That was super cool.

Honestly, why? We’ve got billions of people driving around in cars they don’t know how to build. Is that a problem too?

One use case is if you’re running a web server that is configured to return a “maintenance” page instead of the live site if a particular file exists. Which is actually pretty cool because then you don’t have to update the config when you need to do something or let your users get a bunch of 502 errors, you just touch maintenance and you’re good.

Lately I’ve been seriously thinking about resurrecting my FidoNet node. It looks like FidoNet still exists!

I’m a CPA and my PC runs Linux, but also has a Windows VM for when I need Excel (unfortunately the open source alternatives just don’t cut it, and I’m guessing it’s similar for someone who relies on Word the way accountants rely on Excel), and my work laptop runs Windows.

If you ever edit PDFs with Acrobat Pro, there’s no good Linux equivalent that I’ve found for that either. It can be done, but you’ll need a couple of different programs depending on what you need to edit in the PDF.

In general I’d say that you can run your business in Linux, but it is probably not the best choice.

I tend to think of it like a garbage disposal. If you can’t dispose of your garbage, you gotta keep it somewhere. Except most things probably don’t check if it exists or have a backup plan, so they’ll just crash.

Ironically, that’s like the one thing I’ve learned to do in Vim.

Something like parsing a string that could have command codes in it of varying length. So I guess the difference is, is this a 1-, 2-, or 3-character code?

I have something like this in a barcode generator and I keep trying to find a way to make it more elegant, but I keep coming back to index and offset as the simplest and most understandable approach.

Honest question: is there a mapping function that handles the case where you need to loop through an iterable, and conditionally reference an item one or two steps ahead in the iterable?

I haven’t tried that, but my guess is generally no based on other things I’ve tried chatGPT for and things I’ve read. It would probably have some lucky hits and those would seem like magic, but it would mostly produce correct-sounding answers that don’t fix the problems.

Imagine making a typo and it continually being shared and highlighted for over 30 years.

Kinda makes me glad I’ll never be famous for anything.

I use Ubuntu on my desktop and when I had an NVIDIA video card I did have fairly frequent issues when the proprietary drivers would update and then not play nice with something. That card died and I replaced it with an AMD video card and I don’t think I’ve had a “dive into the annals of gnu/Linux architecture” session since.

I also had some bad RAM at one point and spent a couple of hours trying in vain to boot into either Linux or Windows.

I do think it’s fair to say that there are some things that Windows handles a little more gracefully, but the situation is not nearly as bad as it used to be / people still tend to think it is.

I also have a Windows laptop, and from time to time I’ll have an issue that I’m trying to fix and I’ll end up on the Microsoft forum where someone asked my question and the answers are either answers to questions that weren’t asked or a set of steps that must have been based on a different build of Windows or something because there’s no way to follow them on my installation of Windows 11. So maybe that’s not hostile like the old school Linux forums, but it’s still unhelpful.

I think both are fine, both have their pros and cons, and those pros and cons aren’t as different as people make them out to be.

So long as you’re not breaking any laws

In the US, basically anything you are not authorized to do on someone else’s computer is illegal and can be prosecuted under the CFAA.

I point this out only to highlight that it’s a terrible law that needs to be changed, I’m not disagreeing with anything that your said.

I, too, choose this user’s life.

I sometimes use it for “item”, knowing full well its established meaning as index or iterator, because I’m a rebel.