My wife is thinking about signing up for the Master Workshopper program from AJ & Smart. It’s a relatively big financially decision so I thought I would pass along some of her initial thoughts and questions here in the hopes anyone had some experience with this program either personally or just anecdotally.

Hey everyone,

I'm thinking about signing up for the Master Workshopper program from AJ & Smart and would love to hear from anyone who's already gone through it. If you've done it, I'd really appreciate your thoughts!

Here’s what I’m curious about:

1	Quality of Content: Is the material solid and up-to-date?

2	Instructors: How are the instructors? Do they make the content engaging and clear?

3	Practical Application: Were you able to use what you learned right away in your work?

4	Community and Networking: How’s the community aspect? Did you make any good connections?

5	Value for Money: Do you think it was worth the investment? Why or why not?

6	Career Impact: Has it made a difference in your career or skills?

Any other thoughts or experiences you can share would be awesome too!

Thanks a lot for your help!

Web devs: what's up with this trend? For enterprise apps, I get it…single sign-on needs to detect what your email domain is to send you to your identity provider. For consumers, I feel like it's gotta be one of these reasons:

• Users don't know about the tab key being able to move to other fields on a page
• Mobile users don't really have a tab key, despite there being "previous/next field" arrows on the stock iOS keyboard since its inception (Android users, help me out please)
• Users tend to hit Enter after typing in their username, leading to a form submission with a blank password
• Security, maybe? In the past I have sent a link and a password in separate emails or separate communication methods entirely. Are you hashing/salting these separately for better MITM mitigation?

Did your UX team make a decision? Are my password managers forever doomed to need a "keyboard combo" value for every entry from now on?

Non-devs: do you prefer one method over the other? If so, why?

Tildes maintainers: selfishly, thanks for keeping these together :)

I've noticed this changing over the years from my options when interfacing with a website or app going from "yes" or "no", to "yes" or "maybe later". I've tipped over the point from being mildly annoyed by this trend to now being angry about it.

Navigate to my bank's web portal to pay bills, "did you want to try and qualify for this new Visa card?"

Launch and use an app, "leave a rating!"

It's even a part of Windows now. When running through update prompts, setting up a Microsoft account is "yes" or "remind me in 3 days". The answer is no thank you!

I want to be able say no! And don't ask me anymore, ever again! How often should a product be allowed to nag you into doing something you have absolutely no intention of doing? It feels like a situation where the dial on the nags could just keep getting turned up to try and force people into just submitting into whatever it is they're nagging us to do. They'll just keep prompting you over and over until you get fed up and just say yes.

Is this mindset actively being pushed by large companies to take away our ability to say no, and stop asking? Are there rules in place for this kind of thing?

I've been thinking about the arguments that are increasingly common when dealing with tech: "it's too complicated" and "I just want something that works".

My father gifted a used computer to me and my brother when we were kids. Ours to use, ours to take care. He would pay for the eventual screw up, but we had to walk several blocks carrying the tower to get assistance.

I messed up a lot over the years, mostly because I wanted to explore the little that I knew and learn more. I had some magazines that expected everything to go well if instructions were followed and no access to internet forums to ask for help. I was limited to just one language as well. I had to find a way out. Nowadays things are much more simple and really just work, until they don't and I can't really fix them.

In this world, what people can do is complain. Or offer a report of how things went wrong and wait patiently. It's not even that common for people in general to just go back to the version that worked. There's no version, only the app we use or can't use and it's not our responsibility any kind of maintenance.

I have to confess I was going in another direction when I started, but things are really limited from a consumer's point of view. In part, it's our fault for not wanting to deal with the burden of knowledge, it inevitably takes the control away from us, but big tech really approves and incentives this behavior.

As with so many problems I see in the world, education is the solution. And educating ourselves might be the only dependable option.

As an old, I prefer the old reddit. Which, lets be honest, has been going away for a while.

But so long as I could browse on my phone via i.reddit.com, I was happily entertained by time there.

No longer. And I'm saddened by it. It was an imperfect community, but its good parts are replicated nowhere else as far as I can tell, Tildes notwithstanding. Although, if Tildes were maybe 2-3x as busy and had more para-reality* fans, it'd be really darn close. I am still sad, and sad that we can't keep awesome things that generate a lot of community benefit but low income (see also, usenet). Probably, it's a good dead cow.**

*As a true believer (tm), I hesitate to use the word conspiracy, because it has gained so many negative associations with far right absurdity and violence. Among the more serious members of the community, we have yet to come up with an easy to use term. Another thing in the world I am sad about. For the record, I don't believe the election was stolen, but I also don't believe Kennedy was assassinated by Oswald, or at least not him alone.

