It’s wonderful how the expression “humble Arch Linux user” manages to pack a contradiction in a mere 4 words.

How much would that be in Libraries Of Congress if written down?

I disagree: as a Bachus of Programming I have successfully managed to at the same time both be a God of Programming AND having no clue what’s going on.

(The real joke behind the joke is that today I’m doing Shader programming so that’s quite close to reality and I could definitelly do with large amounts of wine or at least beer).

Here too the Schrödinger’s equations apply: a programmer’s state during coding is a superposition of both of these states until actually trying to run the code, at which point it collapses into one of the two states.

“Will horrors never cease?!”

Well, it was either that or “I’ve been using Unix for so long that my first text editor was ed”.

Yeah, the tools are still there to figure out the low level shit, information on it has never been this easy to come by and bright people who are interested will still get there.

However growing up during a time you were forced to figure the low level details of tech out merely to get stuff to work, does mean that if you were into tech back then you definitely became bit of a hacker (in the traditional sense of the word) whilst often what people consider as being into tech now is mainly spending money on shinny toys were everything is already done for you.

Most people who consider themselves as being “into Tech” don’t really understand it to significant depth because they never had to and only the few who actually do want to understand it at that level enough to invest time into learning it do.

I’m pretty sure the same effect happened in the early days vs later days of other tech, such as cars.

Rebrand Github as an MMO were people fight for code dominance.

Indeed.

Last time I checked, it was way easier in Windows to have a VM running Linux just for Python, than to get Python to reliably work nativelly in Windows.

It really depends on whether that SQL is the standard one (such as SQL92) or with the database specific extensions (such as PL/SQL).

The latter often adds up to a “real” programming language (were you can define your own functions and everything), depending on the database.

But yeah, the rest not so much.

An this was back in the 80s where there were only 8 programming languages…

Yeah, but when it comes to RAM and Storage, the other golden rule is that the longer you delay your upgrade the cheaper it will be (assuming you’ll even need it) or the more you can get for the same money.

So there are two competing pulls in this.

The other day I got a Mini PC to use as a home server (including as media server with Kodi).

It has 8GB of RAM, came with some Windows (10 or 11), didn’t even try it and wiped it out, put Lubunto on it and a bunch of services along with Kodi.

Even though it’s running X in order to have Kodi there and Firefox is open and everything, it’s using slightly over 2GB of RAM.

I keep wanting to upgrade it to 16 GB, because, you know, I just like mucking about with hardware and there’s the whole new toy feeling, but I look at the memory usage and just can’t bring myself around to do it just for fun, as it would be a completelly useless upgrade and not even bright eyed uuh, shinny me can convince adult me to waste 60 bucks on something so utterly completelly useless.

“Sure! You just have to choose which of these other things you want deprioritized since we’re already going at full tilt”

The really funny bit is that the Standup comes from Agile, which is a software development process class exactly about being able to cope with frequent changing requirements, and the Standup is definitelly not the point when new requirements are introduced.

I came here to say the same.

People in the technical career track spend most of their time making software, one way or another (there comes a point were you’re doing more preparation to code than actual coding).

As soon as you jump into the management career track it’s mostly meetings to report the team’s progress to upper management, even if you’re supposedly “technically oriented”.

Absolutelly, as you become a more senior tech things become more and more about figuring out what needs to be done at higher and higher levels (i.e. systems design, software development process design) which results in needing to interact with more and more stakeholders (your whole team, other teams, end users, management) hence more meetings, but you still get to do lots of coding or at least code-adjacent stuff (i.e. design).

The inability to detail the idea all the way down to the level were something concrete can be made from it kills it well before the lack of coding skills.

It’s like what separates having an idea for a book and writting an actual book that is enjoyable to read: there is no “knowing how to code” barrier in there and yet most people can’t actually pull it off when they try or it ends up shallow and uninteresting.

Some man pages are just gigantic lists of unintuitive parameters in alphabetical order with no usage examples and even if you know how to search for text in a man page (forward slash then the text you want to search for) you’re just stabbing in the dark.

Others are excellent.

The problem with man pages is that you never know if you’re getting the former or the latter.

“We stopped applying antitrust laws because they were hurting trust in corporations”