The CPU is the silver squarish shape towards the right. It generates a lot of heat when in use, so having good cooling for it is important. So important that CPUs come with a fan in the box. This involves a heat sink to help draw heat away from the CPU. This screws on mounting points around the CPU, but thermal paste is also used to help heat transfer up. Then there’s a fan that attaches to that heat sink, so that the hot air from the CPU can be blown away from the CPU.

People spend a heckton of money on cooling for their CPU and GPU, because when things overheat, they throttle themselves and performance becomes super slow. Longevity of components can also be harmed by higher temperatures. If it gets too bad, then it will crash entirely.

This PC has put the CPU heatsink on the case fan on the left. I don’t think this is especially harmful in and of itself — the big problem is that the CPU is entirely “naked” and has no cooling whatsoever. This means the CPU begins overheating basically as soon as the PC is turned on.

Edit: you can actually see where the heat sink should match up to the CPU here

The big silver heat sink that’s on the left is meant to be on the CPU, which is the Silver squarish shape towards the right. Keeping the CPU cool is a big deal — CPUs come with a smaller fan which is sufficient for many people, but people who use their PC more intensively, or want to extend the life of their CPU typically buy an additional cooler. Here’s an example of a stock cooler, and here’s a motherboard that’s using the fairly basic aftermarket CPU cooler that I have. It was only $30, but when I was new to PC building, it was strongly recommended, because if your CPU gets too hot, it’ll throttle itself and slow down. People who over clock their CPU (running it at a higher voltage for better performance) have to get even beefier cooling, such as water cooling. You can completely fry your CPU if you do something wrong when overclocking, and even if it doesn’t get that bad, minor mistakes can cause crashes due to CPU overheating.

So TL;DR: keeping your CPU cool is super important for both performance and longevity of the CPU.

The PC in the top photo has zero cooling for the CPU. Not even the stock fan that comes with the CPU. That heatsink that’s attached to the case fan is almost certainly intended for the CPU — you don’t even need a heatsink in that location.

This means that this person’s CPU will rapidly overheat soon after it is turned on.

Edit: you can actually see where the heat sink should match up to the CPU here

TBF, as someone who frequently wears high socks and stockings as part of my regular attire, I don’t think they’re particularly normal. In order to even be able to see that a person is wearing thigh highs as opposed to tights, it’s necessary to wear a fairly short skirt or shorts, which may not be appropriate in many contexts — and if they’re worn with an outfit where you can’t see that you’re wearing thigh highs, then wearing tights appears to be the more practical options.

Plus I have known a lot of people who wanted to be the kind of person who wore thigh-highs, but became impatient with them frequently rolling down. Wearing a suspender belt is a good solution for this, but it’s surprisingly hard to find ones with clips that are robust enough to be useful and not excessively fiddly — most people I have known who have experience with suspender belts know them only as an inconvenient but sexy piece of lingerie, rather than a pragmatic undergarment (which can also be sexy, but they actually exist to serve a function rather than their entire purpose being the sexiness)

So yeah, I would say that people who wear high socks aren’t normal. But I certainly don’t see that as a bad thing — in fact, seeing someone wearing thigh high socks immediately makes them more attractive to me (as a friend or otherwise)

I own a lot of stockings as part of my regular daily attire (they’re so awesome! They’re like tights, except you don’t have to do the weird tights-dance every time you go for a pee, and if one of them gets a hole, you can just throw away the one stocking instead of the entire pair of tights!). However, if I’m doing programming, I’m probably at home, and in lounge wear.

I always found the “programming socks” quite funny, so one day, I decided I wanted to be even more in on the joke, so I deliberately wore some of my fancy thigh highs when sitting down to write some code. I ended up having a tremendously productive session, and it made the socks feel like magic. It was likely just that I was just having a serendipitous day where my brain decided it wanted to get shit done, but still, the prospect that they had actually helped was pretty humorous to entertain.

Because of this, I wore them again the next time I wanted to have an extended, focussed session of coding. And then the time after that. And again and again until eventually, I had created a self-fulfilling prophecy of programming socks increasing my productivity — I came to associate them with the headspace of productive focus, and so now whenever I wear them while sitting at my desk, my brain goes “oh damn, we programming now — best lock in”.

I am extremely happy to have stumbled into this outcome, because it is both useful and hilarious

It’s a reference to the phenomenon of “programming socks”, which is the meme phenomenon of knee high socks being associated with programmers. I think the association stems from the disproportionately high number of trans women and gender non-conforming men (such as femboys) in programming.

A writer friend I have says that if she were looking at just her own financial security, she’s super grateful for AI, because she’s pivoted into fixing AI written articles from places that laid off all their human writers. Being a contractor, her hourly rate is way higher than times when she’s been employed full time as a writer, plus it takes way longer to rewrite a broken article than it would’ve done to just write a decent article from scratch (and they insist that they want her to fix the AI articles, not rewrite them from scratch. I assume this is because the higher ups have their heads so far up their arses that they’re not willing to acknowledge that they shouldn’t have laid off the humans).

The work isn’t as fulfilling as proper writing, but she’s getting paid so much compared to before that she’s able to work less than she was before, and still has money to put into savings. She’s still living super frugally, as if she were still a typical, struggling writer, because she was expecting that this wouldn’t last for very long, but she’s been at this for quite a while now (with a surprising amount of repeat business). She thought for sure that work would begin to dry up once the financial year ended and companies went “holy shit, why are we spending so much on contractors?”, but last we spoke, it was still going strong.

