to include.

Honestly unsure what measure of this is lacking basic common sense or basic human decency. And further astounding that for once the client did the right thing and this was occluded internally.

The number of product people who want software to be built in an 'intuitive and simple manner' when they cannot even explain the problem domain in a intuitive and simple manner is quite incredible.

Tell me you don't want to do technical support without telling me you don't want to do technical support

Chasing information for software crash from a user:

Dev: Are you getting warnings when you open the model?
User: Not when I open the model.
Dev: Huh what's weird, normally there's a warning that looks like this when you open it that looks like this *screenshot*
User: Oh, yes I got that warning

Are there any IDEs out there that have a ribbon interface?

It is amazing how "we should be working on X instead of Y" can mutate into a situation where "we are working on X as well as Y"

Memory just came up from reading another rant about static keyword I wanted to share. Involved a network programming assignment in Java back in my heyday.

Fellow student was told that a static member was shared between every object in a class and decided that they could use that to implement network communication (i.e. if they ran the same java program on different machines, they'd be able to communicate by reading to and writing from the same static fields).

Have a memory of sitting in corner of lab overhearing tutor lose their mind trying to (unsuccessfully) explain why this didn't work.

Question for Support:
What are the recommended system specifications for [X]. We have a client using a laptop with an [BEEFY-CPU] and 32 GB of RAM and your program hits 100% on both resources when this program is used.

Answer by Support:
Those specs look above our recommendations. Programs using 100% of computing availability is a good thing and it means that it is functioning correctly. Of course if they have a more powerful computer it will run faster, but I would say that they are well positioned.

Harari said of the idea of Data-ism:

---

In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.

We are already becoming tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really understands. Every day I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls and articles. I don’t really know where I fit into the great scheme of things, and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers. I don’t have time to find out, because I am too busy answering emails.

---

I was initially entertained by the punchline, but that was soon followed by the rather depressing realisation that my only value to greater society is essentially as a data processing unit

Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and this quote struck me as quite poignant:

On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

— Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher[5]

Basically realised this is 90% of my clients.

A colleague and I were musing about how warped ones understanding of fundamental reality must be to expect this, but then I realised that actually, their understanding is actually far more sophisticated than ours! Here we are boxed into our pissant Euclidean physics, and what they are looking for in software is the equivalent of a Tenet Turnstile, capable of reversing entropy to make sense out of their garbage data!

Incredible! Now that I understand their ingenius vision, I will get to work on the trivial task of writing the 'Algorithm' and packaging this in .NET application (because to those who cannot actually DO, ideas are everything and execution is nothing 🙄).

Once I do I'm honestly not sure if I'm going to use that to make sense of their data or just get in touch with Sator

Clients keep asking if our software will support XYZ format.

XYZ format is a proprietary format that we are not the proprietors of. Unfortunately, it has become something of a de-facto standard in our industry.

It is not practical to support the format because being able to figure it out is difficult, time consuming and not even a certainty. In fact while we have historically done so for previous versions, it has been upgraded several times so this becomes something of an arms race for us (whether intentional or not).

Responses from clients when we try to explain this vary, but a not insignificant number of them intimate that this is a failing or fault on our part.

It is pretty annoying, and considering the damage in perception it can do, is a pretty interesting and subtle form of economic moat I had not previously considered.

One way to resolve tickets quickly

I've worked at a small business for the last 10 years. We used to do all our IT provisioning services in house because originally you could count the number of employees on a mutilated hand. The nice thing about this was that we could get a new employee up and onboarded in a couple of hours.

In the last 6 months we've now moved to Microsoft stack for credentials and managed by a 3rd party provider because it's not worth our time. The problem is that 4 days in, our new employees still have no access to their email or the fileserver.

I've heard about the power of positive thinking so just wanted to celebrate how I've made it to big enterprise!

(Also Microsoft Teams is utterly horrific and IMO successful only because big enterprise organisations need to fulfil statutory compliance/accreditation requirements. It is the definition of economic rent seeking)

The hotly debated topic that anybody can learn to code is always seems to devolve into a definitional or even epistemological argument to the point of being valueless. But I like to think about it like this:

Anybody can learn to code in the same way anybody can learn to drive. The most rudimentary of searches for 'dash cam fails' should provide some valuable context for the practical implications of this.

Settle an argument for our development team. We have infrastructure to report crashes when they occur, via a simple online form submission. The form provides basic fields for a description and an email address, and also posts some basic telemetry (rebuilding what it can of call stack, variables etc). Currently the email address is optional (you can submit the form and leave it blank). The form is not mandatory (the user can hit 'send' to submit online, 'save' to save the crash report to transfer in other ways, or 'cancel' to just ignore it entirely (irregardless of their choice, depending on where the crash has occurred, they may be able to continue using the application or it might exit).

A suggestion has been put forward to make the email address mandatory. Surprisingly, this has kicked off an incredibly polarising debate, so I thought I would put it to devRant to see what is the consensus here.

I'm trying not to bias the discussion by stating with the considerations at play, but would encourage you to think about them before chiming in!

Working with a developer from another company, nominally called Jo. I had a programming session with Jo today.

Sometimes it's hard to succinctly describe an individual developers level of aptitude in highly technical fields to outsiders because it often requires a lot of context relating to the problem being solved and their attempts to solve it.

In this case I think it could be pretty accurately summarised in this little anecdote: there was a 10 second pause in our work today while Jo was trying to figure out how to type '<'

Was testing an editor for writing technical documentation. Asked their support:

Hey ___, am I right in thinking you can't paste images directly from clipboard into a document?

Couple of hours later:

Hi ___, yes, you can add images by uploading them: <url>

The URL they provide has no examples of being able to paste images directly from the clipboard. provides Trying to figure out if this is yes-but-no or no-but-yes.

Quotes are paraphrased (unless *) to protect the incompetent and stupid (or more the case: client and I'm reducing risk of exposure)

Situation: We have a program that opens sqlite database files. Occasionally new versions of the program needs to upgrade these files.

Program UI: To proceed you need to upgrade your database. It is recommended you backup your database before proceeding. Hit Yes to continue or No to abort.

Client: How do you back up a model once it has upgraded? If I hit No the program closes leaving me no option to backup the model.

Support: *The easiest way of backing up a model before upgrading is creating a copy of the file and keeping it in a separate folder*

Client: *Haha forgot about being able to do that outside of* <program name>

TL;DR: engineer in technical role who is probably getting paid $150k+ forgets it is possible to make a copy of a file.

Ahh Amazon, no support via email, you condescending pricks.

Open my Windows 10 laptop and the night light is still on from last night. It's 10am.

Go to night light settings and they're disabled.

Move on and keep working.

After an hour, had enough so google the problem. Looks like it's reasonably common and and there's a registry fix to enable the settings again.

Apply settings. Go to settings and they're all enabled!

However, they don't do anything anymore. Night light is still on.

TL;DR:
Problem Night light settings widgets are disabled.
Solution: Enable night light widgets, but don't make them change night light