I guess the KDE team just triggered my "see red" response. I saw an unfamiliar notification and immediately went on the offensive because of how often attention-stealing and attention abuses in general are exploited by bad actors.
I know the concept of startle-training very well. It has, in fact, been part of my training for certain volunteer roles that were carried out in stressful, objectively dangerous and high-risk scenarios but those were all In Real Life. They were all for a cause in which I believed – I volunteered to be there.
It is precisely so I have patience and resilience to handle those In Real Life scenarios that I so jealously guard my attention when I don't judge that frittering it away on silly annoyances is warranted.
I put INSTALL_MASK additions into files in /etc/portage/env/ and then associate those files with packages via /etc/portage/package.env/. One can discover which package a file belongs to with equery b . Once that package has a package.env entry that applies an INSTALL_MASK, manually delete the unwanted file and run emerge -1 to re-emerge it, then double-check that the file was not restored.
If you – like me – run Gentoo and have a working knowledge of Portage, you can configure it not to install the KDED modules that provide the donation popup thusly:
INSTALL_MASK="/usr/share/knotifications6/donationmessage.notifyrc /usr/lib64/qt6/plugins/kf6/kded/donationmessage.so"
Even without the nag popup, one might still donate: https://kde.org/donate/
Even the very best software fails to understand ADHD & OCD, today, along with many other neuro-divergent traits that exist but aren't directly in scope for this particular topic.
I'm thinking about what happened to me at around 01h30, this morning, when I turned on my PC to quickly check the weather before retiring.
My PC runs Linux, has an SSD, and boots in eleven seconds from a cold start so I actually shut it down to save electricity whenever possible. I had forgotten to check the weather forecast. What should have happened was this: I press the power-button, I open Firefox which navigates to about:blank (the only remaining safe-haven on the web) and I click a bookmark that takes me to a Norwegian weather service that presents a delightfully details and entirely unanimated forecast page – no fear of surprises – then, I shut down.
Eleven seconds after pressing the power-button, KDE Plasma 6.2 popped up a nag for donations.
Now, I understand that KDE is a rather excellent, free and open-source software and I think they deserve all the support that they can get but – right then – trying to understand what the new and unusual and unexpected popup was, why something that doesn't usually happen (and shouldn't be happening on my machine) was showing, and whether it meant something was broken, and deal with all the emotions of the disruption of my expectations was something I strongly resented at 01h30 in the morning.
If I ever was to donate (and, I would, but I'm unemployed at the moment so I can't afford it) I can also assure you it wouldn't be a part of the check-the-weather-because-I-forgot workflow and I wouldn't be doing it at 01h30 in the morning unless I was drunk.
All they earned was resentment.
There is a reason why the things in my kitchen always go into their places and the knives are always sharp. There is a reason why the stuff in my bathroom goes into particular places and my wardrobe is organised "just so": I understand the cost of surprises. I do not spend that cost on things that do not warrant it but reserve that energy for things that do.
Mozilla did this in Firefox, some years back: pushing a modal, full-window popup in my face just to let me know there was a new features for picking a colour scheme! (It didn't go away when one mashed escape, either.)
Microsoft – not purveyors of the very best software – do this constantly. Every website that uses a timer or mouse-leave events to dim the page and show a light-box nag does this. Indeed, much of my ire towards KDE is because this surprise-nag behaviour is something I associate with abusive patterns employed by very worst – KDE should know better.
These vendors either fail to understand that surprises carry a cost – for me and many others – or they underestimate that cost, or they simply disrespect the impact it might have.
All they earn is resentment.
OCD comes into this story: I obsessively had to understand what KDE's novel donation popup was – it resembled a notification and I've turned as many of those off as possible so any that yet appear must be vitally important, I thought.
When it became clear that nothing was on fire, my reaction was one of rage that yet another thing had judged it fair to abuse my attention – as is today's norm. Confusion, then rage and revulsion, were felt long before I'd actually figured out that this was just a nag for donations by a project I normally praise.
It's a great "new feature" in KDE Plasma 6.2. It is supposed to show up once a year[^1] and I know myself: I know I'll either forget about it soon enough to re-ride this wave of negative emotions and unpleasant surprise this time, next year, or – worse! – I'll dwell on it and stressfully, likely sub-consciously, anticipate KDE-Nag-Month towards next December. [^3]
[^1]: Somewhere, it was also mentioned that it is only supposed to be presented to users who do not visit KDE sites and aren't likely to have seen their other outreach campaigns. Exactly how do they get that data, I wonder.
[^3]: Writing this rant, here, is me trying to flush out my resentment so I don't dwell on it any longer. I'm sorry.
No. The popup must be extirpated and, blessed-be-FOSS, it can be. (I read some of the discussions on the merge-request pertaining to the popup and they thought about that. I respect that.)
The nag engendered uncharitable sentiment but, with regards to the likelihood of my donating to KDE, my banishing of it is independent. I would love to feel financially free enough to splash cash about. I am not so sure that KDE would be top of the list[^2] but they would certainly be on the list, quite high up, and being flush to fund others and indulge in generosity is pretty much my number-1 motivation to earn money at all after food, shelter and healthcare are covered.
