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
Well, systemd developers made one of the classic blunders a software developer can do: make a program that has to deal with time and dates. Every time I have to deal with timestamps I’m like “oh shit, here we go again”.
Anyway, as I understood it the reason this is in systemd is because they wanted to replace cron, and it’s fine by me because cron has it’s own brain-hurt. (The cron syntax is something that always makes me squint real hard for a while.)
Yeah, I was about to say.
Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.
PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.
Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.
Free Software is Leftism because it has got us great software and maybe the only bad thing I can say is that release schedules aren’t a thing
Open Source is Capitalist Friendly because, ummmmm, extremely shitty Community Editions and putting everything cool in proprietary side, uhhhhh, random license changes to shit that isn’t actually OSD compliant, unghhhhhh, need of constant vigilance against license violations.
Like I am happy cheap hardware vendors have adopted OSS components but why are they frequently so shitty about everything
This is a very cute thread. I love turtles and I like them for their vast computer science skills too.
I’m in middle of a Rust module of a course, so I’ll do some Programmer Friendly Error Messages:
Line 10: You do not need to dimension a dimensionless variable such as a standalone string variable. (This ain’t Visual Basic.)
Line 20: input doesn’t do parentheses, sorry
Line 20: Input accepts a string: Perhaps you meant ?
Line 30: Concatenation is too modern, perhaps instead of + you meant ; just saying?
Line 40: Invalid syntax with play, maybe you meant play "g3c4e4"?
Well they train me in JavaScript frameworks and such. I allege this knowledge will be useless in a few decades. Or even less so, based on my meagre knowledge so far.
I’m literally on an internship training course where the Exercises Left For The Readers are implementing Number Guessing Games on the various technologies talked about on the course. I’m like “thanks, but I read about this particular exercise extensively the BASIC age. I’m not going to redo these things unless your training material will have little cartoon robots. Like, you know, in the Usborne books or something.”
The font is Revue! People often say that their first love-hate font was Comic Sans - well, this was the first font I thought was pretty damn cool and I saw it getting run to the ground with overuse in early 1990s. It was pretty much in half of the ads in early 1990s. (My theory: It was bundled with a popular graphic design passion package / clipart bundle, Arts & Letters, and everyone made their ads with it. I can’t wait for the day when I finally get arsed to install Windows 3.0 environment and my copy of Arts & Letters and prove the doubters wrong)
I half expected the first comment about the font to be about The Room to be honest.
Sorry for the potato photograph, my phone was a potato, I was a student after all
Well this was Vista era, they were probably doing that to ensure some sort of expectation from particularly tricky legacy apps. Windows prefers not to break old apps if at all possible.
Like I said this was in the Vista era. Or possibly before the Vista release, part of the Longhorn hype train (Longhorn got some super hyped features, such as an epic next-generation filesystem to replace NTFS, which Microsoft ultimately canned, and Vista ended up, you know, being Vista).
This was so long ago that I unfortunately don’t remember what exact feature this was about, but it was about some new Windows component.
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.