Great, thanks for the details!
172 karma · joined May 12, 2021
Religion is inherently ideological and its expression in technological form is still ideological.
The mere act of someone publishing this app is itself ideological. No getting around that.
Even if I don't like the product, it's certainly worth a discussion at least.
How are the codes generated to begin with? Is there some central database that hands them out, or can any clinic generate one (having access to a copy of the private key?)
I get it, I got so frustrated with Linux on laptops* -- one literally set my kitchen table on fire and melted the glass when the fan drivers didn't work -- but, to be fair, this thread IS "A good Linux laptop below 1000 euro".
I don't think there is going to be a perfect Linux on a laptop experience anywhere. The manufacturer-supported Linux variants might be better (dunno, never tried), or a Chromebook, but short of that it's mostly shared components by a few OEMs anyhow.
*Recently bought a Mac, reluctantly, after 30 years of Windows on the desktop and decades of Linux on the server. It's a godsend not having to deal with WSL/Multipass/Docker/Lando etc. just to do some quick dev work AND never having to worry about drivers. The UI is fine, if a bit keyboard-unfriendly compared to Linux and Windows. I don't like Apple as an evil monopolist company, but macOS is admittedly pretty darned nice.
But npm has the popularity/quality/maintenance metrics for a reason; a lot of smaller FOSS projects become abandonware once their original use case is dealt with, or developers turn over, or whatever. There's a lot of smaller packages/solutions/projects that just don't see much love anymore.
I'm not against using FOSS or commercial. Just think there should be a case-by-case cost-benefit analysis. A $10/mo service should be evaluated differently than a $1000/mo stack, and labor value should be compared against both.
Case in point, my boss recently asked me to build a new project that wasn't a part of our regular stack in a somewhat emerging field (web mapping). I did a brief market analysis and let him know that different vendors could probably get it done in about 2 weeks at about $2000. He said that was too much, I warned him that building it in-house would take several months and be very buggy because we have no specialists in that field on our team. He said to use FOSS software to do it, so we did... it ended up taking about 9 months and a few hundred hours of dev time. Now it's built, but with minimal features and lots of bugs. And nobody else can maintain it. The project was in turn open sourced, because we built it from open source software and wanted to give back, but honestly it's shit code. And we're considering abandoning it already due to the high overhead. But you know, someone else is going to run into the same situation at some point, and maybe find it and fork it because it's open source... then probably go through the same rigamarole... well, now we have a proper abandonware factory.
shrug At the same time, I use (and thoroughly appreciate) redis, apache, varnish, chromium, brew, react, etc. Some of those are vendor-supported, some aren't.
It's just a mixed bag. I'm just saying that choosing something just because it's FOSS so you save $10/mo is a lousy reason. There's a lot of great commercial software out there, just like there's a lot of great FOSS software out there.
When I started web dev, I earned $15/hr. Beat the $8/hr I was making before that in landscaping. Now I make a little more than that, which still isn't much. My clients/employers don't pay crazy wages and they don't expect crazy quality work. They know they get what they pay for, and it works out for both parties.
Maybe's OK to have shitty, mediocre code for 90% of the world's needs... a small biz website, with the ecommerce/PCI bits outsourced? Sure, why not. It mostly works, and if it goes down for a few hours a year, maybe that doesn't meet super-reliability standards (can we count 8s instead of 9s?) but it gets the job done well enough? Shrug.
Sure, proper engineer techniques matter for certain applications. I would never want to touch industrial machines, or medical, or space, or automobiles... anything that could blow up and/or kill someone. But most code out there is just for some local, small-scale use, mostly temporary anyhow and bound to obsolete in a few years if not months. There will always be mediocre businesses needing mediocre devs for mediocre pay, just as there will be elite enterprises that require the world's smartest people.
Problem is, git was designed by the super smart for the super smart, great engineering with terrible UX. And it was kinda just trickled down to the rest of us, and it feels a bit like trying to teach Mom to use DOS and edit config.sys just to play a game. Now consumer software UX has leaped forward by decades and it shows, but a lot of the command-line dev tools are still incredibly arcane. They don't have to be, but it's not a priority to fix/improve their UX because, I suppose, it's engineers who are proud of their engineering, not proud of their ability to dumb it down for the rest of us. I don't blame them, I just know I can't meaningfully contribute to git (the project) because I'm not smart enough, well trained enough, whatever, and that complaints would fall on deaf ears like yours. It's an altogether different culture. Elitist by design, or meritocratic if you will.
And believe or not, I've probably spent more time learning git -- reading documentation, diagramming it out with coworkers, cloning repos and experimenting with commands, etc., following a shit-ton of tutorials -- than any other skill I've ever had to learn. It was quicker to learn Perl and regex than mid-level git.
If you want to pay for the world's would-be engineers to receive all the training to go from mere dev to proper "software engineers", by all means please do. But otherwise, well... you know what? World's gonna keep producing mediocrity. Most of us are just average.
Also look for promo codes there. Never buy a thinkpad at MSRP, you can usually get them heavily discounted through various promotions (but still add on first party warranty and on site support if you need).
Their hardware quality isn't always the best but their support is good. Last time my screen hinge broke (a early foldable tablet thinkpad) and someone came out the next day to my house in a rural area and fixed it on the spot while I watched.
They're proper business / dev machines with a legacy going back to the IBM days.
Dell Latitude line is a close imitator/competitor also worth considering.
Razer gets you a lot of power but with tradeoffs in heat management and noise. If you don't need a GPU there isn't a good reason to choose them IMO. They are like MacBook wannabes but tailored for gamers.
I'd personally stay away from consumer laptops if I were you.
If I had to pick one, it would be the ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
It's the same reason consumer operating systems have a trash can and undo features. Just railing on people with "you should've known better" doesn't really help.
Something like postman, for example, is easily a multi-month or year project for a big team of devs to create/maintain. I've been using the free version for years and it's saved an amazing amount of time. I'd use the paid version if I had a bigger team.
Something like Cloudflare is a whole different scale altogether. Their free tier is a loss-leader for their enterprise plan, but even the free tier is better than most paid CDNs out there. And good luck trying to replicate that on a FOSS stack and shared infrastructure.
If you're worried about secret billing, either don't provide your billing info to begin with, cancel trial subscriptions as soon as you start them (usually they won't expire until the end), or use a virtual CC# service like privacy.com.
I think it's a difference in philosophy? Brew does a "good enough" job for the most common use case, supplementing Apple's janky *nix environment with commonly-needed tools, without a built-in package manager. It doesn't try to do complex simultaneous versions... in my (admittedly limited) experience, if you need to do that, you either do that in something like a project-based setup (npm/composer) or in a VM/container with its own packages.
In your situation, when you have multiple pythons running in the same environment, how does anyone given script know which one to call? What's a better way of doing this?
Now if you had a solar-powered Prius towing a wind-powered Tesla on the deck of a nuclear-powered carrier, you're just one creative accountant away from starting your own renewable defense company.
Great old video. Thanks for sharing. Terrifying goose though.
That's aside from all the political shenanigans they pull, trying to kill municipal broadband and net neutrality. There's scarcely a more evil ISP.
I switched away from Comcast as quickly as I could, and never had trouble with either smaller cable companies or fiber providers.
This is the part that seems dubious to me. One, nothing is apolitical anymore. Two, why is it given that people who score higher on agreeableness more likely to answer surveys? If the internet has taught us anything, it's that it's far easier to rile up responses from people who disagree with you.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/08/comcasts-dns-red...