VyseofArcadia

I have no qualms with maintaining a Gentoo installation on my desktop, but on my laptop I want something relatively stable (no-rolling release, prefer something similar to LTS) and hassle free. A great out-of-the-box KDE experience would be nice but not necessary. Currently running Kubuntu, not sure what to switch to. Most "it just works" distros seem to be based on Ubuntu, which defeats the purpose a little. I've considered returning to my first love, Slackware.

Open to suggestions.

> what (and more importantly: why) the requirements are

Maybe in a startup? My experience as an IC in larger, more established companies is the requirements are dictated to you. Someone else has already thought carefully about the customer ask, your job is just to implement, maybe push back a little if the requirements they came up with are particularly unreasonable.

Iterative work is THE way to work in large legacy codebases. The minute you wade into the code, all of your planning is moot. You don't know what's lurking below the surface. No one knows what's lurking under the surface. Except maybe Dave, because he vaguely remembers about 15 years back talking to some guy who wrote some code 30 years back about it.

Greenfield, absolutely design up front you lucky devils, but iterative is the way otherwise.

I'm never had any trouble finding potassium-enriched salt. But also, it really does have quite a different taste from regular salt. Having done both, I'd much rather just use less salt than deal with the sour, slightly off taste of potassium-enriched salt.

Preference is irrelevant. It's demonstrably dangerous. Maybe Gen Alpha will also prefer cars without functioning headlights, but those are thankfully banned.

100% agree.

This would require a level of polish and sophistication that I have no reason to suspect car manufacturers would ever by capable of. I can only imagine making some sort of awkward swiping gesture while frequently glancing at the screen to verify that it worked.

We should NOT have touch screen interfaces in cars. Full stop. If the driver has to divert their gaze from the road to operate e.g. the heating/AC[0], that is a failure of UX sufficiently egregious to keep the car off the road. It is not a toy, it is not a fashion statement, it is a thousand pound chunk of steel that will indiscriminately kill and maim if not operated with care and diligence.

[0] This is the complaint I have with my wife's Honda Civic. If I want to do something as simple as turn on the fan but turn off the AC, it means navigating into a sub menu and correctly hitting one of several choices on a touch screen.

> I'm not good enough at math/geometry to know if this kind of 'next level up' bifurcation of dimensionality extends up past Quaternions or not (like something called Octernions, 16ions, 32ions, 64ions, etc), but it seems like is would?

Octonions and up (more generally known as hypercomplex numbers) exist, but every time you pull the "double dimensions by adding more imaginary components" trick[0], you lose another useful property.

Real to complex loses total ordering. Complex to quaternion loses commutativity. Quaternion to octonion loses associativity (but they are at least alternative). The sedenions aren't even alternative, and they have zero divisors to boot.

You can also generalize hypercomplex numbers to the study of Clifford algebras.

[0] The Cayley-Dickson construction

Right, it's exactly the opposite of what you're thinking. I want the duplicate finder to NOT report them as duplicates, but it currently does.

Very excited for jank. I've been hacking together my weekend projects in Common Lisp for roughly a year. I've been wanting to look at Clojure as a modern lisp, but I want no truck with the JVM.

You did have to be more deliberate about it though. Checking socials and posting to socials required physically going to your computer, sitting down, and doing it. It wasn't something you could just to absent-mindedly with the convenience of just putting your hand in your pocket.

Online shopping and Wikipedia were a thing years before smartphones though. In the post-cell but pre-smart era that the author is glamorizing, you could already scroll inventory and look things up on Wikipedia from the comfort of your own home.

I am a current Clementine user. It is pretty good, but I don't feel it is optimized for collectors with large libraries the way Meelo appears to be. For example, the duplicate finder can't distinguish between the same track that appears on two different albums, e.g. the album it debuted on and a "Greatest Hits" release.

I love this, but I want it as a plain desktop app instead of a server + a web app. I don't want the headaches of self-hosting (regardless of whether it's on the same machine or a different machine on my network or he cloud), I just want to open an application and it works.

> No one feels connected, present, alive, embodied, or sexy when they’re on their phone all day.

I feel like the blame is misplaced. People are on their phones all day because of social media. The phone is just a convenient access point. I suspect without socials, the phone would be considered just a really handy tool [0] rather than the growing consensus that it's some kind of social menace.

[0] that some nerds go too far with, like the computer

Can we not just throw out the last widespread open communication protocol with the bath water?

I'd argue they'd probably benefit more from 1-1 mentorship, and as a bonus you don't have to force your entire team to adopt agile.

Weekly standup to check in with devs, leave them alone otherwise. Reach out if a high priority item comes up, but 9 times out of 10 that can be an email.

I've heard that one of the benefits of agile is identifying blockers and encouraging collaboration, but I saw much better results from assuming you've hired intelligent adults with work ethic and letting them reach out and collaborate as needed. Daily standups, sprints, boards, planning, etc. are great in a low-trust environment where you can't be sure people are doing the right things. But if you've hired self-directed people, that stuff just gets in the way.

> An agile process should build a feature, release that feature, interview users, analyze system behavior, iterate by improving user's goal, adding appropriate scale, iterating by removing unexpected errors or behavior.

I feel like there's this no true Scotsman thing going on with agile. Whenever someone describes their actual experiences with agile, there's always at least one person who speaks up and decries it as as not real agile and what agile should be.

At this point I don't care what agile should be. I just don't want management shoving agile down my throat anymore. I've yet to see it actually improve productivity for any team I've been on. Real agile must be exceedingly rare.

> Microsoft of course couldn't compete with an "Xbox 2" vs a "PS3"

Part of me wants to think that consumers can't possibly that uninformed, but I know in my heart I am wrong.

They should have done what Nintendo (usually) does and left the numbers out of it. Call the next iteration of the Xbox the <something else>box.

The sound design is in fact delightful. Nintendo is great at sound design.

Absolutely! I was just elaborating on my tastes, didn't mean to come across as disparaging yours.

I prefer just "playful" to "mature but still playful". Something about the straightforwardness of "this is a toy for people of all ages, but it is still a toy" speaks to me.

Yeah, I am not a big fan of the Switch UI. They really took out the "surprise and delight" compared to the Wii U and 3DS. Very bland and straightforward, and yet somehow awfully slow and laggy.

I don't like the aesthetic as much as the Switch 1. Looks a little too sleek, too monochrome, not Nintendo-y enough. Other than the splash of color around the thumbsticks it looks like any number of those handheld Steam Deck-alikes that have been coming out.

That said I always wait for the special Zelda editions of Nintendo's consoles, so I don't know that I have standing to complain.

The problem with Xbox naming is that names are both inconsistent and too similar to each other. Aside from the Wii/Wii U debacle, Nintendo console names haven't been consistent, but they have been distinct. It's easy to remember that the GameCube and the Wii aren't the same thing.

Xbox, though, it's just the word Xbox followed by arbitrary numbers, maybe with the letter S or X thrown in for fun. I have no idea why they thought Xbox Series X wouldn't confuse people right after the Xbox One X.

Kudos to Sweden for responding to research.

> There was nothing on vine that was addicting

Well that sounds like a selling point to me.

> human-readable

> sytacticly similar to Rust

Choose one.

I kid, I kid, but Rust is not the easiest-reading language out there. It has the same problem as C++, with a syntax that's not terribly straightforward to begin with, but then it's just liberally sprinkled with nearly every bit of punctuation that can by typed with the US QWERTY layout.