[ShadowBanThis01]

I don't know why you should feel bad about that. If anything, you should feel good that you independently recognized a problem so significant that it was given a name.

I assume most problems I face are solved, and that I just don't know shit. So I scramble to research the solutions, and I'm shocked when what seem to be widely-encountered problems are NOT, in fact solved.

One recent example I encountered was API definition. I was tasked to define a new API for my company's products, and celebrated when I discovered OpenAPI. I was a bit surprised to find that only the very latest version of the standard (3.1) was competent enough to be useful.

And despite 3.1 being ratified for years, today there are still no usable code-generation tools that support it. I wasted weeks studying and trying to fix various tools, after studying reams of redundant and conflicting documentation in different repositories... thinking it was my problem. No. It's just a hideously broken mess.

Today I'm dealing with the same thing in SwiftUI... and again have reached the conclusion that the programming paradigm it pushes has not been thought through. Its rushed and immature state shows in its kitchen sink full of overlapping and rapidly-deprecated approaches to problems that were solved in traditional application structures a decade and a half ago.

Just typing that out, I wonder if I failed to learn from my first example and wasted too much time on the second. But if you're a thorough person, you have to satisfy yourself that you've been diligent in trying to inform yourself of best practices.

[thanksgiving]

I think we’ve all had that one friend/classmate in c plus plus 101 who always “cried wolf” saying there’s a problem with the compiler making the instructor proclaim that 99.9999% of the time if your code fails to run it is not a bug in the compiler. We’ve been taught/trained to find the fault in our own work.

[ShadowBanThis01]

Which, to be fair, is really the correct thing to teach since in the vast majority of cases that's where the fault is!

On the other hand, I find a lot of bugs. Not in things as refined as compilers, usually, but if I had a dollar for every time I've heard, "Well, nobody else has reported this before," I could probably buy a tank of gas. And that's saying something today.

Latest example: Amazon's Web site rejects all phone numbers entered on an Apple Silicon Mac. I was setting up a new address, and it said "remove invalid characters from phone number field:" https://i.imgur.com/mjwiCqc.png

This happened in both Safari and Firefox. Amazon support couldn't figure it out in 1.5 hours of chat. I went to an Intel Mac and entered the exact same number, no problem.

[thanksgiving]

That’s concerning. I’d understand iPhone or iPad or such sandboxed devices but not this. If you are so inclined, can you see if you can reproduce this on a simple html page? Do you think the problem is client side or on their servers?

I like neocities.org for small experiments like this but you can use anything you’d like.

[ShadowBanThis01]

Thinking it through, I assume it's on the client side. Maybe something is wrong with the JavaScript that's doing the validation... but do Safari and Firefox use the same engine?

I don't know what else could vary based on platform. One thing I can't control for is browser and OS versions, because the older Mac I have (the one that works in this case) can't be updated to the latest.

It must be sending garbage characters. But the vast, vast majority of sites work. It's really mystifying.

As far as other sites are concerned... I just remembered one that's not quite as clear-cut. Zoro.com complains that my credentials are wrong, but if I reset my password it complains that I'm trying to use my current password... so it's obviously not wrong. As usual, they just threw up their hands... and sent me a 10% coupon... which of course I can't use because their site is broken. Just tried it again, and it's still unusable. Didn't try the older computer yet.