At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.

Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.

We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.

I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.

There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.

Maybe was thinking of https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ ?

true, though sometimes i find the more verbose style easier to read, and more maintainable (eg: you want to do something else in the block, you can just add a line instead of changing your ternary / etc). Small things

Depends on how it’s set up. If the setting is going into the env it’s a string, so I’d expect some sort of

if os.getenv("this_variable", "false").lower() == "true":   # or maybe "in true, yes, on, 1" if you want to be weird like yaml
  this_variable = True
else:
  this_variable = False

Except maybe a little more elegant and not typed on my phone.

But if the instructions are telling the user to edit the settings directly, like where I wrote this_variable=True, they’d need to case it correctly there.

Is the backend Python and the frontend JavaScript? Because then that would happen and just be normal, because Boolean true is True in python.

I thought mercurial was older than git, but apparently it’s 12 days younger.

I would be absolutely shocked if we had anything approaching justice for what this administration is doing.

We barely got anything for that whole ass insurrection attempt.

I’ve been told violence isn’t the answer and we shouldn’t just shoot nazis and nazi enablers dead.

The way most people change their mind isn’t based on facts or figures, but emotions. Specifically, in-group belonging. For most people, and this certainly includes me and you some of the time, what our in-group believes is more compelling than an out-groups supposed facts.

They see that guy as someone in their group so they believe him. They see you as a bad outside bad bad bad liar, so nothing you say is likely to get through. (This comic is worth reading on this topic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe )

If you want to change someone’s mind, they have to see you as in-group. Not necessarily the same group as what you’re arguing with. We all belong to many groups. American, new yorker, white guy, middle aged, yankees fan, etc etc there are many such slices. Like how you can’t get a republican to recycle by appealing to environmental concerns (because environmentalists are out-group, so fuck them), but you might be able to get them to recycle via something like “only american ingenuity can turn trash into bridges and tanks!”

This takes a lot of time and effort, and if you don’t get them to stop hanging out with the other group, you won’t make any lasting changes.

So I think you’d need a multi prong approach:

• Get them off bad media. Facebook, fox news, etc. This is reinforcing their bad beliefs. Because they see this stuff as trustworthy in-group, it goes right into the worldview.
• Get them to stop hanging out with their shitty maga-hat friends. This is the social in-group that’s reinforcing bad beliefs.
• Get them to trust you.
• Gently introduce the idea that maybe the extreme right doesn’t have their interests at heart, etc

All of which takes a lot of time and effort, and your opposite number is basically trying to do the same thing. Except they have fox news, trump, and such in their corner.

And, again, I’m told we definitely shouldn’t just shoot extreme right wingers and other nazi sympathizers dead. Nor should we burn their houses down. If we’re an emergency responder, we definitely shouldn’t let them die while thinking to ourselves “they would let so many die. without a thought, their passing deserves no mourning” or similar.

You should definitely nullify if you’re on a jury and someone allegedly did violence to a shitty ceo or red-hat, though, bu that’s getting off topic.

Windows sure is bad, though I haven’t seen an actual blue-screen in years. That’s some foul luck.

I think at least New York now requires jobs to post a range. I haven’t even seen bullshit like “$50k - $500k” - maybe the law was written strongly enough that they can’t loophole it that way.

Been doing the job search and it’s frustrating how bad most of the job postings are. There’s so much filler nonsense.

I pretty much just want to know like

• tech stack
• team size
• big picture what the company does
• if they’re assholes about in-office mandates
• salary range

Some postings are like “must know Java, go, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, or rust” and I’m like do you use all of those?

Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally

SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.

You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.

It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.

You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.

It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database

You can do transactions.

There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.

Several times I’ve set the max warnings to whatever the current warning count is, and then decreased that over time.

I turn it off every night when I’m done. It boots quickly and I mostly just use it for the web browser and steam.

My work computer (Mac) I put to sleep because I don’t always want to open all the terminals and IDE and such every time.

At my job, me and another guy were given stuff to work on. But unknown to product, there’s a lot of shared code there.

In my imagination, it should be someone’s job to coordinate this. Instead, I finished a chunk of mine, he finished a chunk of his, and then there was confusion. Maybe that’s just a technical team lead’s job.

Nvidia 4070 super.

I don’t remember the other details off the top of my head. Discord had me run sudo apt install linux-image-oem-24.04b and that fixed the Ethernet. They didn’t really explain details, though. Maybe there were more things to do, but I didn’t get more responses so I was on my own.

I think people over value emotions, but I realize I’m part of people too and it happens to me. Emotions are a fast heuristic but they’re not very inaccurate. They’re good for when speed is important, or when more information isn’t available. Neither is true on an async post about Linux. But yes, I can be dismissive of emotions but it’s something I’m working on.

I’ve seen too many people make strange, unhelpful, decisions because like “someone told me to do something and now I won’t” or “that guy was rude so I’m not going to listen”. That’s what your post felt like to me. (Note the emotional dimension there, heh)

Like, imagine a friend who always forgets their plans, is late, and double books themselves. You probably can’t just be like “use a calendar, dude”. You probably have to gently massage them and incept the idea. If you just tell them, they’ll feel bad, reject the idea, and continue having problems. (In real life, some months later the friend did come around to using a calendar, but only after uselessly wrestling with feeling bad)

So far this has been the smoothest installation of a Linux OS I have ever done.

Envy. I tried to install mint last night on a new computer, and it was a shit show.

• Ethernet and WiFi wouldn’t work.
• Bluetooth wouldn’t work
• the HDMI out stopped working at some point

I did learn you can tether your phone via USB, so I got Internet that way. That was cool.

But after I got Internet working, with help from discord, elden ring and Baldur’s gate 3 both failed to launch in different ways.

I gave up. Windows11 is horrible, but at least those things work.

…what do you mean by using dev containers? Are your people doing development on their host machine?

I’m on Mint. It only offered up to version 550 and veilguard needed 565, if I recall

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=433321 was more or less my problem.