solraph

I grew up in that era as well - but I realised it doesn't matter. I used to have compile my own kernels and fumble around with downloading and installing the nVidia drivers, and now my distro deals with that for me. I can go look if I want to, but I don't need to.

And you know what, it's better that way. The tech scene and civilisation moves forward because those abstractions lets us achieve more with the same amount of time.

I fully embrace that notion that one of the problems of the well polished machines is that access to the underlying layers is actively blocked. I think this is a very real problem.

However, if you want to learn programming, electronics, operating systems or any other level of the stack there is a plethora of options available to you. Most people simply have other interests.

I recently had the opportunity during the lock down to make use of around kg of saffron milk-cap saffron (aka, red pine mushroom, or Lactarius deliciosus), and it utterly changed my concept of what mushrooms could be.

Until that point, I would have told you that I hated mushrooms - that they tasted like mold, or at best, slightly wet rubber - but the saffron milk-caps were completely different, nutty - almost meaty, with a proper texture. Since then I've been on the look out for more interesting mushrooms in my various local grocers, and look out for recipes that make them shine, rather than just using them as filler.

Depends on where you live. Sure, if you an apartment heavy area like Singapore, then no - but based on some very quick googling, it looks like globally around 60% to 80% of the population live in detached or semi-detached houses, where they own the roof, so there's your free space.

Even when people rent, I can see having solar panels simply becoming factored into the rent equation. If the renter can expect to save $100 off their monthly power bill, then the landlord can easily ask for an additional $80 in rent, which means they make more profit over the owned lifetime of the property.

As an example of internationally known brand/quality, here's a complete installed 6.6kw system from IKEA for AUD$5047 (AUD$3197 after subsidy).

That includes panels, inverter, mounting system, and installation.

https://www.ikea.com/au/en/customer-service/product-support/...

At this price point, it's becoming a no-brainer.

Oops, you are right, I confused it with ownCloud

For lost cost Wordpress stuff sure, but for higher end senior type work I think it's worse than other languages.

While this is obviously location dependent, over the last year or so I've had dozens of calls from recruiters asking me to come work on PHP (mostly Symfony and Laravel) applications, and telling me they just can't find competent senior and lead devs.

Ironically, Nextcloud is moving to Golang.

https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/16726

This sounds like someone who has been in their field so long they've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner. They've utterly missed the point of Arduino. It's not for them, it's for beginners, and hobbyists, optimized for fast feedback and making it hard to screw up too much.

I mention fast feedback, because it's so important to new entrants to a field. I tried to build some MCU project way back in the early 2000s, which involved soldering together a parallel port based programmer, and attempting to drive a blinking light as the first project.

It didn't work. I have no idea why. Maybe I had blew some components up or put one in backwards. I don't know what I did wrong, and I didn't know enough to debug it. I didn't know enough to know what questions to ask.

When I came back to MCU programming many years later, I picked up an Arduino kit. A small part of me felt like it was cheating, but it let me get started. It let me iteratively play around with and learn concepts piece by piece. Ironically, I feel like now I'd actually now have a chance of debugging and fixing that parallel port programmer.

I can't speak for React, but I found adding VueJS was perfect for adding JS functionality incrementally to a section of a site. See my other comment on this thread on using it to create a dynamic contact form to an otherwise static site.

> When you just want to add a small bit of interaction to a mostly-static site, jQuery can help.

For very small amounts, perhaps, but honestly, even then I think it has limitations. As an anecdote, about six months ago, I needed to add a couple of dynamic forms to a static site. The forms were a simple contact us, and a mailing list sign up form, and only needed to handle the states of Open->Submitting->Thanks|Failed->Open, while preventing double submissions, etc.

I wrote the first one in jQuery (site was already using it due to the theming), and making sure handled all the various edge cases, and fixing one bug didn't cause another was far harder and time consuming than it should be.

Out of frustration, I wrote the other form in VueJS, and hacked the whole form in about an hour or two. My take away was that anything involving state in jQuery can get overly complicated very quickly.

I'm with you on this one. I just find them incredibly difficult to use long term, despite multiple years across the various Macs and PC laptops I've used.

I strongly suspect most of the complaints about PC trackpads are a bit like Windows/Linux/Mac users complaining about the current font rendering on any of the others. I can't help wondering how much is just personal preference + a bit of echo chamber.

`git add -p` will take you through all the changes in your files, and let you add them selectively. I find this makes for much cleaner commits.

Honestly, I suspect they have the same plethora of issues, they just ignore them.

I've had fifteen years of gut & digestive tract issues, which I eventually narrowed down to fructans (garlic & onion being the worst offenders), and some fruits.

