Ah yeah, that seems to be it. When I drop my keys in the right place, it goes into suspend. If I lift them back off afterwards, it wakes back up.

Neat. 🙃

Yeah, management wants us to use AI at $DAYJOB and one of the strategies we’ve considered for lessening its negative impact on productivity, is to always put generated code into an entirely separate commit.

Because it will guess design decisions at random while generating, and you want to know afterwards whether a design decision was made by the randomizer or by something with intelligence. Much like you want to know whether a design decision was made by the senior (then you should think twice about overriding this decision) or by the intern that knows none of the project context.

We haven’t actually started doing these separate commits, because it’s cumbersome in other ways, but yeah, deliberately obfuscating whether the randomizer was involved, that robs you of that information even more.

Yeah, that’s my biggest worry. I always have to hold colleagues to the basics of programming standards as soon as they start using AI for a task, since it is easier to generate a second implementation of something we already have in the codebase, rather than extending the existing implementation.

But that was pretty much always true. We still did not slap another implementation onto the side, because it’s horrible for maintenance, as you now need to always adjust two (or more) implementations when requirements change.
And it’s horrible for debugging problems, because parts of the codebase will then behave subtly different from other parts. This also means usability is worse, as users expect consistency.

And the worst part is that they don’t even have an answer to those concerns. They know that it’s going to bite us into the ass in the near future. They’re on a sugar high, because adding features is quick, while looking away from the codebase getting incredibly fat just as quickly.

And when it comes to actually maintaining that generated code, they’ll be the hardest to motivate, because that isn’t as fun as just slapping a feature onto the side, nor do they feel responsible for the code, because they don’t know any better how it actually works. Nevermind that they’re also less sharp in general, because they’ve outsourced thinking.

Oh yeah, I was kind of playing devil’s advocate. It is certainly also cursed in many ways…

trance

Hmm, that is kind of cool, in that you can have text on all 4 sides and it’s still generally readable. Not really possible for vertical panels…

Today, I noticed that my glasses case sticks to my work laptop like a magnet.
I played around with it for a few seconds, then the thought struck me, that it might be my glasses case that’s magnetic, and I might be fucking up the electronics or the HDD or something by holding it close to my laptop. Pulled away real quick then. 😅

I did try with my keys later, and well, turns out that it’s my work laptop that’s magnetic, so I guess, I wasn’t fucking anything up after all…

Damn, I’m seeing the ads for the first time, but have heard multiple times already of people calling them confusing, and I definitely understand why.

Imagine telling your mum you want an XBOX for Christmas and she buys you a laptop…

I think, you could replicate it by creating an invite-only instance that federates with no other instances.

…Which makes this whole concept sound exactly as weird as I assume it is. Like, was there a point to these communities? It just sounds like a smaller audience, with no real reason to post there…

Arch basically happens at a granularity of individual packages. You decide from the ground up which packages you actually need, which is how you end up with a comparatively minimal setup.

But yeah, if the package itself is big, then Arch doesn’t usually deal with that. The Linux kernel comes with drivers for most hardware out of the box, which you can remove, if you know you won’t need that hardware.
And while this can also be done on Arch, it is Gentoo’s thing to do precisely that.

Feels like one of those jokes that explicitly shouldn’t go into programmerhumor. A programmer that doesn’t interact with Linux, that’s something to tell the world about…

I imagine, it has also manifested in our culture for women to exert an abundance of caution and to try to gauge reactions as long as possible, because playing it entirely open can lead to the man developing feelings, and if you then have to break things off, it can get ugly. Some men, even if it is just a tiny fraction, may then turn to violence and rape.

In particular, the men may “blame” you for their feelings and they might feel “”“justified”“” in raping you, because you did tell them that you find them attractive. No, none of this makes sense and I’d need to order another bucket of quotation marks, if I wanted to try to continue making sense of it, which I don’t, so let’s not do that.

Yes, the same can happen with the genders reversed, but typically the men are physically stronger, which is why this power dynamic made it into our culture, at least according to my pet theory here.

Probably depends a lot on whether it’s an anonymous survey…

I just want to throw in that if you do want to give Linux a shot, you can do so without installing it.

You can prepare a USB stick from which you could later install Linux, but before you’ll actually install it, you will boot from this USB stick and then you’re able to click around, browse the web etc…

It won’t be entirely representative of the actual performance in the end, because it will run off of the USB stick rather than the hard drive, but yeah, you can at least get an impression whether it might work for your usage.

This kind of bootable USB stick is also called a “Live-USB”, just to give you another term to search for. And well, you will need to enter your BIOS (or at least the boot order menu) of your laptop to tell it to actually boot off of the USB stick.

It isn’t trivial, particularly since I don’t know how techy you are, but yeah, before you go through with the installation, it is rather unlikely that you break things by doing this.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt to create a backup beforehand anyways. 🙂

And yes, I do also think that Linux really deserves consideration here, unless you know upfront that you strictly need applications that do not support Linux. Linux has been known to give old hardware a second life, and your hardware sounds old enough for that to apply here.

Oh, and perhaps also worth throwing in that browsers do work the same on Linux. I moved both of my parents from Windows 7 to Linux and since they practically only use the browser, it took just a few minutes for them to adapt…

I just saw this on F-Droid, will need to test it, but sounds like it could be really good: https://f-droid.org/packages/lu.knaff.alain.saf_sftp

I’m hoping, it works like mounting or FUSE on proper Linux, where you can just use normal applications to transparently access network files. Then you’d be able to use any old file manager app to actually work with the files…

You probably just misread, but just to note that SFTP is different from SMB. They’re similar in purpose, but basically competing protocols…

Well, bullet bras were a thing for quite a while, too:

Yeah, this should be equivalent to interpolation search, which has an average performance of O(log(log(n))).

It helps that the months are separately indexed, so instead of a search on 365 input elements, you can do two searches with much lower input size, i.e. 12 and 31.

But yeah, you’re still in the larger O(log(log(n))) category with that.

Yeah, I always found it really valuable to know a person on the other side. Obviously, they’re not immune to propaganda either, but even just seeing the differences in propaganda can teach you a lot, both about which parts may be untrue, but also how propaganda works.

For example, I once saw a guy on Mastodon, who posted a populist Indian news article and expressed his agreement. The article was about some policy the EU was discussing, following Putins attack on the Ukraine, which would’ve affected India.
That policy was controversial here in the EU. I don’t remember what policy it was, but I didn’t feel good about it, my country (Germany) didn’t support it, but the EU as a whole did agree to it.

Meanwhile, that article framed it as “Europe is doing a bad thing” and “the West is blah”.
Like, man, I doubt, I would agree with my neighbor about this policy, but somehow I’m being generalized into an amorphous blob, the size of half the fucking planet.
It dehumanizes. It makes it seem like we’re not open for discussion, despite us internally leading extremely heated discussions.

But of course, we do the exact fucking same. We talk about India collectively all the time, even though it is much larger than the EU, with 1.4 billion different opinions. You don’t hear “the East” as often these days, but you do hear “Asia”, which is effectively just as meaningless of a word.

And yeah, just seeing the inverse happen to me, made it instantly clear why this is shit, which I would not have even thought about, if I only ever read our news outlets.

Ooh, in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, when trying to enter the ability menu, it may tell you straight-up:

Thanks, game. Rub it in, why don’t you? 🥹