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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • When you come across some Python code for something written 5 years ago and they used four contributed packages that the programmers have changed the API on three times since then, you want to set up a virtual environment that contains those specific versions so you can at least see how it worked at that time. A small part of this headache comes from Python itself mutating, but the bulk of the problem is the imported user-contributed packages that multiply the functionality of Python.

    To be sure, it would be nice if those programmers were all dedicated to updating their code, but with hundreds of thousands of packages that could be imported written by volunteers, you can’t afford to expect all of them them to stop innovating or even to continue maintaining past projects for your benefit.

    If you have the itch to fix something old so it works in the latest versions of everything, you have that option… but it is really hard to do that if you cannot see it working as it was designed to work when it was built.







  • Pretty vague question.

    One assumption that “mathy types” like to make is that the slope be negative-proportional to how far the value (not slope) is from the desired target value… and then you get an exponential decay (buzzword). But there are lots of other assumptions one could make… some of which lead to PID control (buzz; very mathy stuff).

    But these days you could use a neural net (buzz; so mathy they don’t usually pretend to understand what the NN “learns”) or fuzzy logic (buzz; which is ideally intuitive but has many surprisingly mathy assumptions) to make the behavior nonlinear and go to the desired result much faster… so really, there are many many possible answers. Maybe you can watch some ELI5 videos about these buzzwords and refine your question?


  • We have a political environment that lacks credible independent commentators (e.g. Walter Cronkite), so anyone presenting themselves as independent who calls bullshit on a politico is immediately labeled as biased.

    What mechanism do you think could overcome this and pull the mic plug to reduce the incentive to lie without immediately being vigorously attacked?



  • NPR sez Florida law would disallow him voting, but he wasn’t convicted in Florida, so they defer to the law in the state where he was convicted. New York allows felons to vote up until they are imprisoned, which doesn’t seem likely to happen before election day since he is appealing. Skin of teeth again.



  • Using sudo when it isn’t necessary, and the real cannon: sudo su… Adding sudo to your command lines indiscriminately causes files you create to be owned by root even though they are in your home directory, and then you end up using sudo to make changes to the files… and then the filesystem permissions cannot prevent you from successfully running an accidental “sudo rm -rf /” command.

    Seriously… sudo is not a “habit” to develop in order to avoid dealing with filesystem permissions problems.


  • Its more like a kind of claustrophobia… in Japan, men’s urinals are often visible from the door because the Yakuza used to use that as an isolated location in which to kill their target. (And despite the high cleanliness standards and widespread availability of public bathrooms Japanese people avoid them like the plague.) So it it a cultural expectation that women will get assaulted by men if they find themselves in a small space.

    Yes, irrational. But people often don’t behave rationally.


  • Noob question?

    You do seem confused though… Debian is both a distribution and a packaging system… the Debian Stable distribution takes a very conservative approach to updating packages, while Debian Sid (unstable) is more up-to-date while being more likely to break. While individual packages may be more stable when fully-updated, other packages that depend on them generally lag and “break” as they need updating to be able to adapt to underlying changes.

    But the whole reason debian-based distros exist is because some people think they can strike a better balance between newness and stability. But it turns out that there is no optimal balance that satifies everyone.

    Mint is a fine distro… but if you don’t like it, that is fine for you too. The only objection I have to your objection is that you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater… the debian packaging system is very robust and is not intrinsically unlikely to be updated.



  • Bullshit. That is like saying adding more lanes to a freeway will reduce traffic congestion… it just encourages more deforestation.

    If the fertility in a rainforest is in the biomass, learning to live with that biomass in place will be necessary if people are to live there. But there were very few people there before people started their land grab… it may not be possible even when the biomass is restored.

    If the rainforest is valued for the ecological impact it has, then it is more likely that people will have to move out. Not attractive to the people who already moved in, but when they are starving then they will eventually migrate away anyway, and keeping them there with false promises to make cleared land usable will only make things worse.