At least for python, I typically just add another RUN statement instead of changing a file used in a layer up the layer stack. That way the change is fast.
Then when I need to commit, I'll update the requirements file or whatever would cause all the layers to rebuild. And CI can rebuild the whole thing while I move to something else.
It is a bit of a pain, but the other benefits of containers are probably worth the trade off.
Lets use this as an example. I would personally like to have a list of exact results. Separately - a list of similar images would maybe be nice. But tbh, 99.99% of the time with reverse image search, I am trying to play detective, not find similar images. I am usually looking to see the first, original source of something. Or maybe other places I can find this image.
I will point out that detective stuff like this is crucial to try to prevent being catfished, or phished. I am not ignorant that it is also a concern for those who don't want to be found, for privacy or safety reasons; however some threat actor could just find a less public reverse image search I'm sure.
Not really. It's not that uncommon for a support/forum/feedback site to use a separate account. It just means that they didn't have time, didn't want to spend the money, or couldn't link the support software to their main user account system.
I think these days, the average WordPress site runner is trying to find a cheap/free. Non-technical solution.
I help out with a sports league who run a couple wordpress sites.
- One, its totally the wrong CMS for how they use it.
- Two, they have almost no ability to diagnose and debug issues themselves. Honestly 80% of the issues that get raised to me are even just solved by clicking "keep plugin automatically updated"
They really just want a CMS that allows them to share announcements, post schedules and where to show up to play.
But it gets the job done, for cheap, and there is a decent community on plugins and themes.
Wordpress was originally popular because of its openness and community right? I wonder if that's still the platform it is.
No I don’t see it as an open platform with a strong community. Matt has demonstrated he will shut off features for large swaths of sites where is the openness there? The community plugins are loyal to a few popular plugins that all have pay walls if you want to do more than the basics. Any time Wordpress implements a new feature they have to do so it doesn’t completely crush the plugin community. Like site maps for example are trapped behind using a wordpress hook or using a plugin like Yoast to customize them.
I'll second the sibling poster here by saying anything useful you want to do with WordPress will probably have a non-negligible cost, and usually a subscription. WooCommerce for instance requires a subscription to add a minimum quantity to a product! I volunteer for a non-profit that uses it, and it's absolutely insane how many plugins will give you a little for free but charge $5/month or $50/year for just slightly more features.
About a decade ago, there was a huge kerfluffle about making the plugin directory include pricing and payments (like an app store). Matt was hugely against it. I think they did themselves a huge disservice. Pricing is opaque until you install the plugin, often requiring you to go "off site" to install the paid version (or it silently uses a different plugin repository). Lastly, there is no quality control or even ensuring that best/ethical practices are being followed.
So, you end up with this scummy feeling every time you install a plugin and discover its pricing.
If you were to guide them today, what would you set them up that's not WP that gives functionality similar to wp+woo?
(asking for someone who has a site using wp+woo. I don't plan to switch us - the switching cost is too high to be worth it - but I do want to have something in my pocket for the future.)
I went with wordpress for a website for a small charity I help with, I'm not usually a web guy but I used it years ago and, hey, it's open source right?
I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source. Even Automattic's own jetpack seems nothing more than a connector to a proprietary SaaS.
I still don't understand how the new template system is supposed to work either.
Maybe I'd feel different if I was doing this for a company, but I was doing this for free for a charity with near zero budget.
The only real competition seems to be ghost though, and it doesn't even have a real plugin system. If you want something simple like a event calendar you need to host it entirely separately.
> I still don't understand how the new template system is supposed to work either.
Oh gosh I had to use a blog post to even find documentation on it. It’s basically a pile of hidden legos, for a simple table with columns you have to essentially implement it yourself with a few helper methods to help out. Then there’s the new system based on react because they could that has an entirely separate implementation stack. Also for a simple table you end up implementing all the functions and JSX yourself.
> I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source.
