• 1 Post
  • 173 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle
rss


  • I’m not God’s gift to the field, but I am clearly better than most of my competition - that is, practitioners who haven’t put in the reps to build their own C libraries in a cave with scraps, but can read textbooks and use libraries written by elite institutions.

    I agree not reading isn’t a virtue, but after reading something that caused my eyes to roll entirely out of my skull, I had to choose to cut the damage to my optic nerves.

    Maybe the rest was good. That was bad. My critique is constrained to that specific, nauseating paragraph.






  • Metric and imperial don’t change the way carpenters work because in the case you mentioned of a sub-mm dimension, that’s in the 64th of an inch range. Carpenters don’t ever measure to that precision because of the fluidity of the material. Craftsman will at that point just cut to fit.

    My point with those hard numbers wasn’t that metric would make those numbers easier, only that your examples were intrinsically favouring imperial measures. Maybe it’s easier to say:

    What’s easier to figure out, 1/3 of 3cm or 1/3 of 1 93/512 inches? You can easily construct scenarios for a measure that are easy in one and obscene in the equivalent. It’s less about the notation and more about the measure. If you assume all of the initial measures are round in imperial units, then the math will automatically be easier. If your designs were designed in metric, they’ll be round to metric. If they’re in imperial, they’ll be round in imperial.

    And when this degree of precision is actually important, imperial craftsmen (engineers, machinists) already use decimal. A “Mil” is a milli-inch.

    Anyhow, again, I agree that for some very specific scenarios dealing with fractions is easier, especially when you’re doing any base 2 operation.

    I just think that you would be surprised how infrequently the issues you’re imagining would actually manifest themselves, working with intrinsically metric designs, and that you’re underestimating the number of scenarios where not dealing with fractions actually would make your life easier.


  • I understand the underlying principle, but I’m not sure if it actually shakes out that way for a few reasons:

    If you asked a carpenter to cut something to 1/24", they’d be like “what?”. Sure, the math was easier, but the result is unusable. No measuring instrument has divisions of 24ths. The person making a cut would need it in terms of 8ths, 16ths, etc. Any time saved at the initial stage is lost when they need to convert it again to a useable denominator.

    Secondly, what’s 3/32nds of 17/128ths?

    The examples you give are harder in decimal form because nobody is going to make metric carpentry designs for things that are to the tenth of a millimeter, so 1.25cm isn’t even real.

    I admit, there are a lot of specific scenarios where fractional convention is helpful. I just personally think they don’t outweigh the drawbacks.




  • “intuitive” in the sense you described just means “familiar”. One feels like one. Ten feels like ten.

    The magic of metric isn’t that each base unit is somehow more valuable in metric. It isn’t. One will always feel like one.

    The magic is how easy it is to convert from the “small one”, the “medium one” and the “big one”.

    Also, the convention of fractional inches is ridiculous.

    It should be trivial to order 27/64, 3/8, and 7/16. Don’t make me do that math.



  • I’ll rephrase them, except in good faith:

    1. Talking directly to the people about the work is better than a 95 state JIRA pipeline

    2. Document your finished working work, not every broken POC, because that’s a waste of time

    3. If the contract isn’t actually going to meet the desires of your stakeholders, negotiate one that will

    4. If you realize the plan sucks, make a better plan.

    My company paid to have Kent Beck come to workshop with our Sr devs. I expected to dislike him, but he won me over pretty quick.

    I don’t remember what it was, but someone was like “Kent, we do X like you recommend in the manifesto, but it creates Y, and Z problem for us”

    And he was like “So, in your situation it isn’t providing value?”

    Guy was like “No”

    “Then stop doing it.”

    It’s not hard. It’s the most fucking common sense shit. I feel bad for them because these guys came from a world where there were these process bibles that people were following. So they wrote like, basically a letter saying “if your Bible doesn’t serve you, don’t follow it”

    And all these businesses dummies were like “oh look, a NEW bible we can mindlessly follow”


  • Ok, I think I see your position more clearly now:

    You’re thinking about people who are interested and installing based on technical interest and curiosity.

    In those cases, I think you’re probably right. There is probably some base competency at play. A desire to learn. Probably someone in their sphere to support.

    I’m thinking more about the type of people who would buy a Chromebook. Or my cheap ass parents who want to squeeze another 5 years out of an ailing laptop. They don’t want to spend any money and just want to use Facebook and YouTube. Send some emails. Connect to wifi. Print their boarding passes. Not have their machines riddled with viruses within minutes because their windows OS isn’t getting security updates anymore. I think this is actually a massive use case, and I want Linux to be accessible to them without needing to use the terminal for anything.


  • I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve seen absolutely terrible advice posted and taken regarding how to do things in Linux. Can’t connect to something? Easy, make a blanket iptables rule to permit everything. Something can’t read a file? Chmod 777. Install isn’t working? Just install as root and use root as your general login from there on out.

    It’s hard to learn Linux.

    But it’s even harder to FORGET what you’ve learned, to empathize with what it was like to not understand it at all. That’s why it’s SO HARD for us who’ve been using it daily for a decade to empathize with newcomers.

    It’s why people literally can’t fathom why people are afraid of the terminal.

    It’s why, even when someone takes the time to explain why, people go, “nah, that couldn’t possibly be it”

    It’s like when gun people can’t comprehend why people are afraid of guns. The answer is obvious they just can’t hear it.

    Edit: I think I better understand that there are more nuances around the cases now, and I think I’m being unfair by making blanket statements about what is and isn’t obvious



  • IMO, caution, wariness, concern, and unfamiliarity manifest as revulsion.

    EVs. Solar panels. Heat pumps. Anything outside of CIS heteronormal relationships.

    I’m my experience, after the age of like, 25, people (in GENERAL… Obviously many expectations) feel like they’ve got life figured out and push back against pretty much anything that challenges whatever they’ve grown accustomed to.

    Nobody bitched about the DOS prompt when nobody knew how to use computers. Young people learned it. Old people insisted computers were a fad and pushed back entirely.

    In my calculation, it’s just typical and predictable human response. Open to other theories though.


  • I mean, the answer to this is obvious if you can empathize.

    Gui has baked into it hints on cause and effect. The terminal is a freeform incantation machine where you need to know and utter magic spells.

    sudo rm -rf /

    Is just as magically nonsense as

    sudo apt-get update

    If you don’t know what ANY of it does, your capacity to fuck things up is unbounded on the terminal. In a GUI, rightly or wrongly, you expect your capacity to fuck things up is bounded by the context at hand. I do not expect that I can nuke my system clicking through Firefox.

    You can claw the terminal from my cold dead hands, but I’m not offended by the notion of a GUI.

    Why? Because developer attention scales broadly by usage. Well used projects get more love. If we could even break 10% home adoption of any Linux distro and the runaway effect of net new developer input would destroy closed source operating systems, and I’m here for it. If that means adding a fucking Ubuntu checkbox to let people enable Wayland without strictly requiring the command line go fucking nuts.