• 12 Posts
  • 877 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • You can take my terminal when you can pry it from my cold, dead, hands.

    Any one-liner you put together, you can re-run trivially. You can rerun it with modifications trivially. You can wrap it in a for loop that runs it with different parameters trivially. You can stick it in a file and make a reusable Bash script. It’s far easier to show someone else how you did it (just copy/paste the text of your terminal session) than dozens of screenshots of a point-and-click adventure (and not in a good way) GUI app. Bash commands are easier over SSH than GUI apps over RDP or VNC or whatever. You can’t script a GUI app.

    I seriously find myself wondering why someone would you use a GUI for something you can do with a terminal? Learning curve is the only reason I can think of.

    I frequently find myself creating tools that let me do with a terminal what I formerly could only do with a GUI tool.






  • My mother is constantly googling things and reading me the AI overview. And I know LLMs make shit up all the time, and I don’t want AI hallucinations to infect my brain and slowly fuck up my worldview. So I always have to drop everything and go confirm the claims from the AI overview. And I’ve caught plenty of inaccuracies and hallucinations. (One I remember: she googled for when the East Wing of the White House was originally built and the AI overview told her the year of a major renovation, claiming it was the year it was built, but it had been built much earlier.)







  • Wow. Huge topic. And it depends on a ton of things. And I definitely don’t feel like I’ve got it all figured out myself.

    If you’re young and just for the first time having to manage your own affairs rather than depend on parents to help with that, then self-help kind of stuff might well be a fine place to start. (Just avoid Jordan Peterson.) If you’re older and feel like you’ve had the time needed to develop those skills and still don’t have them, it’s likely there’s something deeper going on that might benefit from therapy.

    I personally cared for my ailing grandmother for a long time. And that shit’s hard work, and takes a lot of time. In the process, I let a lot of things go by the wayside like yardwork, home repair, and organization. Now that she has passed, I find myself with a lot of remedial work to catch up on. I feel like I’m making progress. It’s frustrating and slow, but it is progressing and that’s the important part.




  • I can definitely see a lot of good applications for this way of doing things.

    It does seem like I often run across “error handling” code that literally just catches a bunch of different exception types and throws a new exception with the same content from the caught error just reworded, adding literally zero helpful information in the process.

    It’s definitely the case that sometimes the exact sort of crash you’d get if you didn’t handle errors is exactly the best sort of exception output the program could do given its particular use case and target audience. Or at least it might be best to let the error be handled much further away in the call stack.