I haven't been doing WordPress for a few years now, but plugin maintenance does take up either money or time.
"Freemium" is how everyone gets the end customer to contribute something if they want something readily off-the-shelf, considering how low the barrier of entry for plugin installation is.
There is chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml but many options shown there are nonfunctional. The relevant option is listed but I'm not sure if setting it to false has any effect.
Edit: Just found out that on that link above, you can set general.aboutConfig.enable to true to enable about.config.
It looks like the xml page and the about.config one are the same, as the modifications I made are synced.
Thank you so much for that! I was missing the ability to configure a very important option for me in Stable (layout.css.prefers-color-scheme.content-override), but couldn't keep using Nightly because of its instability... You're a lifesaver!
The standard source comes with malware, and the one big alternative comes with malware. Such is the state of the tech industry (even nonprofits) in 2024. Random individuals like Raymond Hill are far more trustworthy than large organizations.
I don't want to pay for a subscription for software I use thrice a year. I was looking forward to having Affinity's suite be the replacement, where I could buy it, and use it.
However I don't want to support another company that is inevitably going to go subscription. Since they've been bought by canva, it's just a matter of time.
I even went so far as to get Affinity Photo being able to start on Wine. But lost interest since their acquisition.
(I'm sure people will question why I don't just use inkscape, krita, or gimp. And its because all of them have a subpar vector experience IMO)
I ended up grabbing the Affinity bundle since it's half off despite concerns about Canva. I'd expect even if they end up moving to a subscription I'd at least have the versions I bought for an extended amount of time. I still have a working copy of Photoshop CS 5 as well. Hopefully we see Affinity remain committed to affordable non subscription plans but if they don't I think the one time purchase will last me a long time. If they put out a version 3 without subscription and it's compelling i'll upgrade, if not i'll continue to use 2 for I'm sure years to come.
Corel's (or whatever they call themselves now) stuff is generally pretty ok, and most of their stuff still lets you buy it outright.
I don't know much about Affinity Photo but Paint Shop Pro and Aftershot have been "good enough" for the limited uses I have for photo editing (though I'm definitely far from a professional). CorelDraw is, I think, a very decent vector drawing program if nothing else.
CorelDraw is great, but for years they were also subscription-only. In the last six months or so they finally started offering a single-price license again--at a prohibitive level.
I bought the previous single-price version years ago, and it's so stale that I prefer to use Inkscape, despite the more limited feature set, and I've been using the Affinity suite as a more professional replacement.
Now it looks like they let you buy it again, but at $550, I'm still giving them the finger. Their upgrade price used to be ~$200; I would pay that once ever 3-4 years or so, and consider that a reasonable expense to get a good product and have it available when I did need it. But for $550, I'd need to be planning on keeping it for something like a decade to get a similar value--and it's too much to justify buying at my limited usage level.
All of these subscription services should get over themselves and allow you to rent them for occasional usage for a reasonable amount of money. If I could give them $20 for intermittent (time-limited? operation-limited?) use, with no "auto-renewal", I might do that every time I actually needed the product.
But no, they need to be greedy and demand that you pay for a year of usage in advance (or by using deceptive practices like Adobe above).
I've used Paint Shop Pro, and I really don't like it. I can use Corel PhotoPaint and Affinity Photo, and they're fine, but PSP makes me crazy when I try to use it. I'd almost rather use Gimp.
Fair enough. I've never paid full price for any Corel product. They're frequently on Humble Bundle where you get a bunch of them on the order of like $30 total. It looks like right now there's even a sale going on: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/corel-productivity-cre...
My CorelDraw license is for 2020, so not super up to date, but I've generally liked it. I've not tried the Essentials package.
I'm stuck with CorelDraw X8 which dates to 2016. If they were selling a buy-it-once license in 2020, I wasn't aware of it. I swear they had switched to subscription-only by then? But maybe it happened that year and I missed the last opportunity to buy a permanent license.