This discovery lead to a train of people in my family removing them during shared meals, and various other people in my family (including a couple of boomers) also discovering they had the same issue!

> Are Sydney and/or Auckland emptying out? Sydney and Auckland aren't, but Melbourne (in the State of Victoria) is, which endured highly restrictive lock downs for 7-9 months.

From friends and family there, it sounds like apartments in the Melbourne CBD (aka. Downtown / City Centre) are effectively ghost towns, with tenants leaving the city, while still paying rent, and rated rental prices dropping by 25%. The general sentiment seems to be that no-one is interested in being forced into close proximity in home & work situations like you'd find on public transport and apartment blocks. So free standing houses, townhouses with separate entrances are at a massive premium.

From friends and family in New Zealand, it's hard to tell, because the already over-priced and rising market is reaching utterly insane levels, potentially (disclaimer: anecdotal based speculation here) driven by New Zealanders returning home from overseas from countries that are now seen as unsafe.

[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-... - Graph: "Residential property prices, quarterly percentage change, September quarter 2020"

Given Australia's general stance on biosecurity, I imagine would not only refuse to pay him seizure of property, but consider fining him for breaching biosecurity rules.

Causing an international incident would be considered a bonus for the publicity it would create.

(not condoning this, just making the observation)

> The pigeon has not yet been caught, but the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment says it will have to be put down because of the _danger of infection to local birds_.

The problem (in this case) isn't the bird breeding, it's infections that it might carry. I can imagine it's possible there's a tonne of diseases it might carry that could be passed to the local native & agricultural bird populations that they have no exposure to.

Australia's relative isolation means that there's many diseases that local animal populations have no immunity to.

An more charitable explanation is the parent poster is someone who puts their principles and a long term view above short term convenience. Seems like good marriage material to me.

> The research world, just like every other social circle, is full of people who are just parroting each other, repeating to each other what everyone already believes, and patting themselves on the back.

I'd be curious to know what your experience is that leads you to this opinion.

A more charitable explanation would be that game changing discoveries are by their nature rare, and even when they do arrive, they only outline a new space for exploration, which means that by definition, most research is going to be filling the gaps in that new space, both for positive results, and the depressingly large chunk of work that is discovering what doesn't work. The results of this negative outcome often look the same.

> So alot of the benefits only kick in after residing in the country for minimum 1 year.

What benefits? I'm not aware of any benefits Kiwi's arriving post 2001 get, apart from some reciprocal medical care, and some allowances to buy property and so forth. Actual money-for-nothing benefits, not so much.

> I believe if you were born in New Zealand, its still (relatively) easy to get Citizenship in Australia, but if you weren't born in NZ and have NZ citizenship, it's much harder.

Assuming we're talking about the Skilled Independent visa (subclass 189) New Zealand stream [0], then it's easier than for people coming from other countries, but I wouldn't say easy. It's also about AUD$4000 per person.

[0] https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-li...

While I'm a fan of the single open network with multiple access model, I really wouldn't use nbn as an example of a government provided network, because of the politicking that went on during it's inception, the corruption that went on during it's build, the changing of horses midstream from fibre everywhere to a mix of less-capable technologies, and the way it was effectively built to be sold to the incumbent.

If you want to see how to build a national broadband network, look across the ditch at what the UFB gets you. AUD$89 for 100mbps, versus NZD$85 for 1 gigabit.

(Orcon in NZ, and TPG used in AU for comparison purposes)

> Make is not a "wrapper" it's a "translucent layer on top of" since it doesn't hide the deps on the underlying tools.

For me, that's kinda the point. If (when!) the underlying layers break, I can open up the Makefile and see exactly what was called, without too much abstraction. It's not there to provide complex build options, it's to provide aliases to the commonly used commands in a platform agnostic way.

Most of my make commands are simply aliases for one or more commands, which are often something like `docker run --rm -it project_runner_image some_command`

There's some real problems with Makefiles in the form of tabs as the prefix, running everything as a shell, weird platform specific versions, etc - but I've yet to see anything else which is as small, as universally available, with such a low barrier to entry. Most of the other options I've seen so far (and I'll be the first to admit I haven't looked very hard) seemed to either be overly complex for simple dev setups, or bound to a particular language.

Not the GP, but I'd recommend Merkur Classic Safety Razor 33C, or any of the Merkur models that are generally discussed as beginner friendly, and an sampler pack of blades.

The sampler pack is key. Every person is different, and every DE razor user I know uses something different. I won't even tell you what I use, because it's not relevant.

As a secondary recommendation, shaving brushes and a proper shaving cream / soap are incredibly worthwhile investments. I usually suggest Proraso as a cheaper, but still decent starter soap to use until you have a better idea of what works for you.

