https://seenthis.net/sites/1063683 merge trees

Evidence? You don’t believe that Joe’s friend’s cousin saw someone dumping ballots into a Yugo? /s

It may look absurd at first blush, but mental illness is actually not funny.

Sigh. Linux is for everyone. NSA. Criminals. Average Joes. Why focus on a small group of users?

Republicans don’t mind a troubled economy because they believe they are avoiding worse pain. Democrats are more willing to increase the cash flow at all levels of the economy. There really isn’t much to be surprised at here.

Of course, they often don’t present their positions that way, but lying is like breathing to all politicians. Trump kind of abandons any pretense otherwise.

Read other people’s code… particularly code by experienced developers. One good way to do that is to single-step debugging through the test code in a well-known package, stepping into the code being tested.

I suppose if you don’t know how test frameworks like pytest work, tackling how they work and how to do single-stepping with some toy example code will be a prerequisite for the above, as will spending some time studying how packages are made. (The latter may seem unattractively tedious, but the knowledge will pay off even if you never become an expert at making your own packages.)

These exercises are very likely to expose weaknesses in your understanding of all sorts of things. Be patient and keep studying!

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When you come across some Python code for something written 5 years ago and they used four contributed packages that the programmers have changed the API on three times since then, you want to set up a virtual environment that contains those specific versions so you can at least see how it worked at that time. A small part of this headache comes from Python itself mutating, but the bulk of the problem is the imported user-contributed packages that multiply the functionality of Python.

To be sure, it would be nice if those programmers were all dedicated to updating their code, but with hundreds of thousands of packages that could be imported written by volunteers, you can’t afford to expect all of them them to stop innovating or even to continue maintaining past projects for your benefit.

If you have the itch to fix something old so it works in the latest versions of everything, you have that option… but it is really hard to do that if you cannot see it working as it was designed to work when it was built.

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Connections

Puzzle #457

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Published in the Journal of Improbable Research?

I didn’t say it was unobtainable. But it might look/behave quite different than the tools you are currently using.

As for Microsoft Exchange, I only use that for work, and my employer would not allow me to connect from my personal machine anyway. I am not saying that you that you have to give up your favorite tools… but I am saying that it you are putting up so many fences then you might as well stay with what you have.

No.

If you ever so carefully paint yourself into a corner then the corner is where you will be stuck. How badly do you want out of your corner?

There are FOSS and SAAS options that could work if you wanted them to… but whether they will depends on you.

Meat eaters trying to become vegetarian for ethical reasons often fail because the “un-meat” options out there don’t meet their standards. Success almost always requires some letting go and re-adjusting. If you are not open to that then don’t force yourself to put up with something you don’t really want.

You are being obtuse. Fiber and cable and DSL are not “ethernet standards” and Ethernet is not used for last mile connections. Re-read the excellent explanation.

knowledge takes you past hand to mouth living on the edge and creates the opportunity for spare time with which to ask silly questions.

Did anyone who up upvoted this actually follow the link and look at the script? This is a troll.

I will just say that I think mermaid is great. I use it via the DiagrammeR package in R and via Quarto. In addition to manually typing in diagrams I sometimes write ad-hoc code that helps me visualize my data (and source code) by emitting one of the relevant mermaid syntaxes.

I would say you are lucky. I lived in my college town for 20years and it started out chock full of co-ops in the 80s and by the time I moved away they were all hardly recognizable or gone. Food co-ops, housing co-ops, internet co-ops… all mutated away from shared labor or were replaced by sole ownerships.

My wife works for an employee-owned engineering company, but they are anything but FOSS in their culture.

I hope these intermediate management structures that combine expertise and collective ownership grow more. But it still isn’t a slam-dunk that should be assumed to be the stupidly-obvious approach unless such organizations compete with the grifters… and then their success won’t be due to the fact that they are using FOSS but that they present a track record of success as an organization.

… and there are a gazillion examples where no community forms and the founder burns out. Cheers where it works, but some projects aren’t sexy enough to attract a self-sustaining community, and when you don’t preselect success stories but choose according to external needs that hit-and-miss experience starts to look less obvious and more like the thing only “smart” people can succeed at.

My objection is to the idea that FOSS is easy… it does require some smarts to succeed with.

Don’t get me wrong… I am all for FOSS and I avoid walled gardens, but people have a hard time remembering to take the trash out to the street on the right day. Spending time driving garbage trucks monthly in the local waste management Co-op is not going to fly well. That problem gets solved using money… homeowners are taxed and the local government either hires garbagepeoples directly, or more often they hire a company that takes care of the problem.

Upshot there is money rather than co-op ownership, and frequently for-profit contractors win the day over government ownership. Contractors supply GaaS, we just have to get the bin to the street. So the equivalency here is the need for the public institution known as city government to retain ownership of the waste management system. Not quite “the people”, since getting co-op volunteers is, well, erratic at best. And there are a ridiculous number of people out there who are vehemently against government management of actual organizations like this. I am for it, but over and over I see “privatization” win elections.

So I am not seeing how pitching this as “stupidly obvious” will win when “obvious” means hiring a contractor nearly every time.