Last time I looked at Essentials, it looked to me like they had hamstrung it too much. I don't remember the specific restrictions they put on it, but I didn't want what they were selling. Might be worth another look with the Humble Bundle though.
I bought the Affinity suite and have gotten good value out of it. If at some point in the future new versions go to a subscription model, I just won't buy them.
Is that the exact situation that subscription pricing (in principle) solves? If you only use it thrice a year then you can pay for it as you go instead of needing pay for the thing outright.
But some of these subscriptions, including the one I think this thread is about, will obligate you for a period of time. This happened to me, signed up to a trial of Adobe to test a graphic designers pc, once it ticked over to paid, I was told that I had a 12 month sub, just billed monthly. (I screeched and pulled my hair out and went all karen and they ended it, but they wouldnt do it twice)
The "Apps on Tap" enthusiasts got absolutely mogged by Adobes commercial reality.
Yep. You’re usually signed up for an “annual plan, paid monthly”. I apparently am and wasn’t even aware of it until I tried to cancel it one time.
To cancel, you need to immediately pay out 50% of the rest of the year. And you’ll lose access to the products at the end of the month.
So unless you’re not even getting 50% of the subscription cost worth of value out of it, it pretty much makes more sense to continue it and cancel just before renewal.
As soon as you run over that 7 day trial, you’ve got a 30 day window a year from now where you can cancel without penalty. Miss it or forget? Set a better reminder for next year…
none of these companies offer monthly subscriptions - they offer a 12-month subscription billed monthly or annually (with a slight discount), your choice.
This is adobe's whole schtick with the cancellation fees for example. You pay 50% of your remaining subscription balance as a termination fee. So if you subscribe 3 times a year for a month and then immediately cancel you are paying more than a yearly subscription.
Even a 1 month subscription for 2 hours of need is too much though. Thrice a year, for a few hours each... But have to pay 3 full months usage is nuts. 12+ months is even crazier.
Bill per hour would be OK.
Or buy once, give me 1 year of free updates but I can use it as-is forever (like intellij) is also fair.
I use Lightroom and Photoshop very irregularly. I now can't access Photoshop 5 that was installed on my Macbook because it doesn't work with the current MacOS. So now not only can I not deauthorize the license to free it up for my Windows machine, I can't actually use it either.
I keep older hardware running older OS's for just this reason.
There was one version of Apple's Photos for MacOS that has not been topped in terms of its retouch tool (actually got much, much worse). Since I restore a lot of old scanned-in family photos I keep this aging iMac just for photo editing.
It might be a bit esoteric ... but the Photos that shipped after macOS Sierra introduced a clever new editing view built upon, I think, CoreImage so that it could do all the processing of levels, temperature, etc. extraordinarily fast — leveraging the hardware — for real-time changes as you dragged the sliders.
Unfortunately the retouch tool in Photos for cloning, fixing scratches, etc. took a huge step backward in performance. Like it became unusable.
So simply for dealing with old scanned family photos that have lots of scratches, tears, etc., I have stuck with Sierra Photos on my one machine.
>However I don't want to support another company that is inevitably going to go subscription
why not buy Affinity now and use it until you need to upgrade? unless there's some horrible TOS, I'm sure that tool as is will last you 5+ years before some new hit feature drops in.
Completely agree! I also refuse to put gas in my car because I know that prices will go up later...
Or on a more serious note: I use Affinity professionally (previously PhotoShop). Why would I care the slightest about what they might or might not do with their pricing model in the future? I need software that delivers right now.
If you don't want to pay for the car, why are you complaining about car dealerships? I don't think anyone here is opposed to the concept of paying for professional tooling in any way, shape, nor form.
For the same reason that you would care with Photoshop or Premier or Lightroom; you're investing money in learning and building your workflow around a tool that is guaranteed to go down the subscription and enshittification path.
