Complaints

Check out the gratitude page for the opposite of this page, if you want some passivity.

Ever hear of the phrase "death by a thousand paper cuts"? This page is the literal manifestation of that idea. This is my place to complain about the little things in life, and the not so little things in life.

Most of the things here aren't big enough to cause me to hate everything, but when combined together even a paper cut can cause you to hurt.

• Big existential stuff
• Software
  • Desktop/laptop
  • Mobile
  • Web
• Misc

Big existential stuff

I guess I should put this at the top, since these things are pretty much the most important problems in our world right now, according to me. I expect none of these to actually be fixed, since our world is chock full of madness and some guy complaining about it on his shitty little website won't do jack shit.

Fuck it. Rapid fire list:

• 150,000+ people die every day, even when most of them don't want to.
• Cryonics is a good idea, and we need to adopt it at a mass scale.
• Climate change is real, and it's going to cause human progress to regress by {arbitrarily large number}.
• The absurd complexity of modern life is going to keep causing more and more problems.
• Nearly all software is shit, and it's only going to get worse until one day it causes some real nasty problems.
• And the big one: AI alignment is a hard problem, and we need to solve it before something goes horribly wrong.

Software

Software in general is horrible. It's bloated and gross and just doesn't work most of the time. How insane is it that one of the standard cures for broken software is to turn it off and turn it back on? Nobody else sees how crazy that is?

If you want to know more about what I'm using, check out the wiki's using page.

Desktop / laptop

st (terminal):

• With the scrollback patch, if you end up using vim and then exiting, scrolling back will sometimes show the vim content you were messing with interspersed with the actual stuff you wanted to scroll back to. Why does it do this? I don't know!

vim:

• When editing a c source file (and only c source files) and being in normal mode while the cursor is next to a character (like an open bracket, let's say) and you press O to open up a new line above you and enter insert mode, for some reason (unknown to me) the thing stalls for a full second like it's waiting for another command. It doesn't actually impede work, but it's annoying. (UPDATE: This appears to happen in markdown files too... Why???).

• When typing in a markdown file, or any file really, sometimes vim will "stall" like it's a lag spike in a demanding video game, except it's just putting characters on the screen. This seems to happen more often the longer your lines are, but don't be fooled, it also happens in totally empty files that just started getting text added to them. I've tried so many different things to fix this, and none of them worked super well. I even disabled all configs and shit using vim -u NONE and still it was doing this. The point of a text editor is to edit text; how do you shit the bed so bad that it lags when imputing text? Huh?

  (Note that I checked that this was happening using other terminal emulators, and even fucking gvim. Same thing. It's a vim problem, not a "Tim is just stupid" problem. I think.)

  This un-fixable lag spike shit is the reason I stopped using vim and switched to nvi. Seriously.

• When you use ctrl+^ to alternate between your most recently visited buffer, for some insane reason it puts your cursor on the beginning of the line you were on. I think this might be because ^ puts it at the beginning of the line, but it's still shit design and you should feel bad.

Firefox:

• Why the hot holy hell can't my vim keybinding extension (vim vixen) do things until the entire webpage is loaded? I have to sit there and wait before I can actually use the functionality. People might have slow connections, assholes!

Debian/bash/fzf:

• I was trying to get the bash keybindings for fzf to work correctly for completing the history. Great stuff, super useful. Except the script you're supposed to source isn't in the right spot. Instead it's in /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/key-bindings.bash for some insane reason.

Mobile

Slide for Reddit:

• Bullshit. There are apparently some weird "gifs" that play sound, even though that's not supposed to be possible for gifs. Whatever, they're marked as gifs, and yet I can't mute them. That's like the most basic functionality of a media player, and you fucked it up.

  This has been fixed in recent versions, but they just introduced a bug where some images (from "reddit galleries" or whatever they're called) just won't load at all. Great. Good job guys.

F-Droid:

• Why is it that when I press the "show apps" button on the "Updates" tab it doesn't respond until I tap it a few times? Or, no, excuse me; It only does this weird behavior sometimes, like you're trying to make a literal skinner box to get me to press this button over and over.

• Why does your app store take so fucking long to update things? I've been waiting for the update that supposedly fixes that Slide for Reddit issue for over a week now. You're an app store, your whole job is to supply apps. What are you even doing?

• Right. And now you're making me wait an entire minute and a half to update the repository. I get that you're trying to keep it privacy friendly by having it load the entire thing each time, but how long does it really take to load metadata for 3000 fucking apps? That's like child's play for a network, right? Am I missing something?

Clock+:

• Somehow, when I try to type in a time for the timer and I start with a 0, it causes a crash. Like I wouldn't want to make timers smaller than 10 minutes or something.

Web

Everything:

• And I don't mean a website called "everything" either. The web in general is just so fucking awful that it needs it's own fucking blog post, or wiki page. It's Evil, bloated, slow, and stupid. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. Hell, I'm ashamed of my own website, just because it has to exist with everything else.

No, seriously. Everything:

• Why is every page so damn slow? If I go to a news article you are, at most, trying to serve me an image to go along with my text. So why would it ever take 20 seconds to start up? What? Sure you need ads to function (say hello to uBlock Origin), but you couldn't possibly demand ads that don't ruin the experience of your website?

www.timtimestim.com:

• What the hell am I thinking? This place looks like baby's first website. Like some 3rd grader just watched "intro to html part 001" from an Indian guy on YouTube, and now knows how to make a page with no CSS or design sense. And yet I did this intentionally, for minimalism and shit. Great job Tim.

github.com:

• Why is it that the first thing I see when I visit your website is a "please sign up here!" form? You only sign up for a website, like, once (unless you have a lot of alt accounts). The act of signing up is far far far far far less common than the act of signing into your website. So why is the sign in button hidden in the top right hand corner without even a border around it? What the hell is wrong with you?

wordpress:

• Can't schedule updates for static pages. Like an archive page updating when a new post comes out. I'm sure that there's ways around this, but it's stupid.

Misc complaints

Stupid fucking drivers:

• I know that road rage and shit is stupid. I try my hardest to keep my cool while driving, for my safety and other's. But, come on, people. Learn to go the speed limit. Learn to accelerate faster than a snail. Learn to stop texting and driving. Pay attention. Christ.

The masks provided at my work:

• This is the middle of the COVID pandemic, and I like to wear a mask while I'm out and doing things, which includes my place of employment. But the mask provided by my job are shit in the extreme. I can't wear them without fogging up my glasses, even if I mess with the nose pipe cleaner shit that's supposed to prevent that. The fabric is stiff and grates. The straps dig into my ears like a sadistic bitch. It's just so bad.