**if anyone is interested, I relay the story of the Wise Man, the Poor Family, and Their Cow.

I say that after throwing some caution to air because I understand that every new thing has some initial resistance or pushback due to the "past comfort zone" effect.

But having said that, I feel the aesthetics of the old site was much better than the new one. But then again, I'm from the old-school world who also prefers old reddit to the new one in browsing experience, so my opinion could be biased! But even considering the modern web design, don't you think the black icons on the top right have a somewhat odd look? And the "21 languages" feels a bit verbose, the I10N icon already conveys what that dropdown is about? And finally, that scrollable sidebar on the left looks a tad ugly?

I just hope this is just a beta stage or something of Wikipedia's new version and a better one will evolve soon! But that's just one humble unpopular opinion, me thinks!

I made an account a few years ago but only started contributing recently. Outside of the barrage of awards, levels, limitations, I really just don't get how to find my way around the site.

For instance, Google Sheets is listed in both Web Applications and Stack Overflow. Is there a way to get a consolidated view of all of the networks or do I have to check each one individually?

There was a recent discussion about the Windows App Store where people said they don't like using it. I'm in the Apple world, and people here constantly complain about the Mac and iOS app stores. I grudgingly use Steam to download games that are only available there. Everyone seems to hate using app stores, but most agree that having them is better than having to find stuff on the web or in bricks and mortar stores.

I don't tend to "shop." When I decide I need a product, I do research. I try to find unbiased sources, though that's problematic in itself. But I don't go browsing for anything because it's largely pointless and tends to drive you towards what the company that's best at selling wants you to buy rather than what's best for your needs. So for the most part, my interaction with app stores is searching for a specific program and either finding it or not.

What do people think would make app stores better? Complaints I've heard include:

• Too hard to find a product you want when you don't know the specific name of a particular one (like you want a photo editor that can make a photo mosaic, but don't know the name of a specific photo mosaic app)
• You search for a specific product and the top hit is a paid placement for a competitor
• Stores are full of crapware with similar names and similar keywords
• Top apps are all games

How could app store makers improve the situation? What would make using an app store a joy for you?

My mother is 65+ years old and loves everything Apple, but whenever I need to touch her computer I find myself questioning that choice.

The degree to which Apple abstract things from the user enables the most absurd behaviors. macOS gives little indication about which programs are open, and the red x on the top left corner just closes windows, not apps. Because the session persistence is so robust, the consequence is that my mother's Macbook Air keeps 12+ programs and their states open at all times literally for months. Every time she comes over from another continent, I close a bunch of stuff and get her an instant performance boost. Plus, she's never really sure if a program is open or not.

The concept of (work)Spaces, as well as the launchpad, spotlight, or even how Finder really works is beyond her. Because of her over-reliance on the dock, she never enabled autohiding, so her screen real state is always crowded.

Folders are entirely immaterial for her. Everything goes to "Downloads" with no organization whatsoever, and she's always looking for stuff "manually" by reading the filenames.

Her machine is running Mojave, and right now I can only see that finder displays two "Libraries": Documents and Downloads. Linux and Windows have Videos, Downloads, Music, etc. Those are easy to make sense of. What's the supposed Mac alternative? Buy stuff on iTunes. Well, if something is not on Amazon Video or Netflix my mother is a pirate like me (hehe), so she never made sense of it and I truly despise using iTunes for doing anything at all. She also downloads a bunch of media related to her job.

I'm not saying macOS is bad, I'm just asking: is it really the best choice for non-technical older people?

Hey everyone, I'm currently looking for some web 1.0-esque websites, but with the twist of being designed for some ancient smartphones. An example of what I mean would be i.reddit.com , reddit's original (and still fully functional) mobile implementation, or Twitter's site when you access it without a modern version of Javascript (which reverts to a clone of itself from around ~2012). I understand this is a super niche category and there's hardly any of them left, but if you happen to know of any or stumble upon one, please let me know! Thank you! :)

So many ROMs.

So many features.

But they all look the same.

I mean, I love that there are many options, but aren't you bored of going to XDA and finding only ROMs that follow the [9.0] EDGY NAME IN CAPS formula?

They all look stock. Android is supposed to be about personalization. Where are the highly customized UIs? Why are all fanboys so scared of breaking the scheme that Material has inforced upon us, and then whine about how Android is inconsistent? I wish that something like MIUI would appear again, like, a ROM made by a no name that ended up making a gigantic empire.

I wish to see someday another developer, making its own thing.

Breaking the AOSP UI mold.

[NOTE] This is reposted from reddit (it was made by me tho) because I wanted to discuss it here.