Your computer will not explode if or when Affinity changes to a subscription model. You'll still have the software and can use it until the next ice age if you please.
Well, until there's an OS update. Most of us have gone down this road before - the old software works until it doesn't, it runs on the old hardware until that doesn't, it's usable until it's not. The actuarial table for any given software release is north of 5 years and south of 10.
This is true on Mac but Windows is remarkably good at allowing most old software to still run. I still run games and professional applications from the 90s on Win11 and only occasionally need to set "compatibility mode" or change resolution. I haven't even had to resort to running a VM with an old version of Windows yet (although that's always an option).
And that's exactly what subscription model kills. Stuff only works for as long as you pony up - and it's only the newest, stuff. When the new version turns to be less useful and more bloated than previous versions, you're out of luck, because eventually the old version won't authenticate against license servers.
Not to mention, the push to run everything in the cloud, via the browser, means that for a lot of software, you literally have zero flexibility and control.
>The actuarial table for any given software release is north of 5 years and south of 10.
even at full price, $200 for 5 years of usage from a professional tool seems pretty good for me. That's $3.33/month if you want to convert to the subscription model way or thinking.
No way any potential subscription model would be cheaper here if you are in it for the long haul.
We're talking about professional software. If you're a professional you have a machine dedicated to that work. If a software update will break software you've paid for and need to use, you don't update that machine. Between 5 and 10 years is a perfectly reasonable run time for paid pro software. You can also keep the old machine around for the software and have a new machine for other needs.
> If you're a professional you have a machine dedicated to that work. If a software update will break software you've paid for and need to use, you don't update that machine.
Yes, that's exactly the right thing to do. Only then the security folks will start whining about factories and shipping terminals being controlled by ancient PCs with WinXP (not to mention power plants with hardware and software older than most of us on this site). In fact, the security folks and the business folks align enough on it that professional software is force-feeding you updates too, and you can't do anything about it unless you're a multinational megacorp and can afford to make bespoke deals with OS vendors.
> Between 5 and 10 years is a perfectly reasonable run time for paid pro software.
5 is the minimum. Legal minimum for some documents, in some cases.
Still, the problem usually isn't upgrades per se, it's that universally these days, newer versions of products are almost always inferior in terms of functionality, performance and ergonomics. So, I might be easily able to afford refreshing my software tools after 5 ways of using them to earn a living, but then I discover they all went to shit and new versions are worse than the versions I have (and even worse, half of the software is now subscription-only).
> So, I might be easily able to afford refreshing my software tools after 5 ways of using them to earn a living,
That's just how all of tech works. Some pockets of software may be able to be fundamentally unchanged over decades, but the fact is that the software I used 5 years ago is not the same as the software I used now. Your choices are the same as ever:
- Don't upgrade for as long as possible
- Upgrade and eat the inefficiency cost for a while until replacements are found/made
- go the FOSS route and either do it yourself or rely on the goodwill of the community until its inevitable next schism.
There is no perfect solution unless you're willing to become a domain expert in that specific kind of tech and roll your own.
The only silver lining is that most of the fundamentals remain the same so you're not starting from square one. Whatever new web stack is being used today is still probably based upon React, which is based on JQuery, which is based Javascript. ES6 isn't a complete recvolution from ES3 (even if there are new major concepts to learn over those 15 years). So you have some knowledge transfer of seeing where and how things.
If I was successful with my career, I hope I would have saved up 50 dollars in 10 years so I could buy the new version of the software or buy an old used computer to run my old version on.
I just don't understand why you're using your own time to defend predatory business models that inevitably screw over the user. You can't just sit on an old piece of software and expect it to work forever because the companies do not want that. I know you're not being malicious but we have so many receipts of this happening. People have plenty of reasons to not want to support companies doing this, and to be wary when they move in this direction.
