Dave.

Time is a cube, and always will be.

And how if you share a file in Teams and then six months later you want to share a file with the same name to ANYONE else via teams, well that’s a big no-can-do. Teams just went ahead and uploaded that file to your “stuff to share” folder in OneDrive and didn’t put it in a subfolder unique to the chat, or add a unique prefix or suffix or anything because hey, you’ll only ever share a file with a particular name once in your life, right?

And nobody would ever want to share a file with the same name, but different data, right? So Teams can just give the end user the choice between replacing the current file with the new one, or sharing the same one again to these new guys, because there’s no possible use case for actually having two files named the same with different information in the file, right?

Nobody would want to share a README.TXT, or Photo001.jpg, or contact.ics, or a zip file of a folder they just downloaded from Teams’ SharePoint interface, the file that’s automatically called “OneDrive.zip” without the option to change it before saving, more than once, right? Right??

Fuck teams. And fuck Teams(New) too, just for the shitty name.

Generally I bash together the one-off programs in Python and if I discover that my “one off” program is actually being run 4 times a week, that’s when I look at switching to a compiled language.

Case in point: I threw together a python program that followed a trajectory in a point cloud and erased a box around the trajectory. Found a python point cloud library, swore at my code (and the library code) for a few hours, tidied up a few point clouds with it, job done.

And then other people in my company also needed to do the same thing and after a few months of occasional use, I rewrote it using C++ and Open3D. A few days of swearing this time (mainly because my C++ is a bit rusty, and Open3D’s C++ interface is a sparsely-documented back end to their main python front end).

End result though is that point clouds that took 3 minutes to process before in python now take 10 seconds, and now there’s a visualisation widget that shows the effects of the processing so you don’t have to open the cloud in another viewer to see that it was ok.

But anyway, like you said, python is good for prototyping, and when you hash out your approach and things are fairly nailed down and now you’d like some speed, jump to a compiled language and reap the benefits.

i like how the answers are the exact same generic unhelpful drivel you hear 20k times a month if you’re…

Searching for a solution to any problem on the internet.

There are a million ad- laden sites that, in answer to a technical question about your PC, suggest that you run antivirus, system file checker, oh and then just format and reinstall your operating system. That is also 90 percent of the answers coming from “Microsoft volunteer support engineers” on Microsoft’s own support forums as well, just please like and upvote their answer if it helps you.

There are a million Instagram and tiktok videos showing obvious trivial, shitty, solutions to everyday problems as if they are revealing the secrets of the universe while they’re glueing bottle tops and scraps of car tires together to make a television remote holder.

There are a trillion posts on Reddit from trolls and shitheads just doing it for teh lulz and Google is happily slurping this entire torrent of shit down and trying to regurgitate it as advice with no human oversight.

I reckon their search business has about two years left at this rate before the general public regards them as a joke.

Edit: and the shittification of the internet has all been Google’s doing. The need for sites to get higher up in Google’s PageRank™ or be forever invisible has absolutely ruined it. The torrent of garbage now needed to ensure that various algorithms favour your content has fucked it for everyone. Good job, Google.

I work in OT. The number of “best practice” IT mantras that companies mindlessly pick up and then slavishly follow to the detriment of their mainly-OT business is alarming.

Make your own damn best practice that suits your business best, don’t copy and paste something from a megacorp. Sure, include elements from megacorp’s best practice if they are applicable, but don’t be a slave to the entirety of it.

Turns out it seems the Australians have public health insurance for everyone - Medicare.

To follow from your comment , because Australia has a publicly funded health system, the government actively works to reduce preventable diseases because it reduces the load on the system.

So they have had:

A sunscreen campaign and skin cancer check initiatives since the '80s.

Anti-smoking campaigns (and high tobacco taxes) where resources are available to help quit.

Every citizen gets a free bowel cancer test mailed to them when they turn 50 to help find and treat cancer earlier.

Road safety laws are tight and helmet / seatbelt regulations are strict as it reduces hospital loads.

Vaccinations for a multitude of easily preventable diseases are given for free in childhood, particularly now for the virus that causes cervical cancer.

Those and a myriad of other public health initiatives all help Australians to live longer.

Coupled with the fact that the cost for the whole population is borne by an income tax of approximately 2% , it means that if you are poor or unemployed, you still have access to health services. That also means that small health issues among low income earners don’t snowball until they are life threatening.

It has the knock on effect that people don’t end up trapped in a job because it offers “good benefits and a low deductible” and concerns about pre existing conditions interfering with insurance and etc when changing jobs is generally moot.