[^2]: They certainly wouldn't be above Signal, my masto. instance, Codeberg, a whole queue of indie game developers, several musicians and a handful of writers …
Perhaps I, alone, get enraged by software that disrupts my expectations of what will appear, interrupts my intended task, fritters away my attention, surprises me often nastily, and curses me to revisit and re-navigate the exceedingly well-charted, choppy straights of outrage.
The prevalence of this sort of annoyance, particularly in today's software, certainly suggests that these patterns do earn positive utility value for the vendors. Do the majority not mind? Do they favour rating the apps they open, run an OS because they actually want to upgrade to the next version that wouldn't even run on their hardware, move to close a browser-tab because they actually want to sign up for a newsletter, or open their browser because they had a whim to pick a new colour scheme?
Are the majority of people inured to interruption?
I know Bugzilla from the days of yore. I haven't actually used it since about 2007, I estimate, and I'm happy to say that your post didn't trigger any hyper-ventilation or other post-traumatic-stress reactions so I do appear to be recovering. 🙃
You are right, though: it is very classic. And libre.
I do like putting task-cards in columns and dragging them from left to right but I'm explicitly not going the Kanban route nor the Scrum route. I reject the prescriptivism that inevitably accompanies those "brand name" methodologies, even while I acknowledge that both methodologies do encompass several excellent ideas one might usefully borrow.
In fact, I always rather liked Trello simply because one could do whatever the heck one wanted with its boards – and the hotkeys were brilliant. (If I test out Planka, hotkeys will be evaluated for sure!)
Sadly, Trello devolved into and, yeah, I wouldn't touch any Atlassian[^1] product with a barge pole, today, nor have I in years.
[^1]: Do they still charge for dark-mode in some of their products? Anyone who has managed a large team that includes neuro-diverse developers knows that dark-mode is tantamount to an accessibility feature and charging for it is just a dic•-move.
Ta. Along with Taiga – which is presently first in the queue to try out[^1] – I've added Planka simply because it looks so immensely and elegantly simple and down-to-earth. I shall not be surprised if Planka wins out from pure simplicity: that would be the same reason why I migrated my self-hosted environment to Gitea (from GitLab)
Planka actually looks to do precisely what I want where as Taiga appears to be an Eierlegende Wohlmilchsau. The latter is great when one actually wants wool, milk and pork, but I'm thinking I only want the eggs. ;)
[^1]: Planka's live demo is just so easy, too. And it does Markdown footnotes which Taiga doesn't. I could live without them but... I LIKE FOOTNOTES.
I did know about the association with PenPot but hadn't actually looked at that because that's not what I'm seeking, presently. But, I did, now, and they are the same people and I also find it very reassuring to see this as No 1 in their FAQ, too:
Penpot is Open Source, and self-hosting Penpot will be free forever.
There are many recommendations in this thread – Wow! Thanks, Lemmy – but I think I shall begin with trialling Taiga, first, and report back on my findings.
I'm fairly certain that the original authors recommended using another generator – like split-mix-64 – to extrapolate low-entropy seeds to the required state width. Using high-resolution time as a seed is common practice throughout software development and I think they were envisioning split-mix-64 to be adequate to get decent seed entropy from a linearly increasing timestamp. I'm certain it would be adequate to widen 32-bit seeds to the required width.
If my memory is correct, the reasoning was that split-mix-64 – although not as robust a PRNG as the XO*SHIRO family – is trivial to compute and reaches a reasonable level of entropy without needing many iterations.
It looks like[^1] the state width is 256-bits, anyway – not 64 bits.
[^1]: I've lost my references and don't have time to go digging through archives right at the moment but I pulled up my Rust library that implements my PRNGs (which is a port of a C++ re-implementation that exploited learnings from implementing a C# library to replace Microsoft's original, slow .NET PRNG, which was based on the research paper's reference implementation, and ran in production for years and years...)
I'm thinking to try Taiga, next, but not today. Their pricing page doesn't seem to indicate that self-hosted instances will be limited and there are other overtly positive signs on their site, too.
Self-hosting is an option they openly promote on the landing page. If you use ctrl+f to search for self-host, you immediately find a link to documentation on how to do that.
Has anyone any experience of Taiga? Horror stories? (Save me time!) Or good recommendations are also welcome.
In preparation for the new year, I've been looking for a "better" way to manage what I'm "doing" and looking for a better task-board / ticket manager / project management solution to replace my current unholy and very-cursed mess involving paper notes on a whiteboard (magnets FTW), issues in Gitea (self-hosted) and a whole bunch of .md files in a git repository.
I tried out self-hosting Leantime in my development Docker environment. That was a waste of effort. It's crowded chock-full of "premium" links that just take you to the paid plugin store. I fully expect artificial limits and nerfs to be enforced, too, if one doesn't pay. (Their "pricing" page even alludes to this, stating that "self-hosted" includes the same as their cloud's "free" tier. That would be 150 tasks. That's borderline useless!)