> It's been gone for years!

That's simply not true. It was there until earlier this year[0].

Regardless, even if it had been removed years ago. It wouldn't have made any difference to my remarks or decision. It's just one more straw on the proverbial camel's back.

[0] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/ubuntu-removes-the-amazo...

This mirrors my experience. I've been a mostly happy Ubuntu user since 5.04/Hoary, baring a few bumps like Unity and pulse audio becoming defaults before they were polished enough for general release.

But after upgrading to 20.04, and fighting with Snap slowdowns, and yet another change in desktop direction, the weird data sharing of searches with Amazon, and weird power management problems on hardware that had previously "Just Worked", I just had had enough. I switched to Mint a month ago, and haven't look back.

I love how Ubuntu has brought Linux into the (somewhat) mainstream, but I'm just over how much it keeps changing direction, and releasing things before they're ready.

Per gallon. $1.30 / L => $5.85 / gallon.

Petrol is/was always more expensive in NZ though, around ~70c/L from memory. On the flip side, registration and insurance is much cheaper.

I'm a massive fan of unit testing, but I mostly agree with the observations. However, I (mostly) disagree with the conclusion. The problems with unit testing I've seen to come from the following anti-patterns in various combinations.

1) The use of unit tests as the exclusive automated test type. ie; No functional tests, integration, etc.

2) Test doubles for most or every dependency, even purely functional dependencies like math libraries.

3) Not using the appropriate kind of test double for the test at hand. (Dummies vs Fakes, vs Spies, vs Stubs, vs Mocks)

4) The overuse of mocking libraries.

Mocking libraries have their place, but in opinion, are used approximately a hundred, perhaps even a thousand times more often than they should be. I use them to create test doubles in exactly three scenarios:

1) A dependency that does not have an interface, usually a third party library. This usually happens in one place only, and is used for writing the wrapper code test.

2) A dependency that has an incredibly large interface and/or dependency graph where building a set of stubs or spies is simply not worth the effort.

3) I want to test weird edge cases that's not available any other way, such as theoretically unreachable code.

These should not be the majority of your unit tests!

To me, that sounds like you've hit a ceiling in your current stack, and probably workplace, and lack examples of people around you to learn from. What the solution to that is depends on your situation. Change of workplace? New career direction? New hobby?

> I have no idea what "better" is any more. Faster? Easier to read/maintain? More loosely coupled? All of these? "It depends." As a gross generalisation, most juniors optimise for their bug-bear of one of these at the expense of all of the others. Most mid level devs try to balance them out, and hopefully, most seniors pick which ever is appropriate for the task at hand, with an eye on the long term consequences of their design - if there even is a long term consequence.

Re webpack replacement; Given the amount of time I've wasted dealing with webpack and it's madness, I'd back you up and say it's probably a net win - as long as it's documented enough to avoid the bus factor. It's not like golang is some esoteric language where it's impossible to find devs for.

P.s: I want to clarify here that I'm not necessarily a good programmer, I've just spent enough time stuck as a niche programmer & probable expert beginner and fighting my way out of it that I recognise the patterns. I'm probably a better study of dev behaviour than actual dev.

From my personal experience, are you still writing things the same way you were six months, a a year, two years ago?

I look at code I wrote a couple of years ago, and not only can I identify how I would write it differently, I can identify /why/ I would write it differently - both what technique, concept, or methodology I have since learned, and how that would make the code better.

If you cannot, you have probably plateaued, like I did for a (far too long) while.

> Many people haven't moved outside of "enterprise" programming languages, so they don't even realize how bad stuff like PHP is at converting business logic into code. Try doing a real project in Kotlin if you like static types. Try Clojure or Elixir if you like dynamic types.

Outside of your average copy/paste stack overflow Wordpress dev, most PHP programmers are very aware of it's flaws, and would probably welcome the chance to move on.

However, the frustrating thing about the prevailing attitude is that creates a stereotype that all PHP developers are incompetent, and this stops PHP devs moving on. I've been trying for the better part of a decade to move out of PHP as my main language. I have github projects in various other languages, submitted patches to open source projects, but the above attitude means that outside of existing PHP shops, no one is interested in hiring me.

I've literally had one potential job tell me that they liked my python code assignment, but they had a policy of not hiring PHP programmers. It was not an isolated incident.

Given those attitudes, are you surprised PHP devs bitterly defend the language?

Analogies are by their nature imperfect. The analogy here is that <item> is being criticised in ways that are no longer true, where <item> in the case of PHP is specfically "insecure by default", regardless of it's many other flaws. Seems fair to me.