Then throw in mandatory government regulated retirement funds that require all employers to put in 12+ percent of an employee’s gross earnings into an employee’s fund of their choosing for their retirement. That coupled with public health generally means the whole US style worker=slave arrangement can’t exist.

Which means the US will get nothing like this as all that screams of nanny state overlords and death panels and moar taxes killing freedom and so on and so forth. Sorry guys.

Australian here. Last time I wrote a cheque, Michael Jackson was still black.

They are supposed to be the glue that binds the internal team together as well as bonding to external groups.

The project manager organises external requirements and steers the project in the direction needed for the business. That direction might change depending on the status of other projects, it’s their job to be on top of that.

They also report progress and roadblocks upstream so that those who manage groups of related projects can work on keeping everything running.

Whether they’re actually competent, well that’s something else entirely.

You can stare at that code all afternoon but you won’t spot the bug until a microsecond after you hit “commit”.

You should release what you’ve written as a framework, that’s what everyone else is doing.

<Insert XKCD standards comic here>

That may be true but if the language is tough to develop with, then those users won’t get a product made with that language, they’ll get a product made with whatever language is easier / more expedient for the developer. Developer time is money, after all.

2004:

User: “I moved my PC to another desk and now my monitor is off. The hard drive is making noises though. All the power cables are in haha. I made sure the connections were all nice and tight it’s a bit strange.”

IT: “Okay I want you to follow the video cable from the monitor to the hard drive. It should have a BLUE connector at the end.Can you see the label where it is plugged in?”

User: “…yes it says ‘serial’, I think?”

IT: “Aha. I’ll drop around this afternoon with a spare monitor. That Trinitron monitor you’ve got will need to go away to be repaired.”

I’d aim for one of the rural areas in Discworld.

Relatively calm life, as long as you keep the local witch on your side.

when you can help people live in discord.

That live support is super handy when you’re 8 timezones apart from the maintainers.

• Hey there, how do I get this thing to compile?

11 hours later

• Ok just need to make sure you have this list of prerequisites installed and then we can walk you through the compilation process.

6 hours later

• Nevermind, I built and installed another project.

Do you want to awaken the Elder Gods, and consequently suffer a slow and inevitable descent into horror and madness? Then give Perl a try.

Truly efficient perl code is write-only.

Scroll Lock? What does that even do nowadays?

In Excel it pans the whole worksheet with the arrow keys instead of shifting the active cell.

Same thing in Word, you can move around in the document without shifting your cursor position.

It also does the same kind of thing in most editors where there is an “active editing position” vs a “view of the page”.

While reading text your brain will bulk recognise what it interprets as common phrases and sentence fragments to build an internal lexical model to then interpret. After a while as you get more proficient at reading this becomes a mostly subconscious operation, which then hands concepts from what it’s read to your front of mind to further deal with.

If you blend contradictory common phrases together your brain will bounce through the phrase/fragment recognition part fine. Then it will trip over the lexical parsing of them, suddenly requiring a lot more mental horsepower to figure out what’s going on. Basically your front of mind task will be interrupted by your subconscious task basically going “what the hell is this!? I can’t make sense of this, you have a look” as it dumps a jumble of words on you.

For example, has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? That phrase broke the internet about 10 years ago and it’s a pretty good example.

you’ll see that he doesn’t like functions to be very long. I think his rule is no more than 4 lines.

Four line functions? Sounds like a codebase adhering to that rule would end up as a nice thick function soup. It feels like… I dunno, those database programmers that like normalising databases to the Nth degree.

If you put your loops into functions then you can just use return instead of break.

And that just sounds like abusing the concept of functions to replace standard flow control that your language provides.

I mean, sure, if I find repetitive chunks of code popping up I’ll break them out into functions, but - generally speaking - I do functions that translate into discrete real-world or UI tasks. I’m opening and parsing a text file into internal structures, I’m doing the reverse to go back to a data file, I’m cycling through the data to update UI components, etc etc.

But hey, I use C and on the rare occasion I sneak a goto in there, so I’m not qualified to pass too much judgement.

15 years ago I was running multi-tasking BASIC programs on a controller that had 2MB of storage. We should have been there by now.

Holy shit, they’re still kicking around:

https://wilke.de/en/embedded-computer/details/zurueck/computer-module/products/tiny-tiger-multitasking-computer.html

I used a few for high speed logging of a quadrature rotary encoder to measure the speed of a hydraulic sampling arm. Battery powered , had a 4 line LCD and keypad with a simple menu interface to take samples, as well as a serial export function to get .CSV files via hyperterminal.

5 stars, would summon with an unholy mix of C++ and PHP again.