Thanks, I hate it.

Only sorta related, but now I have an excuse to tell my anecdote…

One job ago I had a manager who decided that he would convert some of our helper scripts from bash to Python for reasons. I was new there and so didn’t realize what he was doing, or that he had started the process just as I was going through orientation. However, I ended up being the reviewer for the PR.

This was the worst Python I had ever seen but in such odd ways and it mostly worked. It almost felt like it was written by someone who knew bash really well but had never learned any other languages, or thought that bash was just so damn good that he wanted to turn every other language into it. For example, instead of using argparse he was manually looping through argv and parsing them one at a time. And instead of using a standard for each in foo loop, there were index variables and while loops. And certainly there were no comprehensions or any understanding of the basic built in data structures other than using lists as arrays.

So I did a review, assuming that this person was just really new to python and tried to gently coach him towards basic Pythonisms. His response was: “Oh yeah, I just ran them through ChatGPT and assumed it was all ok.”

I quit about two months later.

Array operations in FORTRAN are much easier for the compiler heavily optimize than it is in c/c++ due to its array model and type system. You can achieve much of the same thing with modern compiler extensions, but it’s difficult and not as portable.

Why not both?

As a point of reference, I built a 32TB Synology last year. I took me an afternoon to get it done, plus set up Plex media server, all the arrs and friends, a backup server and a couple other things. Since then maintenance has consisted of remembering to hit the “update containers” button once a month or so. I should probably automate that part but just haven’t bothered yet.

A lot of NAS are capable of hosting containerized services. The Synology DS series, for example, can run everything you’ve mentioned and so much more. For a relatively gentle into check out https://mariushosting.com/

I mean, I wouldn’t say it is the dumbest thing, but it sure is up there.

First, this is a great explanation and example. That being said, tarrifs can be good for the country implementing them in a very narrow set of circumstances.

Let’s say you are in a not very industrialized nation, maybe one recovering from colonialism or war. In that case almost everything is cheaper to import, and so it’s really difficult to get any economy going past subsistence farming. Targeted tariffs can help in that case to encourage local investment in the basic commodities needed to get the economy started.

Similarly, if you have one specific part of your economy that you really care about but it needs some help getting going, tarrifs can help to grow that sector.

In both cases, the tarrifs need to be narrowly targeted and be regularly monitored for when they should be phased out.

But in all cases, a large economy raising broad tarrifs is stupid.

Ooh! Time to give it another look.

Looking back… that was right, hmm, 7 out of 8 times. The miss was a very chill place that gave out Dells, but I lost my job because the funding round didn’t come in.

I remember having a few of these for WordPerfect, MS Word for DOS and Lotus 1-2-3.

I use the “short meetings” option in gcal, which shortens meetings by 5-10 minutes to give me a passing period between meetings. Twice this week people have had the audacity to try and schedule a meeting in that break. 😬

Exactly, the same way I handle all my credentials.

And… they’re basically all correct. Linux does run on all sort of machines, even really ancient ones. It has a solid command line environment, or rather lots of them. And it’s astounding powerful. Windows does still blue screen, is currently the best place for gaming, and wow is MS fucking you with Win11. Macs can have a cool setup, are really simplified for most users and expensive.

I just tried it and it actually works! 🤣

Oh look, it’s me.

When I was a very junior EE I ended up working mostly on microcontroller code. There was one bit of extremely ugly code I inherited that parsed a terribly designed serial communication protocol by using a giant maze of nested if statements. I really wanted to rewrite it to something better, but I never quite came up a solution while I worked there. Years later after I was no longer at the company I had a stress dream about it and finally came up with a working solution. I still wish I could go fix it. I really hope it’s no longer used, or that someone else has finally fixed it.

Which word?

Also, me eating a prune.

I love it, though I haven’t tried using it as a daily driver in a long time. I should give it a whirl!