Jun 8, 2025
Tough problems
"The two hardest problems in software engineering are: variable naming, cache invalidation, and catching off-by-one errors."
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Tough problems
"The two hardest problems in software engineering are: variable naming, cache invalidation, and catching off-by-one errors."
Today, While I was in the middle of typing an email, Microsoft Outlook 365 popped up a window demanding feedback. And boy did I have shit to say.
I had to keep the swearing out, because apparently any report I make is duplicated and sent to the IT department. But the text I ended up sending follows:
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God, I have so much to tell you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. First: Stop messing with everything. Outlook works fine, but you keep changing things that don't need changing. Moving buttons around. Turning on features that I have explicitly turned off for not working before. Just today, you turned on the auto-suggestions again, which would be great if it actually worked. Instead, when it suggests anything you don't accept, it just mashes words together. Do you know how it feels to be typing a professional email and you miss one of those failures and send your email anyway? I mean, to be fair, I caught ten, so I still got a 90% on the ol' Microsoft-sanctioned-typo-factory. But the person I emailed doesn't see it that way, do they? They see that I mashed three words together like there was a wasp on the space bar.
Plus, my signature keeps getting deleted. Not just switched to nothing, but completely deleted. Which means I have to re-make that every time your developers get bored and decide to re-haul a program that absolutely never needs re-hauling. I remember once a couple months ago the attachment button just disappeared, and there was no way for me to attach a final bill. I had to actually use my personal gmail address to send an email to a customer because for about 16 hours, it was impossible to attach anything.
But, you say, I should have sent error reports. And I did. But the question in my mind always comes back to "why are you messing with something that does not need changing?" The only thing that ever happens is that you change aesthetics. Colors. This time the boxes are gone. Do you think you're at risk of losing customers? Do you think you have to keep things new and fresh? No. People are shackled to you. You have a quasi-monopoly and a stranglehold on a whole lot of workflows. People cannot leave you. In the world of word processing and spreadsheets, you are Alcatraz. You don't have to change things to keep people here.
Instead, long-time bugs continue to plague everything I do within this hell-suite of software. Sometimes when I try to start typing in the body of the email, outlook decides that, no, I don't want to type an email! I want to send the other emails in my inbox to the archive, where, if I don't notice this, they will sit and fester forever. There's also the bug where I create an email and it duplicates it and puts it in my drafts. Or the bug where it just creates a blank email and puts it in my drafts. Do you want to know how many blank emails I've deleted from my drafts folder? There are not enough numbers in existence to count this.
If you REALLY want to know how to improve Outlook and this message isn't just going into the wilderness like all those notebooks from the hit-TV-show-where-nobody-liked-the-ending, LOST, then please. Listen. From the bottom of my heart and from the top of my lungs: Stop changing everything. Nothing needs changing. Just run a good service. Get your programmers onto fixing longstanding bugs instead of trying to make an email and scheduling program look like a fashion show in Paris.
And if I seem a little ticked off in this message, it's because your request for feedback popped up in the middle of me compiling an email, which was just about halfway done. Outlook, in all its wisdom, decided that I didn't actually need that email and went ahead and deleted all the text in it. All of it. So after I finish giving you an earful, I'm going to have to retype it.
Hope this helps. Have a wonderful day.
anyone else have a bugged ask inbox? how do i fix it?
GameMaker Ubuntu Beta IDE running inside of a container is kinda buggy
What is this :
Like, what am I supposed to do with this. A restart of the ide fixed things, but how did this even happen?
we’re the chonkiest boi on dreamwidth :’)
https://dw-maintenance.dreamwidth.org/89826.html?thread=4078562#cmt4078562 https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/568617.html?thread=3468436009#cmt3468436009 https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/568617.html?thread=3468343081#cmt3468343081
Pretty sure it is NOT supposed to do that—
Tumblr on my desktop just glitched and this is the best thing that’s happened to me today.