thaumaturgy

12 ms·

91.
by thaumaturgy 2y ago
> Are there any arguments that could seriously motivate me to continue with this career outside of just blind hope that it will be okay? FWIW, as an oldish, so far everything that has been significantly impacted by deep learning has
92.
by thaumaturgy 2y ago
Well, let's see, I had met with my boss, I met with my boss's boss, who was also the CEO, I met with my boss and the CEO, I met with my boss and the CEO and the cofounder. I wrote emails and had hallway chats and met in person. I
93.
by thaumaturgy 2y ago
Yes. About five years ago (so, not new), and for a smaller company. After months of carrying multiple projects myself, including one that deserved at least three more devs on it, I had run out of all the nice ways to plead with management t
94.
by thaumaturgy 2y ago
This here is one of the reasons I reject the title "software engineer".
95.
by thaumaturgy 2y ago
$ php -v PHP 8.2.7 (cli) (built: Jun 9 2023 19:37:27) (NTS) $ php -r 'var_dump(preg_match("/^[a-z0-9 ]+\$/", "hello world"));' int(1) $ php -r 'var_dump(preg_match("&
96.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
FWIW being a "job hopper" doesn't seem to be a negative anymore, and may even be seen as a positive now. From what I've read, if your application makes it to human eyeballs at all, they're more likely to view a long
97.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
Uniformly terrible. I started looking casually for a new position last July, then in earnest last October, and then my previous contract ended in middle of February and I "lucked" into a new contract in middle of March. ("Luc
98.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
That is almost exactly what happened here. We basically had sleet for about a full day, it was relentless. In an area that never snows and rarely freezes, a neighbor went actually ice skating down the street. I still have microspikes from m
99.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
We're getting side-tracked a bit here. In this case: it happened in an area where most folks are accustomed to mild weather year-round and I don't recall seeing even a single box of food kept outside; I was out for propane, and on
100.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
"Frequently" is a bit subjective. This is one of those things where it might only happen in a specific area once every couple of years (for more than a few minutes or hours), but when it happens, it sticks around in people's
101.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
You can do that so long as nobody else in the area affected by the outage had the same idea and got there before you. The last major outage (due to an ice event), I hit the stores within the first hour of the outage and they were already cl
102.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
For those that have the time and interest, Angela Collier is a somewhat newer science communicator, and covers everything described in this reply (and more) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E . I don't have
103.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
Yeah, this is a complex question. For background, I have 40 years of programming experience, about 20 or 25 professionally, depending on how you count. My first system was a Commodore Vic-20. I've done assembly and COBOL and mainframes
104.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
The `die()` trick is good, but bash has an annoying quirk: if you try to `exit` while you're inside a subshell, then the subshell exits but the rest of the script continues. Example: #!/bin/bash die() { echo &q
105.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
It's unclear if you missed the filename being wrongfile.conf . Embedding a -- in the middle of a long series of arguments isn't the magic pixie dust that suddenly makes the filename argument stand out the way that it does when i
106.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
Those are all reasonable points, but: For shell scripts, I would argue quite vehemently that the most important goals should be correctness and readability , with performance being a very distant third concern. I'd even be tempted t
107.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
I use shellcheck a lot, and I've found so far that its complaints fall neatly into one of two buckets: "oh, whoops, nice catch" and "shut up, shellcheck". "useless use of cat" goes into the latter bucket.
108.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
I virtualize most of my desktop environment. I wanted to go with KVM and virt-manager initially, since I'm mostly using a Linux host and Linux guests, but there were two important features I wanted and couldn't figure out how to g
109.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
This might be a fun exercise. Let's assume we have the following data: the user's email address, some sort of smartphone identifying value, their ip address, and their brushing habits. That's not very much; who would want tha
110.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
Re: induced demand, US electricity consumption has been approximately flat since 2007: https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-states#how-... Since the population has grown over that same period, per capi
111.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
This seems like it's getting a bit repetitive at this point. I argue that a concept that is difficult to measure necessarily has a vague, useless, or exceedingly complex definition. I'm not seeing a good argument to the contrary.
112.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
You're being vague -- whether intentionally or unintentionally, I'm not sure -- and beginning to contradict yourself. How is it that productivity as a concept is "not complicated" but also extremely difficult to measur
113.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
Okay, let's walk through this together. Explain to me what makes a developer "productive". What, specifically, are you referring to when you define it as, "How much they get done"?
114.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
It's peculiar that "developer productivity" is even a term. It doesn't have a generally-agreed-upon definition. I don't think a definition is even possible. So, we keep trying to come up with objective measures of a
115.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
Nice to see this getting some treatment. It's been my preferred source control strategy at several places now -- both small and large, though nothing so large as Facebook. It has its limitations, but for the the 90+% of places that are
116.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
Nah. Even the "good" stuff feels cheap. It's the art version of ho-hos and twinkies. Every once in a while I see one and think, "oh, neat, wonder how they got it to do that?", but usually I'm just left slightly
117.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
You might be thinking about Wirecutter pre- and post-NYTimes acquisition, although it's a bit more complicated than that: https://archive.is/5JDw0 (I also like Project Farm, although I don't think of them as compr
118.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
Tone is not subjective? I had no problem with the writing style of the article and wouldn't've even noticed it were it not for this thread. Even after reading the couple of complaints about it, I still prefer it to the endlessly
119.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
Thanks for the recommendation! I've added it to my to-read list. I will note though that "Changes from the 9th edition" on page 4 reads to me like it supports my point moreso than contradicts it. I'd also add my favorite
120.
by thaumaturgy 3y ago
Software "engineering" (little to no actual engineering in this area) is still in its infancy. Civil and mechanical engineering are millenia old and we still had the Tacoma Narrows Bridge less than a hundred years ago; electrical

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