this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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[–] frezik@midwest.social 152 points 2 weeks ago (23 children)

I also hate the way "algorithm" has taken over the public consciousness. You can find people unironically saying "I don't want any algorithm in my social media feed", which is a nonsensical statement.

[–] kamen@lemmy.world 65 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

People are onto something though - there's been a noticeable shift from social media just showing you your feed in a chronological manner to it showing you personally tailored content that shuffles on each refresh and aims to hook you into endless doomscrolling. I understand perfectly well what's an algorithm, but good luck explaining to people that it's not that specific thing.

[–] andioop@programming.dev 20 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way. I'm not sure if they are immune to doomscrolling and actually have gotten it to work in a way that serves them and doesn't involve doomscrolling, or if they are doomscrolling and okay with it. But for me, I really wish I could go back to the chronological feed era.

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 28 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.

Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.

One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you're doing that, though, you're probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there's been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?

It's a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Letting the user decide? If the user decided that they liked fly fishing 8 stars and mother-in-law 0 stars, then the algorithm would show mother-in-law once a week at best and fly fishing 8x out of 10 posts.

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[–] Fabian@lemmy.zip 47 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I think it's the same concept as when people say that they don't want any chemicals in their food. You know what they mean, but in a technical sense the statement is nonsensical.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 10 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, I don't like that one, either.

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[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 16 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

If you walk with algorithm, you won't attract the worm.

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[–] _stranger_@lemmy.world 87 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I call everything a script. Makes the Java devs real mad. Makes the PM's super confused.

[–] drkt@scribe.disroot.org 62 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

A million-line project spread over a hundred files

It's a script!

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 40 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

sqlite is technically just one C source file, so that's definitely a script.

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 weeks ago

GNU Autotools: yes.

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 63 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

See also the client camera movement guide:

collapsed inline media

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 46 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

This is ridiculous. There's no way a client calls a dolly a "pan".

That's obviously zooming.

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[–] Rubanski@lemm.ee 12 points 2 weeks ago

A Pan-o-rama

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[–] SculptusPoe@lemmy.world 60 points 2 weeks ago (12 children)

I fought hard against that for years. I still only use 'app' for phone programs, but I stopped correcting people every time they used the term for anything else. It isn't technically wrong, but it grates on my nerves for some reason.

[–] pmk@lemmy.sdf.org 29 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If someone told me to use the fdisk app I'd be confused.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 14 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Use the ls app.

Then use the cd app.

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[–] SleepingInTraffic@feddit.uk 57 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)
[–] drolex@sopuli.xyz 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

What about a process? File gone wild?

[–] whatwhatwhatwhat@lemmy.world 32 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I’d call that a file loaded to memory

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[–] fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 36 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

What I hate even more, is that the morons who can't read more than two syllables decided to shorten "application" to "app", but now I only ever hear people reading that as "ay pee pee"! What was the fucking point?

[–] piranhaconda@mander.xyz 42 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I've literally never heard anyone call it A.P.P. (and I mean that literally literally, not figuratively literally)

Is this a specific cultural thing? A generational thing? Geography based slang? Why would anyone do this.

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[–] Capsicones@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Chinese phonology doesn't allow for the pronunciation of "app", for example. I see a lot of Chinese people spelling it as "APP", and pronouncing it accordingly. It's kinda funny to me, since the Mandarin word "yingyong" is only two syllables. "APP" just seems more cumbersome by all account, yet it has become inexplicably popular.

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[–] Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com 36 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

On the flipside, "Bot" is the backend for almost everything that I've dealt with recently.

"We need the data moved from X to Y, can someone make a bot for that?"

Internal suffering

"... Yes. We can setup an API between X and Y."

"Great! We also want a bot to generate daily reports from Y"

Suffering intensifies

"... Ok."

I don't even try to fight it anymore.

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Um excuse me the preferred term is "AI agent" if you want outside investment

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[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 35 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (7 children)

And now the kids don't know what a file path is anymore. Legit my wife is a professor, and she gets adeer in the headlight look when she is helping students debug code and she mentions a file path not being right in there code.

