I don’t think an average user is going to know how to interpret the output of mount or findmt

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.

I think about half the time I’ve installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.

Still glad I made the switch.

Linux doesn’t really have the profit motives that lead to enshittification.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

I think there’s a certain kind of user who doesn’t really learn concepts, but rote actions. They click the start menu and then excel to open excel, but they don’t really understand that the start menu is an application launcher and Excel is an application that can be opened in other ways. It’s very one dimensional.

Then when something changes, like the application launcher is moved, they freak out. They don’t have a mental model.

That’s how my mother is, anyway. It’s all magic with no underlying coherent anything. Not sure how to fix that, because it usually comes up when they’re mad or scared, and that’s not a time anyone will learn.

Use a dedicated data type or library. Some languages also have something like python’s Decimal type

>>> .1 + .2
0.30000000000000004
>>> Decimal(".1") + Decimal(".2")
Decimal('0.3')

Yep. Open your browser’s console and do .1 + .2 and you get 0.30000000000000004.

One of the reasons not to use floating point when working with money.

Fed up with Microsoft. I had a windows 10 computer they said couldn’t update to windows 11, and they said Recall was coming, so I said fuck it. Switched to mint, and now I’m trying pop!_os.

Way back like 10+ years ago I ran Ubuntu for a while, but I play a lot of video games and support was lacking. Wine, proton, and other tools have come a long way since then.

My old desktop couldnt update to 11. But for my newer computer, Windows recall was a deciding factor. Fuck that shit. Also fuck their “ai” nonsense.

It’s nice that it’s free and doing little to nothing contrary to my interests.

I used to try to explain to management that some debt is high interest.

Do you actually do work or are you one of those middle-men that add dubious value?

And, like, do you think I can read my coworker’s screen from across the room and be like “Ah yes, that is TransferProjectView.py. I should tell him that I am also planning on touching that file”?

And adults can learn to explicitly communicate. It’s not impossible. You just type into the box.

I don’t think microsoft understands shit. I think their leaders are out of touch, lying, idiots. They continue to exist based on inertia and past success.

It’s frustrating because management are so colossally, transparently, stupid but they get the big paychecks and the workers get fucked. And then like half the workers sit there going “Well this is just and fair. this is a good world. If the people actually doing the work had more of a say, that’s communism and thus axiomatically bad”

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.