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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Microsoft/Windows has a habit of messing up for Linux in despite being on separate partitions. I’ve experienced:

    • overwrite existing grub
    • write its boot sector on a disk it didn’t identify (was part of a software raid setup… So that was fun)
    • acquire a lock on devices and not release it even when restarting, so on Linux the “WiFi adapter suddenly doesn’t work”. -… Probably more.

    IMO, try out a live USB. Dual boot if you want. But as soon as you can, ditch windows entirely.











  • I had mixed feelings about the whole Ondsel thing. And, please correct me if I’m wrong.

    Most of the significant features in 1.0, that supposedly came from Ondsel, are things that I’ve been using for perhaps 3 years now, with a fairly well known branch of FreeCAD called Linkstage3 by a user that goes by RealThunder.

    I don’t know how much he was involved in Ondsel, or the merging of those features into FreeCAD, but it sure looked like a whole lot of great work wasn’t credited to mind boggling amount of work by one person.

    I still use the Linkstage3 branch, because it has a lot more features still, than what was present in the 1.0 pre-release i tried some months ago. Maybe things have changed since then.






  • My biggest gripe is the lack of respect/understanding for the importance of data models and clear domain boundaries.

    Most things that end up as “technical debt” can be traced to this. Sometimes, it’s unavoidable, because what the data models changes, or the requirements of the domain, etc.

    And, it’s very innocent looking differences sometimes. Like “We know that the external system state will change from A to B, so we can update that value on our side to B”. Suddenly you have an implicit dependency that you don’t express as such.

    Or, things like having enum that represents some kind of concept that isn’t mutually exclusive. Consider enum values of A and B. Turns out this really represented AZ, and BP (for some inherent dependency to concepts Z and P). Someone later on extends this to include ZQ. And now, suddenly the concept of Z, is present in both AZ and ZQ, and some consumer that switches on concept Z, needs to handle the edge case of AZ… And we call this “technical debt”.


  • I did eventually yes. Thanks for asking. I was exhausted yesterday, and upon reading my comment again, I get the downvotes. Being a second language doesn’t fully explain the wrong tone there. The article was a lot more insightful and in depth than I had mistakenly assumed.

    After reading it tho, it seemed a lot more focused on performance than I think would be warranted. But that could be due to different concerns and constraints than where I’m used to working. I’d focus more on the mechanisms that best expresses the intent, and although they do discuss this well, the Venn diagram for the appropriate use of exceptions and error codes don’t overlap as much in my world.

    And, it’s not like I’m arguing that they are wrong. It’s an opinion on a choice for a tradeoff that I only think, while allowing the possibility of being wrong, might miss the the mark. Stack unwinding is by its nature less explicit for the state it leaves behind. So it shouldn’t be a question of either error codes or exceptions, but which are most appropriate to express what, and when.

    Even for Rust, where monads are preferred and part of the language to express and handle error codes, I would say that the statement of “newer languages like Rust don’t allow the use of exceptions”, seems incorrect to me. Something like panic!("foo"); coupled with panic::catch_unwind(|| { ... } }); I believe would unwind the stack similar to that of a throw/catch.

    Anyways. Thanks for reminding me to actually read the post. It was well worth it, and very insightful.