manxu

we traced the issue to a 15-year-old Git function with O(N²) complexity and fixed it with an algorithmic change, reducing backup times exponentially.

I feel like there is something wrong with this sentence.

I completely agree. Unless Google is forced to install more than one app store by default, or forced to have multiple app stores downloadable on Play Store, three is no realistic way to install a third party app store on a phone. In both cases, Google’s cooperation is required.

I just had to learn French in middle age, and it’s been fun. They key takeaways from my experience:

1. Contact is everything. The longer you spend listening, reading, speaking, just in general interacting with the target language, the better. Doesn’t matter what you do - Duolingo or PeerTube videos, novels or comic strips.
2. Communication is the goal, not fluency. You can get the gender of a word wrong and people will still understand you. You can use the wrong tense and that’s usually okay. Don’t try to “sound more like a native” or “learn slang words that everyone uses,” because heaven knows nobody is going to take you for a native. But if you can get the point across and can understand what people are saying, you win.
3. Speaking is 10x harder than listening or reading or even writing, because it involves not only forming sentences in an unfamiliar language, but also saying them, which involves your muscles. At first, it’s really hard to say the sounds of the language that don’t exist in your own language, and I found that very frustrating.
4. Language and culture are different, but interconnected. You don’t really speak a language if you don’t understand the culture it’s attached to. For instance, at first I didn’t know what the cashiers were asking me at the checkout, until I learned that they want to see the bags you brought from home to make sure they are empty. The problem with missing cultural references is that everybody around you knows them, and they don’t understand why you don’t, or what there is to explain.
5. One of the very few great use cases of LLMs is, in fact, talking with a chat bot. You give it a good prompt (look for them online) and you are forced to talk in the target language. If the bot can understand you, a native speaker probably will, too. A good tip is to try an AI conversation on the topic of something you are about to do in real life, like applying for an apartment or having a conversation about cheese.
6. Personally, I found that my language skills drowned completely under certain, specific circumstances. For instance, for the life of me I cannot understand voice messages, at all. Even phone conversations are really bad for me, both in talking and listening. I can have a perfectly fine conversation with someone, but when I have to talk with them on the phone, it’s like I never learned the language.
7. The tool you use is not as important as the time you spend. Duolingo was really meh: too much useless vocabulary, not enough grammar and pattern recognition, lack of ability to specify areas of interest, down to always on animations even when you had them all turned off. But, despite the heavy focus on the words, “chouette” and “trousse,” I sort of learned French to the point where I can follow everyone along and can speak and be understood. Took a year to the day and the entire tree.

I remember when they switched map links to (ew) Apple Maps. That was a huge downer.

It’s so weird that we have to go through hoops and loops to get rid of this stuff! I was sick of my Android responding to a long press of the power button, meant to shut it down, with a Gemini prompt. Took me an hour to figure out I can’t get rid of the function, but I can switch back (for now) to old style Google Assistant.

If you have to force functionality down your users’ throat despite them not wanting it, you already lost. Gemini is Google’s Clippy, just less iconic and more also-ran.

It’s definitely a setback, but you learned two important things:

1. You can get an entry level job
2. You need a place where you can work

The ONLY reason it didn’t work out this first time is because 1. and 2. were not sufficiently close in time. I wouldn’t have known either (and now I do, so thanks for the learning experience!). I’d probably start looking for a similar position (maybe with a company that is less weird about infrastructure, although you only know after you get the job) AND an office-type place at the same time.

I would guess a lot of the less-than-five stars motels would be happy to give you a heavy discount if you only use your room during the day and don’t need to stay at night, ever. They are really selling the nights.

It must be incredibly frustrating to be in your current position, but I am really happy that you found a way to make it better. I think you got the right solution for you, it’s just a matter of iterating it until it sticks. I was in your shoes and I wish I had had as clear a plan as you have.

Well, don’t keep us hanging! Which one are you???

If you get within earshot of a Republican, chances are you’ll hear complaints about “damn taxes” within five minutes. So to a certain set of people, definitely everyone they talk to is constantly complaining about taxes.

When I was starting out and making little money, the taxes I paid were definitely cutting into my ability to live. I think instead of “standard deductions” we should have real minimum incomes. If you are under the minimum income for your location, you don’t pay taxes.

Now that I am at the end of my career, I think it’s stupid that my taxes are not higher. If I could have given young me some of the money I am keeping now, I would have had a much better life overall. I obviously can’t do that now, but I can give someone else the same breathing room.

There must have been a gallery component, since I only looked at generators that had one available.

Honestly, in hindsight the templates were really not a big deal. Just for fun, I tried converting the Hugo template I used to Pelican, and it was easy for me.

Pelican is solid and mature and I would use it, in hindsight. The only major flaws are that it’s much slower (but makes up for it with incremental builds) and that the community is much, much smaller. On the plus side, Jinja2 is much, much, much better than Go templating (Hugo borrows from Go).

I went the same direction, from WordPress to static site generation. I did the same evaluation as you are trying to do and ended up with Hugo, mostly because there is a lot of support available for it. My runner up was Pelican, because I was fluent in Jinja2, but I didn’t want to mess around with the templates and Hugo’s were prettier. Sue me, I am shallow.

The one regret I have about Hugo is that the templating language is challenging. I am trying to be as neutral as possible, but it seemed like even simple things were complicated to achieve. If someone would come up with a Hugo that speaks Jinja2, I’d be really delighted.

Other than that, conversion from WordPress to Hugo was relatively straightforward, despite needing to find a gallery component and converting menus. Hugo is indeed very fast in processing, which become important when your blog has thousands of articles.

I set up the blog as a private git repository. The server pulls from it, then runs Hugo and a full text search engine, and the content is visible and searchable within five minutes on update.

I think it’s the “basically” part in basically right back where we started that makes the difference. Even if 100% of Fediverse users were on a single instance, once that instance starts pulling Musk moves, the users can move somewhere else.

Only if that instance defederates from everyone else do we get the Twitter situation again. Or, since that’s actually what happened, Truth Social, which I think is just a slightly modified Mastodon instance with federation disabled/deactivated.

I used to have a Canon Pixma, and the SANE drivers recognized it and scanned from it with no issues, down to the ADF feeder. It was really surprisingly simple, zero setup configuration.

I basically just used the preinstalled software, Skanlite, and it showed with the scanner pre-selected and ready to go.

Of course, YMMV.

Never smoked anything in my life, having one side of the family wiped out prematurely by nicotine, all of them.

Lived in Colorado. The pros outweigh the cons a million to one. The biggest positive was the massive reduction in DUIs, since people drink in bars but smoke weed at home. There may be a reduction in harder drugs, too, given how much easier and cheaper it is to get weed. The tax revenue from weed sales is huge (was bigger, though) and because the laws were changed after Colorado turned liberal-ish, the money was mostly allocated to great causes.

Government loves having a law that can be selectively enforced and is broken by a lot of people. Taking it away is a huge plus, especially in times where the government is looking for easy ways to control the population. Even before now, White people caught in possession or smoking marijuana rarely got more than probation, while some Black people were three-striked for the same.

The only downside is that it still smells bad, and I am still not sure that hacking up your lungs is all that sane or safe.

Yes, it appears that young humans can have very negative reactions to weed, and that it can affect their brains negatively. That would absolutely be a problem if legalization increased week use among teenagers, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.