Good version control hygiene is important. My most recent job we were pretty good about commit messages for the PR, and then squashing that into a single commit when putting it on main. As you say, avoid unrelated things going together. You don’t want to have to revert a whole major feature because your “I’ll just fix it here” broke something.

There’s a guy one of my old coworkers has been complaining about who never writes anything useful in his commit messages. It makes the git log useless and the code reviews harder.

As for abstraction and such, sometimes it feels like it’s just coupling unrelated things together. It can be annoying when it’s like “I want to change this…and it’s used in 17 places for some reason. Guess I’ll check if all of those can handle this change, or this will be the one weird place that’s different…”

I also worked with a guy that was a big fan of having two dozen one line functions. Monster functions are often bad, but a whole separate function like get_last_item(stuff): return stuff[-1] can be excessive.

I don’t consider single player changes cheating. For something to be cheating, you need to break the rules agreed to by the players. If you’re the only player, you presumably can’t break the agreement you make with yourself.

Hypothesis: people who cheat in video games are scum bags in other aspects of life. I wonder if anyone’s done a study on that. I feel like the kind of person who has to cheat in video games is a broken sad sack.

Oh that’s a neat library. Type annotations in python are really nice, and you don’t have to add tooling like when you switch from JS to TS.

Also I wish the inverted pyramid model was still omnipresent, it feels like half the articles I read are meandering and don’t spit out the most important info until it’s mostly over.

That’s probably because of advertising’s dominance. If they can get you to scroll through the whole page that’s so many more ad impressions! I wonder why original newspapers weren’t so bad? Probably because you paid for it up front?

I’m not sure if those people would read the summary. I think that person is watching a video instead. But maybe it would be helpful for them, as you say. It would be far, far, better to invest in public education than AI slop, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

edit: Also, most things have the most important bits in the opening paragraphs. Inverted pyramid and all that.

Most things on the Internet are short and written for a 6th - 8th grade level, I think. You should be able to read them. Reading is a skill that needs practice. So is skimming. Plus, ai isn’t always good at summaries .

It’s weird to be like “git gud” about reading but come on. (Accessibility or translation are separate concerns, which may or may not benefit from LLM tooling)

Many people are illiterate. How many of them are trying to run Linux, I don’t know.

Yeah, that would help. There’s also the smaller risk of “I was going to click on something else, and this new window popped in under the mouse”

I think some applications also don’t accept input for the first couple seconds to prevent this. I vaguely remember something that had the dialogue boxes count down from 5 before you could click or keyboard-interact them.

Feels like the kind of problem with a lot of edge cases, but even catching 70% of the problems would be a big improvement

I hate focus stealing so I might set mine to strict, now that I know that’s an option.

It’s an absolute nightmare to be typing, some dialogue box pops up, and I accidentally accept it by hitting spacebar without even seeing what it was.

I think most computer users now don’t know that file systems exist

I kind of assume Microsoft’s real motivation was to make Linux harder to install, and the “oh it’s more secure” stuff is a happy coincidence for them.

Update: installed mint. Seems work. Had a problem where it couldn’t see the HD. Had to change an option in grub

Pasting what I found online to fix it:

“”" thank you so much! what was the solution!

for anyone might read this in the future: in the bootmenu where u can select which version of linux u wanna boot u can press “e” and then u need to add intel_iommu=off at the end of the line of the “linux” row - i had some double dashes at the end for me it did the job when I add them before the double dashes.

Then I could see the harddrive and install mint mate on my old macbook air

also needed later on to set the parameter permantent by opening a terminal and used this command sudo nano /etc/default/grub

edited this line like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash intel_iommu=off” then save and exit nano and this command for updating the boot thingy

sudo update-grub “”"

So far most things have worked fine.

It’s a little annoying when steam wants to redo the vulkan compilation thing every time, but it seems to work fine if I skip that.

Modding I’m not sure how it’ll work yet. Some stuff probably just works, if it’s like “edit this file” or “replace that file” but I haven’t tried yet.

Whatever’s built into pycharm or vscode for looking at diffs. Command line for push pull squash etc

Only recommendation: some wifi cards (with certain chips, I forget which) in my experience have required me to go hunt down a driver, so check reviews for any card you’re looking at to see if people report it working out of the box.

With Linux mint, with one machine, I had to explicitly open the driver manager and tell it to use the drivers for the wifi. It wasn’t obvious but I’d read it on some random forum and remembered. Once I knew that was a thing, it was easy. Opened the driver manager, plugged in the install media (USB stick) when it asked, and then told it to use the proprietary drivers.

I had a bad time with mint on my desktop. HDMI, wifi, Ethernet, none of that worked.

I’m currently on pop_os and it’s been fine so far.

Good to know. I had some trouble a couple months back getting wifi and Ethernet working, and learned my phone can provide Internet over USB.

I did see a job post for a role that was just reviewing AI code. This is all terrible

Code reviews are important. Unfortunately, no-test-text guy convinced his whole team that he was right, and I wasn’t able to block it. I’d scheduled a meeting to try to get the wider org to adopt a more sensible standard, but then there was a mass layoff 🤷

The other guy with the bad messages is at a tiny startup where they’ve laid off almost everyone, and the other 2 guys don’t want to make waves. The CEO is big on “just ship it” (and also “why are there bugs in production? this is unacceptable!!”)