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Okay, you know those memes where someone takes a picture of 40 honeydew melons and 33 potatoes in a single grocery cart and captions it, like “found the guy from those word problems,” or some shit like that?

This is that guy, except for porn instead of math.

I mean, “fair play to 'im,” as the Irish say. This man is living right.

EDIT: okay, but he probably lives in fear of emergencies that he can’t handle on his own, and he might have to call someone. Like, if he calls up a plumber, it’ll be a sexy plumber girl who immediately goes to work on his “pipe” and never actually fixes anything.

If bees build a huge hive in his crawlspace, it’ll be a sexy beekeeper girl, with nothing on under her bee suit. Talkin’ bout “oh no, I think a bee stung you right here” and then she’s slobbing his knob, instead of removing any bees.

Medical emergency? FOXY NURSE AND DOCTOR COMBO, OILED UP AND RIDING HIS DICK AND FACE, WHILE HIS COMPOUND FRACTURE GOES UNTREATED.

So I’ve heard. :)

I wonder how many people I’ve walked past, just in normal life, who had one inserted. It’s probably a lot of people that you’d NEVER suspect. Especially since it has become so incredibly easy to order stuff online.

Yep. Kinda the sexual equivalent of getting a huge, mind-bogglingly ugly tattoo on your whole face. Almost 100 percent of the people who do it are only doing it because of how transgressive and “out there” it is.

And I mean, there’s so many ways to be sexually adventurous, without just being revolting. For example, I knew a girl back in the day who deliberately put her buttplug in, whenever she knew she would be riding on the back of her FWB’s motorcycle. She was like “two words: railroad tracks.”

I mean, that’s just hilarious. Sometimes, I just find myself thinking about that shit, because of how wacky it was. And she was just an awesome girl, in general.

Seriously. I mean, how rushed for time were the people who invented that shit?

Honestly, it’s the perfect example of almost all multi-tasking being a lie you tell yourself. Most of the time, doing two things at once just means you’re doing them both really badly.

I guess it still might be someone’s fetish. Some kind of blumpkin afficionado, or whatever.

I always figured the idea for the whole blumpkin concept must have been proposed by the blower, rather than the blowee. NOBODY has the balls to SUGGEST that shit. Like, “hey babe, I’ve got a wild idea…I’m about to go take a shit. You wanna suck me off while I’m doing it?”

If you’re willing to say that, you’ve got problems even taking a shit, because you can’t sit on a toilet with balls the size of watermelons.

I took a shit and thought of you

Well, now that I REALLY SUPER DUPER THINK ABOUT IT, I guess it’s possible for a massive log to stimulate the ol’ prostate.

Still gross, tho.

WHAT IN SHAWN LEE’S WORLD OF FUNK WOULD MAKE ANYBODY THINK THAT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA???

I’m flabbergasted, over here. I mean, holy hell, it would be far less stupid to just take the best ever pic you ever took of your dong and alter the meta-data, so it looks like it was taken ten minutes ago.

Not that anyone would ever check the goddamned meta-data on a dick pic. Well, maybe the FBI.

I mentioned VisiCalc to a couple of people, in this discussion, and I think it REALLY needs to be remembered more often, and more clearly.

I keep seeing a lot of people replying to various parts of this discussion, with varying degrees of this opinion:

“Anything you can do with a GUI can be done without a GUI. You basically just THINK you need a GUI, because you’re a lazy non-software person. You just need to get used to using CLI, and when you do, you’ll thank me, because you’ll be able to do even more powerful things than you ever could, with your GUI crutch.”

Well, spreadsheets blow that entire argument out of the water, instantly.

The whole thing about spreadsheets is the fact that they are a GUI. The original VisiCalc spreadsheet application BARELY had a GUI. It was all text characters. It was barely running in realtime. But it was a realtime GUI, and that was the entire reason that it was useful.

Note that you could make a command-line-only spreadsheet program. As in, an entirely hidden spreadsheet, where you use commands to define the fields, enter the data, and then use other commands to do operations and query for the results. But that’s entirely destroying the whole point of the spreadsheet, as a tool. With VisiCalc (and all modern spreadsheet programs), you can see all the fields at once, change them in any order, and watch as any other relevant fields are affected by the different numbers.