10 years down the line their DRM stops working because you're on locked down, ancient hardware and they don't want to support your OS anymore. Steam is relatively benevolent and now there are games you bought and paid for that require a version of windows that steam no longer supports. Maybe they just do what autodesk did, revoke your perpetual license, and tell you to buy a subscription?
Maybe you need to replace your motherboard and it counts as a "new" computer, and it no longer runs on. Maybe they take away your ability to reinstall it on another device because offline authorization no longer is enabled, and their online services don't support your old license. Both of these were done by reason studio. I hope you didn't buy a $400 perpetual license and expect it to work until the ice age.
Maybe they change the ToS like blizzard, and you now have to agree to the new ToS to continue using the software you bought and paid for?
Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate amount of money that you never agreed to, like the whole unity fiasco?
I am so sick of people pretending the free market of software isn't rigged against the user. Every single company screws us over and I hate to see people defend it because they think you can just opt out of it.
And I don't understand why you would write such a long rant about something that hasn't happened and "get sick of people". Learn to love yourself and you can love others.
I'm happy to pay for quality software, both professional and consumer. With Affinity it took exactly one project to recoup much more than the cost ($50) of the software, and I expect that to be true for 99% of graphics professionals.
> Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate amount of money that you never agreed to
Yeah, and then I'll laugh my ass off at them. It's like me writing that anybody who reads this comment owes me a hundred dollars. Now you read it, now you pay. Or not.
Part of growing up is to understand that other people are unique and can't be blamed for what somebody else has done. A child will not understand this, because to him it is only "me and other people" that exists. Every company has to be blamed for the wrongs that some companies did, even the competitors. Every woman has to be blamed for the wrongs that some woman did in the past. Every person who disagrees with me on the internet is exactly the same person who has mistreated me in the past, they make me sick. And so on.
It's the easiest thing in the world to be distrustful. You're never going to be wrong, because you'll never take that risk and you'll effectively repel all people who don't like to be treated as if they were dishonest or be insulted at random. But what kind of people will you be left with?
>You can't just sit on an old piece of software and expect it to work forever because the companies do not want that.
also because users don't want that. I don't think any of us would necessarily be satisfied playing Doom 1993 on Windows 95 because 256KB of RAM is all we'll ever need.
I'm not even saying it's a bad way to live, to be honest; that's just not how user demand works. They'll inevitably want Doom 2/3/4/etc. until the franchise jumps the shark or stagnates into nothingness.
> People have plenty of reasons to not want to support companies doing this, and to be wary when they move in this direction.
Well we're both probably cynically minded here on this topic. It's equally unlikely, but I've taken the path of walking away wherever I can for companies that keep pulling off these stunts. I've more or less de-googled myself over the last year outside of mail and Youtube, for instance. At some point, consumers need to put their foot down, but they won't. How many times does it need to happen before we evaluate who's really the fool?
>Steam is relatively benevolent and now there are games you bought and paid for that require a version of windows that steam no longer supports. Maybe they just do what autodesk did, revoke your perpetual license, and tell you to buy a subscription?
Yes, that's why I don't even trust the benevolent actors for stuff I really care about. If I can find it on GOG, it's likely DRM free and I have no worries about what Steam's runtime looks like 20 years from now. The internet may flame me for that mentality, but I remember when Google was in similar acclaim, down to their long buried "Do No Evil" motto.
Again, not perfect, but the worst thing to do is dump all your eggs in one basket. Always be on the lookout for your own interests and be ready to jump.
>I am so sick of people pretending the free market of software isn't rigged against the user.
I agree with you the same way I agree that locks in an ideal world should not be required. They shouldn't be; I should have a reasonable sense of privacy, respect and security among my fellow man. an unexpected knock on the door shouldn't give me anxiety over it possibbly being an irrelevant sellsman, a crazy relative, or simply a package I forgot about.
But I'll keep my keys ready in the meantime until that ideal time comes. I can only look out for myself until then.
That man baffles me.
He spent 16 years running every street in Philadelphia, starting and ending from home.