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[MaxTheFox]

Tried Darkling. Felt weird in the lower boards for some reason.

[wierd]

Gosh dang it.   

So, with Facebook threatening to force users to suffer its horrific new design that makes it more unpleasant to look at then ever, I looked into ways to revert to old versions of sites. Boom, I soon discovered the wonders of a user-agent switcher extension!   
The first one I tried was a dud, since it didn't allow for old versions of your browser of choice, but soon I had one that let me view sites as an old-ass version of IE, which spares you from a lot of terrible recent design choices.   

Suddenly, Yahoo and Facebook are both more palatable than they've been in a long time. Well, Yahoo's look hasn't changed back to the classic style, but at least it doesn't have a painful tendency to freeze up when switching between folders, pages, or even just refreshing the page.   
Speaking of refreshing, that'd be a good way to describe this whole trick in general... except that the extension I'm using doesn't have an option to affect only certain urls, and for whatever reason SMF seems to derp the hell out when viewed this way. *groan*   

What you are trying to politely say, is that the UX/UI people justifying their paychecks with endless "Fashion show" changes that are completely unwanted from the public, because "SOOOOO last season!", is grating and mentally taxing?

Say it ain't so! /s

(Been saying this about software for decades now.)

[Reelya]

Perhaps they're totally aware but the goal is to shed users who aren't profitable, so they have in fact carefully crafted the changes to do so. If you have a thing that's free as the hook but you make a profit off a minority of users, getting people to fuck off who are never going to pay is good business practice. How often do they have free offers but the free offering basically sucks so you either stop using it or decide to pay for the thing.

[wierd]

That would be the antithesis of the stated scenario though;  He specifically sets his user agent to something that every developer in the known world hates to have to support, (2, circa 2013), meaning it is the least loved part of the codebase, and the least polished, and most prone to malfunction.

It is by definition, the least profitable, and least desired branch. It is the branch that everyone in the org wants to cut, but cant for some reason or another.

This to me, makes it more likely to fall into my explanatory framework-- the UX/UI people would rather momba with a rabid skunk than support that platform, but are forced to do so-- It lacks the capabilities to do all the bells and whistles bullshit, so they are forced to implement only basic functionality.  This hyper-minimalist, "Only raw functionality" aesthetic is preferred; and only available when the UX/UI people have their fingers put in a thumb-vise, with the screws cranked down.

[Reelya]

That's more like an edge case however. So few people log on using IE that worrying about whether IE users log in or not isn't worth the man hours to discuss it. And after all they're only supporting it with a legacy mode, and it's a legacy browser. Neither the mode or the browser are going to get any more updates, hence there's no cost leaving that in. Sounds like they mainly left that in so that they don't in fact have to expend effort to update things for IE.

[wierd]

Maintaining the legacy mode is onerous, since "The latest features!!!ELEVENTYONE!", need to be tested against it to make sure the new changes to the system dont break it.

The easiest thing to do is purge it completely, to remove the QA workload it represents, and the huge cost center it represents.

[Reelya]

The legacy mode was already there, they don't need to support it.

Forcing everyone else to update reduces the amount of 'moving targets'. But IE isn't a moving target so they're 'stuck' with that old mode. That's the deal here: other browsers change so they only want to have one active version going for that. For an old browser that's not getting updates, the logic becomes inverted: it's easier to leave them locked into some older version of the code.

[wierd]

Only true if your bosses are not of the "BREAK EVERYTHING! BREAK IT OFTEN!" mindset.  You know, the kind that are easily swayed by shiny presentations by charlatans, and end up changing back-end suppliers willy nilly.

Then you have to keep maintaining and updating the legacy code, to support the changing substructure.

AND/OR, your vendor for that service decides that the legacy mode APIs are depreciated, and will no longer be supported, without notice-- but you still have fringe legacy mode users you HAVE to support, because contractual obligations.

[methylatedspirit]

Against my better judgement, I repasted my laptop, not because this thing's actually overheating, but because I wanted to improve my thermals. It seems to have done almost nothing. It's a slight improvement, but with emphasis on slight. Under Folding@home and with an undervolt, if I allow the CPU to turbo up to 4.0 GHz, it sustains 3.85 GHz all-core instead of 3.6 GHz at the thermal throttling point (94°C). Limiting clock speed to 3.2 GHz, CPU package temp is now 78°C instead of 80°C. That's it.

I could've gotten a fan to blow into the bottom of the laptop near where its heatsinks are, and I'm pretty sure that will actually do more. Running an AC unit in my room and dropping the temperature to 16°C (60.8°F) would do more than this. Cold weather would have about the same effect. I've basically done the most pointless thing imaginable, and I probably would've voided my warranty by now, not that it meant much to me. On the flip side of things, at least my laptop hasn't gone to the great supercomputer in the sky.

[Yoink]

I almost want to start communicating regularly via Steam, just so I have occasion to use some of the nifty little emoticons they now sell for "Steam points". Or at least, so I can sign off my every message with a happy or mad face from Death Road To Canada, haha.   

The profile backgrounds are pretty sweet, too. I spent a not-insignificant amount of time just now, going through the items from games I've played. That's one way to really make yourself realise how many games you have lying around your Steam library, many of whom haven't been played in years if at all... anyway, it was a tough pick, but I went with a gorgeous depiction of Revachol, the city/region Disco Elysium is set in.   
After that impulse buy I saw many other backgrounds I would have also liked, but DE's artwork just about brought tears to my eyes as I played with how bloody good it is, so I think it's a worthy choice.   

[Imic]

I almost want to start communicating regularly via Steam, just so I have occasion to use some of the nifty little emoticons they now sell for "Steam points". Or at least, so I can sign off my every message with a happy or mad face from Death Road To Canada, haha.   

Nooo! That’s how they suck you in! That’s their great and terrible bait to lure you to the deepest, darkest depths of their website where all the naaaaasty things live...

[MrRoboto75]

my profile still has the hugbot background from Tower of Guns.  Just in case someone else actually played that game.

[Lord Shonus]

Tower of Guns was interesting, but seemed to run out of variety a lot quicker than I expected.

[ChairmanPoo]

Yeah same here.

Tbh I'd rather go for Doom for a procedural shooter. Classic action and can run on a potato

[methylatedspirit]

This is more a 'holy shit' more than anything else. I present to you, the Ryzen 4800U (in red) compared to the 10th gen U-series i7s (in gray):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(Also, possible error: I highly doubt those are Geekbench 5 scores. More likely, it's Geekbench 4. My point still stands, though.)

(Source)

Is this feeling what it's like to witness the Core 2 Duo when it launched, which (to my knowledge) essentially rendered AMD's Athlon 64, and Intel's own Pentium 4 and D obsolete? What kind of voodoo black magic are they pulling here? Sure, extra cores are almost certainly a factor (8 cores on the Ryzen, 4 cores on the Intel), but keep in mind, those extra cores have to fit into the ~15W TDP (AMD cites a configurable TDP of 10-25W for the 4800U) of a typical notebook laptop. Even if I were to allow a 25W TDP, that is impressive.