Well, sure, with an image classifier, the bird identification is doable. I’m sure I could implement that if I went looking for some open source thingamabob that does that. But it’s still not something I could actually understand. That part definitely hasn’t changed over the years.

GIMP (at least in v2) does have a vector path tool and stores the paths with the image! Thing is, they kind of work like selections and you have to explicitly stroke the paths on bitmap layers. It’s a bit more complicated than necessary and not easy to grasp at first.

For illustration work, having good support for both vector and bitmap elements is pretty damn convenient. For example, in comics, you draw the comics themselves in bitmap layers, while panels and speech bubbles go in vector layers. Having the ability to edit the speech bubbles easily is pretty neat.

(Optimally inking/outlines would be vectors too, but most people prefer to do that with bitmap tools anyway, or vectorise later.)

Krita actually does these pretty solidly - vector tools are there and they’re pretty easy to use. In GIMP 2, the vector path support actually is there and the editable texts are actually pretty great, but it has the air of “power user trick, for those in the know” rather than something people actually discover easily. You also need to update the vector strokes manually. (Haven’t tried GIMP 3 yet.) The fact that people still assume you can’t do this stuff really says it all.

There’s always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: “If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you’ll wish you wrote it in a real programming language.”

I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like “Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell.” …around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It’s no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It’s got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.

Long ago, I used Debian on my main PC but decided to go with Ubuntu on the laptop because it was easy to set up.

Later I switched to Debian on the laptop, too, because ultimately I felt Ubuntu was just Debian with extra steps.

Yup, the bottom line is, there was this dude who, upon buying a website, fucked it up.

Upon attaining unprecedented government position, he got access to government systems, and fucked them up.

Did anyone vote for this? No, no one voted for this. Were there supposed to be checks and balances to stop this from happening? Well, theoretically, maybe, but, urgh, the Founding Fathers didn’t expect anyone to unleash the Ultimate Idiot on crucial data infrastructure.

When Elon bought Twitter, I realised right away I’d need to close my account.

What made me hurry up exporting my data and closing the account were the reports of Elon Musk personally fucking with the systems, and the subsequent glitches and outages. Had to get it done while the site was still moderately functional.

And they just let this guy get his hands on actually important national computer infrastructure? Fucking hell.

Whenever Elon speaks of programming, he just spouts the most delusional Point-Haired Boss bullshit imaginable. Truly, he has been promoted to the level of his incompetence.

(It is also highly ironic considering the Dilbert creator’s politics.)

I don’t really watch Star Wars. I’m a more of a Trekkie gal.

🖖

See, you can separate files both ways as long as it’s logical

Funny thing, I used Xfce pretty much everywhere. When I recently had a work laptop I tried KDE seriously for the first time ever, and I was like, oh, this is just a sensible desktop nowadays.

Clearly meant for nice hardware though. Sometimes a bit slow on my Raspberry Pi 4. Might switch back. But otherwise, no complaints.

Well, some browsers have made User-Agent strings useless. Technically, it’s like this:

Firefox: “Mozilla based browser, Gecko engine, Firefox.”

Chromium: “We’re totally a Mozilla based browser we swear. Also KHTML, which is like Gecko basically. I guess also a bit like WebKit. Has anyone ever heard of those? No? OK. Fine, here’s some actual information then…”

Bah. Me, I’ve been using Debian since 1997. I’ve tried Ubuntu (and, what was it called, Progeny?) a few times but decided it was just Debian with extra steps.

I once read about Andy Warhol’s film Empire and thought it could form a decent stylistic background for a movie about your average programmer’s work day.

One continuous 8 hour shot of a programmer sitting by a computer, slowly scrolling through a code, pausing for a long time to stare at particular sections, and occasionally saying “why the fuck doesn’t this work?”

In addition to the stuff already listed:

In the Swedish film version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, Lisbeth and the hacker dude use Ubuntu, especially in the scene where they recover the stuff from Lisbeth’s broken laptop. (In the US version, they decided to use Macs instead. And included a scene where she goes to an Apple store with the broken laptop and they helpfully tell her shit’s unfixable. Realism.)

rm -rf / can brick your system

Well good thing there’s basically no legitimate reason to ever even use rm -rf / anyway so GNU version is perfectly within its rights to refuse to do that by default, am I right? If you know what you’re doing and want to nuke partitions, that’s what cfdisk and mkfs are for, dammit

• Yes
• Yes, and also delete Electron
• That, and also make me forget I ever even heard about Electron in the first place

It’s funny because GNOME was the first OSS X11 desktop environment to get actual usability testing from corporate developers (Sun Microsystems).

I’m not sure if they still have a user interface design guideline document, though. They probably burned it when GNOME 3 development started. Haven’t checked. I’ve mostly used Xfce since then (and very recently KDE).

Choosing to not use something is not a good way to learn how to use it.

In this particular instance, the lesson is to either a) use the provided database tools (e.g. pg_dumpall) for live backup, or b) bring the database cluster down before you backup the raw data folder.

Debian user here. Checks out.

Though I use Windows (and Debian WSL) as desktop daily. The fact that I mostly drink instant coffee is possibly related.

Well cron is “really easy” as long as your requirements are really easy too.

Run a task at specific hour or minute or weekday or whatever? Easy peasy.

Run a task at complex intervals? What the fuck is this syntax. How do I get it right even. Guess I’ll come back next week and see if it ran correctly.

Actually have to look at the calendar to schedule this stuff? Oh lawd here come the hacks, they’re so wide, they’re coming

Run a task at, say, granularity of seconds? Of course it’s not supported, who would ever need that, if you really need that just do an evil janky shellscript hack