hvocode

I’m in the same boat. Due to security restrictions of my employer I can’t use cloud services to store work related stuff. I was really bummed when I discovered that a lot of the interesting features of my RM2 require their cloud service. I’ve dug through the GitHub repos of RM2 hacks and open source tools that are available, but it still feels like I’m missing out.

Reinventing known things and claiming that they’re novel is sort of his shtick. That said, he often does do interesting work - it just takes quite a bit of patience (which many people don’t have) to wade through the fluff and self-congratulating to get to the interesting technical meat of his writings.

Part of me wants to disagree since some of these features make my code shorter, but I have to agree since they commit a sin of language design that I dislike - implicit magic. Decorators are useful because they can help you shrink code by letting the decorator generate boilerplate for you. The code gets smaller, but now it’s harder to know what’s going on since you need to know what magic happened behind the scenes due to the decorator. It feels very much like issues I ran into when I used C++ meta programming libraries - my code shrank, and at the same time my understanding of what it actually did also shrank. Same with the walruses - my code gets smaller because now there’s some implicit stuff happening.

Comprehensions are a little less magical - if anything, they are more explicit. If I want to create a list where each element is generated by some function over another list, I just say it. Doing so with loops is obscuring what I wanted to say in the first place. The problem with comprehensions isn’t so much the comprehension, but the obtuse ways people can use them to eke out performance by avoiding explicit loops.

I’m all for things that are closer to what a programmer means, but less keen on features that entail obscuring details that may come back to haunt the programmer later (I see this most often with decorators).

I’m getting a little tired of articles or chats with people where you get the impression that people think the vaccines will create some sort of covid-proof bubble around them. This is the only explanation I can find for people acting surprised that vaccinated people get sick. The whole point was to prime the immune system so that when exposed, the likelihood of extreme effects would be drastically reduced. That’s it.

(E: I don’t get why people downvote this - all of the benefits of vaccination are precisely due to what I describe. Lower likelihood of individual bad outcomes, which reduces burdens on healthcare, and ideally, reduces community spread by reducing the amount of virus that replicates in an individual and can be passed on. This is why I was one of the first in line when I could get the vaccine. Perhaps daring to critique people with unrealistic vaccine expectations is unacceptable?)

The details of Windows executables are all well documented and open - it's very easy to parse a windows executable and run it. The part that's missing to run it without Windows is the implementation of system calls and system libraries. Without those the executable will run into dependencies that you are missing. This is the whole reason for things like WINE - the executables are easy, but the runtime environment that Microsoft hasn't opened up is hard.

I'm not sure it's a question of FOSS OS vs non-FOSS OS. Working with MacOS has always felt similar to working with other non-Linuxes -- it's different. When OSX first came along with Rhapsody, while it was a form of UNIX it was definitely painful - stuff rarely built out of box, and there was lots of breakage. It surprises me when people talk about how wonderful OSX used to be that they forget how absolutely painful it was for the first few years of its existence. There was a brief period between 2005 and 2013 when stuff worked reliably (the "golden age" you refer to) - and it wasn't a matter of OSX becoming more open. It was just popular, so OSX was a first class citizen in most configure scripts and the OS didn't really put up any barriers to using it like a Linux with respect to the Linux security/permissions model.

The added restrictions of recent times (e.g. SIP, the move to a non-GNU build toolchain, hard read-only restrictions on the OS region of the filesystem, etc) aren't so much a FOSS issue as them just adopting conventions that aren't present on the Linuxes. The breakage of packages and porting efforts feel very similar to when we used to have to worry about how a package would work on HP-UX, Irix, Solaris, and the various systems that were all similar but not quite identical. That was never a function of FOSS or not - it was just a function of not being all the same.

I find it very frustrating that people try to treat OSX as a Linux - it's not, and it never will be. If you want to support macOS, then support macOS - don't try to bash Linux-isms onto it since they will always feel like a hack since it isn't and never will be a Linux. If that's important to you, there's an easy solution - use Linux. I do that - I have my MacBook that I use as a Mac, and for the stuff that's simply too awkward to use natively there, I just ssh to my Linux workstation and carry on.

Oh come on. Even before the pandemic your typical anti-vaccine person also wasn’t universally against all vaccines. They usually had some subset that represented their favorite rationale for not getting it: those containing substances they don’t like, those developed with a process that had a fetal cell line somewhere nearby, those given in clusters in early childhood instead of spread later on, etc. Anti-mRNA vaccine sentiment is just another instance of the same thing. Sorry if they feel sad for having that label, but it’s the same behavior.

Competitive programming is fun. It’s amazing that some people seem to think everything is about career path optimization.

Are we not allowed to do things for fun or just to pass the time anymore without someone writing that we’re wasting our time since it isn’t boosting our career?

I wouldn’t overthink the tools. I found a mostly minimal toolset was sufficient when I did my PhD: actively used repositories to make sure I never lost my work (private repos so I didn’t have to care what I put in them), plain old emacs for editing, and a mix of Mathematica, Matlab, and Python for my numerical and plotting needs. Used physical sticky notes and cheap legal pads for notes and keeping on top of todo lists. I printed papers to read since I never found a digital method to maintain the deep focus I needed to fully read the papers. I generally discourage students from worrying much about tools: at the end of the day if you’re thinking more about a tool or workflow process than your research work, you’re not making progress towards the degree. Use whatever tools and methods allow you to be productive without thinking about the tools or methods.

I don’t get it. Why would you sign in with any personal information on a work device? Just create a free account and use it for work. I have zero sympathy for people who use personal accounts on work devices : just because they let you take it home doesn’t mean it’s not 100% work territory.

This sounds less like bad corporate policy and more like naive employees who didn’t think through the importance of separating work and personal devices.