saltcured

It smells like delusions of grandeur, to be so shameless about asserting his own enterprise as the highest priority for society.

Whether he truly has these beliefs or just cynically thinks it is a good way to message, it disturbs me. It only makes it worse, seeing how quickly these new platforms can invade and contaminate the fourth estate (or the mass-market communications that have essentially subsumed that role already).

I think the person above is stating that this is distinguishing characteristic of "good" developers. By extension, the ones you are referring to are not good.

For me, the "P" key is right at the split between zones. I probably (nearly?) always type "O" with my middle finger. But, the "P" is easily done with middle and ring fingers, and it seems like I may split the duty in many words.

It's hard to be sure, because I'm not sure how much I bias my movements by trying to monitor them while I do it! Normally I just type on auto-pilot, looking at the screen and not really being aware of the specific movements or finger duties...

I have a very idiosyncratic touch-typing method. I am self-taught with 40+ years of computer usage since grade school. There are arcing zones that are in the natural reach of different fingers, but with overlap where adjacent fingers can reach the same keys. I think my middle fingers are somewhat dominant, and may do more than their share of the total keypresses because of their dexterity and reach.

I have relatively large and flexible hands, so I span the keyboard by bending and reaching fingers rather than moving my forearms. The outer heel of my hands are statically parked on the palm rest or desk, and just the small joints in my hands and fingers are moving.

This parked posture is probably why I strongly prefer the Thinkpad "trackpoint" input device for general computer use.

Yeah, thanks for that. I can only imagine someone reacted as if I am arguing against solar, which I'm not. It's just that you really need storage to phase out the natural gas peaker plants, since they need to deliver on-demand rather than as-available.

And, this gets even worse if you are also replacing baseload plants with solar, since the solar output is more variable than those old plants were, so now you need even more storage capacity to offset those dropouts at the same time you are handling demand peaks.

Sometimes, I think there is some magical thinking going on when people see solar panels work at a house without batteries, and they fail to recognize how much they depend on the grid for stability. If they ran in island mode, they'd quickly understand just how important storage is...

And, for larger undergraduate courses, the graders may be undergrads hired to do this menial work for the TAs, while the TAs focus on things like extra study sections and office hours.

As a CS undergrad, I did that kind of work at UC Berkeley in the 90s, grading courses that I'd taken 2-4 semesters earlier. I even did a semester as a TA, because the professor was having a hard time finding enough grad students who wanted to deal with one of those larger classes.

There seems to be an analogy here between these kinds of programmers and the many types of "machinist" that were coded in earlier economic studies.

But, these are job categories, not separate industries. I think the industry category would be more about the employer or the product category, not the individual job codes of their employees..?

Whatever it is doing, it won't be doing it for very long ;-)

Hmm, how much of that is base load versus the dramatic rise of natural gas plants that respond to dynamic demands? Even in daytime, I think you need storage to get rid of those, right?

Hah, from the headline here, I was expecting a completely different article about traditional file management UX, i.e. before the cloud UX of "it's always saved, except when it isn't" started to invade everything.

Not only the deliberate action, but the period with progress and success indicators, since this operation took a while and could go wrong along the way.

Yeah, I added a boring case on day 1 and would have trouble describing the feel of the bare device right now.

Found one on Amazon so I dodge Google's exorbitant plastic markup, and it is a relatively minimalist wrap that smooths out the camera bump and makes it more grippy in hand, in pockets, and on flat surfaces.

The behavior of those slippery phones in pockets is almost the bigger gripe to me. Like they are a new class of motion amplifier, trying to rotate and squirt their way out at the slightest twitch.

I think your thought experiment is begging the question by asserting the outputs are indistinguishable.

The poster above is complaining that the actual outputs are qualitatively "not creative". That they embody a statistical norm, while creative work has more unique variance.

These two viewpoints cannot be bridged by a flourish that ignores the fundamental difference of opinion...

Yes, that's why I left wiggle room for a few choice packages you track yourself.

What isn't really tenable for a small team is to drag in scores to hundreds of different third-party packages and rely on them all when you have no staff allocated to really evaluate and monitor so much upstream stuff.

The mitigation is to ignore nearly all that stuff in PyPI, realizing it is barely a step up from copy-pasting out of stack overflow. Same goes for, e.g. python-whatever RPMs that look like they were drive-by contributions.

So your trusted base is the Python runtime and maybe a few choice libraries that actually have engaged package management. Sadly, it is a trap to think you can put things on the internet as a small player by leveraging lots of third-party stuff, when you don't have the resources to actually maintain that large dependency base.

This also may mean you want a base OS like Fedora and not some crusty "enterprise" variant that tries to bundle a frozen Python from 15 years ago. This is getting a little better in recent years, with some enterprise platforms having optional package streams for parallel install of newer runtime versions, etc.

Edit to add: on the Fedora-derived platforms, pip doesn't really interfere much anymore. The platform python-* RPMs go into /usr/lib/... while pip installs into /usr/local/lib/... or your ~/.local/lib/... hierarchy. The only mysterious behavior you get is if you manage to install in both places and then you have to understand the path search order. Just like if you do strange things with user and virtual environments.

Heh. This is part of why I always preferred getting my python runtime and all these core libs from my linux distro packager. But python die-hards look at me like I'm insane when I suggest this.

Even in today's LLM-addled world, I still think it's a better tradeoff for smaller system/site operators. Get the distro-level testing and regular auto-patching, rather than telling yourself it is a good idea to "freeze" your python world at the pace of your slowest app/system integrator.

It's the same reason I think docker is an anti-pattern for these small groups. You really cannot safely use these strategies to bake an image and divorce yourself from the maintained distro layer unless you are going to adopt CI/CD that does the same thing. Keep tracking all these patches to the entire runtime with all the dependencies, rebuild, re-test, and redeploy.

It's total cargo culting to adopt the freeze/image techniques and just abandon apps in place as if that is robust!

But, it's also more than just automatically updating everything. There is an editorial aspect to distro management to help secure the supply chain to your app. Most smaller orgs cannot feasibly do this as well as the regular linux distro maintainers. Some large orgs can probably do it better, but that doesn't matter if you aren't doing it large org style with dedicated security folks tracking all this against well-developed policies and procedures...

To be fair, Java applets and the Flash plugin socialized that before Javascript tried to walk us back from the edge just a bit.

And before that, whatever Microsoft "macro" or embedded code variant was popular that week in all those document formats...