Why ever would I self-host that? Even if I did, how could I trust it to remain free for the features I need, if it paywalls features in the self-hosted scenario? If I self-host it, I'd also want to be free to hack on it and potentially push merge-requests to an open-source project – why would I ever do that for a paywalled app I don't get paid to work on?
My Docker dev. environment runs off a tmpfs so the daemon got stopped, umount /var/tmp/docker, and that shall be the last I ever see of Leantime. Good riddance.
The search continues. I'm open to suggestions of what's worth trying, though. Lemmy, what would YOU actually trust?
Here's a thought that fell upon me[^1], last night, in those wee frosty, dark and restless hours: sleep is immensely important for everyone but it is even more so for us with ADHD[^3] simply because we typically suffer from difficulties directing and commanding our attention and train-of-thought, whilest awake, and sleep, bringing dreams, brings relief.
When I do find myself struggling with control over attention – including getting lost in thoughts, inability to focus, inability to disengage and a propensity to obsess on topics – I also notice that I have absolutely no ability to let my mind drift and sort through the things that are challenging or bothering me, or it, in any kind of cathartic or therapeutic way.
I imagine that that's what the sleeping mind does and, even more so, that is what the dreaming mind does: sift and sieve thoughts and experiences and memories.
It's probably also succour for one's corporeal body. Anyone post-puberty (or sufficiently far embroiled in it) knows that one's body's wants manifest in their dreams. Conversely, I know that my ADHD can see my waking self so sunk into a mire of focus that I can go without food or water, without sleep, end up borderline hyperthermic from sitting still or failing to notice that I'm inadequately dressed, even carrying a painfully over-bloated bladder.
Watching neuro-typical people in my life, I observe that they often daydream or muse wanderingly through their ideas as they go about their lives. None of them say they identify with my tales of ignoring my physical well-being in favour of black-holes of thought. Most of them even appear to be able to think about nothing at all at times: something I certainly could never do when I'm awake and sober.
I've heard some say that things like music or yoga or running are requirements for them to do this. Some say the television needs to be on but they're not really watching it. Believe it or not: I even have neuro-diverse friends who use distraction-scrolling, online, to free their minds to mindless musings.
Those concepts are anathema to me. I find music to be exhausting despite loving it: if music is playing, you can be 100% certain that my attention will be focussed solely on it and its harmonies and musicality and dynamics and mood and message. [^4] Similar things I could write about the others and scrolling must surely be worst of all.
So, for me, I think that sleep is my brain's only chance to drift and my dreams are its only sand-box in which to play. [^8]
Could one call such drifting and playfulness unnecessary for healthy human life? I shouldn't think so.
I think that slumber offers the same to others who are either free of ADHD-related specialities, or are living with a different set, but they are rich with other chances to sort their thoughts[^5] that are impossible for people like me.
Hence my unproven argument for the heightened importance and necessity of sleep for those with ADHD.
How could I back up this argument with citation? Have you any? Have you read anything of relevance or an opinion to put forth?
What could we conclude as a consequence? Perhaps this is the seed of an argument that any wholistic tackling of ADHD should necessarily amplify its emphasis on nurturing sleep and dream-time and warding against insomnia. [^6]
Perhaps I am completely off the mark. [^7]
Where shall we go with this, Beehaw? Throw your ideas into this petri-dish.
[^1]: Hello, Beehaw, and well met. Servus. Wazzup. 'habe d' Ehre. [^2] I'm new here. I thought I'd just jump right in and make this – my first post – a proper challenging one. Testing the waters by diving into the deep end, as it were... I don't know you but please Be(e) nice and help me add a "yet" on to that statement.
[^2]: There. That's about covered all the good greetings I can dredge up from the lands I've called, "home."
[^3]: Ugh. I hate that acronym. I hate that label.
[^4]: I cannot listen to the vast majority of over-produced podcasts or shows because of this. I would play a talk- or discussion-show for the ideas being discussed but my brain just goes, "oh, music!" and the words are reduced to noise.
[^5]: Let me point out that I only experience ADHD-related inabilities to steer my attention the majority of the time. Sometimes – albeit rarely – I'm actually fine so I know what it feels like to be awake-but-drifting. I'm sure I've even meditated, before.
[^6]: I think there is certainly a connection between ADHD and insomnia and finding citations for that would pose no challenge. Sleep-disruption is also listed amongst the side-effects of every ADHD medication's package-insert that I've ever read.
[^7]: I certainly do not mean to reinforce an us-and-them mentality or "claim" sleep for ADHD people in any way. I am simply intrigued by the idea that one could posit that sleep is of even-more importance and therefore more worthy of ever-more consideration. [^9]
[^8]: I do enjoy games and many creative pursuits, too, but those waking hobbies are invariably approached with intense focus and presence. It takes active effort to prevent them from consuming me – see previous ramblings about forgetting I have a bladder.
[^9]: Of course, I would argue that sleep goes tragically ignored in every population, beyond the charlatans peddling hacks and gimmicks. Today's hypothetical does nothing to deny that.
South African, living in Germany, left-leaning, deeply aligned with the opening lines of the Grundgesetz that declare all people to have inherent worth. Nerdy of nature and short of stature, I bend code and words to my purposes yet revel in my sports and thrive in the hills and high places.