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Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I was plenty good at maths up to the point where I couldn't study more (as in, my other subject choices locked me out of taking the next stage, A-level). However in general I found the more complex stuff abstract and characterless.

    For example statistics bored me. We're working out the upper quartile something something? To what end?

    I've used maths for accounts, programming, carpentry, and so forth, but that's always been fairly basic stuff. The more advanced stuff has never been of the slightest value to me (I still don't know why I, a layman, should give a shit about factorisation, prime numbers, happy numbers, etc..). I am not saying that it has no value - simply that to me personally it might as well be memorising the principles behind a naming scheme for shades of grey paint. I can learn the principles and they make sense, but so what?

    I pretty much felt the same way about the higher levels of chemistry. Oh these are ionic bonds? Okay..?

    My teachers were excellent and enthusiastic (my entire maths class got the highest grade possible, myself included) but I don't really see what there is to like. I didn't dislike it, I was just indifferent. The easier stuff could be like a basic puzzle game, the more complex stuff I could apply the system I learned and provide the correct, if pointless, answer.

    It felt like being taught someone else's complex system for sorting different sizes of white paper, I suppose I could say.

  • My job isn't this bad but has the occasional pointless company meeting and the like. I'm fine with it - it's their money they're wasting. I do not look to my employer for meaning - I like the team I work with but I've no love for the work. I'm good at it and try to find joy in it where I can, but it is not my primary source of personal validation.

    It's a pretty comfortable life. I've worked for myself before and it was much harder in every way with nowhere near the pay.

  • You met me at a very strange time in my life.

  • Every cloud has a silver lining, I suppose.

  • I started doing CS50 way back when and pretty much bailed when it got to C. I could understand it but it felt like I had to build the entire universe to do the simplest of things.

    I like that with Python I can knock something together quickly enough to justify the time it takes. Having to do something manual and repetitious at work? Knock out a Python script to make it less error prone in future. If it took a lot of time I'd just have to suck it up and suffer through.

  • Fair enough, it read to me as a "gotcha" (as in "if python is do great then why can't it..."). I've spent too much time on places like Reddit where every interaction is three seconds from becoming a knife fight!

  • ...and people use MS Excel as a database, it's not the fault of the tech that people force things to do things they're not designed for.

  • That doesn't sound like much of a "gotcha". The requirements for small stuff and big stuff are drastically different.

  • I would argue it's because it is Good Enough. The most popular solutions to things are rarely the optimum ones but the ones that are generally applicable.

    For example, I could fight with bash's unpleasant syntax or I could do it more easily (but less efficiently) with Python. Would it be as performant? Absolutely not - but the performance gains wouldn't be worth the time and maintainability.

  • I generally go by either what the person I'm speaking to is likely to prefer or whichever is easier to pronounce, assuming I think it won't cause confusion for the listener.

  • I'm sure both owners will be devastated.

  • Similarly I find it very useful for if I've written a tool script and really don't want to write the command line interface for it.

    "Here's a well-documented function - write an argparser for it"

    ...then I fix its rubbish assumptions and mistakes. It's probably not drastically quicker but it doesn't require as much effort from me, meaning I can go harder on the actual function (rather than keeping some effort in reserve to get over the final hump).

  • Yeah, one of my colleagues leans on it too hard and it's really undermining his actual talent.

  • I've seen it generate working unit tests plenty. In the sense that they pass.

    ...they do not actually test the functionality. Of course that function returns what you're asserting - you overwrote its actual output and checked against that!

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  • I found the whole experience tremendously frustrating and as you can see from some of the other responses and votes, the community does not consider that to be a reasonable reaction.

    Hence why I bailed on the whole thing. I don't need the grief.

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  • I was told a tool was a resilient approach to drive management. It wasn't, outside of a very specific set of circumstances.

    Your analogy not only makes no sense but is exactly why I'm hostile about this. I'm not an expert at the specific limitations of a niche hard disk technology is, I must be a fucking moron or something, and ridicule is a clearly an appropriate reaction.

    My idea of a useful tool for dealing with hard disks is not one that loses its shit when a hard disk is temporarily disconnected. That is not a ridiculous assumption. If that's an issue then that should be made abundantly clear.

    I assigned drives based on serial number and passed them through to TrueNAS and it couldn't handle that reliably. I do not think I was asking for the moon on a stick.

    The USB interface is a temporary measure, I was going to move the disks to an internal setup after testing but if it can't handle something that basic then like fuck am I trusting it with something like migrating from USB SATA to internal SATA.

    If I need both disks to access mirrored data then it's as useful as a chocolate teapot.

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  • I was trying to use it for a mirrored setup with TrueNAS and found it to be flakey to the point of uselessness. I was essentially told that I was using it wrong because I had USB disks. It allowed me to set it up and provided no warnings but after losing my test data for the fifth time (brand new disks - that wasn't the issue) I gave up and setup a simple rsync job to mirror data between the two ext4 disks.

    If losing power effectively wipes my data then it's no damn use to me. I'm sure it's great in a hermetically sealed data centre or something but if I can't pull one of the mirrored disks and plug it into another machine for data recovery then it's no damn good to me.

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  • Looks like I angered people by not loving ZFS. I don't feel like being bagged on further for using it wrong or whatever.

    Edit: elaborated, got bagged on. Shocked Pikachu face.

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  • I have given up on ZFS entirely because of how much of a pig it was.

  • If they run, they're antifa. If they don't run, they're well-disciplined antifa.