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

I used to do this, because it didn’t seem to cause any issues — until it did, and I lost a lot of data.

It does mean something to them, but not in a way that will stop you from getting laid off; what it means is that after laying you off, they’ll quickly come to regret it and scramble to try to fill the knowledge gap they now have. I know a few people who were called up by the company basically begging them to help. A couple of people I know were able to leverage this to get a short term position contracting (at exorbitantly higher rates than their salary way), and a few others instead just cackled in schadenfreude.

Do you have a link? Because if you tell me you found it but don’t tell me where, then that may put you at risk of being in the same ring of hell as people who comment “nvm, solved it” to their tech forum posts.

This isn’t useful to me at the moment, but nonetheless, I really appreciate when people like you take the time to share knowledge in this way.

There is a special place in heaven for the people who do this, just as there’s a special place in hell for people who reply to their own forum post about a complex technical problem.

(Side note: I tried the find the xkcd where he is yelling at his computer after finding a forum post from someone who has the exact same computer problem as he does, but the original poster hasn’t updated it. Alas, I couldn’t. If anyone knows which one I mean, I’d appreciate you pointing me to it, because it’ll drive me mad until I remember how to find it)

This is supremely silly. I will never use it, but I’m glad that it exists; you’re delightful

Damn, I didn’t notice they were made out of lambdas. Guess I need to switch to NixOS

As others have said, Fitgirl is a major player in the games piracy scene. She doesn’t crack the games, but she does repack cracked games (compresses them in clever ways). It’s quite common for people to impersonate her or her site to try to fool people into downloading malware. This seems to be another one of those.

She warns against this quite frequently. From her faq, for example:

"Q: Do you have a Facebook page? A: I didn’t, don’t and won’t have a Facebook page. The same applies to Twitter, Instagram, whatever else. This site is the only official FitGirl Repacks source. If you happen to come here from “Facebook FitGirl Page” – you’ve been fooled by an imposter. "

(Note: this comment is not an endorsement of games piracy, and this community is not the appropriate venue for discussions of that nature. Anyone interested should go to relevant communities like the ones hosted on the db0 Lemmy instance )

Yes.

I feel this. I’ve found that a good response in those circumstances is to say “sorry, can we put a pin in this? I feel like I don’t have the capacity to properly process what you’re telling me right now, so I’d rather we resume this conversation at a later point. Thanks for helping me figure out [bool question] though.”

It’s a useful response if one genuinely is interested to learn, but not at that moment.

Sometimes, (amongst friends who accept how thoroughly weird I am) I will actually say “XOR” when I want to make my intentions clear. It means that when they give the silly OR answer, I can jokingly chastise them for poor listening. The downside is that they relish the opportunity to give OR answers when I am not sufficiently specific in my question. I reap what I sow ¯_(ツ)_/¯

“That said, people can put it in “recipe” format - a set of steps to be blindly followed without understanding - but even there you have some minimal foundational knowlegde required”

Something that’s quite interesting is that apparently one of the core components of how Latin and Greek used to be taught in fancy public schools (especially in like, Isaac Newton’s era) was that students would be made to copy out sections from classical literature (such as the Odyssey). Obviously this would be happening alongside lessons involving basic grammar, but I’ve seen some scholars suggest that this kind of blind repetition was a key component to the language learning, and that it may even be useful for learning languages in a modern context.

I was already interested based on your first comment but this:

“The UBA is a masterpiece, and I’m not being sarcastic.”

has thoroughly piqued my interest. Thank you for being an opinionated nerd on the internet.

This made me smile because it reminded me of building my late best friend’s PC. I had a lot of fun doing it, but I insisted on making him do parts of it so that he would understand the basics of what was going on

I sort of like that on my ThinkPad though. It reminds me of the defiance shown in liberating the laptop from its grim past life.

I respect this.

This is hilarious. I’m deeply sad that I don’t think my irl friends would appreciate this joke, because I want to share it with everyone.

(I am personally irked by vibe coding because some assholes in my life have been real smug about how much better of a programmer they are than me due to vibe coding. )