Only sorta related, but now I have an excuse to tell my anecdote…

One job ago I had a manager who decided that he would convert some of our helper scripts from bash to Python for reasons. I was new there and so didn’t realize what he was doing, or that he had started the process just as I was going through orientation. However, I ended up being the reviewer for the PR.

This was the worst Python I had ever seen but in such odd ways and it mostly worked. It almost felt like it was written by someone who knew bash really well but had never learned any other languages, or thought that bash was just so damn good that he wanted to turn every other language into it. For example, instead of using argparse he was manually looping through argv and parsing them one at a time. And instead of using a standard for each in foo loop, there were index variables and while loops. And certainly there were no comprehensions or any understanding of the basic built in data structures other than using lists as arrays.

So I did a review, assuming that this person was just really new to python and tried to gently coach him towards basic Pythonisms. His response was: “Oh yeah, I just ran them through ChatGPT and assumed it was all ok.”

I quit about two months later.

Array operations in FORTRAN are much easier for the compiler heavily optimize than it is in c/c++ due to its array model and type system. You can achieve much of the same thing with modern compiler extensions, but it’s difficult and not as portable.

Why not both?

I’ve had small Debian servers such as a RaspPi or a NUC that I’ve never updated after the initial setup and they were still working perfectly when I finally turned them off to move. If you don’t want to update a Linux system, don’t. Maybe setup auto security updates if it’s going to be exposed to the raw internet and running some open servers.

Ooh! Time to give it another look.

It’s alway weird to me that even though Ubuntu has the largest Linux desktop market share, no one admits to using it.

Anyway, I use Ubuntu because I was doing a lot of ROS development when I last built a machine, and getting ROS running properly on other distros can be a pain.

Looking back… that was right, hmm, 7 out of 8 times. The miss was a very chill place that gave out Dells, but I lost my job because the funding round didn’t come in.

I remember having a few of these for WordPerfect, MS Word for DOS and Lotus 1-2-3.

I use the “short meetings” option in gcal, which shortens meetings by 5-10 minutes to give me a passing period between meetings. Twice this week people have had the audacity to try and schedule a meeting in that break. 😬

I just tried it and it actually works! 🤣

Oh look, it’s me.