1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Personally, when I'm looking around for different software, as someone that's in-between unfamiliar and familiar with tech: if it doesn't have an installer/executable/apk and only describes a way to build/compile from source, I have to imagine it wasn't intended for non-devs to start with.
Yet somehow I seem to find my way to software like that occasionally. ๐คทโโ๏ธ
And that's probably the case.
When someone creates a hobby project, they might not immediately have the time to spend on making a convenient package or executable because it's still in early development, still buggy and unsupported, or it's targeting only people capable of compiling code.
Or it uses Code that's publicly available but you aren't allowed to redistribute.
Many people are very uncomfortable with the degree to which their work and life depend on computer systems they do not understand. They feel vulnerable to computer problems, pressured into depending on more tech than they really want, and do not believe they have the knowledge or resources to remedy problems with it.
So when something goes wrong, they feel helpless. This is not unfounded, but it can often make the problem worse.
Depending on the person, this can lead to blaming or blame-dodging behavior. IT folks โ did you ever ask someone what the error message was and they say "It's not my fault!" or "It's not my job to fix it, you're the computer person!" ... as if blame ever helped!
The "tech person" differs not so much in knowledge but in having a different emotional response to tech doing a weird/broken thing: when something goes wrong, they jump to curiosity. It's not "I already know how to fix this" but "We don't know what happened here yet, but we can find out." Knowledge comes from exercising this curiosity.
But this is not something that everyone can do, because people who feel unsafe don't typically go to curiosity to resolve their unsafety.
If only they had any idea how complex and unreliable the non tech things their lives depend on and they imagine they know are.
I agree, but also computers break differently. Using a computer is just like other everyday activities like driving a car, until something goes wrong
Imagine if you broke down, but you didn't know if it was 'the car' (call a mechanic), or the road, or the traffic lights...
Imagine if you broke down
soo just another Tuesday? ๐ฅฒ
Basically everything.
Like, even filling out a basic Excel sheet can be difficult to some people who have absolutely no experience in it.
Look, I'm a software engineer, and I still fucking hate filling out spreadsheets. I'm honestly at the point where I'd rather make everything a QUERY function than deal with ARRAYFORMULA bullshit. Honestly, if Google Sheets could add SQL language formatting, we'd be golden.
I said basic Excel sheet.