Serious response, no joke... what's a file path?

These are sophomores and Juniors in college.

[–] Piatro@programming.dev 31 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

These are sophomores and Juniors in college.

... Who grew up in a world where computer internals were abstracted away so you never needed to know what a file was or even that they exist. I wouldn't know what a file was either if I didn't grow up in exactly the right time frame and have a dad who hoarded DOS PCs.

[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 14 points 2 weeks ago

Oh no, I get why they don't know what one is. It just makes teaching coding to them very difficult.

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[–] myrmidex@slrpnk.net 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Meh every generation has its quirks. My college class in 2000 spent 1 whole week going over the Windows Start menu...

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[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 34 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yes but imo patch is now update

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[–] bier@feddit.nl 33 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

In the Netherlands basically everyone uses whatsapp. In the beginning people would say send me a whatsapp or something like that. But pretty quickly people started to shorten it to just app. So people will say stuff like I just got an app (instead of message), it drives me nuts. Like my family chat group is called "app group".

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 13 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

In Italy people loves start up companies because they think they all make apps. And they write is as "Start apps"

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[–] Phen@lemmy.eco.br 31 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

A long time ago I joined a new remote-first company and in my first month they made an event where they brought in all employees from all over the world for a week at a farm hotel for a mix or meetings and leisure activities.

In one specific meeting the CEO was talking app this app that and I was very confused. The product was a server side program that had a web client, an electron app and two native mobile apps. But the CEO was talking about things that didn't make sense for those apps.

At some point I interrupted the meeting and asked for clarification: what are you talking about when you say app? It's not the mobile apps?

The CEO made a funny face and mentioned an engineer. I looked at him and he had a smug face and said something along the lines of "well, go on, explain it". CEO then explained he was talking about the new big project, which was basically an extension system for the server product - and the extensions would be called apps.

That night I found that engineer at the hotel bar and asked more details about it. Turns out he was the team lead on this project and he hated the term "apps" for it and had been very vocal about it before, saying among other things that it would cause confusion with the client apps we have. Most of the company agreed with him at the time but the CEO demanded it be named apps anyway.

These days everyone there thinks that naming it apps was the right call, but I always hated having to refer to them as "server extension app" to avoid any confusion, specially because I often worked on integrations with third party tools and those tools also had their own stuff called apps so instead of just saying something like "the Kabum extension" I had to say "the ChaChin server Kabum app" (as in this example's context there would also be multiple Kabum clients and ChaChin clients that would all be known as apps too)

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[–] notarobot@lemm.ee 29 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

The other day I realized they did that because its APPle. I have no evidence but I'm sticking with it

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[–] someacnt@sh.itjust.works 20 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

The script is compiled to a program which is then executed by the OS.

->

The app is appified to an app which is then apped by the app.

Damnit.

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[–] bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Web browser? "app". Web page? "app". Dialog box? "app". Phone app that's just a thin shell for the web site? "appapp".

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[–] samus12345@lemm.ee 12 points 2 weeks ago
[–] tisktisk@piefed.social 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I hate that this meme never explains what application meant 'back then'
I get that it's a problem now, but if it had a clear enough definition back then, maybe this couldn't have occurred the way it did?

[–] capuccino@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago

I always understood "application" like a gadget in the software world that just resolved one specific problem, and had that own definition till got distorted

[–] ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago

I felt like I was alone in being frustrated at this trend. However I found a bit of relief to discover, through messing around in a Win98 virtual machine, that they were occasionally using the term "app" back then as well. Of course it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now, but whatever.

Also I thought I'd never see the Xbox kid meme again. What an unexpected throwback!

[–] noctivius@lemm.ee 10 points 2 weeks ago

linux app download free no registration

[–] phr@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

$ sudo appt-get install app

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[–] perishthethought@lemm.ee 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

This is really, "what techs call it" and "what non-techs call it".

As a tech, I usually know what someone means when they "app".

It's "glitch" that drives me mad though. Glitch sounds like a ghost caused the error one tine only, versus some lazy coder.

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