25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)
I have waited all through the cryptocurrency mess to upgrade my pc. Now I’ll have to wait out the AI boom. I assume after that electricity will be 10x the cost or something. Maybe I will reach the end of my natural life before I can upgrade my PC. Maybe I’ll hand down heirloom components to my kids.
A half dozen daily? All I can say is your perspective strikes me as highly industry-dependent.
I agree, but I didn’t have the vacation days. I had just enough for the driving day and I think 5 or 6 days for an anniversary vacation in April.
What shocked me was there was hardly any discernible lightening of the schedule. I expected the week to be pretty light, but I wound up in 8+ hours worth of meetings and deployments every day except Christmas Day. I was given half of Christmas Eve off, but I’d already put in 8 hours by then anyway.
I always feel like I lose the trail. I barely ever even take lunch. I recently moved to a tech lead role and I barely have time to look at actual code. I still feel like taking time off is hard because I have to keep constant track of everything or I will completely lose the thread of everything that’s going on.
I did get Friday off to drive back home from a working vacation. It felt great. The vacation was stressful as hell because I had family stuff and work stuff intermingled. I literally was in my car fixing an issue with a deployment one minute, boarding an airboat to look at alligators the next, and an hour later I’m in a forgettable meeting in the back seat of the car as someone else drives home.
It wasn’t ideal but the vacation was booked before I had to change jobs and I went from being forced to take that week off to having to cover for 80% of my team. I’m definitely getting too old for this shit, but I enjoy it.
This is not a problem that has a technical solution. This requires a business solution—stop doing business with that vendor. Whatever service agreement exists between your companies is either not being enforced or was negotiated by a drunken mule.
I’ve had good luck keeping the home partition and just reinstalling the OS. Set it up with the same user name and home directory and you’re done.
Boolean Algebra is one of the few things I learned in electronics that I still apply in programming all the time.
Following instructions to use GitHub as a blog host. Step one: fork some repo so that I’ve got a copy on my profile.
It’s mostly The Sims with mods along with whatever meme games she’s hearing about on YouTube. There’s no concern about rootkit anti-cheat or anything, and so far my experience has been almost anything on Steam will run in Linux without having to do anything. She’ll run into performance issues with her current hardware before she hits any games that aren’t compatible.
This is a great suggestion. Especially the not breaking it part.
My daughter is very Linux curious but she’s not going to want to learn anything about it. She just wants to play games and chat with friends. I’ll probably switch her when I upgrade and pass my current computer down.
You’re looking at secondary effects with a lot of causes, then assuming the cause. Energy prices are far more complicated than just AI. My prices are up because trade war with Canada.
I use autocomplete, asking chat, and full agentic code generation with Cline & Claude.
I don’t consider environmental damage by AI because it is a negligible source of such damage compared to other vastly more wasteful industries.
I am primarily interested in text generation. The only use I have for generated pictures, voices, video or music is to fuck around. I think I generated my D&D character portrait. My last portrait was a stick man.
What I ask it to do? My ChatGPT history is vast and covers everything from “how is this word used” to “what drinks can I mix given what’s in my liquor cabinet” to “analyze code for me” to “my doctor ordered some labs and some came back abnormal, what does this mean? Does this test have a high rate I’d false positive?” to “someone wrote this at me on the internet, help me understand their point” to “someone wrote this at me in the internet, how can I tell them to fuck the fuck off… nicely?” And I write atrocious fiction.
Oh I use it a lot to analyze articles and identify bias, reliability, look up other related articles, things that sound bad but really don’t mean anything and point out gaps in the journalistic process (I.e. shoddy reporting).
I also have written a discord dungeon master bot. It works poorly due to aggressive censorship and slop on open AI.
I use Mint. I got used to it very quickly. I have a harder time going back and forth between that and my MacBook. I’ve used Ubuntu. It’s fine also.
It’s been so long since I’ve used Fedora that my opinion would be outdated, but I observe it has many adherents, which it wouldn’t if it was terrible.
I really like Mint, but if you’re looking for something that screams “not windows” I guess you could look elsewhere. I’m not a big fan of “how the fuck do I…” and for the most part Mint has worked as I’d expect.
What if I develop software all day long and just don’t feel like an OS I need to fuck around with? I feel like Mint is great for anyone who just doesn’t want to fuck around with their own computer. Every game I want to play works. Every productivity tool I want is there. Any software I develop works fine. Anything I want to serve on my local network works fine. I click the update once a week or so and it just works.
I feel like people scoff at Mint because you don’t need to know anything about computers to use it, but that’s actually a hell of a feature even if you do know.
Mate, the great thing about Linux is it isn’t just one thing. I love Mint, but I think it’s great that people who like different things can get what they like, too. In fact I want those folks not to use it. If everyone used Mint, it would just become another Windows (or maybe RedHat would be a better parallel).
Having options means everyone is pushed to improve. Consolidation means ossification.
That said, Mint rocks and people should use it—if they want.
The hardest part about learning to code is that the projects you really want to do are far beyond your abilities as a beginner. I recommend starting with modding, creating websites, or even writing macros for stuff like excel. They get you started.
Then also watch some YouTube videos on stuff like SOLID, design patterns, functional programming, and “getting started with <language>”.
Then try to write your own versions of stuff. I learned a bunch of stuff by writing my own versions of stuff. Like I tried backporting Java Functions, BiFunctions, Predicates, etc to Java 7. It didn’t work great because the language support wasn’t there, but I learned a lot about what things are hard and why things are designed the way they are. I feel sorry for the poor bastards that inherited that code.
Also, don’t let people give you too much shit about asking questions of AI. It frequently explains things way better than it executes. It’s a great first line of learning even if you really need a deeper dive into the documentation to understand the more esoteric stuff. If you have a question you can’t find the answer to, ChatGPT will explain it in 30 seconds where you might have to wait days on a forum for someone to feel like answering.
Beware: ChatGPT is awful about mixing different versions of stuff so the answers it gives may well be obsolete. But if you’re really confused it can point you in the right direction. Yeah, you’ll have to learn a lot more nuance when you start doing shit professionally, but if you’re just fucking around it’s great. And googling for answers isn’t much better in that regard. The best answers come from the docs, but especially when you’re starting out, the documentation often assumes a baseline of contextual knowledge you aren’t going to have.
Try implementing a custom collector in Java just based on the docs. Have fucking fun with that.
Probably depends on the speed of your usb pen and port. If you know for a fact that everything USB side is 3.1, USB will be faster. Otherwise eMMC will be faster. If everything is USB3.1 gen 2, USB looks to be around 3x as fast. Gen 1 is about 25% faster.
What I found in a quick search:
If any part of the USB chain is 2 or lower, it’s slower.
That was a great video. I didn’t have any idea this was a thing. I have nothing but more questions so I’m going to go do some reading.
I think there is a problem with overloading the term API gateway. That’s really an orchestration service that might often live behind the gateway itself. In fact in some architectures each of those service calls would go through their own API gateway, if they serve both clients and services.
I agree with the idea and have used this architecture multiple times, but calling it an API gateway (which, to be fair, is exactly what I called it the first time I proposed it in design meetings) is going to confuse folks who are already working on cloud architecture.