I’m glad that at least someone human is making bank off of this. And if it was to be anyone who lucks into this, I’m glad that it’s someone who has the extremely poor fortune to be laid off 4-5 times in one year (and this was pre-AI — she was just super unlucky)

I’m a biochemist who got into programming from the science side of it, and yeah, code written by scientists can be pretty bad. Something that I saw a lot in my field was that people who needed some code to do something as part of a larger project (such as adding back on the hydrogens to a 3d protein structure from the protein database) would write the thing themselves, and not even consider the possibility that someone else has probably written the same thing, but far better than they be can, and made it available open source. This means there’s a lot of reinventing the wheel by people who are not wheel engineers.

I find it so wild how few scientists I’ve spoken to about this stuff understand what open-source code actually means in the wider picture. Although I’ve never spoken to a scientist in my field who doesn’t know what open source means at all, and pretty much all of them understand open source software as being a good thing, this is often a superficial belief based purely on understanding that proprietary software is bad (I know someone who still has a PC running windows 98 in their lab, because of the one piece of essential equipment that runs on very old, proprietary code that isn’t supported anymore).

Nowadays, I’m probably more programmer than biochemist, and what got me started on this route was being aware of how poor the code I wrote was, and wanting to better understand best practices to improve things like reliability and readability. Going down that path is what solidified my appreciation of open source — I found it super useful to try to understand existing codebases, and it was useful practice to attempt to extend or modify some software I was using. The lack of this is what I mean by “superficial belief” above. It always struck me as odd, because surely scientists of all people would be able to appreciate open source code as a form of collaborative, iterative knowledge production

You make a compelling point

Your comment felt like it made my blood pressure spike, because I have heard people saying this 100% without irony

That is a much better name for it, especially because some of the ways in which veteran code gets creaky does feel analogous to age

I wish that the code was open source, because it’d be super interesting to be able to look under the hood of a game like Rollercoaster Tycoon

I use Fedora, but I frequent the Arch wiki often enough that I feel like an honorary Arch user.

(((gnu)imp)tk)lib)object)

Indeed, that is the healthier way to go about things.

Personally, I struggle with that kind of compartmentalisation, but I would probably be healthier if I could do that. I have never lasted long when doing work that I’m not passionate about, and when I am passionate about work, it’s hard to not bring it home (even if that’s just working on stuff adjacent to the task).

I know a lot of people who work in academia, and it’s simultaneously inspiring and depressing to see how people’s research interests end up bleeding into basically all elements of their regular life. I think some people are just wired that way. I wish that they had the freedom to engage in that in a more healthy way, free from the additional bullshit that Capitalism heaps onto them, making the dynamic so toxic.

However, given that we do live under such oppressive economic conditions, “work to live, not live to work” is an essential mantra to aspire towards, especially the people who put their whole heart into their work. It’s not ideal, but it is necessary to learn if we want to survive without burning out.

I don’t use Arch, but I am eternally grateful for their excellent documentation.

I am also grateful to you for your comment, because this is a good idea

Having a development folder is such a good idea that I feel silly for not thinking of it sooner. Thanks for the idea.

Something I find cool about this book is that it’s so well known that people who haven’t even read it will often gesture towards it to make a point. It reminds me of how “enshittification” caught on because so many people were glad to have a word for what they’d been experiencing.

It’s a useful phrase to have. Recently a friend was lamenting that they’d had a string of bad jobs, and they were struggling to articulate what it was that they wanted from a job. They were at risk of blaming themselves for the fact that they’d struggled to find anything that wasn’t soul sucking, because they were beginning to doubt whether finding a fulfilling job was even possible.

They were grasping at straws trying to explain what would make them feel fulfilled, and I cut in to say “all of this is basically just saying you don’t care what job you have, as long as it’s a non-bullshit job”. They pondered it for a moment before emphatically agreeing with me. It was entertaining to see their entire demeanour change so quickly: from being demoralised and shrinking to being defiant and righteously angry at the fucked up world that turns good jobs into bullshit. Having vocabulary to describe your experiences can be pretty magical sometimes

I don’t have any specific examples, but the standard of code is really bad in science. I don’t mean this in an overly judgemental way — I am not surprised that scientists who have minimal code specific education end up with the kind of “eh, close enough” stuff that you see in personal projects. It is unfortunate how it leads to code being even less intelligible on average, which makes collaboration harder, even if the code is released open source.

I see a lot of teams basically reinventing the wheel. For example, 3D protein structures in the Protein Database (pdb) don’t have hydrogens on them. This is partly because that’ll depend a heckton on the pH of the environment that the protein is. Aspartic acid, for example, is an amino acid where its variable side chain (different for each amino acid) is CH2COOH in acidic conditions, but CH2COO- in basic conditions. Because it’s so relative to both the protein and the protein’s environment, you tend to get research groups just bashing together some simple code to add hydrogens back on depending on what they’re studying. This can lead to silly mistakes and shabby code in general though.

I can’t be too mad about it though. After all, wanting to learn how to be better at this stuff and to understand what was best practice caused me to go out and learn this stuff properly (or attempt to). Amongst programmers, I’m still more biochemist than programmer, but amongst my fellow scientists, I’m more programmer than biochemist. It’s a weird, liminal existence, but I sort of dig it.

Something that I’m disproportionately proud of is that my contributions to open source software are a few minor documentation improvements. One of those times, the docs were wrong and it took me ages to figure out how to do the thing I was trying to do. After I solved it, I was annoyed at the documentation being wrong, and fixed it before submitting a pull request.

I’ve not yet made any code contributions to open source, but there have been a few people on Lemmy who helped me to realise I shouldn’t diminish my contribution because good documentation is essential, but often neglected.

Vim has long since won the war. I say that as an emacs user who is familiar with using vim because it’s installed by default on the vast majority of computers I interact with nowadays