As many people have said about the spreadsheet revolution, it allowed people to “play around with the numbers.” For most users, that was what elevated the microcomputer from a mere calculator to a game-changing, paradigm-shifting, universally necessary tool, for anyone who did any kind of business.

Before VisiCalc, you might as well just use a digital calculator, to help you with your business stuff. Just using command-line programs to do calculations wasn’t really any faster than a desktop calculator. And those desktop calculators usually had hard-copy printers built into them, so that you wouldn’t ever have to re-list the queries you’d made, to refresh your memory.

But, again, the realtime GUI spreadsheet blasted all that apart, and gave users life-altering tools. It wasn’t just a matter of “oh, look. We dumbed down the interface, so that stupid Bob the Business Major can finally use software.” It was a real step beyond what command-line tools can do.

Now, think about my example of a molecular simulation program for melting, cooling, and tempering ceramics. Isn’t that process even more complex than doing sum and division operations on some dollar values, rounded to two digits after the zero? Doesn’t it logically follow that you’d want a GUI for a molecular simulation tool, so that you could PLAY AROUND WITH THE NUMBERS, in the same way that you would, with your business expense sheets?

That’s the whole point of the software doing simulations, right? On the one level, it’s simply easier to poke around at finite-state machines that model known physical and chemical properties than it is to do a bunch of experiments in a real kiln. That’s the first stage of why simulation is good for progress. But it really does go beyond that. I would argue that a GUI in a simulation lets you see things from angles that you would never have thought of, before you started tinkering.

If you have to think about how you’re going to query the system, on a command line, then read out the data afterward, you’re going to run up against the limitations of the human imagination. Some users will think of every query they ought to make, without any prompting, and with less trial and error. Others will never think of certain aspects of the simulation, unless and until they can SEE the parameters laid out in front of them, in a graphical, preferably realtime fashion.

Obviously, not everything can be realtime. But graphical interfaces always allow better viewing of simultaneous and parallel functions.

It’s not just a matter of “we’ll throw some of these non-techie users a bone, and make this stuff easier for their lazy asses.” There ARE fundamental advantages to a GUI, which truly to go beyond simple “user friendliness.” Succinctly, a GUI user is not the opposite of a power user.

Agreed.

I am still curious, as to why this hasn’t been a solution, already.

For that matter, why isn’t there any kind of industry standard “non game engine” that caters to productivity, academic, and specialized applications, in the way I’m describing?

especially if there is no reason for that size

Yeah, but we’ve established that this would be a good reason. It’s a tradeoff of size and loading time, versus modern GUI development which is being described as cripplingly onerous.

I absolutely care about the size of a program

But why, actually? If your answer is “I have filled my hard drive with huge games and movies,” that’s also fine. That’s a good answer. But we’re making the assumption that the large-install-footprint app in question is a useful one.

Only install the stuff you find useful or fun. That’s my philosophy, and I don’t think it’s half bad. I’m never going to say “I find this application to be woefully lacking in utility, but it makes up for that by being really tiny.”

That’s pretty much just going back to my original post. If I am going to be using a piece of software for productivity, I will be fine with a substantial installation and a moderate loading time. Conversely, if it’s so non-useful that I’m not even using it, why would I care about how big it’s not?

For an actual example, look at Adobe Premiere. It’s got an 8 gig install size and takes about 15 seconds to load into memory. For people who think in backend terms, I realize that’s, like, upsetting. But, again, I’m a user. I installed the application once, literally years ago, and it auto-updates. I run it once or twice a day, and leave it open for hours.

No user is ever really spending any time fantasizing about “oooh, but what if that executable could be smaller.” As long as I can scrub through the video without it lagging, it’s all good. It’s just a matter of different priorities.

This. This is the best comment.

Now you’re thinkin’ with portals.

I suppose there really does need to be a renaissance of people trying to contribute on the frontend side.

I do feel some real motivation to get my shit together, learn Godot, and start shoving small open-source projects into it. I could make a difference.

That’s a hard argument to rebut. The only thing I can really refer to is VisiCalc. The OG spreadsheet program. The original “killer app.”

The whole thing about a spreadsheet is that it’s a realtime pseudo-GUI. It’s not a command-line-interface thing, and that’s VITAL TO ITS FUNCTION, AT THE END-USER LEVEL.

