Can I vote for obsfuscators not holding a language hostage?

Ok, I think I see your position more clearly now:

You’re thinking about people who are interested and installing based on technical interest and curiosity.

In those cases, I think you’re probably right. There is probably some base competency at play. A desire to learn. Probably someone in their sphere to support.

I’m thinking more about the type of people who would buy a Chromebook. Or my cheap ass parents who want to squeeze another 5 years out of an ailing laptop. They don’t want to spend any money and just want to use Facebook and YouTube. Send some emails. Connect to wifi. Print their boarding passes. Not have their machines riddled with viruses within minutes because their windows OS isn’t getting security updates anymore. I think this is actually a massive use case, and I want Linux to be accessible to them without needing to use the terminal for anything.

I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve seen absolutely terrible advice posted and taken regarding how to do things in Linux. Can’t connect to something? Easy, make a blanket iptables rule to permit everything. Something can’t read a file? Chmod 777. Install isn’t working? Just install as root and use root as your general login from there on out.

It’s hard to learn Linux.

But it’s even harder to FORGET what you’ve learned, to empathize with what it was like to not understand it at all. That’s why it’s SO HARD for us who’ve been using it daily for a decade to empathize with newcomers.

It’s why people literally can’t fathom why people are afraid of the terminal.

It’s why, even when someone takes the time to explain why, people go, “nah, that couldn’t possibly be it”

It’s like when gun people can’t comprehend why people are afraid of guns. The answer is obvious they just can’t hear it.

Edit: I think I better understand that there are more nuances around the cases now, and I think I’m being unfair by making blanket statements about what is and isn’t obvious

Right, and so if you have no idea what ANY of it means you just bail back to windows.

IMO, caution, wariness, concern, and unfamiliarity manifest as revulsion.

EVs. Solar panels. Heat pumps. Anything outside of CIS heteronormal relationships.

I’m my experience, after the age of like, 25, people (in GENERAL… Obviously many expectations) feel like they’ve got life figured out and push back against pretty much anything that challenges whatever they’ve grown accustomed to.

Nobody bitched about the DOS prompt when nobody knew how to use computers. Young people learned it. Old people insisted computers were a fad and pushed back entirely.

In my calculation, it’s just typical and predictable human response. Open to other theories though.

I mean, the answer to this is obvious if you can empathize.

Gui has baked into it hints on cause and effect. The terminal is a freeform incantation machine where you need to know and utter magic spells.

sudo rm -rf /

Is just as magically nonsense as

sudo apt-get update

If you don’t know what ANY of it does, your capacity to fuck things up is unbounded on the terminal. In a GUI, rightly or wrongly, you expect your capacity to fuck things up is bounded by the context at hand. I do not expect that I can nuke my system clicking through Firefox.

You can claw the terminal from my cold dead hands, but I’m not offended by the notion of a GUI.

Why? Because developer attention scales broadly by usage. Well used projects get more love. If we could even break 10% home adoption of any Linux distro and the runaway effect of net new developer input would destroy closed source operating systems, and I’m here for it. If that means adding a fucking Ubuntu checkbox to let people enable Wayland without strictly requiring the command line go fucking nuts.

If the goal is to visualize growth trends, I don’t think raw user counts are the correct value to track on the Y-axis at all. That’s where my head was at when I said it doesn’t make sense. Abusing the Y-axis to try and coax data out in this case is just a symptom of having the wrong measure.

Daily new users. Percent user growth.

Yeah when I showed the cop the graph of my speed before getting in my car to be 67000mph (speed of the earth around the sun) to 67080mphwhen I was driving it he couldn’t see the difference so I didn’t get the ticket.

Or sometimes choosing a common-sense reference makes sense.

Which isn’t to say THIS one does, it doesn’t, but the absolutism of “it’s nerf or nothing” is a tad extreme.

It depends VERY much about the content and invitees of the meetings.

If you’re there to give your expert engineering feedback, awesome. If you’re there to receive the information you need in order to provide expert engineering feedback, awesome.

So often, I find, meetings are too broad and end up oversubscribed. Engineers are in a 2 hour meeting with 10 minutes of relevance.

There are serious differences in meeting culture, with vast implications oh the amount of efficacy you can juice from the attendees.

I’m wondering if it’s a regional thing? I just looked online for pressure treated 2x2’s and all the ones I’m seeing (home hardware, home depot, advantage lumber, etc) list as actual being 1.5x1.5

Clicking through 90 fucking prompts if I wanna donate to charity or learn about their credit card offerings or if I want to sign up for their rewards program or if I want to give them my email so they’ll email me a receipt?

… Are YOU the mod from Fox news?

ESC : q ENTER (assuming you haven’t modified the buffer)?

What’s the two key press exit pattern?

Somebody please do the math which shows the global delta of CO2 related arch vs Ubuntu bloat. I need to know exactly how many dozens of minutes of vespa usage this is equivalent to per year when taken globally.

As a mechanical engineer turned software developer, I do consider the task to be fundamentally an engineering task.

It’s just that the willingness to forgive ineptitude in software is infinitely greater… So much so that the industry has completely normalized absolute garbage work.

It’s engineering, just with systemically terrible engineers.

I agree they aren’t practically interesting egde cases, because in order to hit them, they’re no longer meaningful for realistically describing pirate ships. At very high turning speeds, it also ceases to matter that one is 3/4 than that the other either. But at that point, we’re talking about pirate ships spinning like ballerinas across the seven seas.

Yeah, I’ve got a similar thought.

There do exist scenarios where there would be a solution… For example if the base turning speed is 0, or the distance between them is already sufficiently small (and their relative orientations are aligned).

Thank you!

Although, I’m realizing that for completeness, there probably are mathematical constraints around the relationship between the required absolute values of turning speeds and movement speeds. They’re kinda egde-casey for any practically imagined scenarios, but would come into play for a rigorous proof.

It depends on what you mean by “escape”, and what you view as the alternative.

I suspect that the pursuer could never converge on the same instantaneous point, given sufficient initial distance (and orientation). At a certain distance, the prey could enter a stable orbit around the pursuer. I don’t have a mathematical proof but I strongly suspect this to be the case,and I can envision the structure of a proof.

Could the prey infinitely extend the gap between themselves and the pursuer? No. I don’t have the tooling to actually present such a proof, but of that one I am confident.

I think if you introduced concepts of obstacles and a “radius of escape” (where if the gap meets a threshold the predator is permanently foiled), then there are almost certainly scenarios where the prey could escape.

We actually see this scenario play out in nature all the time

I expect English is their second language, based on the surreal absurdity of the binary state of “healthy” and “futility”. It’s all a futile attempt, we all die. The comment reads like a Salvador Dali or René Magritte. C’est ne pas une pipe.

Which isn’t me ripping on someone for learning a new language, it’s just an emergent property of people unconstrained by convention.