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Cake day: September 24th, 2024

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  • rumba@lemmy.ziptoMemes@sopuli.xyzIf Open Source is so great...
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    12 hours ago

    I got a job and was not allowed to use a linux laptop, so I went with mac.

    Same. 2015. I could have pushed them to let me use Linux, but it would have been making waves in a remote shop. The 2015 MacBook hardware was decent, so I got it. Domain binding was still in fashion. 99 problems. Finally, I got it okay-ish, set up Brew, it’s a hack. I started trying to use the terminal to do things, almost no config available, the disk mount subsystem was alien, the logs were crap. Since then, the hardware and compatibility has just gotten awful.







  • I was on a cruise once. Upper deck mini-buffet had a plate of piped black bean croquettes.

    They were lumpy like the beef here, and because they were piped, one side of the ends was pinched off.

    The head chef for the boat was making his rounds. We were laughing at the presentation. He smiled at us probably thinking what are these assholes laughing at, he looked down, frowed, what za fuk were zey thinking putting shit out like this. Within a few minutes the pan disappeared and the next day that buffet was quite pretty.


  • Hell, even if you are a programmer and have no memory issues, it’s a hell of a lot faster to have it boilerplate something for you for a given engine with certain features than to sit down and write it from scratch or try to find a boilerplate. Stack exchange usage has been going down regularly as LLMs are filling the gap.

    It doesn’t get you to third base or anything. But it does get you started and well-structured within the first couple minutes of code for any reasonably simple task.

    Last year I worked on a synchronized Halloween projector project. I had the first week of work saved into my repo, but as Halloween approached, I wrote a lot of it on the server. After Halloween, I failed to commit it back and inadvertently wiped the box.

    This year, after realizing my code was gone, I decided to try having copilot give me a head start. I had it start back over from scratch, asked it in detail for exactly what I had last year, it was all fully functional again in about 4 hours. It was clean, functional well documented code. I had no problem extending it out with my own work and picked up like I hadn’t lost anything.



  • For the last few years, I’ve been trying to get them to assign me at least someone part-time to learn my tribal knowledge. I’ve been writing documents and leaving copious notes in Slack canvasses to stakeholders. If something happens to me, they’ll be struggle-bussing it.

    When I go on vacation, I’m still stuck for end-game support for p0 stuff. If production is down, I’ll stop what I’m doing, If they can’t make money, they can’t pay my salary. I’ll answer P1 questions off hours to an extent.

    I don’t absolutely hate it. I’m paid well for the inconvenience but they’re playing with fire. I only go places that have some form of internet somewhere (doesn’t need to be everywhere) and I’m always within 15 minutes of grabbing my laptop.



  • Wasting your time? impossible. All you’re learning will at least gently affect everything else you do. Will you contribute meaningfully to foss? only time will tell.

    Like any craft, you git good by doing. The first program I wrote was in ASIC to fix 2500 computers on a LAN. We were a small shop (7 ppl) providing on-site support for a large complex. We were gearing up to have to go to 2500 desks and edit win.ini to make sure Vshare was set up for ccMail.

    I stayed late a couple nights and wrote a little app to copy win.ini line by line to a new file and fix vshare in the process. Then, it ran some sanity checks to make sure the file looked good, and the files were swapped out. Saved us a LOT of time.

    A few jobs later, we had a Cold Fusion/IIS server that would occasionally corrupt logs and we needed reports on the logs for our clients. I couldn’t nail down what caused the error. The files were multiple gigabytes in the day where an entire company could comfortably work off of 2GB. I found the problem, they were missing a linebreak once in a while, and the analytics app we were using would just shit the bed on that.

    I needed to break up the offending lines or at least remove them. I didn’t have enough time or space to copy them to a new file.

    This was pre-2000 so the languages and tooling were pretty dumb.

    I learned some PHP, but memory was an issue, abandoned I learned some Perl that worked, but it took many hours, and I’d have to dedicate a box to just fixing the logs every morning. I finally bit the bullet and learned enough C to fix it; it only took an hour to run.

    Since then, I’ve just been learning to solve problem after problem and have chosen tools that I didn’t know. Keep on amateuring. Do small projects and cron jobs with different languages/tools.

    Branch out into new languages when you have to start finding hacks to do things in current languages. Once you get good at working on smaller pictures, the big pictures won’t look as daunting.





  • It’s not supposed to be read only every time, The nasty command you enter is likely fixing a symptom.

    A lot of times if you’re swapping back and forth between windows and Linux the drive will be perceived as dirty. An fsck might be enough to make it stop misbehaving.

    After you plug it in if you run sudo dmesg, It might give you some insight as to why it’s being mounted read only, If you fix the underlying cause you won’t have to remember the command anymore