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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • My condolences. And as much as I hate Posit/Workbench, some of that is on your IT department. If I’m reading your comment correctly, you’re having issues because it needs admin privileges to update some things, namely packages. That’s honestly a very simple fix, they just need to grant your user NTFS write permissions to the Rstudio/Workbench install directory locally (and maybe some registry keys, but that’s not definite). That’s it. It’s a 10-second permanent fix and no more UAC prompts for you.



  • What’s nightmarish about the installation? Is it because medical stuff is still on like Win XP?

    Anything more than the most basic bare-bones install of Workbench (formerly Rstudio) quickly turns nightmarish. Try setting it up on a Linux dedicated server with AD auth with auto-mounting of network shares per-user. Posit’s documentation isn’t great (or even agrees with itself across pages) even in the simplest best-case scenario, and if you deploy anything that’s even slightly complicated, it turns into a Hellscape. There’s a good chance you will end up on one of the Posit employees’ blog to read an incomplete explanation of setting up a feature because it’s entirely missing or incomplete in the documentation. This isn’t some crazy off-the-wall edge scenario either, it’s an (allegedly) supported configuration and would be a typical deployment scenario in a multi-user R environment.

    Their support is absolute shit too, it’s truly fucking atrocious. First-level support will not solve your issue, I promise you that, and you won’t get anyone who actually knows WTF they’re talking about until you’re escalated at least twice. And even then, they are very much up their own ass and have a VERY snobby attitude about the product, and always assume that it’s the user at fault, even when you provide absolute 100% proof that it’s their product at fault. It obviously couldn’t possibly be their Super Precious Perfect-in-Every-Way Golden God Product, because as we’ve previously established before, it is a Perfect Product Which Does No Wrong, Ever. They also love to try and shirk responsibility and say that X is not a supported configuration for literally everything, and then claim that the documentation must be wrong when you point out in their documentation that it is.

    Don’t even get me started on the Lovecraftian nightmare that is R package management. It’s even worse than the essay I just typed out, and they want to charge you essentially the entire Workbench license cost x2 to make it usable. Their logging is useless too, it has basically two settings, one of which is essentially “nothing,” and the other is “firehose of bullshit that you need to follow along in their source code to try to find anything useful.” That’s not an exaggeration, I actually had to do that to diagnose an issue and provide proof to them that yeah, it is your half-assed shit product that’s the problem.

    So yeah, if you’re not just Click-Click-Click-Next installing it, it very quickly becomes nightmarish. Posit desperately needs competition in the space, because they’re absolute shit, but they can be absolute shit with impunity since they don’t have any real competition.



  • SAME. I know without a doubt the brown cornucopia was part of the fruit logo.

    There is zero doubt in my mind. It’s literally how I learned what a cornucopia is.

    I was in 6th grade and our school was going to have a Christmas play, which involved some kids dressing as reindeer. The teacher showed us an example of the kind of sweatpants we’d need to wear, and they were Fruit of the Loom, still in the package. I asked the teacher what the brown fruit was, and she told me to look it up and that it was a cornucopia, except she said it like “Cornycopia,” which I couldn’t find in the dictionary until she told me it was spelled with a ‘u’ and not a ‘y’.

    I didn’t misremember that, I didn’t confuse it with Thanksgiving, etc. The only reason I know what a cornucopia is is because of that and how she mispronounced it.


  • Before I replace it with something that won’t catastrophically collapse when the wind blows the wrong way, I get some sort of sick satisfaction out of doing autopsies on the house-built-of-matchsticks “solutions” that users come up with and I don’t know why. Some of them are truly fascinating and make you wonder how someone could possibly arrive at that conclusion based on what they were actually try to achieve.

    It’s also why if I’m asked to implement something, my first question isn’t “When does this need to be done?,” it’s “What exactly is the problem you’re trying to solve?”

    What a user asks for and what they actually need very rarely intersect.





  • It would be better to our them on blast on social media since that sometimes gets the companies attention to try and fix PR.

    Works almost every time. I had a ticket with a vendor open at work for just about 3 months, and then only replies I’d gotten on the ticket was the “We’ve received your support request which we’ll promptly ignore!” autoresponse upon opening, and then another auto-response a month later saying the ticket was being assigned to another department. I’d replied to the ticket ~20 times asking for updates in that time.

    I finally got sick of essentially yelling into an empty room and called out the company, their marketing team, their support team, and their CEO on Twitter, making sure to @ each one of them in the message. I got a reply from their CEO and an actual human responded to the ticket less than an hour later.

    It’s shitty and a last resort, but it’s generally very effective.


  • I have a Hisense and had a similar experience. I was watching something fullscreen on an HDMI input, and then it suddenly switched inputs and showed a fullscreen firmware update prompt. I had no choice available other than to agree to update the firmware, no cancel button, couldn’t change inputs, nothing, the only choice was to update the firmware. So I unplugged the TV.

    About 10 seconds after I powered it back on, the exact same update prompt happened, still with no choice to decline it. I pulled power and booted it back up one more time just to be sure, met with the update prompt again.

    This made me very angry.

    The next time I powered it on, I had a packet capture running to see where it was phoning home. I created a firewall rule blocking all the hostnames it tried to connect to at startup, pulled the plug, and then booted it back up. No more update prompt, and it hasn’t happened again. Good thing they don’t download and pre-stage the new firmware, I guess.

    Let me know if you want the hostnames and I’ll PM them to you.






  • They really don’t, though. Inclusion/exclusion operators work most of the time, but it’ll still return results with explicitly-excluded keywords. It also fucks up results by returning entries with similar words to your query, even when you double-quote a part of the search term. Advanced queries that use booleans and logical AND/OR don’t work at all anymore, that functionality has been completely removed. It returns what it thinks you want, not what you actually want, even when explicitly crafting a query to be as specific as possible.

    I use Kagi for search now and it’s 1000x better, especially when researching technical issues; it’s like when Google actually respected your search terms and query as a whole.




  • The EU has no enforcement ability outside of their own borders regardless of what they tell you.

    So uh, you think Google doesn’t operate or do business in the EU? They have 20+ offices there. In the example I gave, they would 100000% be subject to GDPR, fullstop; it’s not a question, matter of opinion, or debate. They’d even be subject to it if an EU citizen was physically inside the US on vacation and opened a Fi account while they were here.

    You EU guys are brainwashed and gullible to a level on par with N Koreans.

    I’m from Virginia and knowing compliance stuff (GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS, NIST 800-*, etc) is a requirement of my job.


  • Weird. In the email I received, I just clicked the first link and a page opened letting me know I had opted out.

    Yeah, not for me. It just went to the main Fi account page when I actually got it to open instead of it trying to open in the Fi app. Maybe an A/B test or something, I don’t know.

    What I do know is that I just switched wireless carriers, because fuck all that noise. That shit really rubbed me the wrong way. I might be on the road to completely divorcing myself from Google at this point.