Of course, the computer can do any of the spreadsheet calculations by means of querying a CLI. But the thing about a spreadsheet is that you just change one element on the screen, and all the other elements auto-update, in response to the altered field.

That functionality was a major-ass deal for doing some summing and dividing, so you don’t fuck up your payroll and your expense reports. It increased productivity. It reduced clerical errors.

But you’re over here, like “well, can’t you just use the command line to enter the new parameters for your molecular glass simulation?”

My argument: isn’t that shit just a little more complex than a spreadsheet with some basic monetary figures on it? If a GUI is a game-changer for juggling a few dollar-figures in a monthly budget document, it’s EVEN MORE CRITICAL in any application where both the data and the calculations are more complicated.

The GUI paradigm isn’t a frivolous luxury, which is only made for those of us who are just too lazy to get savvy with the CLI game. GUI has real and exclusive benefits. The more complex the data entry, the sillier it becomes to just say “you don’t really NEED that GUI, you just want it for convenience.”

I honestly do get that. And I realize I am overstating my case, in a way that basically makes me an asshole.

I think the problem is often rooted in how projects advertise themselves. The small dev team is like “WE’RE PASSIONATE ABOUT GETTING ________ INTO THE HANDS OF USERS, BECAUSE WE KNOW THE ONLY OTHER SOFTWARE THAT DOES _______ IS A 27-YEAR-OLD APP THAT ONLY WORKS ON A SPECIFIC REVISION OF WINDOWS 95.”

But then the damned app is command-line only, and it just feels like it was all a tease.

You make a lot of good points, but here’s one thing you need to understand, about the difference between users and developers. Especially in 2024.

multiple megabytes or gigabytes

Yeah. Thaaaaat’s fine. The program can be 10 gigabytes. Or 100. That’s normal. If the thing does what I need it to do, I don’t give a shit. I realize that non-game developers want their whole app to still be able to fit on a 3.5" floppy disk, but from where I’m sitting, that’s just a learned preference that can be traded off, in favor of modern solutions that are massively easier to implement than reinventing the GUI wheel, every time you make an app.

People have so many terabytes of space, now. Keeping specialized productivity apps tiny is just a weird flex, at this point.

I appreciate your perspective. I’ll also fire off a question at you, which I’ve also posed to some of the other participants in this discussion:

Why is all of this so different, when you shift the frame to game development? Modern game engines are built to allow EXTREMELY fast implementation of realtime GUI elements. When you go to study gamedev, you’re tying GUI elements to backend code in literally the second hour of the coursework.

So why aren’t game engines used for productivity and specialized-use-case software?

Using a game engine for that would be major overkill and make the project way bigger then it has to be

But what if that makes the difference between users being able to actually use the software, versus…just literally not using it?

Keep in mind that I’m talking about end-user software, from the very start of the conversation. Not backend-only stuff, not tools that are only ever going to be used for batch process stuff. I’m talking about stuff like my example of a simulation program for glass and ceramic casting.

Wouldn’t it make absolutely perfect sense to use a game engine for something like that? The user won’t give a fuck if it takes 2 gigs of disk space, and has a loading screen on startup. They are going to be spending real hours of time, using the application to generate actionable information.

The Python solution that would be lighter, smaller, and more flexible isn’t any good if nobody actually implements it, right? And, from where I’m sitting, it seems like the version that uses Godot or Unity would be so much more actionable.

You can look at it as me yelling and being rude. And I was exaggerating, for effect. I realize things are harder than I made it out.

On the other hand, the problem remains, even if nobody is yelling about it, and maybe that’s worse. If a project goes on, for literal years, as a supposedly released thing, but there’s never a GUI, then most users won’t use it.

I will admit that I’m an asshole, in this situation. I almost certainly could really apply myself, and help to add GUIs to some of these apps that I’ve wanted to see GUIs in, over the years. But others absolutely cannot. They just aren’t built for coding, in any way, shape, or form.

So they just won’t use the software in question, even if it is exactly what they need. When developers contribute to free software projects, the hope is that they will be used. I lament the fact that some projects just float around forever, never getting that use, because a GUI isn’t forthcoming.

That just sucks. Even if everyone has a perfectly valid excuse for not fixing it. It still sucks.

EDIT: Your edit is extremely appreciated.